Consumption Kritik

1nc
Consumption-oriented development policy is grounded within a global system of inequality
and militarism the aff continues reactionary violence and environmental destruction
Byrne and Toly 6 [John Head of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Its a
leading institution for interdisciplinary graduate education, research, and advocacy in energy and
environmental policy John is also a Distinguished Professor of Energy & Climate Policy at the
University of Delaware 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC), Toly Directs the Urban Studies and Wheaton in Chicago programs
- Selected to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leaders Program for 2011-2013 expertise includes issues related to urban and environmental politics, global cities, and public
policy, Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a Discourse, p. 1-32]
From climate change to acid rain, contaminated landscapes, mercury pollution, and biodiversity
loss, the origins of many of our least tractable environmental problems can be traced to the
operations of the modern energy system. A scan of nightfall across the planet reveals a social dila
that also accompanies this systems operations: invented over a century ago, electric light
remains an experience only for the socially privileged. Two billion human beingsalmost onethird of the planets populationexperience evening light by candle, oil lamp, or open fire, reminding
us that energy modernization has left intactand sometimes exacerbatedsocial inequalities that
its architects promised would be banished (Smil, 2003: 370 - 373). And there is the disturbing link
between modern energy and war. 3 Whether as a mineral whose control is fought over by the
powerful (for a recent history of conflict over oil, see Klare, 2002b, 2004, 2006), or as the enablement of an atomic
war of extinction, modern energy makes modern life possible and threatens its future.
With environmental crisis, social inequality, and military conflict among the significant problems
of contemporary energy-society relations, the importance of a social analysis of the modern
energy system appears easy to establish. One might, therefore, expect a lively and fulsome debate of the sectors performance,
including critical inquiries into the politics, sociology, and political economy of modern energy. Yet, contemporary discourse on
the subject is disappointing: instead of a social analysis of energy regimes, the field seems to be a
captive of euphoric technological visions and associated studies of energy futures that
imagine the pleasing consequences of new energy sources and devices. 4 One stream of euphoria
has sprung from advocates of conventional energy, perhaps best represented by the unflappable
optimists of nuclear power 12 Transforming Power who, early on, promised to invent a magical fire
(Weinberg, 1972) capable of meeting any level of energy demand inexhaustibly in a manner too
cheap to meter (Lewis Strauss, cited in the New York Times 1954, 1955). In reply to those who
fear catastrophic accidents from the magical fire or the proliferation of nuclear weapons, a new
promise is made to realize inherently safe reactors (Weinberg, 1985) that risk neither serious accident nor
intentionally harmful use of high-energy physics. Less grandiose, but no less optimistic, forecasts can be heard
from fossil fuel enthusiasts who, likewise, project more energy, at lower cost, and with little
ecological harm (see, e.g., Yergin and Stoppard, 2003). Skeptics of conventional energy, eschewing
involvement with dangerously scaled technologies and their ecological consequences, find solace
in sustainable energy alternatives that constitute a second euphoric stream. Preferring to
redirect attention to smaller, and supposedly more democratic, options, green energy advocates
conceive devices and systems that prefigure a revival of human scale development, local selfdetermination, and a commitment to ecological balance. Among supporters are those who believe

that greening the energy system embodies universal social ideals and, as a result, can overcome
current conflicts between energy haves and havenots. 5 In a recent contribution to this perspective,
Vaitheeswaran suggests (2003: 327, 291), todays nascent energy revolution will truly deliver power to the people as micropower meets
village power. Hermann Scheer

echoes the idea of an alternative energy-led social transformation: the

shift to a solar global economy... can satisfy the material needs of all mankind and grant us the
freedom to guarantee truly universal and equal human rights and to safeguard the worlds cultural diversity
(Scheer, 2002: 34). 6 The euphoria of contemporary energy studies is noteworthy for its historical
consistency with a nearly unbroken social narrative of wonderment extending from the
advent of steam power through the spread of electricity (Nye, 1999). The modern energy
regime that now powers nuclear weaponry and risks disruption of the planets climate is a
product of promises pursued without sustained public examination of the political, social,
economic, and ecological record of the regimes operations . However, the discursive landscape has
occasionally included thoughtful exploration of the broader contours of energy-environment-society relations. As early as 1934, Lewis Mumford
(see also his two-volume Myth of the Machine, 1966; 1970) critiqued the industrial energy system for being a key source of social and ecological
alienation (1934: 196): The changes that were manifested in every department of Technics rested for the most part on one central fact: the
increase of energy. Size, speed, quantity, the multiplication of machines, were all reflections of the new means of utilizing fuel and the
enlargement of the available stock of fuel itself. Power was dissociated from its natural human and geographic limitations: from the caprices of
the weather, from the irregularities that definitely restrict the output of men and animals. 02Chapter1.pmd 2 1/6/2006, 2:56 PMEnergy as a Social
Project 3 By 1961, Mumford despaired that modernity

had retrogressed into a lifeharming dead end (1961: 263,

248): ...an orgy of uncontrolled production and equally uncontrolled reproduction: machine
fodder and cannon fodder: surplus values and surplus populations... The dirty crowded houses, the dank
airless courts and alleys, the bleak pavements, the sulphurous atmosphere, the over-routinized and dehumanized factory, the drill schools, the
second-hand experiences, the starvation of the senses, the remoteness from nature and animal activityhere are the enemies. The living organism
demands a life-sustaining environment.

The impact is extinction consumption-oriented politics is the root cause of their

environment/resources impacts the aff causes error replication
Ahmed 12 Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy
Research and Development (IPRD), an independent think tank focused on the study of violent
conflict, he has taught at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex "The
international relations of crisis and the crisis of international relations: from the securitisation of
scarcity to the militarisation of society" Global Change, Peace & Security Volume 23, Issue 3,
2011 Taylor Francis
The twenty-first century heralds the unprecedented acceleration and convergence of multiple, interconnected global crises climate
change, energy depletion, food scarcity, and economic instability. While the structure of global
economic activity is driving the unsustainable depletion of hydrocarbon and other natural
resources, this is simultaneously escalating greenhouse gas emissions resulting in global warming. Both
global warming and energy shocks are impacting detrimentally on global industrial food production, as
well as on global financial and economic instability. Conventional policy responses toward the intensification of these
crises have been decidedly inadequate because scholars and practitioners largely view them as separate
processes. Yet increasing evidence shows they are deeply interwoven manifestations of a global political
economy that has breached the limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which it
is embedded. In this context, orthodox IR's flawed diagnoses of global crises lead inexorably to their
securitisation, reifying the militarisation of policy responses, and naturalising the proliferation of violent
conflicts. Global ecological, energy and economic crises are thus directly linked to the Otherisation
of social groups and problematisation of strategic regions considered pivotal for the global political
economy. Yet this relationship between global crises and conflict is not necessary or essential, but a function
of a wider epistemological failure to holistically interrogate their structural and systemic causes . In

2009, the UK government's chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddington warned that without mitigating and preventive action 'drivers' of global
crisis like demographic expansion, environmental degradation and energy depletion could lead to a 'perfect storm' of simultaneous food, water
and energy crises by around 2030.1 Yet, for the most part, conventional policy responses from national governments and international institutions
have been decidedly inadequate. Part of the problem is the way in which these crises are conceptualised in relation to security. Traditional
disciplinary divisions in the social and natural sciences, compounded by bureaucratic compartmentalisation in policy-planning and decisionmaking, has meant these crises are frequently approached as largely separate processes with their own internal dynamics. While it is increasingly
acknowledged that cross-disciplinary approaches are necessary, these have largely failed to recognise just how inherently interconnected these
crises are. As Brauch points out, 'most studies in the environmental

security debate since 1990 have ignored or failed

to integrate the contributions of the global environmental change community in the natural
sciences. To a large extent the latter has also failed to integrate the results of this debate.*" Underlying this problem is the
lack of a holistic systems approach to thinking about not only global crises, but their causal
origins in the social, political, economic, ideological and value structures of the contemporary
international system. Indeed, it is often assumed that these contemporary structures are largely what need to be 'secured* and protected
from the dangerous impacts of global crises, rather than transformed precisely to ameliorate these crises in the first place. Consequently,

policy-makers frequently overlook existing systemic and structural obstacles to the implementation of desired
reforms. In a modest effort to contribute to the lacuna identified by Brauch, this paper begins with an empiricallyoriented, interdisciplinary exploration of the best available data on four major global crises
climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity and global financial instability illustrating the
systemic interconnections between different crises, and revealing that their causal origins are not accidental but
inherent to the structural failings and vulnerabilities of existing global political, economic and
cultural institutions. This empirical evaluation leads to a critical appraisal of orthodox realist and liberal
approaches to global crises in international theory and policy. This critique argues principally that orthodox IR reifies a
highly fragmented, de-historicised ontology of the international system which underlies a reductionist,
technocratic and compartmentalised conceptual and methodological approach to global crises.
Consequently, rather than global crises being understood causally and holistically in the systemic context of the
structure of the international system, they are 'securitised* as amplifiers of traditional security threats, requiring counterproductive militarised responses and/or futile inter-state negotiations. While the systemic causal context of global crisis
convergence and acceleration is thus elided, this simultaneously exacerbates the danger of reactionary violence, the
problematisation of populations in regions impacted by these crises and the naturalisation of

the consequent proliferation of wars and humanitarian disasters . This moves us away
from the debate over whether resource 'shortages* or 'abundance* causes conflicts, to the question of how either can generate crises which
undermine conventional socio-political orders and confound conventional IR

discourses, in turn radicalising the processes of

social polarisation that can culminate in violent conflict.

We must begin with a social critique and analysis of the modern energy regime.
Ethical criticism of the existing energy regime cultivates alternatives to technocratic
consumption.
Barry 12 [John Barry, Reader Politics @ Queens University (Belfast), The Politics of Actually
Existing Unsustainability p. 284-290]
'Dissident' is perhaps a better and more accurate term to apply to greens than 'revolutionary', since while both share an opposition to the
prevailing social order, revolutionary is clearly more antagonistic rather than agonistic, to use the terms indicated in chapter 7. Dissidents seek to
direct a self transforming present in a more radical direction, whereas revolutionaries typically seek the complete destruction of the existing order
and then the construction of a new one. Greens as dissidents also begin from an acceptance of the inevitability of key aspects of this transitionprimarily around climate change and the end of the oil age-and thus see an answer to 'what is to be done?' in terms of managing and shaping that
inevitable transition, rather than building/re-building. Dissident also seems less extreme and dogmatic in its critique and its demands, than those
who advocate full-blown revolution. And given what was said in chapter 3 and elsewhere about the link between creativity, flexibility, and
adaptive fitness, it would be odd for green politics to be dogmatic revolutionaries animated by a sense of the hopelessness of working within and
through contemporary institutiohs or that there was nothing worth preserving within and from the contemporary social order. Green

dissent
could perhaps be (wrongly) described as somewhere on a continuum between 'reformism' and 'revolution', a form of 'creative adaptive

management' to create

collective resilience in the face of actually existing unsustainability.1 In his essay

'The Power of the Powerless', Vaclav Havel uses the story of a greengrocer who unthinkingly displays his
'loyalty' to the regime by displaying a Communist Party slogan in his shop. This the greengrocer
does 'ritualistically, since this is the only way the regime is capable of acknowledging his display
of loyalty' (Havel, 1978: 45). In a similar way, being a dutiful consumer and not questioning economic growth
could also perhaps be regarded as the way in which loyalty to a dominant capitalist, consumer
regime is ritualistically displayed, enacted, and affirmed . It is for this reason, if not only this reason, that one
completely misunderstands consumerism, consumption, and being a 'consumer', if one views it
solely individualistically as some economic-cum-metabolic act. As a public display of loyalty ,
consuming is first and foremost a collective act, an individual joining others in a shared activity and associated identity. So while critics such as
Fromm are correct in highlighting the distinction in consumer culture between 'being' and 'having' (Fromm, 1976), what these analyses often miss
is that consumption is also an act of' belonging' and identity affirmation (Keat, 1994; Jackson, 2009b).It is for this reason that a refusal to
consume is so damaging to the modern political and economic order and why to consciously choose not to consume is perhaps one of the most
politically significant acts one can do in a consumer society. And one that, the continual performance (or rather non-performance) of which,

to question economic
growth under consumer capitalism is to be 'disloyal' to the prevailing order. While for Havel living in what
further marks one out as a dissident, part of 'the great refusal' to use Marcuse's term (Marcuse, 1964). That is,

he calls the 'post-totalitarian' communist regime is 'living a lie', I do not want to go so far and say that life in contemporary consumer capitalist
democracies is in the same way to 'live a lie'. Rather what I would like to dwell upon is Havel's notion of'living within the truth' and what this can
offer for green dissidents. For

Havel 'living within the truth ... can be any means by which a person or
group revolts against manipulation: anything from a letter by intellectuals to a workers' strike, from a rock
concert to a student demonstration, from refusing to vote in the farcical elections, to making an open speech at some official congress, or even a
hunger strike' (Havel, 1986: 59-60). Though clearly written with the then communist regime in mind, Havel's call to 'live in truth' is equally
pertinent to consumer capitalism. As he puts it: The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn
makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A

person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the
accoutrements of mass civilization, and who has not roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything
higher than his or her own personal survival, is a demoralized person . The system depends
on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society. (Havel, 1978: 62; emphasis added) Silence is of
course a consequence and precondition for this demoralization, and what power requires under consumer capitalism is passive
and silent acquiescence as much as active participation. For Havel the re-appropriation of individual responsibility is
something to be actively striven for. This reverses or balances the usual focus on rights and freedoms with which often
'progressive' critiques of consumerism are couched. In Havel's response to what Tim Jackson amongst others has called 'The Age of
Irresponsibility' (Jackson, 2009b ), also connects with some of the green republican arguments outlined in chapters 6 and 7, not least the stress on
both the recovery of the good of politics and the centrality of the individual citizen as a moral being and not just or only a consumer (or
producer/worker or investor). As Jackson notes, 'the "age of irresponsibility" is not about casual oversight or individual greed. The economic
crisis is not a consequence of isolated malpractice in selected parts of the banking sector. If there has been irresponsibility, it has been much more
systemic, sanctioned from the top, and with one clear aim in mind: the continuation and protection of economic growth' (Jackson, 2009b: 26;
emphasis added). The

struggle Havel describes from the 1968 'Prague Spring' between 'the system' and
'the aims of life' (Havel, 1978: 66) resonate green concerns of the degradation of natural life-supporting
systems and the undermining of conditions promoting human conviviality, quality of life, and
well-being (Barry, 2009b; De Geus, 2009, 2003; Jackson, 2009a). What Havel goes on to say about political change and strategy in the
context of a consumer culture is pertinent and important for those seeking a transition away from unsustainability, 'Society is not sharply
polarized on the level of actual political power, but ... the

fundamental lines of conflict run right through each

person' (Havel, 1978: 91; emphasis added). This is a profound point, namely that it is difficult, if not impossible, to simply analyse actually
existing unsustainability as an oppressive totalitarian regime in which there is an identifiable 'them' dominating 'us'. Under consumer capitalism,
debt-based consumption, and so on, we who live in these societies are all implicated in its continuation. And while of course there are identifiable
groups and institutions (such as large corporations, financial wealth management firms, the leadership of mainstream political parties, key
agencies of the nation state such as departments of finance, global financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMP, and what Sklair has
called the

'transnational capitalist class') who do benefit more from actually existing unsustainability,
we have to face up to the fact that 'ordinary people', that is, everyone also contributes (unequally
of course) to the 'mundane' operation of global capitalism and the exploitation of people and
planet. The recognition of this is but another way of drawing attention to the fact that capitalism, the common sense of
neoclassical economics, and so on have achieved 'full spectrum' domination of hearts and minds, such

that capitalism, and

realistic critiques of it, need to be viewed as cultural (and indeed psychological)

projects . It is for this reason that I canvassed the Transition movement in chapter 3, since it adopts an explicitly cultural and psychological
approach. Of course such cultural and psychological critical analyses are not exhausted by this movement and these cannot be a substitute for
oppositional political struggle. This

'cultural turn' in green politics is, to my mind, linked to the 'postscarcity

economics of sustainable desire' outlined in chapter 5, and is premised firmly on a notion of human
flourishing that lies beyond production, 'supplyside' solutions , 'competiveness', and increasing
'labour productivity'. This notion of flourishing is not anti-materialist. Let me make that abundantly clear, it is not an ascetic
renunciation of materialism for its own sake, as if material life is intrinsically unworthy or does not express valued modes of human being.
Thus I do not accept the Fromm-inspired view that materialism or indeed material consumption is simply a mode of 'having' and not 'being'. After
all, the

critique should be directed at consumerism and overconsumption, not materialism or consumption per se.
At a basic level one can see how communism and consumerism are two 'regimes of truth' -to return to the Foucauldian language used in
chapter 4 imposing their version of the truth, exacting payment, compliance, and subjectivity from
their client populations, quelling, distracting, and undermining dissidents, and using different but
also some shared techniques to continue. And the appropriate dissident, progressive attitude, and
strategy against both is, for Havel, ultimately an ethical one, an ethical and political life-affirming 'reconstitution of
society' (Havel, 1978: 115). That Havel conceives consumer-capitalist and communist societies as comparable can be seen in his view that:
traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to the autonomism of
technological civilization, and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by
it. People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies ... the
omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information. (Havel, 1978:
116; emphasis added) Some of the republican elements expressed in Havel's thought centre around 'responsibility' (Havel, 1986: 104). He
maintains that the abdication of responsibility in the name of consumer choice-what I have elsewhere described as the reduction of political
liberty to a consumer 'freedom of choice' (Barry, 2009a)-weakens the ethical and political capacities of citizens within liberal democracies.

Liberal consumer-citizens then become 'victims of the same autonomism, and are incapable of
transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible
members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny' (Havel, 1978: 116;
emphasis added). In this Havel is articulating concerns very close to the type of green republicanism outlined in this book. His concluding
comments in The Power of the Powerless also offer suggestive lines for interpreting the Transition movement. In a passage focusing on the
contours of what Havel calls the

'existential revolution' that is needed to renew the relationship of humans to

the 'human order and cosmopolitan responsibility', Havel notes that the structures needed to make this happen 'should
naturally arise from below as a consequence of authentic "selforganization"; they should derive energy from a living dialogue with the genuine
needs from which they arise, and when these needs are gone, the structures should also disappear ... The decisive criterion of this
"selfconstitution" should be the structure's actual significance and not just a mere abstract norm' (Havel, 1978: 119). A better description of the
Transition movement's aims, motivations, and objectives would be hard to find. Havel goes on to describe these new, provisional, and practical
structures 'postdemocratic'. He describes the outlines of these 'authentic' political structures in this manner: Do not these groups emerge, live, and
disappear under pressure from concrete and authentic needs, unburdened by the ballast of hollow traditions? Is not their attempt to create an
articulate form of 'living within the truth' and to renew the feeling of higher responsibility in an apathetic society really a sign of some
rudimentary moral reconstitution? In other words, are riot these informed, non-bureaucratic dynamic and open communities that comprise the
'parallel polis' a kind of rudimentary prefiguration, a symbolic model of those more meaningful 'post-democratic' political structures that might
become the foundation of a better society? (Havel, 1978: 120-121). Fundamental here, I think, is Havel's call to responsibility and struggle
against the prevailing political order when it undermines quality of life, perpetuates injustice, or the denial or compromising of democratic norms.
In a similar vein Carla Emery puts it eloquently, 'People have to choose what they're going to struggle for. Life

is always a struggle,
whether or not you're struggling for anything worthwhile, so it might as well be for something
worthwhile' (in Astyk, 2008: 204). Or to phrase it differently: get busy living or get busy dying. WHAT IF WE ARE THE PEOPLE WE'VE
BEEN WAITING FOR? 289 As argued throughout this book in facing the many challenges of the present time-climate change, peak oil,
diminishing forms of social well-being, financial and economic crises, and the ecological liquidation of the foundations of life on the planet-the
most important response needed is one which explicitly focuses on imagination and creativity. As W. B. Yeats (long before Barak Obama used a
version of these sentiments) suggested, what is needed is for us 'to seek a remedy ... in audacity of speculation and creation' (Yeats, 1926). While

'another world is possible' it can only be possible if it is imagined, and perhaps one of the most
persistent obstacles to the transition away from actually existing unsustainability apart from
ignorance of the ecological and human costs of our capitalist-consumer way of life-is the
stultifying grip of 'business as usual' and its limited and limiting horizons of possible futures for
ourselves and our societies. In many respects, our collective inability to respond to 'limits to growth' is

in large measure due to limits of creativity and imagination . We cannot, or find it very difficult, to
imagine a different social order. For Richard Norgaard the answer to our present ecological predicament is as difficult to achieve as it is simple to
express, 'We need a new life story. We need an overarching story that respects a diversity of life stories. Living

the story of
economic development is destroying humanity and nature and a good many other species along
with us. We need a master story that puts our hope, compassion, brains, sociality, and diversity to
new and constructive ends' (in Deb, 2009: xxiii). And if we follow Havel, it may be that this new story we need is already here, in
the same sense that the eco-feminist Mary Mellor (Mellor, 1995) has persuasively written that the sustainable world, society, or mode
of being is not some utopian 'there' but an already living, embodied, engendered 'here' in the
reproductive and exploited labour of women, in the 'core' economic activity of caring and sharing
and ... flourishing. The Polanyi-inspired attempt to 'reembed' the economy within human social relations can be viewed as a defensive
move to protect community from both the formal market and the state. Such protective measures can include the
expansion of the social economy, or the efforts by the Transition movement in seeking to disrupt,
slow down and re-conceptualize the economy. Such reactive measures could all be thought of as seeking to defend and
extend those sustainable practices in the here and now, that is, that already exist within 'actually existing unsustainability'. This is particularly the
case with reproductive labour as outlined in this book. Actually it

is the neoclassical economic view that is

'utopian' in promoting a fictitious and dangerous imaginary of human life lived at 365/24/7
speed and a way of life completely out of synch not just with human biological but also
ecological time. And, it must be recalled, 'Mother Nature does not do bailouts'. As Havel suggests, 'For the real question is whether the
"brighter future" is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and
weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?' (Havel, 1978: 122). Now there's an intriguing
set of concluding thoughts-what if not only the resilient, sustainable way of life is 'always already here', present, and available to us if we so
choose-but also if it is indeed the case that 'we are the people we've been waiting for?' And what of the hard greens, where do they and their
analysis fit within this book? For it is fair to say that they have been shadowing the book. While I discussed them briefly in the Introduction and
made some casual comments about them and their diverse positions and prescriptions throughout, I have not met them head on as it were. So it
would be fitting for me to offer my thoughts on the place and status of the hard green position. Are they basically correct? Do I agree with them
(from the green republican acceptance of the time-bound and contingent character of all human creations, including civilizations and societies)
that they have identified the beginning of the end of our existing capitalist, carbon-based civilization and societies? While I certainly admire their
brutal honesty, I baulk at their jump from crisis to collapse, and then from collapse to violence and 'de-civilization' (Elias, 2000; Hine and
Kingsnorth, 2010). Their political analyses echo (almost always unwittingly) the eco-authoritarian position of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The
hard-green view in being so pessimistic means its pessimism precludes a view of politics as the 'art of the possible', and a view of the inevitability
of collapse can and does lead to de-politicized or even anti-political responses. But surely the

challenge, as outlined by the green

republican project of this book, is to embrace new intelligibilities, ways of being, having, and doing, new
identities and subjectivities, and new arts of life, all must be part of a project to avert collapse?2 This is, as I see it, the
point of green republican politics as a form of 'anticipatory politics' to challenge the rule of the 'nee-liberal vulgate'. At this present moment, on
the cusp of this 'Great Transition', what

greens need is to cultivate critical awareness, opposition, and

dissent, to have the courage of their convictions in analysing and resisting actually existing
unsustainability, and outlining their vision for the transition to a better society, in part to engage, inform, and prepare citizens for the
coming changes that will characterize the decades ahead. Greens need to be realistic and cleareyed in their disavowal of naive utopianism, but
convinced of its basic conviction that another world is possible, necessary, and desirable. And while on quiet mornings we may hear it coming, its
arrival, like all major transitions in human history, will demand political struggle. The battle for hearts, minds, and hands has begun, and my
writing this book and you reading it are constitutive of that struggle.

links

aquaculture links
Aquaculture locks in capitalist development cycles that destroy the natural world
and unequal development patterns
Clark and Clausen 8 [2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August), Monthly Review, Brett Clark
teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Rebecca Clausen teaches
sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the
Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisiscapitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem]
Aquaculture: The Blue Revolution? The

massive decline in fish stocks has led capitalist development to turn to

a new way of increasing profitsintensified production of fishes. Capitalist aquaculture represents
not only a quantitative change in the intensification and concentration of production; it also places
organisms life cycles under the complete control of private for-profit ownership.3 1 This new
industry, it is claimed, is the fastest-growing form of agriculture in the world. It boasts of having ownership from
egg to plate and substantially alters the ecological and human dimensions of a fishery.32 Aquaculture (sometimes also referred to as
aquabusiness) involves subjecting nature to the logic of capital. Capital attempts to overcome natural
and social barriers through its constant innovations. In this, enterprises attempt to commodify, invest
in, and develop new elements of nature that previously existed outside the political-economic
competitive sphere: As Edward Carr wrote in the Economist, the sea is a resource that must be preserved and harvested.To enhance
its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than
hunters.33 As worldwide commercial fish stocks decline due to overharvest and other anthropogenic

causes, aquaculture is witnessing a rapid expansion in the global economy . Aquacultures contribution to global
supplies of fish increased from 3.9 percent of total worldwide production by weight in 1970 to 27.3 percent in 2000. In 2004, aquaculture and
capture fisheries produced 106 million tons of fish and aquaculture accounted for 43 percent.34 According to Food and Agriculture
Organization statistics, aquaculture is growing more rapidly than all other animal food producing sectors. Hailed as the Blue Revolution,

aquaculture is frequently compared to agricultures Green Revolution as a way to achieve food

security and economic growth among the poor and in the third world. The cultivation of farmed
salmon as a high-value, carnivorous species destined for market in core nations has emerged as one
of the more lucrative (and controversial) endeavors in aquaculture production.35 Much like the Green Revolution, the Blue
Revolution may produce temporary increases in yields, but it does not usher in a solution to food
security (or environmental problems). Food security is tied to issues of distribution. Given that the Blue Revolution is
driven by the pursuit of profit, the desire for monetary gain trumps the distribution of food to those in need.36 Industrial aquaculture
intensifies fish production by transforming the natural life histories of wild fish stocks into a
combined animal feedlot. Like monoculture agriculture, aquaculture furthers the capitalistic
division of nature, only its realm of operation is the marine worl d. In order to maximize return on investment,
aquaculture must raise thousands of fish in a confined net-pen. Fish are separated from the natural environment and
the various relations of exchange found in a food web and ecosystem. The fishs reproductive life
cycle is altered so that it can be propagated and raised until the optimum time for mechanical
harvest. Aquaculture interrupts the most fundamental metabolic processthe ability of an
organism to obtain its required nutrient uptake. Because the most profitable farmed fish are carnivorous, such as Atlantic
salmon, they depend on a diet that is high in fishmeal and fish oil. For example, raising Atlantic salmon requires four pounds of fishmeal to
produce every one pound of salmon. Consequently, aquaculture production depends heavily on fishmeal imported from South America to feed the
farmed carnivorous species.37 The inherent contradiction in extracting fishmeal is that industries must

increase their exploitation of marine fish in order to feed the farm-raised fishthereby increasing
the pressure on wild stocks to an even larger extent. Such operations also increase the amount of bycatch. Three of
the worlds five largest fisheries are now exclusively harvesting pelagic fish for fishmeal, and these
fisheries account for a quarter of the total global catch. Rather than diminishing the demands
placed on marine ecosystems, capitalist aquaculture actually increases them, accelerating the
fishing down the food chain process. The environmental degradation of populations of marine species, ecosystems, and tropic

levels continues.38 Capitalist

aquaculturewhich is really aquabusinessrepresents a parallel example

of capital following the patterns of agribusiness. Similar to combined animal feedlots, farmed fish
are penned up in high-density cages making them susceptible to disease . Thus, like in the production of beef,
pork, and chicken, farmed fish are fed fishmeal that contains antibiotics, increasing concerns about
antibiotic exposure in society. In Silent Spring of the Sea, Don Staniford explains, The use of antibiotics in salmon
farming has been prevalent right from the beginning, and their use in aquaculture globally has
grown to such an extent that resistance is now threatening human health as well as other marine
species. Aquaculturists use a variety of chemicals to kill parasites, such as sea lice, and diseases that spread quickly throughout the pens. The
dangers and toxicities of these pesticides in the marine environment are magnified because of the long food chain.39 Once subsumed
into the capitalist process, life cycles of animals are increasingly geared to economic cycles of
exchange by decreasing the amount of time required for growth. Aquabusiness conforms to these
pressures, as researchers are attempting to shorten the growth time required for fish to reach
market size. Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) has been added to some fish feeds to stimulate growth in fishes in aquaculture
farms in Hawaii. Experiments with fish transgenicsthe transfer of DNA from one species to anotherare being done to increase the rate of
weight gain, causing altered fish to grow from 60 percent to 600 percent larger than wild stocks.40 These growth mechanisms illustrate capitalist
aquacultures drive to transform nature to facilitate the generation of profit. In addition, aquaculture alters waste assimilation.

The introduction of net-pens leads to a break in the natural assimilation of waste in the marine
environment. The pens convert coastal ecosystems, such as bays, inlets, and fjords, into aquaculture
ponds, destroying nursery areas that support ocean fisheries. For instance, salmon net-pens allow fish feces and
uneaten feed to flow directly into coastal waters, resulting in substantial discharges of nutrients. The excess nutrients are toxic to the marine
communities that occupy the ocean floor beneath the net-pens, causing massive die offs of entire benthic populations.41 Other waste products are
concentrated around net-pens as well, such as diseases and parasites introduced by the caged salmon to the surrounding marine organisms.

This risks extinction only the alt can solve

Clark and Clausen 8 [2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August), Monthly Review, Brett Clark
teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Rebecca Clausen teaches
sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the
Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisiscapitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem]
As a result, the system is inherently caught in a fundamental crisis arising from the transformation
and destruction of nature. Istvn Mszros elaborates this point, stating: For today it is impossible to think of anything at all
concerning the elementary conditions of social metabolic reproduction which is not lethally threatened by the way in which capital relates to them
the only way in which it can. This is true not only of humanitys energy requirements, or of the management of the planets mineral resources
and chemical potentials, but of every facet of the global agriculture, including the devastation caused by large scale de-forestation, and even the
most irresponsible way of dealing with the element without which no human being can survive: water itself. In the absence of

miraculous solutions, capitals arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the objective determinations of

causality and time in the end inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of humanity [and nature
itself].46 An analysis of the oceanic crisis confirms the destructive qualities of private for-profit
operations. Dire conditions are being generated as the resiliency of marine ecosystems in general is
being undermined. To make matters worse, sewage from feedlots and fertilizer runoff from farms are transported by rivers to gulfs and
bays, overloading marine ecosystems with excess nutrients, which contribute to an expansion of algal production. This leads to oxygenpoor water and the formation of hypoxic zonesotherwise known as dead zones b ecause crabs and
fishes suffocate within these areas. It also compromises natural processes that remove nutrients from the
waterways. Around 150 dead zones have been identified around the world. A dead zone is the end
result of unsustainable practices of food production on land. At the same time, it contributes to the
loss of marine life in the seas, furthering the ecological crisis of the world ocean. Coupled with
industrialized capitalist fisheries and aquaculture, the oceans are experiencing ecological
degradation and constant pressures of extraction that are severely depleting the populations of
fishes and other marine life. The severity of the situation is that if current practices and rates of fish
capture continue marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world could collapse by the year
2050.47 To advert turning the seas into a watery grave, what is needed is nothing less than a

worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of global society itself .

Claims of sustainable aquaculture are a smokescreen for the invasive economic

model posed by the 1ac aquaculture locks in neo-colonial production paradigms
and maintains a profound wealth gap
Macabuac 5 [Maria Cecilia F. Macabuac, PHD in Philosophy of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic
University, July 15, 2005, After the Aquaculture Bust,
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07242005-083742/unrestricted/03Ch123.pdf]
The Boom-to-Bust Cycle of Aquaculture Many, if not all, economies

of poor countries are dependent on exportoriented extractive industries which include gas, oil, and mining ventures, logging, and agroindustrial aquaculture and plantations. Such extractive enclaves: 1. are capital-intensive; 2. are generally run
by the state or by large corporations, in ways that lead to high rates of corruption, repression and
conflict; 3. use little unskilled or semi-skilled labor; 4. are geographically concentrated and create
small pockets of wealth; 5. produce social and environmental problems that disproportionately
impact the poor; 41 6. follow a boom-and-bust cycle that creates economic insecurity (Ross 2001). Many of
the peripheral countries that are most highly dependent on extractive industries are classified as highly indebted
poor countries (Ross 2001)-- demonstrating the degree to which these enterprises have failed to fuel either
healthy economic growth for the nation or alleviation of the impoverishment of citizens.
Aquaculture is one of those peripheral extractive industries which booms only as long as ecological
resources and market prices are at supportive levels. When environmental degradation threatens
the supply base or new producers enter the market and cause price drops, aquaculture
operations tend to bust very quickly. Export-oriented shrimp ponds typically bust only after five to ten years of
intensive farming, primarily because of shrimp diseases and ecological degradation (McGinn 2002). Only a few investments are directed toward
reinvigoration of abandoned shrimp farms while most corporations transfer to other promising areas, leaving behind land and waterways that
will be unsuited for cultivation for several centuries (Skladany et. al. 1995). While ecological degradation accounts for the

bust cycle in shrimp production, competition from synthetics and from alternative agricultural
commodities (such as corn starch) are much more likely to trigger bust cycles in seaweed production.
Between 1978 and 1984, the Philippines was the top producer of seaweed. By 2000, China was the number one exporter, followed by the
Philippines and Chile (Trade Data International 2003). Worldwide, fish comprise 17 percent of the animal protein in the human diet, and fish are
the most 42 important source of animal protein in the diets of peripheral populations. According to Shiva (2000: 43): The two primary
justifications for industrial aquaculture are the crisis of depletion of marine resources and the crisis of malnutrition among the poor in the Third
World. . . . Though pushed by both national and international organization as an answer to world food scarcity. . ., shrimp contributes little to the
nutritional needs of the worlds population, being a luxury item that is consumed mainly by the rich in the developed world. On the one hand,
aquaculture has vastly expanded world output of fish and marine foods. On the other hand, aquaculture has now integrated into

global commodity chains peripheral fish and marine resources, resulting in two impacts on the
food chains of those poor countries that undertake aquaculture projects. 1. Aquaculture removes
fish and marine resources from local consumption chains and exports those foods to rich countries
thereby threatening traditional food chains in producing countries. 2. Because less fish is available
to peripheral populations, malnutrition and hunger are on the rise, especially in those countries
with large aquaculture and fishing sectors (Shiva 2000). Despite all its purported advantages, the Blue Revolution is really
food imperialism (Yoshinori 1987). Aquaculture is an industry controlled by core-based transnational
corporations, and it has concentrated control over the worlds fish and marine foods into the hands
of a few companies. Rather than eradicating hunger or expanding resources to feed peripheral
populations, aquaculture has further polarized world food distribution and consumption. At the
turn of the 21st century, the richest fifth of the world consumes nearly half of all meat and fish, the
poorest fifth only 5 percent. 4 While poor countries supply 85 percent of the internationally traded
fishery products, core countries consume 40 percent of the world total supply of fish (McGinn 1998). 5
Core citizens have benefitted greatly from the new global food chains stimulated by the Blue
Revolution, and they now consume three times more fish than people in the developing countries.

the horrible irony is that peripheral populations cannot afford the luxury meats
available in abundance to core citizens, so they must rely on fish for animal protein. While North
Americans and Western Europeans acquire more than 90 percent of their animal protein from
beef, pork, and chicken, Africans and Asians are dependent on fish for about one-third of their
animal protein (McGinn 1998). Aquaculture also drains away peripheral fish supplies for uses outside
the human food chain. Non-food uses of fish in rich countries (such as animal feed and oils) is greater than the total human
consumption of fish in Latin America, Africa and India combined. 6 In reality, fish resources are drained away to rich
countries and threaten the local food chain in two ways. First, the aquaculture outputs
overwhelmingly are exported to the core as luxury foods. Second, the production of those exports and
of non-food uses of marine resources requires high levels of inputs of other smaller fishes.
Aquaculture and agro-industrial fisheries redirect resources from the human food chains to
fishponds of producing countries (Shiva 2000: 44 7 For example, the US price for shrimp dropped from $5 per pound to $3.38
However,

in 2003 (Public Citizen 2004). 8 In Malaysia, the high demands of prawn farms for fish feed has also caused a shortage of fish for the salted
fish industry (Wilks 1995:122). 43). Consequently, less fish are now available to poor Asian consumers because aquaculture requires

such high levels of inexpensive small fish as pond feed (Food and Agriculture Organization 2004). To complicate
matters, agro-industrial fisheries consume more resources than they produce, thereby threatening
food security even further. In 2000, 5.7 million tons of cultured fish were produced in Asia, requiring 1.1 million tons of feed,
derived from a staggering 5.5 million tons of wet-weight fish (Shiva 2000: 43). Thus, one ton of smaller fish that are typically
a significant part of the diets of poor households are absorbed to cultivate every ton of export fish
that will provide luxury sea cuisine for rich households. Peripheral food security is threatened in another way. While
core consumers enjoy declining prices that result from the expanding supply of tropical shrimp and
deep-sea specialty fishes, the cost of fish rises in peripheral countries that engage in export-oriented
aquaculture (Public Citizen 2004). 7 In Indonesia, world demand for prawn has pushed up local prices for
small fish, such as sardines, that were traditionally consumed by the poor. Ordinary consumers in
Malaysia can no longer afford one kind of prawn ( Panaeidae) because aquaculture producers prefer to
export this commodity at higher prices to Japan. 8 In Sri Lanka, the traditional shrimp curry has
disappeared from the diets of poor families because the pressure to export has driven up prices
(Yoshinori 1987).

Aquaculture causes environmental destruction the 1acs prioritization of the

Global North in economic decision calculi is an unsustainable ecological model
Macabuac 5 [Maria Cecilia F. Macabuac, PHD in Philosophy of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic
University, July 15, 2005, After the Aquaculture Bust,
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07242005-083742/unrestricted/03Ch123.pdf]
Ecological Degradation In

every peripheral country where aquaculture has been prioritized, satisfying

the huge export market for cultivated shrimp has led to significant environmental damage (Aksoy
and Beghin 2005: 277). The core can pay cheap prices for peripheral fish and marine resources because
most of the real costs of production are externalized to the ecosystems and communities of the
Global South (Public Citizen 2004:1). Fishpond systems deprive local people of their traditional sources of
fish, shellfish, timber, and charcoal, and they weaken the natural capacity of coastal ecosystems to
filter and purify water, cycle nutrients, remove contaminants, and buffer the land from coastal
storms and severe weather (McGinn 1998: 49, Primavera 1991). Through the privatization of mangroves, large aquaculture
operations expropriate from the public commons many ecological resources which local residents
have historically used for subsistence and for small-scale enterprises (Bailey 1988). Poor coastal
communities lose access to ecological goods (such as shells, oysters, weeds, and other types of fishes) which form a
significant part of their traditional diets and their cash-earning capacity. Many subsistent fishing
households that once gathered food resources from mangroves or shallow seas are shoved out of
those ecosystems when those natural resources are reoriented for export production (Wilks 1995). In
Malaysia, for example, several thousand fishermen have suffered big declines in fishcatch due to destruction of mangroves and river pollution
caused by aquaculture ponds along the coast. The aquaculture industry has destroyed most of the mangroves in

Ecuadors coastal regions. 9 Commercial fishponds and seaweed operations also compete with
agriculture for fresh water and introduce salt water into waterways and navigation canals. In Bangladesh, for example,
many farms have been damaged by the flow of salt water from the shrimp ponds to the rice-fields, greatly reducing the farm output. 10

Aquaculture also draws high levels of water from underground aquifers upon which farms are
dependent for irrigation. As the water level declines and the aquifer compacts, land subsidence occurs over time and
the area becomes vulnerable to flooding (Primavera 1991). Export-oriented aquaculture also threatens ecological biodiversity.
On the one hand, aquaculture ponds engage in mass monocultural production, using up the space that
was once occupied by hundreds of different species. On the other hand, that export species must devour
high levels of smaller adjacent species if it is to be produced at high export levels. For instance, 36
million tons of wild fish is needed to produce 7.2 million tons of shrimps. 11 In addition, export-
oriented shrimp production requires high inputs of antibiotics and other chemicals. It is common
practice for fishponds and hatcheries to flush into nearby seas, mangroves, and rivers excess lime,
organic wastes, pesticides, chemicals and disease microorganisms (McGinn 1998). These waste outputs:
1. build up as silt and sedimentation in rivers, bays, and along coasts, threatening all the species in
that habitat and all the human occupations dependent on that ecosystem (McGinn 1998), 2. can trigger
harmful algae blooms (World Resources Institute 2001), 3. or can cause the emergence of resistant new strains
of pathogens (Primavera 1991). Moreover, escapes of genetically-modified fish can invade the gene pool of
wild fish and 47 them altogether (McGinn 1998).

Aquaculture expansion and maintenance produces violent cycles of poverty and

displacement turns their starvation and poverty internals
Macabuac 5 [Maria Cecilia F. Macabuac, PHD in Philosophy of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic
University, July 15, 2005, After the Aquaculture Bust,
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07242005-083742/unrestricted/03Ch123.pdf]
Unemployment, Poverty and Displacement While the

Blue Revolution has expanded food outputs, it has led to the

elimination of employment opportunities for peripheral coastal populations. On the one hand,
aquaculture has destroyed small-scale, family owned farms and enterprises to pave the way for
corporate-owned agribusiness enclaves (Bailey and Skladany 1991). In the global shrimp chain, for instance,
small- scale traditional ponds have been aggregated to form larger, export-oriented, corporateowned prawn farms. International agencies help create a dualistic pattern of development, with
benefits skewed towards a limited number of large-scale fishing enterprises rather than towards
the far more numerous small-scale sub-sector, which often comprises 90 percent of the households located in the areas
where commercial aquaculture is entrenched (Bailey 1988b: 36). On the other hand, export-oriented aquaculture industries
employ far fewer laborers than do small-scale fishing operations. The net result has been that
unemployment has risen among fishing households in peripheral countries that have converted to
Blue Revolution production strategies (Kurien 2002). In the case of shrimp aquaculture, there are very few laborers involved in
the entire production process (Bailey and Skladany 1991). One of the social impacts of globalized aquaculture is the
displacement of people and small local businesses, thus depriving them of their traditional sources
of livelihood (Kurien 2002). Bangladesh provides an enlightening example. Large landowners and citybased absentee owners dominate shrimp culture in the southern districts of Bangladesh. To
aggregate the natural resources essential to agro-industrial production, poor rice farmers have
been forcefully dislocated by the state and by invasive gangs controlled by shrimp-farm owners. 12
Little wonder, then, that export-oriented aquaculture has exacerbated existing social inequalities in poor
countries. Because large aquaculture operations require high capital investments for infrastructure, only the rich can engage in this venture.
Small entrepreneurs are effectively shut out (Primavera 1991) because big businesses in joint ventures
with foreign investors monopolize the industry and the credit offered by banks and financial
institutions (Kurien 2002). Shrimp farming has also been linked to widespread human rights abuses. In Thailand, China, Indonesia, India,
Vietnam, Bangladesh, and the Philippines aquaculture has been accompanied by land seizures, the displacement of tens of thousands of people,
and the depletion, salinization, and chemical pollution of drinking water. The requirement of certain shrimp species for brackish water means
that, over time, salts penetrate the water table, while water exchange practices associated with more intensive shrimp farms typically involve

pumping water in from surrounding rivers or groundwater supplies (thus depleting fresh water sources) and then pumping out water from the
ponds into canals, rivers and near-shore waters. This process can lead to contamination of groundwater supplies and rivers by pollutants
(including pesticides, antibiotics and disinfectants) and saltwater. . . . (Environmental Justice Foundation 2003: 10). After the advent of exportoriented shrimp farms, 20,000 fishers in Sri Lankas Puttalam District were forced to migrate because their small-scale fish catches declined to
levels that would not support their households. From Satkhira, Bangladesh and Andrah Pradesh state in India, 49 168,000 people have been
displaced from rural areas to overcrowded cities. Child labor supports the aquaculture industry in many peripheral countries. In

Bangladesh, for example, children collecting shrimp fry to stock shrimp farms work 13 hours a day
in and around water, leaving many with skin and respiratory disorders. In addition, shrimp farming has
been tied to murders of activists and laborers in five Latin American countries and in six Asian
countries, including the Philippines (Environmental Justice Foundation 2003). On the one hand, export aquaculture
has not proven to be a capitalist technological advance that has positively impacted world hunger.
On the other hand: Where shrimp aquaculture has expanded. . . many local peoples have seen their ways of life
destroyed, their economic system undermined, their access to essential resources cut off. They had
no voice in what has been happening to them. This is an invisible type of human rights violation
(Environmental Justice Foundation 2003: 26).

economy links
Economic collapse is inevitable in their macroeconomic framegains are privatized
while costs are displaced onto the poor
Stiglitz, econ prof, 8Professor of Economics at Columbia, Ph.D. from MIT, recipient of the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (Joseph, 7 July 2008, The End of Neo-liberalism?,
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz101/English, RBatra)
For a quarter-century, there has been a contest among developing countries, and the losers are clear: countries that pursued neo-liberal
policies not only lost the growth sweepstakes; when they did grow, the benefits accrued
disproportionately to those at the top.
Though neo-liberals do not want to admit it, their ideology also failed another test. No one can claim that
financial markets did a stellar job in allocating resources in the late 1990s, with 97% of investments in fiber optics taking years to see any light. But at least that mistake had an unintended
benefit: as costs of communication were driven down, India and China became more integrated into the global economy.

The newly constructed homes built for families that

could not afford them get trashed and gutted as millions of families are forced out of their homes,
But it is hard to see such benefits to the massive misallocation of resources to housing.

in some communities, government has finally stepped in to remove the remains. In others, the blight spreads. So even those who have been model citizens, borrowing prudently and maintaining

markets have driven down the value of their homes beyond their worst nightmares.

their homes, now find that

To be sure, there were some short-term benefits from the excess investment in real estate: some Americans (perhaps only for a few months) enjoyed the pleasures of home ownership and living
in a bigger home than they otherwise would have. But at what a cost to themselves and the world economy! Millions will lose their life savings as they lose their homes. And the housing
foreclosures have precipitated a global slowdown. There is an increasing consensus on the prognosis: this downturn will be prolonged and widespread.

free-market
rhetoric has been used selectively embraced when it serves special interests and discarded
when it does not.
Nor did markets prepare us well for soaring oil and food prices. Of course, neither sector is an example of free-market economics, but that is partly the point:

Perhaps one of the few virtues of George W. Bushs administration is that the gap between rhetoric and reality is narrower than it was under Ronald Reagan. For all Reagans free-trade rhetoric,
he freely imposed trade restrictions, including the notorious voluntary export restraints on automobiles.
Bushs policies have been worse, but the extent to which he has openly served Americas military-industrial complex has been more naked. The only time that the Bush administration turned
green was when it came to ethanol subsidies, whose environmental benefits are dubious. Distortions in the energy market (especially through the tax system) continue, and if Bush could have
gotten away with it, matters would have been worse.

This mixture of free-market rhetoric and government intervention has worked particularly badly
for developing countries. They were told to stop intervening in agriculture, thereby exposing their farmers to devastating competition from the United States and Europe.
Their farmers might have been able to compete with American and European farmers, but they could not compete with US and European Union subsidies. Not surprisingly,

investments in agriculture in developing countries faded, and a food gap widened.

Those who promulgated this mistaken advice do not have to worry about carrying malpractice insurance. The costs will be borne by those in developing countries, especially the poor.

This

year will see a large rise in poverty, especially if we measure it correctly.

Simply put, in a world of plenty, millions in the developing world still cannot afford the minimum
nutritional requirements. In many countries, increases in food and energy prices will have a particularly
devastating effect on the poor, because these items constitute a larger share of their expenditures.
The anger around the world is palpable. Speculators, not surprisingly, have borne more than a little of the wrath. The speculators argue: we are not the cause of the problem; we are simply
engaged in price discovery in other words, discovering a little late to do much about the problem this year that there is scarcity.

Expectations of rising and volatile prices encourage hundreds of millions of

farmers to take precautions. They might make more money if they hoard a little of their grain today and sell it later; and if they do not, they wont be able to afford it if
next years crop is smaller than hoped. A little grain taken off the market by hundreds of millions of farmers around
the world adds up.
Defenders of market fundamentalism want to shift the blame from market failure to government
failure. One senior Chinese official was quoted as saying that the problem was that the US government should have done more to help low-income Americans with their housing. I agree.
But that does not change the facts: US banks mismanaged risk on a colossal scale, with global
consequences, while those running these institutions have walked away with billions of dollars in
But that answer is disingenuous.

compensation.

there is a mismatch between social and private returns. Unless they are closely aligned, the
market system cannot work well.
Neo-liberal market fundamentalism was always a political doctrine serving certain
Today,

interests . It was never supported by economic theory. Nor, it should now be clear, is it
supported by historical experience. Learning this lesson may be the silver lining in the cloud now hanging over the global economy.

Administration of global economic order requires threat inflation and subversion

results in greater overall violence
Neocleous, Prof of Gov, 8 [Mark Neocleous, Prof. of Government @ Brunel, Critique of Security, p95-]
In other words, the

new international order moved very quickly to reassert the connection between
economic and national security: the commitment to the former was simultaneously a commitment to the latter, and vice versa.
As the doctrine of national security was being born, the major player on the international stage would aim to
use perhaps its most important power of all its economic strength in order to re-order the
world. And this re-ordering was conducted through the idea of economic security.99 Despite the
fact that econ omic security would never be formally dened beyond economic order or economic well-being,100 the signicant
conceptual con sistency between economic security and liberal order-building also had a strategic ideological role. By

playing on
notions of economic well-being, economic security seemed to emphasise economic and thus human
needs over military ones. The reshaping of global capital, international order and the exercise
of state power could thus look decidedly liberal and humanitarian. This appearance helped
co-opt the liberal Left into the process and, of course, played on individual desire for personal security by using
notions such as personal freedom andsocial equality.101
Marx and Engels once highlighted the historical role of the bour geoisie in shaping the world according to its own interests. The need of a
constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production;
it compels them . . . to become bourgeois in themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.102

this ability to batter down all Chinese walls would still rest
heavily on the logic of capital, but would also come about in part under the guise of security.
The whole world became a garden to be cultivated to be recast according to the logic of
security. In the space of fteen years the concept economic security had moved from connoting insurance policies for
working people to the desire to shape the world in a capitalist fashion and back again. In fact, it has constantly shifted between these
registers ever since, being used for the constant reshaping of world order and resulting in a
comprehensive level of intervention and policing all over the globe. Global order has
come to be fabricated and administered according to a security doctrine underpinned by
the logic of capitalaccumulation and a bourgeois conception of order. By incorporating within it a
In the second half of the twentieth century

particular vision of economic order, the concept of national security implies the interrelatedness of so many different social, econ omic,
political and military factors that more or less any development anywhere can be said to impact on liberal order in general and Americas
core interests in particular. Not only could bourgeois Europe be recast around the regime of capital, but so too could the whole international
order as capital not only nestled, settled and established connections, but alsosecured everywhere.

Security politics thereby became the basis of a distinctly liberal philosophy of global
intervention, fusing global issues of economic management with domestic policy
formations in an ambitious and frequently violent strategy. Here lies the Janus-faced character of
American foreign policy.103 One face is the good liberal cop: friendly, prosperous and democratic, sending money and
help around the globe when problems emerge, so that the worlds nations are shown how they can alleviate their misery and perhaps even
enjoy some prosperity. The other face is the bad liberal cop: should one of these nations decide, either through parliamentary
procedure, demands for self-determination or violent revolution to address its own social problems in ways that conict with the interests of
capital and the bourgeois concept of liberty, then the

authoritarian dimension of liberalism shows its face; the

liberal moment becomes the moment of violence. This Janus-faced character has meant that through the
mandate of security the US, as the national security state par excellence, has seen t to either overtly or covertly re-order the affairs of
myriads of nations those rogue or outlaw states on the wrong side of history.104
Extrapolating the gures as best we can, one CIA agent com mented in 1991,there

have been about 3,000 major

covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations all illegal, and all designed to disrupt,
destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries, adding that every covert operation has

been rationalized in terms of U.S. national security.105 These would include interventions in Greece, Italy,
France, Turkey, Macedonia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Indonesia, China, Korea, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Brazil,
Guatemala, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Bolivia, Grenada, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines,
Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, Angola, Ghana, Congo, South Africa, Albania, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia,
Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and many more, and many of these more than once. Next up are the 60 or more countries identied as the bases of
terror cells by Bush in a speech on 1 June 2002.106 The

methods used have varied: most popular has been the

favoured technique of liberal security making the economy scream via controls,
interventions and the imposition of neo-liberal regulations. But a wide range of other
techniques have been used: terror bombing; subversion; rigging elections; the use of the CIAs
Health Alteration Committee whose mandate was to incapacitate foreign ofcials; drugtrafcking;107 and the sponsorship of terror groups, counterinsurgency agencies, death
squads. Unsurprisingly, some plain old fascist groups and parties have been co-opted into the
project, from the attempt at reviving the remnants of the Nazi collaborationist Vlasov Army
for use against the USSR to the use of fascist forces to undermine democratically elected
governments, such as in Chile; indeed, one of the reasons fascism owed into Latin America was
because of the ideology of national security.108
Concomitantly, national security has meant a policy of non-intervention where satisfactory security
partnerships could be established with certain authoritarian and military regimes: Spain under Franco, the Greek junta,
Chile, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan, South Vietnam, the Philippines, Turkey, the ve Central Asian republics that emerged
with the break-up of the USSR, and China. Either

way, the whole world was to be included in the

newsecure global liberal order.

The result has been the slaughter of untold numbers. John Stock well, who was part of a CIA project in
Angola which led to the deaths of over 20,000 people, puts it like this:
Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and guring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos
or the hills of Nicaragua is very difcult. But, adding them up as best we can, we

come up with a gure of six million

people killed and this is a minimum gure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed
in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola the operation I was part of and 22,000
killed in Nicaragua.109

Note that the six million is a minimum gure, that he omits to mention rather a lot of other
interventions, and that he was writing in 1991. This is security as the slaughter bench of
history. All of this has been more than conrmed by events in the twentyrst century: in a speech on 1 June 2002, which became the
basis of the ofcial National Security Strategy of the United Statesin September of that year, President Bush reiterated that the
US has a unilateral right to overthrow any government in the world, and launched a new
round of slaughtering to prove it.
While much has been made about the supposedly new doctrine of preemption in the early twenty-rst century, the policy of preemption has
a long history as part of national security doctrine. The

United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufcient threat to our national security. The greater the threat,
the greater is the risk of inaction and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves . . . To
forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adver saries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre emptively.110

In other words, the security policy of the worlds only superpower in its current war on
terror is still underpinned by a notion of liberal order-building based on a certain vision of
economic order. The National Security Strategy concerns itself with a single sustainable model for national success based on
political and economic liberty, with whole sections devoted to the security benets of economic liberty, and the benets to liberty of the
security strategy proposed.111

Kagans hegemony is responsible for domestic and global genocide the impact is endless
warfare
Pringle, International Relations @ NYU, April 16, 2012 [Joshua Pringle is a master's student of
international relations at New York University as well as the senior editor of Worldpress.org. access
4/26/12 http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/3904.cfm]

In his article "Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American Decline," published in The New
Republic, Robert Kagan argues that American decline could put the entire world order at
risk of collapse. In Kagan's words:
"The present world ordercharacterized by an unprecedented number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the current
crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great powersreflects American principles and preferences, and was built and
preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions. If American power declines, this world order will decline
with it."
Kagan insists that the idea of a liberal, democratic order surviving without the United States propping it up is "a pleasant illusion."

The degree of ethnocentricity that underlies Kagan's article would be hard to understate . In
fact, the words "ethnocentricity," "hubris" or "jingoism" fall short of characterizing a worldview that
puts U.S. hegemony on par with the life-sustaining power of the sun. To the people in countries who have found
themselves on the receiving end of brute U.S. influencenot to mention the generations of
people inside U.S. borders who have seen the myth of U.S. benevolence dispelled by their own
struggles for civil rights or a living wagethe illusion being weaved here is not so much
a pleasant one.
Would Kagan have a different view of U.S. dominance if he had lived in Iran in 1953, when a CIA plot
overthrew the country's prime minister and replaced him with a brutal shah? Or if he'd
lived in Guatemala in 1954?Lebanon in 1958, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965? How would
he have felt living in one of the South American countries in the 1970s that saw a U.S.-backed
coup remove a popular government while killing and torturing thousands in the
process? The U.S. list of post-World War II militaryinterventions is a long one, leading up to the
recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and it requires a very skewed vision of reality to
think we were greeted as liberators each time our bootsor bombshit the ground.
Kagan criticizes Iran and North Korea for defying "American demands that they cease
their nuclear weapons programs." Never mind the implicit assumption here that countries
should obey U.S. demands. Why does he think those countries might have wanted nuclear
weapons in the first place? Take a look at a map of U.S. military bases in all the countries
surrounding Iran, and the picture becomes clear pretty quickly.
Kagan complains that "Arabs and Israelis refuse to make peace, despite American entreaties." Again, put aside the implication
that U.S. "entreaties" should be treated as gospel. Such a statement ignores layers of geopolitical strategy embedded in the
conflict, which do not revolve completely around the United States. It also ignores the role that theUnited States has

played in perpetuating the conflict, by tacitly supporting Israel in its occupation of the
West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Also absent from this narrow point of view is mention of the international agreements and
institutions that have managed to come together without U.S. ratification, such as the
Kyoto Protocol or the International Criminal Court. There is a world out there that keeps turning even when
the United States isn't pushing it.
Throughout the article, the fiber of Kagan's language is laced with this implicit assumption that the United States should have its
hands in all matters of global importanceif anything, for the global good. When he talks of the Arab Spring spinning out of
U.S. control, he implies that this is a decidedly bad thing, not for reasons of U.S. strategic interest in the region, but for the sake
of liberal democracy. To non-Americansor to Americans who have managed to avoid getting drunk on the Kool-Aidthis
must be insulting at the least.
The trouble is, Kagan's blindly nationalistic perspective is shared by so many Americans that he is
able to proceed on the basis of these assumptions without ever bothering to explain or justify them. The source of that

is a nationalism that has survived the massacre of Native

Americans, the enslavement of blacks, the persecution of immigrants, the
repression of women, the exploitation of the poor working class and the
imperialistic conquest of foreign markets, and has still managed to come out
clean on the other side.
nationalism runs deep. It

Don't get me wrong; I'm not about to trade in my U.S. citizenship anytime soon. But if we are to discuss the implications of U.S. dominance

The United States is but a single

country, and to suggest that the prosperity of all others relies on it is to egregiously
misrepresent the hegemonic order.
entering a state of decline, we would be wise to first put that dominance in its proper context.

offshore wind links

Wind reduces energy to mere techne its focus on technological improvement and
progresses plays into a faulty historical narrative that ends up excluding the
unheard other from politics
Byrne and Toly 6 [John, Noah, Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a Discourse
Transforming Power: Energy, Environment, And Society in Conflict. Eds John Byrne, Noah
Toly, and Leigh Glover. Pgs 1-32. Transaction Publishers]
To date, the

greatest success in real green energy development is the spread of wind power. From a
miniscule 1,930 MW in 1990 to more than 47,317 MW in 2005, wind power has come of age . Especially
noteworthy is the rapid growth of wind power in Denmark (35 percent per year since 1997), Spain (30 percent per year since 1997), and Germany
(an astonishing 68 percent per year since 2000), where policies have caused this source to threaten the hegemony of fossil fuels and nuclear
energy. Wind now generates more than 20 percent of Denmarks electricity and the country is the

world leader in turbine manufacture. And as the Danes have demonstrated, offshore wind has the
potential to skirt some of the land-use conflicts that have sometimes beset renewable energy
alternatives. Indeed, some claim that offshore wind alone might produce all of Europes residential electricity (Brown, 2004). National
energy strategists and environmental movements in and beyond Europe have recognized the achievements of the Danes, Spaniards, and Germans
with initiatives designed to imitate their success. What are the characteristics of this success? One envied feature is the remarkable decline in the
price of wind-generated electricity, from $0.46 per kWh in 1980 to $0.03 to $0.07 per kWh today (Sawin, 2004), very close to conventionallyfueled utility generating costs in many countries, even before environmental impacts are included. Jubilant over winds winning

market performance, advocates of sustainable energy foresee a new era that is ecologically much
greener and, yet, in which electricity remains (comparatively) cheap. Lester Brown (2003: 159) notes that wind satisfies seemingly equally
weighted criteria of environmental benefit, social gain, and economic efficiency: Wind is...clean. Wind energy does not produce sulfur dioxide
emissions or nitrous oxides to cause acid rain. Nor are there any emissions of health-threatening mercury that come from coal-fired power plants.
No mountains are leveled, no streams are polluted, and there are no deaths from black lung disease. Wind does not disrupt the earths climate...[I]t
is inexhaustible...[and] cheap. This would certainly satisfy the canon of economic rationalism. It is also consistent with the ideology of modern
consumerism. Its politics bestow sovereignty on consumers not unlike the formula of Pareto optimality, a situation in which additional
consumption of a good or service is warranted until it cannot improve the circumstance of one person (or group) without decreasing the welfare
of another person (or group).17 How would one know better off from worse off in the wind-rich

sustainable energy era? Interestingly, proponents seem to apply a logic that leaves valuation of
better and worse devoid of explicit content. In a manner reminiscent of modern economic
thinking, cheap-and-green enthusiasts appear willing to set wind to the task of making
whateverwhether that is the manufacture of low-cost teeth whitening toothpaste or lower cost
SUVs. In economic accounting, all of these applications potentially make some in society better off (if one accepts that economic growth and
higher incomes are signs of improvement). Possible detrimental side effects or externalities (an economic term for potential
harm) could be rehabilitated by the possession of more purchasing power, which could enable society
to invent environmentally friendly toothpaste and make affordable, energy-efficient SUVs.
Sustainable energy in this construct cooperates in the abstraction of consumption and production.
Consumptionof-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose, and, relatedly, production-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose are not issues.

The construct altogether ignores the possibility that more-is-better consumptionproduction

relations may actually reinforce middle class ideology and capitalist political economy, as well as
contribute to environmental crises such as climate change. In the celebration of its coming market
victory, the cheap-and-green wind version of sustainable energy development may not readily
distinguish the economic/class underpinnings of its victory from those of the conventional energy
regime. Wind enthusiasts also appear to be largely untroubled by trends toward larger and larger
turbines and farms, the necessity of more exotic materials to achieve results, and the advancing
complications of catching the wind. There is nothing new about these sorts of trends in the modern
period. The trajectory of change in a myriad of human activities follows this pattern. Nor is a
critique per se intended in an observation of this trend. Rather, the question we wish to raise is
whether another feature in this pattern will likewise be replicatednamely, a technological
mystique (Bazin, 1986) in which social life finds its inspiration and hope in technical acumen and

searches for fulfillment in the ideals of technique (Mumford, 1934; Ellul, 1964; Marcuse, 1964; Winner, 1977, 1986;
Vanderburg, 2005). This prospect is not a distant one, as a popular magazine recently illustrated. In a special section devoted to thinking After
Oil, National Geographic approvingly compared the latest wind technology to a well-known monument, the Statue of Liberty, and noted that the
new machines tower more than 400 feet above this symbol (Parfit, 2005: 15 - 16). It was not hard to extrapolate from the story the message of
Big Winds liberatory potential. Popular Science also commended new wind systems as technological marvels, repeating the theme that, with its
elevation in height and complexity lending the technology greater status, wind can now be taken seriously by scientists and engineers (Tompkins,
2005). A recent issue of The Economist (2005) included an article on the wonder of electricity generated by an artificial tornado in which wind is
technologically spun to high velocities in a building equipped with a giant turbine to convert the energy into electricity. Indeed, wind is being
contemplated as a rival able to serve society by the sheer technical prowess that has often been a defining characteristic of modern energy
systems. Obviously, wind energy has a long way to go before it can claim to have dethroned

conventional energys technological cathedrals (Weinberg, 1985). But its mission seems largely to
supplant other spectacular methods of generating electricity with its own. The politics supporting
its rapid rise express no qualms about endorsing the inevitability of its victories on technical
grounds. In fact, Big Wind appears to seek monumental status in the psyche of ecologically modern society. A recent alliance of the
American Wind Energy Association and the U.S. electric utility industry to champion national
(subsidized) investment in higher voltage transmission lines (to deliver green-and-cheap electricity),
illustrates the desire of Big Wind to plug into Giant Powers hardware and, correspondingly, its
ideology (see American Wind Energy Association, 2005, supporting Transmission Infrastructure Modernization). The
transformative features of such a politics are unclear. Indeed, wind powerif it can continue to be
harvested by everlarger machinesmay penetrate the conventional energy order so successfully
that it will diffuse, without perceptible disruption, to the regime. The air will be cleaner but the
source of this achievement will be duly noted: science will have triumphed still again in wresting
from stingy nature the resources that a wealthy life has grown to expect. Social transformation
to achieve sustainability may actually be unnecessary by this political view of things, as middle-class
existence is assured via clean, low-cost and easy-to-plug-in wind power.

Market solutions make wind a neoliberal messiahassumes a natural

consumerism that cant be sustained
Glover et al 2006 *Policy Fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy,
University of Delaware, **Directs the Urban Studies and Wheaton in Chicago programs,
selected to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leaders Program for 2011-2013,
***2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Distinguished Professor of Energy & Climate Policy at the
University of Delaware, Head of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy (Leigh Glover,
Noah Toly, John Byrne, Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a Discourse, in Transforming
Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict, p. 1-32,
http://www.ceep.udel.edu/energy/publications/2006_es_energy_as_a_social_project.pdf, WEA)
The search for harmonized market-style policies to strengthen the energy status quo in the
face of its mounting challenges reflects the growing political power of energy neoliberalism in an era of economic globalization (Dubash,
2002; Dubash and Williams, 2006). The two processes build a com- plimentary, if circular, politics in support of conventional energy: the logic is that global economic
development requires energy use, which can only be properly planned if international capitalist institutions
can be assured that the lubricant of globalization, namely, the unfettered power of markets, is established by enforceable policy (Byrne et
al., 2004). Correspondingly, resulting carbon emissions can only eventually be abated if economic globalization is protected so that international capitalist institutions find it profitable to begin to lower carbon emissions and/or

Consumers and producers, rather than citizens, are judged to be the proper signatories to the
social contract because these participants, without the stain of politics, can find rational answers to our problems. In sum,
conventionalists counsel against preconceiving the social and environmental requirements for an energy
transition, preferring a continuation of the existing energy regime that promises to deliver a reasonable, practical future consistent with its past.
sequester them. 15

Scheer (2002: 137) describes the erroneous assumption in such reasoning: The need for fossil energy is a practical constraint that society must respect, for better or worse; whereas proposals for a swift and immediate
reorientation...are denounced as irresponsible. An orderly transition is thus forecast from the current energy status quo of fossil fuel and nuclear energy dominance to a new energy status quo with possibly less carbon, but surely
with giant-sized fossil and nuclear energy systems in wide use. The Sustainable Energy Quest The problems of the conventional energy order have led some to regard reinforcement of the status quo as folly and to instead
champion sustainable energy strategies based upon non-conventional sources and a more intelligent ideology of managed relations between energy, environment, and society consonant with environmental integrity. This regime
challenger seeks to evolve in the social context that produced the conventional energy regime, yet proposes to fundamentally change its relationship to the environment (at least, this is the hope). Technologies such as wind and
photovoltaic electricity are purported to offer building blocks for a transition to a future in which ills plaguing modernity and unsolved by the conventional energy regime can be overcome (Lovins, 1979; Hawken et al., 2000;

Scheer, 2002; Rifkin, 2003; World Bank, 2004b). While technical developments always include social, material, ecological, intellectual, and moral infrastructures (Winner, 1977: 54 - 58; Toly, 2005), and may, therefore, be key to

technologies, even environmentally benign ones, will be

appropriated by social forces that predate them and, thereby, can be thwarted in the
fulfillment of social promises attached to the strategy. Indeed, if unaccompanied by reflection upon
the social conditions in which the current energy regime thrives, the transition to a renewable energy regime may usher in very few social
benefits and little, if any, political and economic transformation. This is the concern that guides our analysis (below) of the
promoting fundamentally different development pathways, it is also possible that

sustainable energy movement. At least since the 1970s when Amory Lovins (1979) famously posed the choice between hard and soft energy paths, sustainable energy strategies have been offered to challenge the prevailing
regime. Sometimes the promise was of no more than alternative and least cost energy (Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, 1974a, 1974b; OToole, 1978; Sant, 1979), but adjectives such as appropriate, natural,
renewable, equitable, and even democratic have also been envisioned (Institute for Local SelfReliance, 2005; Scheer, 2002: 34). 16 The need to depart from the past, especially in light of the oil crises of the 1970s and the
energy-rooted threat of climate change that has beset policy debate since the late 1980s, united disparate efforts to recast and reconceive our energy future. Partly, early criticisms of the mainstream were reflective of a broader
social agenda that drew upon, among other things, the anti-war and anti-corporate politics of the 1960s. It was easy, for example, to connect the modern energy regime to military conflicts of the period and to superpower politics;
and it was even easier to ally the mainstreams promotion of nuclear power to the objectives of the Nuclear Club. With evidence of profiteering by the oil majors in the wake of the 1973-1974 OPEC embargo, connecting the
energy regime with the expanding power of multinational capital was, likewise, not difficult. Early sustainable energy strategies opposed these alliances, offering promises of significant political, as well as technological, change.
However, in the thirty years that the sustainable energy movement has aspired to change the conventional regime, its social commitments and politics have become muddled. A telling sign of this circumstance is the shifted focus
from energy politics to economics. To illustrate, in the celebrated work of one of the movements early architects, subtitles to volumes included breaking the nuclear link (Amory Lovins Energy/War, 1981) and toward a

Today, however, the bestsellers

chart a course toward natural capitalism (Hawken et al., 2000), a strategy that anticipates synergies
between soft path technologies and market governance of energy-environment-society relations. Indeed, a
durable peace (Lovins Soft Energy Paths, 1979). These publications offered poignant challenges to the modern order and energys role in maintaining that order.
of the movement

major sustainable energy think tank has reached the conclusion that small is profitable (Lovins et al., 2002) in energy matters and argues that the soft path is consistent with economic rationalism. Understandably, a movement

Without adaptation, the

conventional energy regime could have ignored soft path policy interventions like demand-side
management, integrated resource planning, public benefits charges, and renewable energy portfolio standards (see Lovins
and Gadgil, 1991; Sawin, 2004), all of which have caused an undeniable degree of decentralization in energy-society relations. In this
that sought basic change for a third of a century has found the need to adapt its arguments and strategies to the realities of political and economic power.

vein, it is clear that sustainability proponents must find ways to speak the language and communicate in the logic of economic rationalism if they are to avoid being dismissed. We do not fault the sustainable energy camp for being

the concern is whether victories in the everyday of incremental politics have been balanced by attention to
the broader agenda of systemic change and the ideas needed to define new directions. A measure of the sustainable energy initiatives strategic
strategic. Rather,

success is the growing acceptance of its vision by past adversaries. Thus, Small is Profitable was named Book of the Year in 2002 by The Economist, an award unlikely to have been bestowed upon any of Lovins earlier works. As
acceptance has been won, it is clear that sustainable energy advocates remain suspicious of the oil majors, coal interests, and the Nuclear Club. But an earlier grounding of these suspicions in anti-war and anti-corporate politics

Thus, it has been suggested

that society can turn more profit with less carbon, by harnessing corporate power to heal the
planet (Lovins, 2005; L. H. Lovins and A. B. Lovins, 2000). Similarly, Hermann Scheer (2002: 323) avers: The fundamental problem with todays global economy is
not globalization per se, but that this globalization is not based on the sunthe only global force that is equally available to all and whose bounty
is so great that it need never be fully tapped. However, it is not obvious that market economics and globalization can be
counted upon to deliver the soft path (see e.g. Nakajima and Vandenberg, 2005). More problematic, as discussed below, the emerging soft path may fall well
short of a socially or ecologically transforming event if strategic victories and rhetorics that celebrate them overshadow systemic critiques of
energy-society relations and the corresponding need to align the sustainable energy initiative with social movements to address a
appears to have been superseded by one that believes the global economy can serve a sustainability interest if the raison de market wins the energy policy debate.

comprehensive agenda of change. Catching the Wind To date, the greatest success in real green energy development is the spread of wind power. From a miniscule 1,930 MW in 1990 to more than 47,317 MW in 2005, wind
power has come of age. Especially noteworthy is the rapid growth of wind power in Denmark (35 percent per year since 1997), Spain (30 percent per year since 1997), and Germany (an astonishing 68 percent per year since 2000),
where policies have caused this source to threaten the hegemony of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Wind now generates more than 20 percent of Denmarks electricity and the country is the world leader in turbine manufacture.
And as the Danes have demonstrated, offshore wind has the potential to skirt some of the land-use conflicts that have sometimes beset renewable energy alternatives. Indeed, some claim that offshore wind alone might produce all
of Europes residential electricity (Brown, 2004). National energy strategists and environmental movements in and beyond Europe have recognized the achievements of the Danes, Spaniards, and Germans with initiatives designed

One envied feature is the remarkable decline in the price of wind-generated electricity,
Jubilant
over winds winning market performance, advocates of sustainable energy foresee a new era that is ecologically much greener and,
yet, in which electricity remains (comparatively) cheap. Lester Brown (2003: 159) notes that wind satisfies seemingly equally weighted criteria of environmental benefit, social
to imitate their success. What are the characteristics of this success?

from $0.46 per kWh in 1980 to $0.03 to $0.07 per kWh today (Sawin, 2004), very close to conventionally-fueled utility generating costs in many countries, even before environmental impacts are included.

gain, and economic efficiency: Wind is...clean. Wind energy does not produce sulfur dioxide emissions or nitrous oxides to cause acid rain. Nor are there any emissions of health-threatening mercury that come from coal-fired

This would certainly satisfy

is also consistent with the ideology of modern consumerism. Its politics bestow
sovereignty on consumers not unlike the formula of Pareto optimality, a situation in which additional consumption of a good or service is warranted until it cannot improve the circumstance of
one person (or group) without decreasing the welfare of another person (or group). 17 How would one know better off from worse off in the
wind-rich sustainable energy era? Interestingly, proponents seem to apply a logic that leaves valuation of better and worse devoid
of explicit content. In a manner reminiscent of modern economic thinking, cheap-and-green enthusiasts appear willing to set wind to the
task of making whateverwhether that is the manufacture of low-cost teeth whitening toothpaste or lower cost SUVs. In economic accounting, all of these applications potentially make
power plants. No mountains are leveled, no streams are polluted, and there are no deaths from black lung disease. Wind does not disrupt the earths climate...[I]t is inexhaustible...[and] cheap.
the canon of economic rationalism. It

some in society better off (if one accepts that economic growth and higher incomes are signs of improvement). Possible detrimental side effects or externalities (an economic term for potential harm) could be rehabilitated by the
possession of more purchasing power, which could enable society to invent environmentally friendly toothpaste and make affordable, energy-efficient SUVs. Sustainable energy in this construct cooperates in the abstraction of

The construct altogether

ignores the possibility that more-is-better consumption-production relations may actually reinforce middle class
consumption and production. Consumption-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose, and, relatedly, production-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose are not issues.

ideology and capitalist political economy, as well as contribute to environmental crises such as climate change. In the celebration of its coming market
victory, the cheap-and-green wind version of sustainable energy development may not readily distinguish the economic/class underpinnings of its victory from those of the conventional energy regime. Wind enthusiasts also
appear to be largely untroubled by trends toward larger and larger turbines and farms, the necessity of more exotic materials to achieve results, and the advancing complications of catching the wind. There is nothing new about
these sorts of trends in the modern period. The trajectory of change in a myriad of human activities follows this pattern. Nor is a critique per se intended in an observation of this trend. Rather, the question we wish to raise is
whether another feature in this pattern will likewise be replicatednamely, a technological mystique (Bazin, 1986) in which social life finds its inspiration and hope in technical acumen and searches for fulfillment in the ideals of
technique (Mumford, 1934; Ellul, 1964; Marcuse, 1964; Winner, 1977, 1986; Vanderburg, 2005). This prospect is not a distant one, as a popular magazine recently illustrated. In a special section devoted to thinking After Oil,
National Geographic approvingly compared the latest wind technology to a well-known monument, the Statue of Liberty, and noted that the new machines tower more than 400 feet above this symbol (Parfit, 2005: 15 - 16). It was
not hard to extrapolate from the story the message of Big Winds liberatory potential. Popular Science also commended new wind systems as technological marvels, repeating the theme that, with its elevation in height and
complexity lending the technology greater status, wind can now be taken seriously by scientists and engineers (Tompkins, 2005). A recent issue of The Economist (2005) included an article on the wonder of electricity generated
by an artificial tornado in which wind is technologically spun to high velocities in a building equipped with a giant turbine to convert the energy into electricity. Indeed, wind is being contemplated as a rival able to serve society by

wind energy has a long way to go before it can claim to have

dethroned conventional energys technological cathedrals (Weinberg, 1985). But its mission seems largely to supplant other spectacular methods of
generating electricity with its own. The politics supporting its rapid rise express no qualms about endorsing the inevitability of its victories on tech- nical grounds. In fact, Big Wind appears to
seek monumental status in the psyche of ecologically modern society. A recent alliance of the American Wind Energy
the sheer technical prowess that has often been a defining characteristic of modern energy systems. Obviously,

Association and the U.S. electric utility industry to champion national (subsidized) investment in higher voltage transmission lines (to deliver green-and-cheap electricity), illustrates the desire of Big Wind to plug into Giant

The transformative features of

such a politics are unclear. Indeed, wind powerif it can continue to be harvested by everlarger machinesmay penetrate the conventional energy order so successfully that it will
diffuse, without perceptible disruption, to the regime. The air will be cleaner but the source of this achievement will be duly noted: science will have triumphed still again in
wresting from stingy nature the resources that a wealthy life has grown to expect. Social
transformation to achieve sustainability may actually be unnecessary by this political view of things, as middle-class existence is assured via clean, lowPowers hardware and, correspondingly, its ideology (see American Wind Energy Association, 2005, supporting Transmission Infrastructure Modernization).

cost and easy-to-plug-in wind power.

hegemony links
Hegemony is discursively constructed and relies on antagonisms between a Self and
Other that results in annihilation
Herschinger 12 lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of the Armed
Forces Munich, Germany
(Eva, Hell Is the Other: Conceptualising Hegemony and Identity through Discourse Theory, Millennium - Journal of International Studies
September 2012 vol. 41 no. 1 65-90, dml)
Many IR-poststructuralists share with discourse theorists crucial commitments most importantly, a specific understanding of language,
discourse and the role of contingency. To start with, language

does not merely reflect reality but constructs reality:

by speaking, something is done, for instance, in betting, giving a promise or naming a ship. 23 Thus, a material
reality of course exists; however, there is no objective or true meaning beyond linguistic
representations . 24 Discourse is conceived in analogy, as it is constitutive for the construction of knowledge and the constitution of
objects. While there are different notions of discourse, the Essex School conceptualises discourse as a structured totality, 25 a system of
meaningful practices, which relates differences to establish their meaning. In other words, the

meanings and the identities of

objects and subjects are formed through a system of practices embodied by discourse. These
practices are routinised forms of human and societal reproduction, which are material and articulatory at the same time,
since human beings constantly engage in the process of linking together different elements of
their social lives in these continuous and projective sequences of human action. 26
This constant process of linking hints at the role of contingency in the Essex School. Although being defined as a totality, discourse is a
structure penetrated by contingency and temporality, marked by ruptures and breaches because the relation
between differences can constantly change and meaning is organised differently. Attempts to fix
meaning around closed structures are in vain: neither absolute fixity nor absolute non-fixity is possible. 27 However, to
allow for identity and social formation, the Essex School argues that meaning needs to be partially fixed; that
is, partial fixations bind the very flow of differences temporally. Such fixations are achieved as any discourse situates itself as an attempt to
dominate the field of discursivity 28 and subjects search for a constitutive decision articulating social meaning in one way rather than another.
With regard to international counter-terrorist policies and drug prohibition measures, such

conceptualisations of language, discourse

and contingency imply, on the one hand, that these policies are based on specific, contingent linguistic
representations of the security problem they want to address and on specific, partially fixed
constructions of Self and Other. On the other hand, these linguistic representations fuel the actions of
the respective countermeasures by making them intelligible and legitimate. This is what I mean by
conceptualising practices to be articulatory and material at the same time.
In the Essex School, hegemony is conceptualised against this background inasmuch as it builds on Gramscis claim that
the articulation of collective wills takes place in the midst of political struggles within state, economy and civil society. For Gramsci, hegemony is
the genuine political moment marked by an ideological struggle which tries to unify economic, political and intellectual objectives. 29

Hegemony is no longer confined to the attempt to form a political alliance but aims at the total fusion of different
objectives, involving the creation of a collective will. The latter is forged via an ideological struggle which, according to Mouffe, is a
process of disarticulation-rearticulation of given ideological elements in a struggle between two hegemonic principles to appropriate these
elements. 30
As such, hegemony

is a discursive phenomenon produced through specific relations of forces.

Typically, these relations articulated in hegemonic practices organise the discursive space by
drawing boundaries and creating identities. In the Essex School context, such shaping of the discursive terrain is
encompassed by the logic of equivalence. While discursive elements are per se different, the logic of equivalence produces equivalential
differences. To explain: a,b,c are equivalent with regard to something identical underlying them all; thus, a,b,c are equivalent (But not identical!)
with respect to z. This something identical is termed the general equivalent. 31 By contrast, the

logic of difference encompasses the

opposite movement as it extenuates the equivalential ties between elements, that is, it disperses hegemonic formations and
disintegrates current identities. The logic relates discursive elements while preserving their difference indeed, difference makes
them conceivable as elements: a is different from b,b from c and so on. Still, both logics cannot do with or without each other, as a certain
degree of difference is conditional to establish equivalential chains. One is diluted by what the other is trying to fix, but none of the logics

dominates a discourse completely as only partial fixations are possible. 32

Yet, to pursue my argument further, it

is necessary to establish a link between hegemony and the articles

relational concept of identity, which states that in the process of identity construction, a Self and
corresponding Other(s) are created. While the terminology of a Self is rarely employed in the Essex School context, (which
rather speaks of the subject), ties with the relational conceptualisation of identity in IR-poststructuralism are obvious when Laclau claims that
[t]here is no way that a particular group living in a wider community can live a monadic existence on the contrary, part

of the
definition of its own identity is the construction of a complex and elaborated system of relations
with other groups. 33 This clearly resonates with the IR-poststructuralist thought of difference being a requirement built into the logic
of identity. 34 However, IR-poststructuralism has expended some energy trying to outline that speaking of Self and antagonistic
Other(s) captures only half the story since the antagonistic Other is often situated within a more
complicated set of identities. 35 Identity construction produces varying degrees of otherness and does not necessarily depend upon
a juxtaposition to a radically threatening Other. 36 Still, the treatment of antagonistic and non-antagonistic Others
involves some combination of hierarchy , eradication , assimilation or expulsion
and in the moment of a blocked identity the self might be driven by the desire to move from a relationship of
mutuality and interdependence to one of autonomy and dominance . 37 These dynamics show that in
IR-poststructuralism, identities are fragmented and can only be partially fixed: identity does not signal that stable core of the self, unfolding from
the beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change. 38 On the contrary, the

discursive nature of identity

always allows for alternative constructions against which other identity notions are protected and
defended: identities are subject to constant (re)writing in the sense of inscribing a particular meaning so as to render more permanent that
which is originally contingent. 39
By taking into account these congruent conceptualisations of identity being based on difference in the Essex School and IR-poststructuralism, I
argue that international hegemonies

are about creating a collective Self juxtaposed to its antagonistic

Other, that is, that which the Self deems culpable of blocking its desired identity . 40 Central to this
claim are the operations of the logic of equivalence: modelling the discursive topography by outlining what a number of elements have in
common and drawing frontiers goes hand in hand with separating a discursive space into at least two diametrically opposed entities. In
hegemonic relations, the identities constructed are distinct from identities emerging in other contexts (for instance, between cooperation partners).
41 Identity

construction in the context of hegemonies is a process soaked in power, since the

entities created by the logic of equivalence are separated by an antagonistic frontier and are constructed as
antagonistic camps. Thus, the logic makes reference to an us them axis: two or more elements can be
substituted for each other with reference to a common negation or threat. 42 Indeed, the joint project that the logic of equivalence links
elements into consists of countering a common enemy in order to achieve the vision of a world which
is blocked by the presence of the Other . According to the articles conceptualisation of hegemony and identity,
this is when a Self and an Other are created by outlining that elements are not equivalent in terms of sharing a positive
property but in terms of having a common enemy. And as this Self considers its identity as blocked by the Other,
the latter appears to be responsible for the failure of the Self to achieve its full identity. The point is
not that the Self is nothing because it cannot be a full presence of itself. Rather, the political actions of the Self will be
shaped by the idea that the annihilation of the enemy will permit the Self to become the
fully constituted identity it seeks to be. 43 A typical assertion in this respect would be: if we only
eliminated terrorism, the world would be a peaceful and safe place.

Hegemony is a paranoid fantasy---the most secure nation on earth sees threats to

empire everywhere, which legitimizes constant violence---you have an obligation to
place the structural violence that hegemony invisibilizes at the core of your decision
calculus
McClintock 9chaired prof of English and Womens and Gender Studies at UWMadison.
MPhil from Cambridge; PhD from Columbia (Anne, Paranoid Empire: Specters from
Guantnamo and Abu Ghraib, Small Axe Mar2009, Issue 28, p50-74)

By now it is fair to say that the United States has come to be

dominated by two grand and dangerous hallucinations:

the promise of benign US globalization and the permanent threat of the war
on terror.
9/11two countries invaded,
grasp a

I have come to feel that we cannot understand the

extravagance of the violence

to which the US government has committed itself after

thousands of innocent people imprisoned, killed, and tortured unless we

defining feature of our moment , that is, a deep and disturbing doubleness with

respect to power . Taking shape, as it now does, around fantasies of global omnipotence
All Evil) coinciding with

(Operation Infinite Justice, the War to End

nightmares of impending attack, the U nited S tates has entered the domain of

paranoia : dream world and catastrophe.

For it is only in paranoia that one finds simultaneously and in such condensed form both

deliriums of absolute power and forebodings of perpetual threat.

quality of the war on terror, a

Hence the spectral and nightmarish

limitless war against a limitless threat, a war vaunted by the US

administration to encompass all of space and persisting without end.

a real war, for terror is not an identifiable enemy nor a strategic, real-world target. The war on terror is what William Gibson calls elsewhere

But the war on terror is not

a consensual hallucination,

only at the cost of catastrophic self-

4 and the US government can fling its military might against ghostly apparitions and hallucinate a victory over all evil

delusion and the infliction of great calamities elsewhere.

I have come to feel that we urgently need to make visible

(the better politically to challenge)

circuits of imperial violence

connect those circuits
have come to characterize the United States as a

that now animate the war on terror. We need, as urgently, to illuminate the

those established but

concealed

continuities that

of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxesthe modern slave-ships on the middle passage to nowherethat

super-carceral state.

Can we, the uneasy heirs of empire, now speak only of national things? If a long-established but primarily covert US imperialism has, since 9/11, manifested itself more aggressively as an overt empire, does the terrain and
object of intellectual inquiry, as well as the claims of

political responsibility,

shadowlands of empire?

not also extend beyond that useful fiction of the exceptional nation to embrace

If so, how can we theorize the phantasmagoric, imperial violence that has come so dreadfully to constitute our kinship with the ordinary, but which also at

the same moment renders extraordinary the ordinary bodies of ordinary people, an imperial violence which in collusion with a complicit corporate media would render itself invisible,

of emergency into fitful shadow and fleshly bodies into specters?

is not something that happens elsewhere,
to reconfigure,

the

an

offshore

casting states
For

imperialism

fact to be deplored but as easily ignored. Rather, the force of empire comes

from within , the nature and violence of the nation-state itself, giving rise to perplexing questions: Who under an empire are we, the people? And who are the ghosted, ordinary people

beyond the nation-state who, in turn, constitute us?

We now inhabit

a crisis of violence and the visible . How do we insist on seeing the

violence that the imperial state attempts to render invisible,

violence? For to allow the spectral, disfigured people (especially those under torture) obliged to inhabit the
visible as ordinary people is to

forfeit the

long-held

while also seeing the ordinary people afflicted by that

haunted no-places and penumbra

of empire to be made

US claim of moral and cultural exceptionalism, the

traditional self-identity of the U nited S tates as the uniquely superior, universal

standard-bearer of moral authority, a tenacious, national mythology of originary
innocence now in tatters .

The deeper question, however, is not only how to see but also how to theorize and oppose the violence without becoming beguiled by the seductions of spectacle

alone. 6
Perhaps in the labyrinths of torture

we must also find a way to speak with ghosts, for specters disturb

the authority of vision and the hauntings of popular memory disrupt the great
forgettings of official history.
Paranoia
Even the paranoid have enemies.
Donald Rumsfeld
Why paranoia? Can we fully understand the

proliferating circuits of imperial violence the very eclipsing of which gives to our moment its

uncanny, phantasmagoric castwithout understanding the

across the

pervasive presence of the paranoia

political and cultural spectrum

that has come, quite

violently , to manifest itself

as a defining feature of our time? By paranoia, I mean not simply Hofstadters famous identification of the US states

tendency toward conspiracy theories. 7 Rather, I conceive of paranoia as an inherent contradiction with respect to power: a double-sided phantasm that oscillates precariously between deliriums of grandeur and nightmares of
perpetual threat, a deep and dangerous doubleness with respect to power that is held in unstable tension, but which, if suddenly destabilized (as after 9/11), can produce

pyrotechnic

displays of violence . The pertinence of understanding paranoia, I argue, lies in its peculiarly intimate and peculiarly dangerous relation to violence. 8
Let me be clear: I do not see paranoia as a primary, structural cause of US imperialism nor as its structuring identity. Nor do I see the US war on terror as animated by some collective, psychic agency, submerged mind, or
Hegelian cunning of reason, nor by what Susan Faludi calls a national terror dream. 9 Nor am I interested in evoking paranoia as a kind of psychological diagnosis of the imperial nation-state. Nations do not have
psyches or an unconscious; only people do. Rather, a social entity such as an organization, state, or empire can be spoken of as paranoid if the dominant powers governing that entity cohere as a collective community
around contradictory cultural narratives, self-mythologies, practices, and identities that oscillate between delusions of inherent superiority and omnipotence, and phantasms of threat and engulfment. The term paranoia is
analytically useful here, then, not as a description of a collective national psyche, nor as a description of a universal pathology, but rather as an analytically strategic concept, a way of seeing and being attentive to
contradictions within power, a way of making visible (the better politically to oppose) the contradictory flashpoints of violence that the state tries to conceal.
Paranoia is in this sense what I call a hinge phenomenon, articulated between the ordinary person and society, between psychodynamics and socio-political history. Paranoia is in that sense dialectical rather than binary, for its
violence erupts from the force of its multiple, cascading contradictions: the intimate memories of wounds, defeats, and humiliations condensing with cultural fantasies of aggrandizement and revenge, in such a way as to be
productive at times of unspeakable violence. For how else can we understand such debauches of cruelty?
A critical question still remains: does not something terrible have to happen to ordinary people (military police, soldiers, interrogators) to instill in them, as ordinary people, in the most intimate, fleshly ways, a paranoid cast
that enables them to act compliantly with, and in obedience to, the paranoid visions of a paranoid state? Perhaps we need to take a long, hard look at the simultaneously humiliating and aggrandizing rituals of militarized
institutions, whereby individuals are first broken down, then reintegrated (incorporated) into the larger corps as a unified, obedient fighting body

, the methods by which

schools , the military, training camps not to mention the paranoid image-worlds of the corporate
mediainstill paranoia in ordinary people and fatally conjure up collective but
unstable fantasies of omnipotence. 10 In what follows, I want to trace the flashpoints of imperial paranoia into the labyrinths of torture in order to illuminate three crises that animate
our moment: the crisis of violence and the visible, the crisis of imperial legitimacy, and what I call the enemy deficit. I explore these flashpoints of imperial paranoia as they emerge in the torture at Guantnamo and Abu
Ghraib. I argue that Guantnamo is the territorializing of paranoia and that torture itself is paranoia incarnate, in order to make visible, in keeping with Hazel Carbys brilliant work, those contradictory sites where imperial
racism, sexuality, and gender catastrophically collide. 11
The Enemy Deficit: Making the Barbarians Visible Because night is here but the barbarians have not come. Some people arrived from the frontiers, And they said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall
become of us without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.
C. P. Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians
The barbarians have declared war.
President George W. Bush
C. P. Cavafy wrote Waiting for the Barbarians in 1927, but the poem haunts the aftermath of 9/11 with the force of an uncanny and prescient dj vu. To what dilemma are the barbarians a kind of solution? Every modern
empire faces an abiding

crisis of legitimacy

in that it flings its power over territories and peoples who have not consented to that power. Cavafys insight is that

an

imperial state claims legitimacy only by evoking the threat of the barbarians. It is only
the threat of the barbarians that constitutes the silhouette of the empires
borders in the first place.

On the other hand, the hallucination of the barbarians disturbs the empire with

perpetual nightmares of

impending attack. The enemy is the abject of empire: the rejected from which we
cannot part. And without the barbarians the legitimacy of empire vanishes like a
disappearing phantom. Those people were a kind of solution.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the grand antagonism of the United States and the USSR evaporated like a quickly fading nightmare. The cold war rhetoric of totalitarianism, Finlandization, present
danger, fifth columnist, and infiltration vanished.

Where were the enemies now to justify the continuing

escalation of the military colossus ?

barbarians?

By rights,

And now

what shall become of us without any

the thawing of the cold war should have prompted an

immediate downsizing of the military ; any plausible external threat had simply ceased to exist. Prior to 9/11, General Peter Schoomaker, head of the US
Army, bemoaned the enemy deficit: Its no use having an army that did nothing but train, he said. Theres got to be a certain appetite for what the hell we exist for. Dick Cheney likewise complained:

The

threats have become so remote. So remote that they are difficult to ascertain . Colin
Powell agreed: Though we can still plausibly identify specific threatsNorth Korea, Iran, Iraq, something like thatthe real threat is the unknown, the uncertain. Before becoming president, George W. Bush likewise
fretted over the postcold war dearth of a visible enemy: We do not know who the enemy is, but we know they are out there. It is now well established that the invasion of Iraq had been a long-standing goal of the US
administration, but there was no clear rationale with which to sell such an invasion. In 1997 a group of neocons at the Project for the New American Century produced a remarkable report in which they stated that to make
such an invasion palatable would require a catastrophic and catalyzing eventlike a new Pearl Harbor. 12
The 9/11 attacks came as a dazzling solution, both to the enemy deficit and the problem of legitimacy, offering the Bush administration what they would claim as a

political casus belli

and the military unimaginable license to expand its reach . General Peter Schoomaker would publicly admit that the
attacks were an immense boon: There is a huge silver lining in this cloud. . . . War is a tremendous focus. . . . Now we have this focusing opportunity, and we have the fact that (terrorists) have actually attacked our homeland,
which gives it some oomph. In his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke recalls thinking during the attack, Now we can perhaps attack Osama Bin Laden. After the invasion of Afghanistan, Secretary of State Colin
Powell noted, America will have a continuing interest and presence in Central Asia of a kind we could not have dreamed of before. Charles Krauthammer, for one, called for a declaration of total war. We no longer have to
search for a name for the post-Cold War era, he declared. It will henceforth be known as the age of terrorism. 13

warming links
Focus on catastrophic warming overlooks the role of technologic organization in
driving environmental devastation
Eileen CRIST, Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech
University, 2007 [Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse, Telos,
Volume 141, Winter, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Telos Press, p. 33-36]
While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in
representing it as the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a manner deserves
to be challenged for two reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed solutions to the technical
realm, by powerfully insinuating that the needed approaches are those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention
from the planet's ecological predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight for the
one issue that trumps all others. Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center stage as
the highest priority problem, has bolstered the proliferation of technical proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for
figuring out what technologies, or portfolio thereof, will solve "the problem." Whether the call is for
reviving nuclear power, boosting the installation of wind turbines, using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossilfuel use, developing carbon-sequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the sun's rays, the

narrow character of
such proposals is evident: confront the problem of greenhouse gas emissions by technologically
phasing them out, superseding them, capturing them, or mitigating their heating effects. In his The
Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the need to face climate change by "changing our whole style of living."16 [end page
33] But the thrust of this work, what readers and policy-makers come away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in nuclear energy
as, in his words, "the one lifeline we can use immediately."17 In the policy realm, the

first step toward the technological fix

for global warming is often identified with implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery
agitates for the treaty, comparing the need for its successful endorsement to that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the ozone-depleting
CFCs. "The Montreal protocol," he submits, "marks a signal moment in human societal development, representing the first ever victory by

the deepening
realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that
dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the planet's predicament. Just as
the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long
underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be nave not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely
unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hoped-for) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were
restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and innovations, the root cause of the
ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of production, trade,
extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth,
would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of
the Earth. Industrial-consumer civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and
perceived entitlement to, the entire planet.19 But questioning this civilization is by [end page 34] and large
sidestepped in climate-change discourse, with its single-minded quest for a global-warming
techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the
climate crisisamong numerous other catastrophesclimate-change literature often focuses on how global
warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes over what technological means can save it
from impending tipping points.21 The dominant frame of climate change funnels cognitive and pragmatic work toward specifically
addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate change looms so huge [end page 35] on
the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other facets
of the ecological crisis: mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial
fishing, continued old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine
humanity over a global pollution problem."18 He hopes for a similar victory for the global climate-change problem. Yet

disruption, incessant development, and so on, are made to appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with
"dangerous anthropogenic interference" with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climatechange discourse encourages the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisisa crisis that has
been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas
remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other academic
literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the consequences of
global warming for biodiversity,23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous
greenhouse-gas buildup by decades, centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a
technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate species and ecosystem lossesindeed,
is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a
resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end towill barely addressthe ongoing
destruction of life on Earth.

Warming IMPACTS and framing as ANTHROPOGENIC used to promote

acceptance of capitalist growth
Smith 8
PhD Johns Hopkins 1982; Dist Prof) Political economy, urban social theory, space, nature-culture,
history and theory of geography (nsmith@gc.cuny.edu) Prof. SmithNeil Smith was trained as a
geographer and his research explores the broad intersection between space, nature, social theory
and history. He teaches in urban anthropology, cultural anthropology and environmental
anthropology, and directs the Center for Place Culture and Politics. His environmental work is
largely theoretical, focusing on questions of the production of nature. His urban interests include
long term research on gentrification, including empirical work in North America and Europe and a
series of theoretical papers emphasizing the importance of patterns of investment and
disinvestment in the the real estate market. He also writes more broadly on New York City, focusing
especially on the "revanchist city" which has filled the vacuum left in the wake of liberal urban
theory.

Nature-washing and the Production of Nature Although the environmental movement was in full
swing, it would have been difficult in the early 1980s to anticipate the extent to which some
broad acceptance of the "production of nature" thesisor whatever language we want to use
would become not just radical orthodoxy but the stuff of front-page headlines. Global warming
and humanly induced climate change are no longer scarehead slogans of the environmental left
but the bread, butter, and martini lunches of Wall Street boardrooms. Granola green is
supplanted by dollar green. Indeed the production of nature has become in some respects the
capitalist orthodoxy; climate change has been converted from a threat on profits to a new
sector of capitalist profitability. Sufficiently so that by 2003 the Pentagon, in collaboration
with the U.S.-based Global Business Network, could warn about the effects of climatic change
on "U.S. security" and advance a multibillion dollar program for climate security. But the issue is
not quite this simple. There seems to be no reasonable scientific basis on which to deny that
global warming is taking place and that intensifying social economies of production,
reproduction, and consumption contribute to that result. Quite the extent of this global social
contribution to climatic change, however, is not at all clear, and may well be incalculable. The
problem is that to calculate such a responsibility requires assuming either a static nature against
which global warming can be definitively measureda demonstrably unrealistic scientific
assumptionor else assuming some trajectory of "natural" change (but how is that projected

future to be assumed?) against which some human component might be measured. There are of
course sophisticated models of cyclic global climate change based on data that reaches back to
the nineteenth century (however geographically selective), but accuracy in describing the past
never guarantees one's predictions for the future. In the end, the attempt to distinguish social visa-vis natural contributions to climate change is not only a fool's debate but a fool's philosophy: it
leaves sacrosanct the chasm between nature and society nature in one corner, society in the other
which is precisely the shibboleth of modern western thought that the "production of nature"
thesis sought to corrode. One does not have to be a "global warming denier"an interesting
descriptor in itselfto be a skeptic concerning the ways that a global public is being
stampeded into accepting wave upon wave of technical, economic, and social change, framed
as necessary for immediate planetary survival . As part of a more comprehensive revival of a
bankrupt geographical determinism, global warming has become a convenient excuse for any
number of social sins. Beyond the obvious implications of melting ice caps, rising sea levels,
shifting climate and vegetation belts, flooded cities, and so forth, global warming can be
summoned to exonerate many social sins: increased summer crime in hot cities, crop failures,
new migration patterns, record summer heat in southeastern Europe, record rain and cold in
northwestern Europe, a 35 percent reduction in species diversity by 2.050, unprecedented
increase in feline fertility in Toronto. . . . The apocalyptic tone of imminent environmental doom
suffuses virtually every aspect of daily life, present and future. Much as corporate "greenwashing"
in the 1990s absorbed green politics, recoding environmentalism to the purpose of capitalist
profit, the specter of global warming and of climate change is today deployed on behalf of a
certain " nature-washing." This may seem paradoxical. Nature-washing is the process by
which social transformations of nature are well enough acknowledged, but in which that socially
changed nature becomes a new super determinant of our social fate. It might well be society's fault
for changing nature, but it is the consequent power of that nature that brings on the apocalypse.
The causal power of nature is not compromised but would seem to be augmented by social
injections into that nature. The dichotomy of nature and society is maintained rather than
weakened: "nature-washing" accumulates a mountain of social effects into the causal dustbin of
nature. Nature is the still far-off Van Diemen's Land of social cause and consequence.

at: resource scarcity

Neoliberal resource management amplifies scarcity through symptom-driven
responsestheir framework is analytically incapable of explaining their impacts
Ahmeda 2011 PhD, Executive Director at the Institute for Policy Research and Development,
and Associate Tutor at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex (Nafeez
Mosaddeq, Global Change, Peace & Security, 23.3, The international relations of crisis and the
crisis of international relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of
society, WEA)
Yet such well-meaning recommendations often do not lead to sufficiently strong policy action by
governments to rein in energy sector corruption.68 Furthermore, it is painfully clear from the examples of Kyoto,
Copenhagen and Cancun that international cooperative state strategies continue to be ineffective, with states
unable to agree on the scale of the crises concerned, let alone on the policies required to address them. Indeed, while some modest successes were apparent in the
Cancun Accord, its proposed voluntary emissions regime would still likely guarantee according to even mid-range climate models a global average temperature

This calls into question the

efficacy of longstanding recommendations such as Klare's that the international community develop unprecedented international
mechanisms to coordinate the peaceful distribution of natural resources in the era of scarcity and environmental degradation.70 While at face value
such regulatory governance mechanisms would appear essential to avoid violent conflict over depleting resources,
they are posited in a socio-political and theoretical vacuum. Why is it that such potentially effective international
mechanisms continue to be ignored? What are the socio-political obstacles to their implementation? Ultimately, the problem is that they
overlook the structural and systemic causes of resource depletion and environmental
degradation. Although neoliberalism shares neorealism's assumptions about the centrality of the state as a unitary rational actor in the international system,
rise of 4C or more, which would in turn culminate in many of the IPCC's more catastrophic scenarios.69

it differs fundamentally in the notion that gains for one state do not automatically imply losses for another; therefore states are able to form cooperative,

While neoliberalism therefore

encourages international negotiations and global governance mechanisms for the resolution of global crises, it implicitly
accepts the contemporary social, political and economic organisation of the international system as an unquestionable
given, itself not subject to debate or reform.72 The focus is on developing the most optimal ways of maximising exploitation of the
interdependent relationships conducive to mutual power gains, which do not necessarily generate tensions or conflict.71

biophysical environment. The role of global political economic structures (such as centralised private resource-ownership and deregulated markets) in both generating

neoliberalism is axiomatically unable to view

the biophysical environment in anything other than a rationalist, instrumentalist fashion, legitimising the overexploitation of natural resources without limits, and inadvertently subordinating the global commons to the
competitive pressures of private sector profit-maximisation and market-driven solutions, rather than institutional
reform.73 Mutual maximisation of power gains translates into the legitimisation of the unlimited exploitation of the biophysical environment without recognition
global systemic crises and inhibiting effective means for their amelioration is neglected. As such,

of the human costs of doing so, which are technocratically projected merely as fixable aberrations from an optimal system of cooperative progress.74

Consequently, neoliberalism is powerless to interrogate how global political economic structures consistently
undermine the establishment of effective environmental regimes. 2.4 The socio-historical evacuation of the political ecology of power
Global ecological, economic and energy crises thus expose a core contradiction at the heart of modernity that the
material progress delivered by scientific reason in the service of unlimited economic growth is destroying the
very social and environmental conditions of modernity's very existence. This stark contradiction between official government
recognition of the potentially devastating security implications of resource scarcity and the continued abject failure of government action to mitigate these security

It reveals an analytical
framework that has focused almost exclusively on potential symptoms of scarcity. But a truly
implications represents a fundamental lacuna that has been largely overlooked in IR theory and policy analysis.

complete picture of the international relations of resource scarcity would include not only a map of projected impacts, but would also seek to grasp their causes by
confronting how the present structure of the international system itself has contributed to the acceleration of scarcity, while inhibiting effective national and

the present risk-oriented preoccupation with symptoms is itself

symptomatic of IR's insufficient self-reflection on its own role in this problem. Despite the normative emphasis on ensuring national
and international security, the literature's overwhelming preoccupation with gauging the multiplicity of ways in which ecological, energy
international responses. It could be suggested that

crises might challenge security in coming decades provides very little opening in either
theory or policy to develop more effective strategies to mitigate or prevent these heightened security challenges. On the
and economic

contrary, for the most part, these approaches tend to highlight the necessity to maximise national politicalmilitary and international regimes' powers so that states
might be able to respond more robustly in the event that new threats like resource wars and state failure do emerge. But

the futility of this

trajectory is obvious a preoccupation with security ends up becoming an unwitting accomplice in the intensification of insecurity. The extent of
orthodox IR theory's complicity in this predicament is evident in its reduction of inter-state relations to balance-of-power dynamics, despite a lack of determinate bases
by which to define and delineate the dynamics of material power. While orthodox realism focuses inordinately on a militarypolitical conceptualisation of national
power, conventional attempts to extend this conceptualisation to include economic dimensions (including the role of transnational corporations) as well as
production, finance, ideas and institutions beyond the state do not solve the problem.75 This Weberian proliferation of categorisations of the multiple dimensions of
power, while useful, lacks a unifying explanatory order of determination capable of rendering their interconnections intelligible. As Rosenberg shows in his analysis
of the dynamics of distinctive geopolitical orders from Rome to Spain and Teschke in his exploration of the changing polities of continental Europe from the eighth
to the eighteenth centuries these orders have always been inseparably conjoined with their constitutive relations of production as structured in the context of
prevailing socialproperty relations, illustrating the mutually-embedded nature of economic and extra-economic power.76 In contrast, orthodox IR axiomatically
fragments the economic and extra-economic (and the latter further into military, political, cultural, etc.) into separate, autonomous spheres with no grasp of the
scope of their interconnection.77 It also dislocates both the state, and human existence as such, from their fundamental material conditions of existence, in the form
of their relationship to the biophysical environment, as mediated through relations of production, and the way these are governed and contested through social
property relations.78 By externalising the biophysical environment and thus human metabolism with nature from state praxis, orthodox IR simply lacks the
conceptual categories necessary to recognise the extent to which socio-political organisational forms are mutually constituted by human embeddedness in the natural
world.79 While further fragmenting the international into a multiplicity of disconnected state units whose behaviour can only be analysed through the limited lenses of
anarchy or hierarchy, orthodox IR is incapable of situating these units in the holistic context of the global political economy, the role of transnational capitalist classes,

the mediating structure of the global political

economy along with the beliefs and behaviour of agents within it (through which this structure is constructed) play a
critical role in the transformation of ecological or resource-related events into concrete politically-defined
conditions of scarcity that lead to crisis or conflict. A powerful example is provided by Davis in his study of
the impact of the El NioSouthern Oscillation (ENSO) the vast oscillation in air mass and Pacific Ocean temperature. In the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, ENSO created large-scale droughts in many countries peripheral to the European empires, including those
in Asia (India, China, Java, the Philippines and Korea), and in Brazil, southern Africa, Algeria and Morocco. Davis shows that British free market
imperial policy converted these droughts into foreseeable but preventable deadly famines, multiplying death tolls
to gross proportions without any historical precedent.81 In 187476, northern harvests were more than sufficient to provide
reserves for the 1878 autumn crops deficit. But most of the grain from north-western Indian subsistence farming was controlled by a
captive export sector designed to stabilise British grain prices, which from 1876 to 1877 had increased due to poor harvests.
This generated a British demand that absorbed almost the entirety of north-western India's wheat surplus. Meanwhile,
profits from these grain exports were monopolised by wealthy property holders, moneylenders and grain merchants, as
and the structural pressures thereby exerted on human and state behaviour.80 Indeed,

opposed to poor Indian farmers. India's newly-constructed modern railway system shipped grain from drought areas to central depots for hoarding, leading to
exorbitant price hikes that were co-ordinated in a thousand towns at once. Food prices rocketed out of the reach of outcaste labourers, displaced weavers,
sharecroppers and poor peasants. Consequently, the poor began to starve to death even in well-watered districts reputed to be immune to food shortages. Thus,
between 1877 and 1878, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat to Europe while between 5.5 and 12 million Indians starved to death.
This catastrophe occurred not outside the modern world system, but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.82

impacts

2nc extinction
Interconnected consumptive crises are acceleratingextinction
Nhanenge 7 [Jytte Masters @ U South Africa, ECOFEMINSM: TOWARDS INTEGRATING
THE CONCERNS OF WOMEN, POOR PEOPLE AND NATURE INTO DEVELOPMENT]
There is today an increasing critique of economic development, whether it takes place in the North or in the South. Although

the world
more and more wealth, the riches do not appear to "trickle down" to the poor and improve
their material well-being. Instead, poverty and economic inequality is growing. Despite the existence of development aid
for more than half a century, the Third World seems not to be "catching up" with the First World. Instead,
militarism, dictatorship and human repression is multiplied. Since the mid 1970, the critique of global
economic activities has intensified due to the escalating deterioration of the natural environment.
Modernization, industrialisation and its economic activities have been directly linked to increased
scarcity of natural resources and generation of pollution, which increases global temperatures and degrades
soils, lands, water, forests and air. The latter threat is of great significance, because without a healthy environment
human beings and animals will not be able to survive. Most people believed that modernization of the world would
improve material well-being for all. However, faced with its negative side effects and the real threat of
extinction, one must conclude that somewhere along the way "progress" went astray. Instead of
material plenty, economic development generated a violent, unhealthy and unequal world. It is a world where
a small minority live in material luxury, while millions of people live in misery. These poor
people are marginalized by the global economic system. They are forced to survive from degraded environments; they
on average generates

live without personal or social security; they live in abject poverty, with hunger, malnutrition and sickness; and they have no possibility to speak
up for themselves and demand a fair share of the world's resources. The majority of these people are women, children, traditional peoples,
tribal peoples, people of colour and materially poor people (called women and Others). They are,

together with nature,

dominated by the global system of economic development imposed by the North. It is this scenario, which is the
subject of the dissertation. The overall aim is consequently to discuss the unjustified domination of women, Others and nature and to show how
the domination of women and Others is interconnected with the domination of nature. A good place to
start a discussion about domination of women, Others and nature is to disclose how they disproportionately must carry the negative effects from
global economic development. The below discussion is therefore meant to give an idea of the "flip-side" of modernisation. It gives a gloomy
picture of what "progress" and its focus on economic growth has meant for women, poor people and the natural environment. The various
complex and inter-connected, negative impacts have been ordered into four crises. The categorization is inspired by Paul Ekins and his 1992 book
"A new world order; grassroots movements for global change". In it, Ekins argues that humanity

is faced with four interlocked

crises of unprecedented magnitude. These crises have the potential to destroy whole ecosystems
and to extinct the human race. The first crisis is the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass
destruction, together with the high level of military spending. The second crisis is the increasing number of people
afflicted with hunger and poverty. The third crisis is the environmental degradation. Pollution, destruction of
ecosystems and extinction of species are increasing at such a rate that the biosphere is under
threat. The fourth crisis is repression and denial of fundamental human rights by governments, which prevents
people from developing their potential. It is highly likely that one may add more crises to these four, or categorize them differently, however,
Ekins's division is suitable for the present purpose. (Ekins 1992: 1).

structural violence
Structural violence outweighsdont be fooled by neoliberal claims of inevitability
Hintjens 7 [Helen Hintjens is Lecturer in the Centre for Development Studies, University of
Wales, MDF Understanding Development Better, http://udb.globalconnections.nl/sites/udb.global-connections.nl/files/file/2923317.051%20-%20Position
%20Paper%20Helen%20Hintjens.pdf]
From Johan Galtung, famous Norwegian peace guru, still alive and heads up TRANSCEND University on-line, has been working since
1960s on showing that violence

is not OK. His Ghandian approach is designed to convince those who

advocate violent means to restore social justice to the poor, that he as a pacifist does not turn a
blind eye to social injustices and inequality. He extended therefore our understanding of what
is violent, coercion, force, to include the economic and social systems avoidable injustices,
deaths, inequalities. Negative peace is the absence of justice, even if there is no war. Injustice
causes structural violence to health, bodies, minds, damages people, and must therefore be
resisted (non-violently). Positive peace is different from negative (unjust and hence violent) peace. Positive
peace requires actively combating (struggling peacefully against) social injustices that
underpin structural violence. Economic and social, political justice have to be part of
peacebuilding. This is the mantra of most NGOs and even some agencies (we will look later at NGO Action Aid and DFID as
examples). Discrimination has to end, so does the blatant rule of money, greater equality is vital
wherever possible. All of this is the opposite of neo-liberal recipes for success, which in
Holland as in Indonesia, tolerate higher and higher levels of social inequality in the name of
efficiency. Structural violence kills far more people than warfare for example one estimate in DRC is that
4 million people have been killed in war since 1998, but NGOs estimate that an additional 6 million people
have died in DRC since then, from disease, displacement and hunger, bringing the total to an
unthinkable 10 million of 90 million est. population. Since there exists far more wealth in the
world than is necessary to address the main economic causes of structural violence, the real problem is
one of prioritiesp. 307 Structural violenceis neither natural nor inevitable, p. 301 (Prontzos).

Overcorrection and hyper-vigilance are key to prevent invisible atrocities

Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 4
(Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn)
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg.
19-22)
This large and at first sight messy Part VII is central to this anthologys thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized,
and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African
Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Dalys version of US apartheid in Chicagos South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class
hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the smelly working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence
is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and
racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US inner city to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39).
Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e.

Absolutely central to our approach is a

blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention
to the little violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life
shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the
preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34).

voyeuristic tendencies of violence studies that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and

individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a
violence continuum comprised of a multitude of small wars and invisible genocides (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted
in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices,
prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The

violence continuum also refers to the ease with which

humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and
assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence
and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish
Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian
1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it

is absolutely necessary to make just such

existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times.
Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of genocide
into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there

is), an even greater risk lies in

failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily
enacted as normative behavior by ordinary good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison
construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the
criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39),

constitute the small wars and invisible genocides to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino
youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are invisible genocides
not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein
observed

the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our

eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieus partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32
and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the
minutiae of normal social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth
- Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and
explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglias notion of peacetime crimes - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship
between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime

crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely

ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematic- ally and dramatically in the
extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the
legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on illegal aliens versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938,
known as the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace
possible. Internal stability is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied
strangle-holds. Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. It is an easy-to-identify
peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less
politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place
in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The

public consensus is based

primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man,
the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United
States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration
becomes the normative socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men
(Prison Watch 2002). In the end it

is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity

among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance
to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render
participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more
easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of
radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification
which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for
alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamins view of
late modern history as a chronic state of emergency (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic
anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically
critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons,
mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other total institutions. Making

that decisive move to recognize the continuum

of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary
people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against

categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and
genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the
differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy
living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial,
religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to pseudo- speciation as the human
tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during
the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of mass violence

. Collective denial and

misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and
professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for
example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who
celebrate the death of angel-babies, and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families.

Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence
inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means
by symbolic violence, the violence that is often nus-recognized for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to
what Taussig (1989) calls terror as usual. All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and
violence in peace, and between war crimes and peace-time crimes. Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in
courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence,
Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan
identifies rneconnaissance as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and
progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see
also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence,
Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt
(1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively
that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate
physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes
(Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence
which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of
reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and
genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that

mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is

socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even
by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social
sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early warning signs
(Charney 1991), the priming (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the genocidal continuum (as we call it) that push
social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of
social support and humane care to vulnerable social parasites (the nursing home elderly, welfare
queens, undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security
prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed
feelings of victimization).

2nc sustainability
Collapse is imminentnow is unique because public policy has exhausted the range
of viable fixes
Wallerstein, Ph.D., 11senior research scholar at Yale University, PhD from Columbia
(Immanuel, January/ February 2011, THE GLOBAL ECONOMY WON'T RECOVER, NOW
OR EVER, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/unconventional_wisdom?
page=0,9, RBatra)
the basic costs of all production have risen remarkably. There are the personnel
expenses of all kinds -- for unskilled workers, for cadres, for top-level management. There are the costs incurred as producers
pass on the costs of their production to the rest of us -- for detoxification, for renewal of resources, for infrastructure. And the democratization
of the world has led to demands for more and more education, more and more health provisions,
and more and more guarantees of lifetime income. To meet these demands, there has been a
significant increase in taxation of all kinds. Together, these costs have risen beyond the point that permits
serious capital accumulation. Why not then simply raise prices? Because there are limits beyond which one cannot push their level. It is called the elasticity of
The problem is that

demand. The result is a growing profit squeeze, which is reaching a point where the game is not worth the candle.

we are witnessing as a result is chaotic fluctuations of all kinds -- economic, political, sociocultural. These fluctuations
cannot easily be controlled by public policy. The result is ever greater uncertainty about all kinds of short-term decision-making, as well as frantic
realignments of every variety. Doubt feeds on itself as we search for ways out of the menacing uncertainty
posed by terrorism, climate change, pandemics, and nuclear proliferation.
The only sure thing is that the present system cannot continue. The fundamental political
struggle is over what kind of system will replace capitalism, not whether it should survive. The
choice is between a new system that replicates some of the present system's essential features of hierarchy and polarization and one that
is relatively democratic and egalitarian.
The extraordinary expansion of the world-economy in the postwar years (more or less 1945 to 1970) has been
followed by a long period of economic stagnation in which the basic source of gain has been
rank speculation sustained by successive indebtednesses. The latest financial crisis didn't bring down this system; it
merely exposed it as hollow. Our recent "difficulties" are merely the next-to-last bubble in a process of boom and bust the world-system has been undergoing since
What

around 1970. The last bubble will be state indebtednesses, including in the so-called emerging economies, leading to bankruptcies.
Most people do not recognize -- or refuse to recognize -- these realities. It is wrenching to accept that the historical system in which we are living is in structural crisis and will not survive.

Meanwhile, the system proceeds by its accepted rules. We meet at G-20 sessions and seek a futile consensus. We speculate on the markets.
We "develop" our economies in whatever way we can. All this activity simply accentuates the structural
crisis. The real action, the struggle over what new system will be created, is elsewhere.

Not sustainable
Naess, Aalborg Urban Planning professor, 2006
(Peter, Unsustainable Growth, Unsustainable Capitalism, Journal of Critical Realism, 5.2,
ebsco, ldg)
The idea that greater eciency and substitution of consumption away from the most harmful categories are
sucient to ensure environmentally sustainable development has been criticised by a number of prominent
economists. 17 For one thing, there is an absence of institutional frameworks for changing the quality of growth.
The need for such frameworks in order to prevent private initiatives from causing negative impacts was recognised already by the classical
economic theorist Adam Smith. History has so far shown that capitalist companies are strongly opposed to the introduction of such
frameworks. 18 Even

if institutional frameworks were installed, it is doubtful that continual

economic growth could be made environmentally sustainable. According to Herman Daly, sustainable growth is an
oxymoron. In its physical dimension, the economy is an open subsystem of the earths ecosystem, which is
nite, non-growing and materially closed. As the economic subsystem grows, it incorporates an ever greater
proportion of the total ecosystem into itself and must reach a limit at 100 percent, if not before. 19
Admittedly, the earth receives an amount of solar energy several orders of magnitude greater than the
energy utilised for human purposes. However, the natural resources exploited in order to increase consumption
and production are not conned to energy, but include a range of raw materials, chemicals and foodstus as well. Growth in
production facilities, infrastructure and housing standards also occupies space and contributes to the fragmentation
of ecosystems. Moreover, the utilisation and distribution of solar energy for human purposes requires
material installations (e.g., solar heat panels, photovoltaic cells, transmission lines and batteries), and some of the components may
cause pollution during material extraction, production or disposal after use, and/or have a limited durability. 20 As indicated above, shifting
from the polluting production of industrial society to the allegedly cleaner and less environmentally harmful commodities of post-industrial
society has been mentioned as a way to change the content of growth in an environmentally sound way. 21 However, extensive

outsourcing of manufacturing industries from wealthy countries to Third World countries with lower labour costs during
recent decades indicates that there is no post-industrial society on a global scale. There is also a question as to
whether there is not considerable material resource consumption associated with most of the activities of the service sector, which is often
highlighted as a less environmentally loading sphere than the manufacturing industries. Many of these service

businesses are quite

transport intensive. The food and beverages served in a restaurant are, for example, often imported from far corners of the world, and
thus contain considerable indirect energy consumption. Scientic work, which is often mentioned as an activity leaving few ecological imprints
in itself, is also increasingly based on heavily polluting international air travel. 22 Moreover, new scientic knowledge often facilitates
extended material consumption. Apart from its growth impetus through technological development, the contribution of science to economic
growth is probably quite limited. Basically, almost all kinds of service represent the results of human labour in connection with some capital
asset. Any

increase in service activities in order to obtain economic gains would need to be performed
without any increase in these service-oriented capital assets if the ecological requirements were to be met. 23 The
microchip is often considered an outstanding example of dematerialisation since both its economic value and its uservalue are high, whereas the weight of the product is minimal. However, the production of such a complex system as a
microprocessor involves a number of more or less hidden costs. According to a study conducted by the United Nations
University in Tokyo, the relative consumption of secondary materials is substantially higher in the
production of microchips than is the case for traditional commodities. The results of the study suggest that the
production of such complex and highly organised systems as microprocessors involves a mechanismtermed secondary materialisation
working in the opposite direction to dematerialisation. Secondary

materialisation is the apparent tendency for ever

more complex products to require increasing amounts of secondary materials and energy in order to render
possible the lower level of entropy characterising these products, compared to traditional commodities. Entropy is the thermodynamic notion for
the opposite of order. A highly organised system is a low-entropy system obtained through the input of labour and energy. It requires enormous
amounts of energy to transform the heap of sand making up the raw material of the microchip into a microchip that can function inside a
computer. The production of a microchip weighing two grammes requires more than one and a half kilograms of fossil energy, 72 grammes of
chemical substances, 32 litres of water and 700 grammes of nitrogen and other gases. 24

Debt, offshoring, financialization, ecology prove only shift from EMPIRE to

MULTITUDES averts extinction
Shor 10
http://www.stateofnature.org/locatingTheContemporary.html
Fran Shor teaches in the History Department at Wayne State University. He is the author of
Dying Empire: US Imperialism and Global Resistance (Routledge 2010).
Attributing the debilitation of the U.S. economy to a mortgage crisis or the collapse of the
housing market misses the truly epochal crisis in the world economy and, indeed, in capitalism
itself. As economist Michael Hudson contends, " the financial 'wealth creation' game is
over . Economies emerged from World War II relatively free of debt, but the 60-year global run-

up has run its course. Financial capitalism is in a state of collapse, and marginal palliatives
cannot revive it ." According to Hudson, among those palliatives is an ironic variant of the
IMF strategies imposed on developing nations. "The new twist is a variant on the IMF
'stabilization' plans that lend money to central banks to support their currencies - for long enough
to enable local oligarchs and foreign investors to move their savings and investments offshore at
a good exchange rate." The continuity between these IMF plans and even the Obama
administration's fealty to Wall Street can be seen in the person of Lawrence Summers, now the
chief economic advisor to Obama. As further noted by Hudson, "the Obama bank bailout is
arranged much like an IMF loan to support the exchange rate of foreign currency, but with the
Treasury supporting financial asset prices for U.S. banks and other financial institutions ...
Private-sector debt will be moved onto the U.S. Government balance sheet, where "taxpayers"
will bear losses." [4] So, here we have another variation of the working poor getting sapped by
the economic elite! In fact, one estimate of U.S. federal government support to the elite financial
institutions is in the range of $10 trillion dollars, a heist of unimaginable proportions. [5] Given
the massive indebtedness of the United States, its reliance of foreign support of that debt by
countries like China, which has close to $2 trillion tied up in treasury bills and other investments,
a long-term crisis of profitability, overproduction, and offshoring of essential manufacturing, it
does not appear that the United States and, perhaps, even the capitalist system can avoid
collapse. Certainly, there are Marxist economists and world-systems analysts who are convinced
that the collapse is inevitable, albeit it may take several generations to complete. The question
becomes whether a dying system can be resuscitated or, if something else can be put in its place.
One of the most prominent world systems scholars, Immanuel Wallerstein, puts the long-term
crisis of capitalism and the alternatives in the following perspective: Because the system we have
known for 500 years is no longer able to guarantee long-term prospects of capital accumulation,
we have entered a period of world chaos. Wild (and largely uncontrollable) swings in the
economic, political, and military situations are leading to a systemic bifurcation, that is, to a
world collective choice about the kind of new system the world will construct over the next
fifty years. The new system will not be a capitalist system, but it could be one of two kinds: a
different system that is equally or more hierarchical and inequalitarian, or one that is
substantially democratic and equalitarian. [6] What Wallerstein overlooks is the possibility that a
global crisis of capitalism with its continuous overexploitation and maldistribution of
essential resources, such as water, could lead to a planetary catastrophe. [7] While
Wallerstein and many of the Marxist critics of capitalism correctly identify the long-term
structural crisis of capitalism and offer important insights into the need for more democratic and
equalitarian systems, they often fail to realize other critical predicaments that have plagued
human societies in the past and persist in even more life-threatening ways today. Among those
predicaments are the power trips of civilization and environmental destructiveness. Such power
trips can be seen through the sedimentation of power-over in the reign of patriarchal systems and
an evolutionary selection for that power-over which contaminates society and social
relationships. Certainly, many of those predicaments can also be attributed to a 5000 year history
of the intersection of empire and civilization. Anthropologist Kajsa Ekholm Friedman analyzes
that intersection and its impact in the Bronze Age as an "imperialist project..., dependent upon
trade and ultimately upon war." [8] However, over the long rule of empire and especially within
the last 500 years of the global aspirations of various empires, "no state or empire," observes
historian Eric Hobsbawm, "has been large, rich, or powerful enough to maintain hegemony over

the political world, let alone to establish political and military supremacy over the globe." [9]
While war and trade still remain key components of the imperial project today and pretensions
for global supremacy persist in the United States, what is just as threatening to the world as we
know it is the overexploitation and abuse of environmental resources. Jared Diamond brilliantly
reveals how habituated attitudes and values precluded the necessary recognition of
environmental degradation which, in turn, led to the collapse of vastly different civilizations,
societies, and cultures throughout recorded history. [10] He identifies twelve contemporary
environmental challenges which pose grave dangers to the planet and its inhabitants. Among
these are the destruction of natural habitats (rainforests, wetlands, etc.); species extinction; soil
erosion; depletion of fossil fuels and underground water aquifers; toxic pollution; and climate
change, especially attributable to the use of fossil fuels. [11] U.S. economic imperialism has
played a direct role in environmental degradation, whether in McDonald's resource destruction of
rainforests in Latin America, Coca-Cola's exploitation of underground water aquifers in India, or
Union Carbide's toxic pollution in India. Beyond the links between empire and environmental
destruction, unless we also clearly understand and combat the connections between empire and
unending growth with its attendant "accumulation by dispossession", we may very well doom
ourselves to extinction . According to James Gustave Speth, Dean of the Yale School of
Forestry and Environmental Studies, the macro obsession with growth is also intimately related
to our micro habituated ways of living. "Parallel to transcending our growth fetish," Speth
argues, "we must move beyond our consumerism and hyperventilating lifestyles ... This
reluctance to challenge consumption has been a big mistake, given the mounting environmental
and social costs of American "affluenza," extravagance and wastefulness." [12] Of course, there
are significant class and ethnic/racial differences in consumerism and lifestyle in the United
States. However, even more vast differences and inequities obtain between the U.S. and the
developing world. It is those inequities that lead Eduardo Galeano to conclude that "consumer
society is a booby trap. Those at the controls feign ignorance, but anybody with eyes in his head
can see that the great majority of people necessarily must consume not much, very little, or
nothing at all in order to save the bit of nature we have left." [13] Finally, from Vandana Shiva's
perspective, "unless worldviews and lifestyles are restructured ecologically, peace and justice
will continue to be violated and, ultimately, the very survival of humanity will be
threatened ." [14] For Shiva and other global agents of resistance, the ecological and peace
and justice imperatives require us to act in the here and now. Her vision of "Earth Democracy"
with its emphasis on balancing authentic needs with a local ecology provides an essential
guidepost to what we all can do to stop the ravaging of the environment and to salvage the
planet. As she insists, "Earth Democracy is not just about the next protest or next World Social
Forum; it is about what we do in between. It addresses the global in our everyday lives, our
everyday realities, and creates change globally by making change locally." [15] The local,
national, and transnational struggles and visions of change are further evidence that the imperial
project is not only being contested but also being transformed on a daily basis. According to
Mark Engler, "The powerful will abandon their strategies of control only when it grows too
costly for them to do otherwise. It is the concerted efforts of people coming together in local
communities and in movements spanning borders that will raise the costs. Empire becomes
unsustainable ... when the people of the world resist ." [16] Whether in the rural
villages of Brazil or India, the jungles of Mexico or Ecuador, the city squares of Cochabama or
Genoa, the streets of Seattle or Soweto, there has been, and continues to be, resistance around the

globe to the imperial project. If the ruling elite and many of the citizens of the United States have
not yet accepted the fact that the empire is dying and with it the concentric circles of economic,
political, environmental, and civilizational crises, the global multitudes have been busy at
work, digging its future grave and planting the seeds for another possible world. [17]

at: democracy checks (okane)

Not in the context of runaway liberalism
Mitchell Dean, Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, 2001, Demonic Societies: Liberalism,
biopolitics, and sovereignty. Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. Hanson and Stepputat, p. 50-1
Finally, although

liberalism may try to make safe the biopolitical imperative of the optimization of
life, it has shown itself permanently incapable of arrestingfrom eugenics to contemporary
genetics---the emergence of rationalities that make the optimization of the life of some dependent
on the disallowing of the life of others. I can only suggest some general reasons for this.
Liberalism is fundamentally concerned to govern through what it conceives as processes that are
external to the sphere of government limited by the respect for rights and liberties of individual
subjects. Liberal rule thus fosters forms of knowledge of vital processes and seeks to govern
through their application. Moreover, to the extent that liberalism depends on the formation of
responsible and autonomous subjects through biopolitics and discipline, it fosters the type of
governmental practices that are the ground of such rationalities. Further, and perhaps more simply, we might
consider the possibility that sovereignty and biopolitics are so heterogeneous to one another that the
derivation of political norms from the democratization of the former cannot act as a prophylactic
for the possible outcomes of the latter. We might also consider the alternative to this thesis, that biopolitics captures
and expands the division between political life and mere existence, already found within
sovereignty. In either case, the framework of right and law can act as a resource for forces engaged in
contestation of the effects of biopower; it cannot provide a guarantee as the efficacy of such
struggle and may even be the means of the consolidation of those effects.

at: timeframe
Calling attention to timeframe is a shell game to obscure structural analysisyou
have time to think
Bilgin and Morton 4 (Pinar, Professor of International Relations Biliken and Adam David,
Senior Lecturer and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice IR
University of Nottingham, From Rogue to Failed States? The Fallacy of Short-termism,
Politics, 24(3), p. 176-178)
Calls for alternative approaches to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the criticism that such
alternatives could only work in the long term whereas something needs to be done here and
now. Whilst recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political scientist to
point to the fallacy of short- termism in the conduct of current policy. Short-termism is defined
by Ken Booth (1999, p. 4) as approaching security issues within the time frame of the next
election, not the next generation. Viewed as such, short-termism is the enemy of true strategic
thinking. The latter requires policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take small steps towards achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking
steps that might eventually become self-defeating. The United States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies in the post-Cold War era,
namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both were supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the United
States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War policy of supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US policymakers now have to face the instability they
have caused. Hence the need for a comprehensive understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them through varied forms of
intervention. Although some commentators may judge that the road to the existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic approach to the problem of
international terrorism requires a more sensitive consideration of the medium-to-long-term implications of state building in different parts of the world whilst also
addressing the root causes of the problem of state failure. Developing this line of argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings of state failure
in relation to different time increments shaping policymaking might convey alternative considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167170), divergent issues

viewed through the lenses of an

incremental time frame, more immediate concerns to policymakers usually become apparent when
might then come to the fore when viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly,

linked to precocious assumptions about terrorist networks, banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant players and events are
readily identified (al-Qaeda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, strong/weak states) and judgements made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism).
The key analytical problem for policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice given the constraints of time and energy devoted to a particular

These factors lead policymakers to bring conceptual baggage to bear on an issue that
simplifies but also distorts information. Taking a second temporal form, that of a conjunctural
time frame, policy responses are subject to more fundamental epistemological concerns. Factors
decision.

assumed to be constant within an incremental time frame are more variable and it is more difficult to produce an intended effect on ongoing processes than it is on

policy in this realm can therefore

begin to become more concerned with the underlying forces that shape current trajectories. Shifting
actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the war on terror be waged for? Areas of

attention to a third temporal form draws attention to still different dimensions. Within an epochal time frame an agenda still in the making appears that requires a shift
in decision-making, away from a conventional problem-solving mode wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof grounds, towards a risk-averting mode,
characterised by prudent contingency measures. To conclude, in relation to failed states, the latter time frame entails reflecting on the very structural conditions
shaping the problems of failure raised throughout the present discussion, which will demand lasting and delicate attention from practitioners across the academy and
policymaking communities alike.

at: cap solves environment

Complex environmental externalities overwhelm normal resilienceproduction and
tech improvements are insufficient
Ehrenfeld, Rutgers biology professor, 2005 (David, The Environmental Limits to
Globalization, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2, ebsco, ldg)
environmental changes brought about or accelerated by globalization are, however, much easier to
describe for the near future, even if the long-term outcomes are still obscure. Climate will continue to change
rapidly (Watson 2002); cheap energy and other resources (Youngquist 1997; Hall et al. 2003; Smil 2003), including fresh water (Aldhous 2003; Gleick
2004), will diminish and disappear at an accelerating rate; agricultural and farm communities will deteriorate further while we
lose more genetic diversity among crops and farm animals (Fowler & Mooney 1990; Bailey & Lapp 2002; Wirzba 2003); biodiversity will
decline faster as terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems are damaged (Heywood 1995); harmful exotic species will become ever more
numerous (Mooney & Hobbs 2000); old and new diseases of plants, animals, and humans will continue to proliferate (Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention 1995-present;Lashley & Durham 2002); and more of the great ocean fisheries will become economicallyand
occasionally biologicallyextinct (Myers & Worm 2003). Although critics have taken issue with many of these forecasts (Lomborg 2001; Hollander 2003), the
critics' arguments seem more political than scientific; the data they muster in support of their claims are
riddled with errors, significant omissions, and misunderstandings of environmental processes (Orr 2002).
The overall

Indeed, these environmental changes are demonstrably and frighteningly real. And because of these and related changes, one social prediction can be made with
assurance:

globalization is creating an environment that will prove hostile to its own survival. This is not a
the same as saying globalization ought to be stopped

political statement or a moral judgment. It is not

that
. The enlightened
advocates of globalization claim that globalization could give the poorest residents of the poorest countries a chance to enjoy a decent income. And the enlightened
opponents of globalization assert that the damage done by globalization to local communities everywhere, and the increasing gap it causes between the rich and the

The debate is vitally important, but the fate of globalization

is unlikely to be determined by who wins it. Al Gore remarked about the political impasse over global warming and the current rapid
poor, far outweigh the small amount of good globalization may do.

melting of the world's glaciers: Glaciers don't give a damn about politics. They just reflect reality (Herbert 2004). The same inexorable environmental reality is even
now drawing the curtains on globalization. Often minimized in the United States, this reality is already painfully obvious in China, which is experiencing the most
rapid expansion related to globalization. Nearly every issue of China Daily, the national English-language newspaper, features articles on the environmental effects of

Will
the desperate attempts of Chinese authorities to mitigate the impact of rapid industrialization on the
disastrously scarce supplies of fresh water be effective (Li 2004; Liang 2004)? The environmental anxiety is palpable and pervasive. The
environmental effects of globalization cannot be measured by simple numbers like the gross domestic product or
globalization. Will efforts in China to rein in industrial expansion, energy consumption, and environmental pollution succeed (Fu 2004; Qin 2004; Xu 2004)?

unemployment rate. But even without such summary statistics, there are so many examples of globalization's impact, some obvious, some less so, that a convincing

Among the environmental impacts of globalization,

perhaps the most significant is its fostering of the excessive use of energy, with the attendant consequences. This surge in
argument about its effects and trends can be made. The Disappearance of Cheap Energy

energy use was inevitable, once the undeveloped four-fifths of the world adopted the energy-wasting industrialization model of the developed fifth, and as goods that
once were made locally began to be transported around the world at a tremendous cost of energy. China's booming production, largely the result of its surging global
exports, has caused a huge increase in the mining and burning of coal and the building of giant dams for more electric power, an increase of power that in only the first
8 months of 2003 amounted to 16% (Bradsher 2003; Guo 2004).

The many environmental effects of the coal burning include, most importantly, global

warming. Fossil-fuel-driven climate change seems likely to result in a rise in sea level, massive extinction of species, agricultural losses from regional shifts in
temperature and rainfall, and, possibly, alteration of major ocean currents, with secondary climatic change. Other side effects of coal burning are forest decline,
especially from increased nitrogen deposition; acidification of freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems from nitrogen and sulfur compounds; and a major impact on
human health from polluted air. Dams, China's alternative method of producing electricity without burning fossil fuels, themselves cause massive environmental
changes. These changes include fragmentation of river channels; loss of floodplains, riparian zones, and adjacent wetlands; deterioration of irrigated terrestrial
environments and their surface waters; deterioration and loss of river deltas and estuaries; aging and reduction of continental freshwater runoff to oceans; changes in
nutrient cycling; impacts on biodiversity; methylmercury contamination of food webs; and greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. The impoundment of water in
reservoirs at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere has even caused a small but measurable increase in the speed of the earth's rotation and a change in the planet's
axis (Rosenberg et al. 2000; Vrsmarty & Sahagian 2000). Moreover, the millions of people displaced by reservoirs such as the one behind China's Three Gorges
Dam have their own environmental impacts as they struggle to survive in unfamiliar and often unsuitable places. Despite the importance of coal and hydropower in
China's booming economy, the major factor that enables globalization to flourish around the worldeven in Chinais still cheap oil. Cheap oil runs the ships, planes,
trucks, cars, tractors, harvesters, earth-moving equipment, and chain saws that globalization needs; cheap oil lifts the giant containers with their global cargos off the
container ships onto the waiting flatbeds; cheap oil even mines and processes the coal, grows and distills the biofuels, drills the gas wells, and builds the nuclear power
plants while digging and refining the uranium ore that keeps them operating. Paradoxically, the global warming caused by this excessive burning of oil is exerting
negative feedback on the search for more oil to replace dwindling supplies. The search for Arctic oil has been slowed by recent changes in the Arctic climate. Arctic
tundra has to be frozen and snow-covered to allow the heavy seismic vehicles to prospect for underground oil reserves, or long-lasting damage to the landscape
results. The recent Arctic warming trend has reduced the number of days that vehicles can safely explore: from 187 in 1969 to 103 in 2002 (Revkin 2004).

Globalization affects so many environmental systems in so many ways that negative interactions
of this sort are frequent and usually unpredictable. Looming over the global economy is the imminent disappearance of cheap oil.
There is some debate about when global oil production will peakmany of the leading petroleum geologists predict the peak will occur in this decade, possibly in the
next two or three years (Campbell 1997; Kerr 1998; Duncan & Youngquist 1999; Holmes & Jones 2003; Appenzeller 2004; ASPO 2004; Bakhtiari 2004; Gerth 2004)

remaining untapped reserves and alternatives such as oil shale, tar sands, heavy oil,
and biofuels are economically and energetically no substitute for the cheap oil that comes pouring out of the ground in the Arabian Peninsula and
a comparatively few other places on Earth (Youngquist 1997). Moreover, the hydrogen economy and other high-tech solutions to the loss of cheap
oil are clouded by serious, emerging technological doubts about feasibility and safety, and a realistic fear that, if they can work,
they will not arrive in time to rescue our globalized industrial civilization (Grant 2003; Tromp et al. 2003; Romm 2004). Even energy conservation,
but it is abundantly clear that the

which we already know how to implement both technologically and as part of an abstemious lifestyle, is likely to be no friend to globalization, because it reduces
consumption of all kinds, and consumption is what globalization is all about. In a keynote address to the American Geological Society, a noted expert on electric
power networks, Richard Duncan (2001), predicted widespread, permanent electric blackouts by 2012, and the end of industrial, globalized civilization by 2030. The
energy crunch is occurring now. According to Duncan, per capita energy production in the world has already peakedthat happened in 1979and has declined since

The world is not about to run out of

perhaps it is not going to run out of oil from unconventional sources any time soon. What
will be difficult to obtain is cheap petroleum, because what is left is an enormous amount of low-grade hydrocarbons, which are likely to be
that date. In a more restrained evaluation of the energy crisis, Charles Hall and colleagues (2003) state that:
hydrocarbons, and

much more expensive financially, energetically, politically and especially environmentally. Nuclear power still has importanttechnological, economic,
environmental and public safety problems, they continue, and at the moment renewable energies present a mixed bag of opportunities. Their solution? Forget about
the more expensive and dirtier hydrocarbons such as tar sands. We need a major public policy intervention to foster a crash program of public and private investment
in research on renewable energy technologies. Perhaps this will happennecessity does occasionally bring about change. But I do not see renewable energy coming
in time or in sufficient magnitude to save globalization. Sunlight, wind, geothermal energy, and biofuels, necessary as they are to develop, cannot replace cheap oil at
the current rate of use without disastrous environmental side effects. These renewable alternatives can only power a nonglobalized civilization that consumes less

output of

Saudi reserves has started to fall

energy (Ehrenfeld 2003b). Already, as the

the giant
oil
(Gerth 2004) and extraction of the
remaining oil is becoming increasingly costly, oil prices are climbing and the strain is being felt by other energy sources. For example, the production of natural gas,
which fuels more than half of U.S. homes, is declining in the United States, Canada, and Mexico as wells are exhausted. In both the United States and Canada,
intensive new drilling is being offset by high depletion rates, and gas consumption increases yearly. In 2002 the United States imported 15% of its gas from Canada,
more than half of Canada's total gas production. However, with Canada's gas production decreasing and with the stranded gas reserves in the United States and
Canadian Arctic regions unavailable until pipelines are built 510 years from now, the United States is likely to become more dependent on imported liquid natural gas
(LNG). Here are some facts to consider. Imports of LNG in the United States increased from 39 billion cubic feet in 1990 to 169 billion cubic feet in 2002, which was
still <1% of U.S. natural gas consumption. The largest natural gas field in the world is in the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Gas is liquefied near the site of
production by cooling it to 260F (162C), shipped in special refrigerated trains to waiting LNG ships, and then transported to an LNG terminal, where it is offloaded, regasified, and piped to consumers. Each LNG transport ship costs a half billion dollars. An LNG terminal costs one billion dollars. There are four LNG
terminals in the United States, none in Canada or Mexico. Approximately 30 additional LNG terminal sites to supply the United States are being investigated or
planned, including several in the Bahamas, with pipelines to Florida. On 19 January 2004, the LNG terminal at Skikda, Algeria, blew up with tremendous force,
flattening much of the port and killing 30 people. The Skikda terminal, renovated by Halliburton in the late 1990s, will cost $800 million to $1 billion to replace. All
major ports in the United States are heavily populated, and there is strong environmental opposition to putting terminals at some sites in the United States. Draw your

From LNG to coal gasification to oil shale to

fission to breeder reactors to fusion to renewable energy, even to improvements in efficiency of energy use (Browne 2004), our
society looks from panacea to panacea to feed the ever-increasing demands of globalization. But no one solution or combination of
own conclusions about LNG as a source of cheap energy (Youngquist & Duncan 2003;Romero 2004).
nuclear

solutions will suffice to meet this kind of consumption. In the words of Vaclav Smil (2003): Perhaps the evolutionary imperative of our species is to ascend a ladder
of ever-increasing energy throughputs, never to consider seriously any voluntary consumption limits and stay on this irrational course until it will be too late to salvage
the irreplaceable underpinnings of biospheric services that will be degraded and destroyed by our progressing use of energy and materials. Loss of Agricultural
Biodiversity Among the many other environmental effects of globalization, one that is both obvious and critically important is reduced genetic and cultural diversity
in agriculture. As the representatives of the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries' many subsidiary seed corporations sell their patented seeds in more areas

farmers are dropping

crop varieties

previously isolated from global trade,

their traditional
, the reservoir of our accumulated genetic
agricultural wealth, in favor of a few, supposedly high-yielding, often chemical-dependent seeds. The Indian agricultural scientist H. Sudarshan (2002) has provided a
typical example. He noted that Over the last half century, India has probably grown over 30,000 different, indigenous varieties or landraces of rice. This situation has,
in the last 20 years, changed drastically and it is predicted that in another 20 years, rice diversity will be reduced to 50 varieties, with the top 10 accounting for over
three-quarters of the sub-continent's rice acreage. With so few varieties left, where will conventional plant breeders and genetic engineers find the genes for disease
and pest resistance, environmental adaptations, and plant quality and vigor that we will surely need? A similar loss has been seen in varieties of domestic animals. Of
the 3831 breeds of ass, water buffalo, cattle, goat, horse, pig, and sheep recorded in the twentieth century, at least 618 had become extinct by the century's end, and
475 of the remainder were rare. Significantly, the countries with the highest ratios of surviving breeds per million people are those that are most peripheral and remote

Rural
Haitians have traditionally raised a morphotype of long-snouted, small black pig known as the Creole pig.
Adapted to the Haitian climate, Creole pigs had very low maintenance requirements, and were
mainstays of soil fertility and the rural economy. In 1982 and 1983, most of these pigs were deliberately killed as part of
swine disease control efforts required to integrate Haiti into the hemispheric economy. They were
replaced by pigs from Iowa that needed clean drinking water, roofed pigpens, and expensive, imported feed. The substitution was a
disaster. Haitian peasants, the hemisphere's poorest, lost an estimated $600 million. Haiti's ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
(2000), who, whatever his faults, understood the environmental and social effects of globalization, wrote There was a 30% drop in enrollment in rural
schools a dramatic decline in the protein consumption in rural Haiti, a devastating decapitalization of the peasant economy and an
from global commerce (Hall & Ruane 1993). Unfortunately, with globalization, remoteness is no longer tenable. Here is a poignant illustration.

incalculable negative impact on Haiti's soil and agricultural productivity. The Haitian peasantry has not recovered to this day. For many peasants the extermination
of the Creole pigs was their first experience of globalization. The sale of Mexican string beans and South African apples in Michigan and Minnesota in January is not

without consequences. The globalization of food has led to the introduction of high-input agricultural methods in many less-developed countries, with sharply
increasing use of fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, irrigation pumps, mechanical equipment, and energy. There has been a correspondingly sharp decline
in farmland biodiversityincluding birds, invertebrates, and wild crop relativesmuch of which is critically important to agriculture through ecosystem services or
as reservoirs of useful genes (Benton et al. 2003). The combination of heavy fertilizer use along with excessive irrigation has resulted in toxic accumulations of salt,
nitrates, and pesticides ruining soils all over the world, along with the dangerous drawdown and contamination of underground reserves of fresh water (Hillel 1991;
Kaiser 2004; Sugden et al. 2004). Although population growth has been responsible for some of this agricultural intensification, much has been catalyzed by

Fish and shellfish farmingmuch of it for exporthas

more than doubled in the past 15 years. This industry's tremendous requirements for fish meal and fish oil to use as food and
its degradation of coastal areas are placing a great strain on marine ecosystems (Naylor et al. 2000). Other
unanticipated problems are occurring. For instance, the Scottish fisheries biologist Alexander Murray and his colleagues (2002) report that
infectious salmon anemia is caused by novel virulent strains of a virus that has adapted to intensive aquacultural practices
and has exploited the associated [ship] traffic to spread both locally and internationally. Extensive ship traffic and lack of
globalization (Wright 1990). Aquaculture is another agriculture-related activity.

regulation increase the risk of spreading disease to animals raised for aquaculture and to other animals in marine environments. [and underscore] the potential role
of shipping in the global transport of zoonotic pathogens. Loss of Wild Species The reduction of diversity in agriculture is paralleled by a loss and reshuffling of
wild species. The global die-off of species now occurring, unprecedented in its rapidity, is of course only partly the result of globalization, but globalization is a major
factor in many extinctions. It accelerates species loss in several ways. First, it increases the numbers of exotic species carried by the soaring plane, ship, rail, and truck
traffic of global trade. Second, it is responsible for the adverse effects of ecotourism on wild flora and fauna (Ananthaswamy 2004). And third, it promotes the
development and exploitation of populations and natural areas to satisfy the demands of global trade, including, in addition to the agricultural and energy-related
disruptions already mentioned, logging, over-fishing of marine fisheries, road building, and mining. To give just one example, from 1985 to 2001, 56% of Indonesian
Borneo's (Kalimantan) protected lowland forest areasmany of them remote and sparsely populatedwere intensively logged, primarily to supply international
timber markets (Curran et al. 2004). Surely one of the most significant impacts of globalization on wild species and the ecosystems in which they live has been the
increase in introductions of invasive species (Vitousek et al. 1996; Mooney & Hobbs 2000). Two examples are zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha), which came to
the Great Lakes in the mid-1980s in the ballast water of cargo ships from Europe, and Asian longhorn beetles (Anoplophera glabripennis), which arrived in the United
States in the early 1990s in wood pallets and crates used to transfer cargo shipped from China and Korea. Zebra mussels, which are eliminating native mussels and
altering lake ecosystems, clog the intake pipes of waterworks and power plants. The Asian longhorn beetle now seems poised to cause heavy tree loss (especially
maples [Acersp.]) in the hardwood forests of eastern North America. Along the U.S. Pacific coast, oaks (Quercus sp.) and tanoaks (Lithocarpus densiflorus) are being
killed by sudden oak death, caused by a new, highly invasive fungal disease organism (Phytophthora ramorum), which is probably also an introduced species that was
spread by the international trade in horticultural plants (Rizzo & Garbelotto 2003). Estimates of the annual cost of the damage caused by invasive species in the United
States range from $5.5 billion to $115 billion. The zebra mussel alone, just one of a great many terrestrial, freshwater, and marine exotic animals, plants, and
pathogens, has been credited with more than $5 billion of damage since its introduction (Mooney & Drake 1986; Cox 1999). Invasive species surely rank among the

introduced species directly affect human health,

either as vectors of disease or as the disease organisms themselves. For example, the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes
principal economic and ecological limiting factors for globalization. Some

albopictus), a vector for dengue and yellow fevers, St. Louis and LaCrosse encephalitis viruses, and West Nile virus, was most likely introduced in used truck tires
imported from Asia to Texas in the 1980s and has spread widely since then. Discussion of this and other examples is beyond the scope of this article. Even the partial
control of accidental and deliberate species introductions requires stringent, well-funded governmental regulation in cooperation with the public and with business.
Many introductions of alien species cannot be prevented, but some can, and successful interventions to prevent the spread of introduced species can have significant
environmental and economic benefits. To give just one example, western Australia has shown that government and industry can cooperate to keep travelers and
importers from bringing harmful invasive species across their borders. The western Australian HortGuard and GrainGuard programs integrate public education; rapid
and effective access to information; targeted surveillance, which includes preborder, border, and postborder activities; and farm and regional biosecurity systems
(Sharma 2004). Similar programs exist in New Zealand. But there is only so much that governments can do in the face of massive global trade. Some of the
significant effects of globalization on wildlife are quite subtle. Mazzoni et al. (2003) reported that the newly appearing fungal disease chytridiomycosis (caused by
Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), which appears to be the causative agent for a number of mass die-offs and extinctions of amphibians on several continents, is
probably being spread by the international restaurant trade in farmed North American bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana). These authors state: Our findings suggest that
international trade may play a key role in the global dissemination of this and other emerging infectious diseases of wildlife. Even more unexpected findings were
described in 2002 by Alexander et al., who noted that expansion of ecotourism and other consequences of globalization are increasing contact between free-ranging
wildlife and humans, resulting in the first recorded introduction of a primary human pathogen, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, into wild populations of banded
mongooses (Mungos mungo) in Botswana and suricates (Suricata suricatta) in South Africa. The Future of Globalization The known effects of globalization on the
environment are numerous and highly significant. Many others are undoubtedly unknown. Given these circumstances, the first question that suggests itself is: Will

environmental side effects

globalization, as we see it now, remain a permanent state of affairs (Rees 2002; Ehrenfeld 2003a)? The principal
of
globalizationclimate change, resource exhaustion (particularly cheap energy), damage to agroecosystems, and the spread of exotic species, including pathogens

make this economic system unstable and short-lived. The socioeconomic

consequences of globalization are likely to do the same. In my book The Arrogance of Humanism (1981), I claimed that our ability to
manage global systems, which depends on our being able to predict the results of the things we do, or
even to understand the systems we have created, has been greatly exaggerated. Much of our alleged control is
(plant, animal, and human)are sufficient to

science fiction; it doesn't work because of theoretical limits that we ignore at our peril. We live in a dream world in which reality testing is something we must never,

Perrow explored the reasons why we have trouble predicting what so many of our
own created systems will do, and why they surprise us so unpleasantly while we think we are managing them. In his book
Normal Accidents, which does not concern globalization, he listed the critical characteristics of some of today's complex systems . They are
highly interlinked, so a change in one part can affect many others, even those that seem quite distant. Results of some
processes feed back on themselves in unexpected ways. The controls of the system often interact with each other unpredictably. We have only indirect
ways of finding out what is happening inside the system. And we have an incomplete understanding of some of the system's processes. His example of such a
system is a nuclear power plant, and this, he explained, is why system-wide accidents in nuclear plants cannot be predicted or eliminated by system
design. I would argue that globalization is a similar system, also subject to catastrophic accidents, many of them environmental
events that we cannot define until after they have occurred, and perhaps not even then. The comparatively few
never do, lest we awake. In 1984 Charles

commentators who have predicted the collapse of globalization have generally given social reasons to support their arguments. These deserve some consideration
here, if only because the environmental and social consequences of globalization interact so strongly with each other. In 1998, the British political economist John
Gray, giving scant attention to environmental factors, nevertheless came to the conclusion that globalization is unstable and will be short-lived. He said, There is
nothing in today's global market that buffers it against the social strains arising from highly uneven economic development within and between the world's diverse

The combination of [an] unceasing stream of new technologies, unfettered market

competition and weak or fractured social institutions has weakened both sovereign states and multinational corporations in their
ability to control important events. Note that Gray claims that not only nations but also multinational
corporations, which are widely touted as controlling the world, are being weakened by globalization. This idea may
come as a surprise, considering the growth of multinationals in the past few decades, but I believe it is true. Neither governments nor
giant corporations are even remotely capable of controlling the environmental or social forces released by globalization,
societies. The result, Gray states, is that

without first controlling globalization itself.

Capitalism commodities environmental destruction-means it cant self-correct

Foster et al., Oregon sociology professor, 2010
(John, The Ecological Rift: Capitalisms War on the Earth, pg 69-72, ldg)
A peculiarity of capitalism, brought out by the Lauderdale Paradox, is that it feeds on scarcity. Hence, nothing is more dangerous to capitalism as
a system than abundance. Waste

and destruction are therefore rational for the system. Although it is often
supposed that increasing environmental costs will restrict economic growth, the fact is that such
costs continue to be externalized under capitalism on nature (and society) as a whole. This perversely
provides new prospects for private profits through the selective commodification of parts of nature (public wealth). All of this points to
the fact that there is no real feedback mechanism, as commonly supposed, from rising ecological
costs to economic crisis, that can be counted on to check capitalisms destruction of the
biospheric conditions of civilization and life itself. By the perverse logic of the system, whole new industries and
markets aimed at profiting on planetary destruction, such as the waste management industry and carbon trading, are being opened up. These

new markets are justified as offering partial, ad hoc solutions to the problems generated nonstop by capitals laws of motion.38 In fact, the growth of natural scarcity is seen as a golden
opportunity in which to further privatize the worlds commons. This tragedy of the privatization
of the commons only accelerates the destruction of the natural environment, while enlarging the
system that weighs upon it. This is best illustrated by the rapid privatization of fresh water, which
is now seen as a new mega-market for global accumulation. The drying up and contamination of
freshwater diminishes public wealth, creating investment opportunities for capital, while profits
made from selling increasingly scarce water are recorded as contributions to income and riches. It
is not surprising, therefore, that the UN Commission on Sustainable Development proposed, at a 1998 conference in Paris, that governments
should turn to large multinational corporations in addressing issues of water scarcity, establishing open markets in water rights. Grard

Mestrallet, CEO of the global water giant Suez, has openly pronounced: Water is an efficient
product. It is a product which normally would be free, and our job is to sell it. But it is a product
which is absolutely necessary for life. He further remarked: Where else [other than in the monopolization of
increasingly scarce water resources for private gain] can you find a business thats totally international, where the
prices and volumes, unlike steel, rarely go down?39 Not only water offers new opportunities for
profiting on scarcity. This is also the case with respect to fuel and food. Growing fuel shortages,
as world oil demand has outrun supply with peak oil approaching has led to increases in
the prices of fossil fuels and energy in general, and to a global shift in agriculture from food
crops to fuel crops. This has generated a boom in the agrofuel market (expedited by governments on the grounds of national security
concerns). The result has been greater food scarcities, inducing an upward spiral in food prices and the spiking of world hunger. Speculators have
seen this as an opportunity for getting richer quicker through the monopolization of land and primary commodity resources.40 Similar issues
arise with respect to carbon-trading schemes, ostensibly aimed at promoting profits while reducing carbon emissions. Such schemes continue to
be advanced despite the fact that experiments in this respect thus far have been a failure in reducing emissions. Here, the expansion of capital
trumps actual public interest in protecting the vital conditions of life. At all times, ruling-class circles actively work to prevent radical structural
change in this as in other areas, since any substantial transformation in social-environmental relations would mean challenging the treadmill of
production itself, and launching an ecological-cultural revolution. Indeed, from

the standpoint of capital accumulation,

global warming and desertification are blessings in disguise, increasing the prospects of
expanding private riches. We are thus driven back to Lauderdales question: What opinion, he asked, would be entertained of the
understanding of a man, who, as the means of increasing the wealth ofa country should propose to create a scarcity of water, the abundance of
which was deservedly considered one of the greatest blessings incident to the community? It is certain, however, that such a projector would, by
this means, succeed in increasing the mass of individual riches.41 Numerous ecological critics have, of course, tried to address the
contradictions associated with the devaluation of nature by designing new green accounting systems that would include losses of natural
capital.42 Although such attempts are important in bringing out the irrationality of the system, they run into the harsh reality that the current
system of national accounts does accurately reflect capitalist realities of the non-valuation/undervaluation of natural agents (including human
labor power itself). To alter this, it is necessary to transcend the system. The dominant form of valuation, in our age of global ecological crisis, is
a true reflection of capitalisms mode of social and environmental degradation causing it to profit on the destruction the planet. In Marxs
critique, value was conceived of as an alienated form of wealth.43 Real wealth came from nature and labor power and was associated with the
fulfillment of genuine human needs. Indeed, it would be wrong, Marx wrote, to say that labour which produces use-values is the only source
of the wealth produced by it, that is of material wealth.Use-value always comprises a natural element.Labour is a natural condition of human
existence, a condition of material interchange [metabolism] between man and nature. From this standpoint, Lauderdales paradox was not a mere
enigma of economic analysis, but rather the supreme contradiction of a system that, as Marx stressed, developed only by simultaneously
undermining the original sources of all wealth the soil and the worker.

at: cap solves space

Only a dozen people could get off the rock in time, that means only the very wealthy
surviveworse than extinction.
William Ophuls, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern, 1997, Requiem For Modern
Politics, p. 9
Contrary to the pronouncements of diehard technological optimists, space colonization is not an answer. The
entropic costs of lifting mass into orbit will restrict space exploration and eventual colonization to a tiny
vanguard. Extensive trade in matter and energy is also ruled out, except in some remote science-fictional future in which we have mastered the force of gravity. Nor can we
decouple ourselves from nature here on Earth, at least to the extent envisioned by those who would have us live in artificial ecologies based on such emergent technologies as

Even if these unproven technologies are eventually found to be both economically

practical and ecologically harmless, replacing nature as the maker of all the basic requisites of life for large
numbers of people will take infinitely more capital, knowledge, and managerial skill than we now possess or are
ever likely to acquire.
biotechnology, nanotechnology, and fusion power.

Asteroids arent a threat

Carl Sagan, David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the
Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, 1994, Pale Blue Dot, p. 313
Civilization-threatening impacts require bodies several hundred meters across, or more. (A
meter is about a yard; 100 meters is roughly the length of a football field.) They arrive
something like once every 200,000 years. Our civilization is only about 10,000 years old, so
we should have no institutional memory of the last such impact. Nor do we.

Capitalism guarantees extinction before we leave the rockcollapse of the system is

imminent
Li, teaches economics at the University of Utah, April 2008
[Ming, An Age of Transition: The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the Demise of
Neoliberalism, Monthly Review Vol 59 Iss 11, Proquest]
On February 1, Immanuel Wallerstein, the leading world system theorist, in his biweekly commentaries pronounced the year
2008 to be the year of the "Demise of the Neoliberal Globalization." Wallerstein begins by pointing out that
throughout the history of the capitalist world system, the ideas of free market capitalism with minimal
government intervention and the ideas of state regulated capitalism with some social protection have
been in fashion in alternating cycles. In response to the worldwide profit stagnation in the 1970s,
neoliberalism became politically dominant in the advanced capitalist countries, in the periphery, and eventually in the
former socialist bloc. However, neoliberalism failed to deliver its promise of economic growth, and as the global
inequalities surged, much of the world population suffered from declines in real incomes. After the mid-1990s, neoliberalism met with growing
resistance throughout the world and many governments have been under pressure to restore some state regulation and social protection.

Confronted with economic crisis, the Bush administration has simultaneously pursued a further widening of
inequality at home and unilateral imperialism abroad. These policies have by now failed decisively.
As the U nited S tates can no longer finance its economy and imperialist adventure with increasingly larger foreign debt,
the U.S. dollar, Wallerstein believes, faces the prospect of a free fall and will cease to be the world's reserve currency.
Wallerstein concludes: "The political balance is swinging back....The real question is not whether this
phase is over but whether the swing back will be able, as in the past, to restore a state of relative
equilibrium in the world-system. Or has too much damage been done? And are we now in for more violent
chaos in the world-economy and therefore in the world-system as a whole?"9 Following Wallerstein's arguments, in the coming years
we are likely to witness a major realignment of global political and economic forces. There will
be an upsurge in die global class struggle over the direction of the global social transformation. If

we are in one of the normal cycles of the capitalist world-system, then toward the end of the current period of
instability and crisis, we probably will observe a return to the dominance of Keynesian or state capitalist
policies and institutions throughout the world. However, too much damage has been done. After
centuries of global capitalist accumulation, the global environment is on the verge of collapse
and there is no more ecological space for another major expansion of global capitalism. The
choice is stark-either humanity will permit capitalism to destroy the environment and therefore
the material basis of human civilization, or it will destroy capitalism first. The struggle for ecological
sustainability must join forces with the struggles of the oppressed and exploited to rebuild the global economy on the basis of production for
human needs in accordance with democratic and socialist principles. In this sense, we

have entered into a new age of

transition. Toward the end of this transition, one way or the other we will be in a fundamentally
different world and it is up to us to decide what kind of world it turns out to be.

Capitalism necessitates space militarization

Melbourne Indy Media Anarchism and Human Survival: Russell's Problem May 13, 2003
http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/47400.php
One may well ask what has all this to do with state capitalism? Consider the thinking behind the
militarisation of space, outlined for us by Space Command; historically military forces have evolved to
protect national interests and investments both military and economic. During the rise of sea commerce,
nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests. During the westward expansion of the continental United States, military
outposts and the cavalry emerged to protect our wagon trains, settlements and roads. The document goes on, the

emergence of
space power follows both of these models. Moreover, the globalization of the world economy
will continue, with a widening between haves and have nots. The demands of unilateral
strategic superiority, long standing US policy known as "escalation" or "full spectrum" dominance, compel Washington to
pursue space control". This means that, according to a report written under the chairmanship of Donald Rumsfeld, "in the coming
period the US will conduct operations to, from, in and through space" which includes "power projection in, from and through space". Toward this
end, Washington has resisted efforts in the UN to create an arms control regime for space. As a result there will inevitably arise an arms race in
space.

Nuclear war
Gordon R. Mitchell, member of CSIS Working Group on Theater Missile Defenses in the Asia-Pacific Region,
FLETCHER FORUM ON WORLD AFFAIRS, Winter 2001, p. 1-ff
A buildup of space weapons might begin with noble intentions of 'peace through strength' deterrence, but this
rationale glosses over the tendency that ' the presence of space weaponswill result in the increased
likelihood of their use'.33 This drift toward usage is strengthened by a strategic fact elucidated by Frank
Barnaby: when it comes to arming the heavens, 'anti-ballistic missiles and anti-satellite warfare technologies go
hand-in-hand'.34 The interlocking nature of offense and defense in military space technology stems from the
inherent 'dual capability' of spaceborne weapon components. As Marc Vidricaire, Delegation of Canada to the UN
Conference on Disarmament, explains: 'If you want to intercept something in space, you could use the same
capability to target something on land'. 35 To the extent that ballistic missile interceptors based in space can knock
out enemy missiles in mid-flight, such interceptors can also be used as orbiting 'Death Stars', capable of sending
munitions hurtling through the Earth's atmosphere. The dizzying speed of space warfare would introduce
intense 'use or lose' pressure into strategic calculations, with the spectre of split-second attacks creating
incentives to rig orbiting Death Stars with automated 'hair trigger' devices. In theory, this automation
would enhance survivability of vulnerable space weapon platforms. However, by taking the decision to commit
violence out of human hands and endowing computers with authority to make war, military planners could sow
insidious seeds of accidental conflict. Yale sociologist Charles Perrow has analyzed 'complexly interactive,
tightly coupled' industrial systems such as space weapons, which have many sophisticated components that all

depend on each other's flawless performance. According to Perrow, this interlocking complexity makes it impossible
to foresee all the different ways such systems could fail. As Perrow explains, '[t]he odd term "normal accident" is
meant to signal that, given the system characteristics, multiple and unexpected interactions of failures are
inevitable'.36 Deployment of space weapons with pre-delegated authority to fire death rays or

unleash killer projectiles would likely make war itself inevitable, given the susceptibility of such
systems to 'normal accidents'. It is chilling to contemplate the possible effects of a space war. According to
retired Lt. Col. Robert M. Bowman, 'even a tiny projectile reentering from space strikes the earth with
such high velocity that it can do enormous damage even more than would be done by a
nuclear weapon of the same size!'. 37 In the same Star Wars technology touted as a quintessential tool of
peace, defence analyst David Langford sees one of the most destabilizing offensive weapons ever
conceived: 'One imagines dead cities of microwave-grilled people'.38 Given this unique potential for
destruction, it is not hard to imagine that any nation subjected to space weapon attack would retaliate
with maximum force, including use of nuclear, biological, and/or chemical weapons. An
accidental war sparked by a computer glitch in space could plunge the world into the most
destructive military conflict ever seen.

at: cap solves war

Capitalism is the root cause of war
Dr. David Adams, 2002, former UNESCO Director of the Unit for the International Year for the
Culture of Peace, former Professor of Psychology (for 23 years) at Wesleyan University,
specialist on the brain mechanisms of aggressive behavior and the evolution of war, Chapter 8:
The Root Causes of War, The American Peace Movements, p. 22-28, http://www.culture-ofpeace.info/apm/chapter8-22.html
To take a scientific attitude about war and peace, we must carry the causal analysis a step further. If peace movements are caused by wars and war threats, then we must ask, what are the causes

rs, it is necessary to dismiss a false analysis that

has been popularized in recent years, the myth that war is caused by a "war instinct." The best
biological and anthropological data indicate that there is no such thing as a war instinct despite
the attempt of the mass media and educational systems to perpetuate this myth. Instead, "the
same species that invented war is capable of inventing peace" (note 15). Since there are several kinds of war, it is likely that
of these wars, both in the short term and in the long term? Before analyzing the causes of wa

there are several different kinds of causes for war. There are two kinds of war in which the United States has not been engaged for over two centuries. The first are wars of national liberation such
as the American Revolution or today's revolutions in Nicaragua and South Africa being waged by the Sandinistas and the African National Congress. The second are wars of revolution in which
the previous ruling class is thrown out and replaced by another. In the British and French Revolutions of earlier eras the feudal land-owners were overthrown by the newly rising capitalist class.

. The six wars

and threats of war that have caused American peace movements in this century have been wars
of imperial conquest, inter-imperialist rivalry, and capitalist-socialist rivalry. What are the root
causes of these wars in the short term? For the following analysis, I will rely upon some of
America's best economic historians (note 16). The Spanish-American and Philippine Wars of
1898, according to historian Walter LaFeber, were inevitable military results of a new foreign
policy devoted to obtaining markets overseas for American products. The new foreign policy was
the response to a profound depression that began in 1893 with unemployment soaring to almost
20 percent. Farm and industrial output piled up without a market because American workers,
being unemployed, had no money to buy them. Secretary of State Gresham "concluded that
foreign markets would provide in large measure the cure for the depression." To obtain such
markets, the U.S. went into competition with the other imperialist empires such as Britain and
Spain. The U.S. intervened with a naval force to help overthrow the government of Hawaii in
1893, intervened diplomatically in Nicaragua in 1894, threatened war with England over
Venezuela in 1895, and eventually went to war with Spain in 1898 and invaded the Philippines in
1898. To quote from the title of LaFeber's book, the U.S. established a "new empire." American
intervention in World War I again rescued the economy from a depression. In 1914 and 1915, as
war between the European imperialist powers broke out, American unemployment was rising
towards ten percent and industrial goods were piling up without a market. One industrial market
was expanding, however, the market for weapons in Europe. The historian Charles Tansill
concludes that "it was the rapid growth of the munitions trade which rescued America from this
serious economic situation." And since the sales went to Britain and France, it committed the U.S. to their side in the war. Finance capital was equally involved: "the
In the revolutions of this century in Russia, China, Cuba, etc. the capitalists, in turn, were overthrown by forces representing the working class and landless farmers

large banking interests were deeply interested in the World War because of wide opportunities for large profits." When bank loans to Britain and France of half a billion dollars went through in
1915, "the business depression, that had so worried the Administration in the spring of 1915, suddenly vanished, and 'boom times' prevailed." Of course, German imperialism did not stand idly by
while the U.S. profited from arms shipments and loans to their enemies in the war. German submarine warfare against these shipments finally provoked American involvement in the War. The

es. In his recent

book on the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, David Abraham has
documented how major capitalists turned to Hitler to fill the vacuum of political leadership when
the economy collapsed. In part, the absence of political leadership "with the collapse of the
export economy at the end of 1931...drove German industry to foster or accept a Bonapartist
solution to the political crisis and an imperialist solution to the economic crisis. The "Bonapartist
solution", as Abraham calls it, was found in Hitler's Nazi Party. As he says, "By mid-1932, the
rise of fascism in Europe was the direct result of still another cyclical depression, the Great Depression that gripped the entire capitalist world in the Thirti

vast majority of industrialists wanted to see Nazi participation in the government." For these
industrialists, "an anti-Marxist, imperialist program was the least common denominator on which
they could all agree, and the Nazis seemed capable of providing the mass base for such a
program." The appeasement of Hitler's promise to smash the communists and socialists at home and to destroy the Soviet Union abroad expressed a new cause of capitalist war. Up
until that time, inter-imperialist wars were simply the response to economic contradictions at home and capitalist competition abroad. In part, World War II was yet another inter-imperialist war.
But now a new cause of war was emerging alongside of the old. The rise of socialism was a direct threat to the entire capitalist world. In addition to glutted domestic markets and competition for
foreign markets, the capitalists now had to face the additional problem that the overall foreign market itself was shrinking. Thus, they tended to support each other in the face of a common
enemy. After World War II, there was a particularly sharp shrinkage in the "free world" for capitalist exploitation as socialism and national liberation triumphed through much of the world. The
U.S. and its allies responded by demanding that the socialist countries open their doors to investment by capitalism. According to historian William Appleman Williams, "It was the decision of
the United States to employ its new and awesome power in keeping with the traditional Open Door Policy which crystallized the cold war." As Williams explains, "the policy of the open door,

Diplomatic and military confrontation between the U.S.

and USSR were used to justify the Cold War and establishment of NATO, but the underlying
issues were economic. As pointed out by historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, "The question of
foreign economic policy was not the containment of Communism, but rather more directly the
extension and expansion of American capitalism according to its new economic power and
needs." In addition to the new problem of shrinking world markets, there remained the problem of cyclical depressions. Although unemployment was not bad in 1946 because industry
like all imperial policies, created and spurred onward a dynamic opposition."

was producing to meet the accumulated needs of the war-deprived American people, the specter of another depression was very much a factor in the Cold War. As the Kolkos point out, "The
deeply etched memory of the decade-long depression of 1929 hung over all American plans for the postwar era....In extending its power throughout the globe the United States hoped to save

The Vietnam War was a continuation of the Cold War, as the

United States tried to prevent further shrinkage of the world capitalist economic system. The
U.S. had already fought a similar war in Korea. In his chapter, "The U.S. in Vietnam, 1944-66:
Origins and Objectives," Gabriel Kolko calls the intervention of the United States in Vietnam,
"the most important single embodiment of the power and purposes of American foreign policy
since the Second World War." Elsewhere in his book, Kolko goes into detail about the economic
basis of American imperialism: access to raw materials, access to markets for American
products, and investment opportunities for American capital. The Vietnam War, he explains, was
not a conspiracy or simply a military decision. It was the natural result of "American power and
interest in the modern world." Finally we come to the question of what has caused the massive
escalation of the arms buildup under Presidents Carter and Reagan (and more recently under
Bush, father and son). To some extent, it is a response to the old problem of cyclical depressions.
Since World War II, each recession has been deeper than the last, until by 1981 unemployment
reached double digits for the first time since the Thirties. Government spending was needed to
put people back to work. Would the government spend the money for military weapons or for civilian needs? A long line of Presidential candidates, standing for the
itself as well from a return of the misery of prewar experience."

military solution, have been supported in their campaigns by the military-industrial complex against other candidates who were unable to wage a serious campaign for civilian spending instead of

The growing power of the military-industrial complex is a new and especially

dangerous addition to the economic causes of war. It reflects an economic crisis that goes even
deeper than those of the past. In addition to the cyclical depressions and the shrinkage of foreign
markets, there is a new imbalance in the entire structure of capitalism. There is an enormous
increase in financial speculation and short-term profit schemes. The military-industrial complex
has risen to become the dominant sector of the American economy because through the aid of
state subsidies it generates the greatest short-term profits. Never mind if the U.S. government
goes into debt to banks and other financial institutions in order to pay for military spending. The
world of financial speculation does not worry about tomorrow. Not only does this "military
spending solution" endanger the security of the planet, but it also increases the risk of a major
financial collapse and subsequent depression. To summarize, we may point to the following
causes of American wars over the past century: 1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor
military spending.

colonial and neo-colonial countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the
"free world" - i.e. the part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial speculation and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. In the
1985 edition of this book the argument was made that the socialist countries were escaping from the economic causation of war. In comparison to the capitalist countries, they did not have the
same dynamic of over-production and cyclical depression, with periods of enhanced structural unemployment. As for exploitation and imperialism, despite the frequent reference in the American
media to "Soviet imperialism," the direction of the flow of wealth was the opposite of what holds true under capitalist imperialism. Instead of the rich nations extracting wealth from the poor
ones, which is the case, for example between the U.S. and Latin America, the net flow of wealth proceeded from the Soviet Union towards the other socialist countries in order to bring them
towards an eventually even level of development. According to an authoritative source associated with the U.S. military-industrial complex, the net outflow from the Soviet Union amounted to
over forty billion dollars a year in the mid-1980's. In one crucial respect, however, the 1985 analysis was incorrect. It failed to take account of the military-industrial complex that had grown to be
the most powerful force of the Soviet economy, a mirror image of its equivalent in the West. The importance of this was brought home to those of us who attended a briefing on economic
conversion from military to civilian production that was held at the United Nations on November 1, 1990, a critical time for Gorbachev's program of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. The speaker,

Ednan Ageev, was the head of the Division of International Security Issues at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was asked by the Gorbachev administration to find out the extent to
which the Soviet economy was being used for military production. Naturally, he went to the Minister of Defense, where he was told that this information was secret. Secret even to Gorbachev. In
conversation, Ageev estimated that 85-90% of Soviet scientific researchers were in the military sector. That seems high until you realize that the Soviet's were matching U.S. military research,
development and production on the basis of a Gross National Product only half as large. Since about 40% of U.S. research and development was tied to the military at that time, it would make
sense that the Soviets would have had to double the U.S. percentage in order to keep pace. How could the Gorbachev administration convert their economy from military to civilian production if
they could not even get a list of defense industries? Keeping this in mind, along with the enormous militarization of the Soviet economy, it is not so surprising that the Soviet economy collapsed,
and with it the entire political superstructure. The origins of the Soviet military-industrial complex can be traced back to the Russian revolution which instituted what Lenin, at one point, called
"war communism". He warned that war communism could not succeed in the long run and that instead of a top-down militarized economy, a socialist economy needed to be structured as a
"cooperative of cooperatives." But war communism was entrenched during the Stalin years, carried out of necessity to an extreme during the Second World War, and then perpetuated by the Cold
War. The economic causation of the war system is not new. It originated long before capitalism and socialism. From its beginnings in ancient Mesopotamia, the state was always associated with
war, both to capture slaves abroad and to keep them under control at home. As states grew more powerful, war became the means to build empires and to acquire and rule colonies. In fact, the
economic causation of war probably extends back even further into ancient prehistory. From the best analysis I know, that of Mel and Carol Ember, using the methods of cross-cultural
anthropology, it would seem that war functioned as a means to survive periodic but unpredictable food shortages caused by natural disasters. Apparently, tribes that could make war most
effectively could survive natural disasters better than others by successfully raiding the food supplies of their neighbors. While particular wars can be analyzed, as we have done above, in terms
of immediate, short-term causes, there is a need to understand the war system itself, which is as old as human history. Particular wars are the tip of a much deeper iceberg. Beneath war, there has
developed a culture of war that is entwined with it in a complex web of causation. On the one hand, the culture of war is produced and reinforced by each war, and, on the other hand, the culture
of war provides the basis on which succeeding wars are prepared and carried out. The culture of war is a set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that consists of enemy images, authoritarian social
structure, training and arming for violence, exploitation of man and nature, secrecy and male domination. Without an enemy, without a social structure where people will follow orders, without
the preparation of soldiers and weapons, without the control of information, both propaganda and secrecy, no war can be carried out. The culture of war has been so prevalent in history that we
take it for granted, as if it were human nature. However, anthropologists point to cultures that are nowhere near as immersed in the culture of war, and it is the opinion of the best scientists that a
culture of peace is possible. Peace movements have not given enough attention to the internal use of the culture of war. The culture of war has two faces, one facing outward and the other
inward. Foreign wars are accompanied by authoritarian rule inside the warring countries. Even when there is no war threat, armies (or national guards) are kept ready not just for use against
foreign enemies, but also against those defined as the enemy within: striking workers, movements of the unemployed, prisoners, indigenous peoples, just as in an earlier time they were used
against slave rebellions. As documented in my 1995 article in the Journal of Peace Research (Internal Military Interventions in the United States) the U.S. Army and National Guard have been
used an average of 18 times a year, involving an average of 12,000 troops for the past 120 years, mostly against actions and revolts by workers and the unemployed. During periods of external
war, the internal wars are usually intensified and accompanied by large scale spying, deportations and witch hunts. It would appear that we have once again entered such a period in the U.S. We
are hardly alone in this matter. Needless to say, the culture of war was highly developed to stifle dissent in the Soviet Union by Stalin and his successors of "war communism." The internal
culture of war needs to be analyzed and resisted everywhere. For example, readers living in France should question the role of the CRS. The internal use of the culture of war is no less
economically motivated than external wars. The socialists at the beginning of the 20th Century recognized it as "class war," carried out in order to maintain the domination of the rich and
powerful over the poor and exploited. Not by accident, it has often been socialists and communists who are the first to be targeted by the internal culture of war in capitalist countries. And they, in
turn, have often made the most powerful critique of the culture of war and have played a leading role in peace movements for that reason. Their historical role for peace was considerably
compromised, however, by the "war communism" of the Soviet Union. With its demise, however, there is now an opportunity for socialists and communists to return to their earlier leadership
against war, both internal and external, and to insist that a true socialism can only flourish on the basis of a culture of peace. In considering future prospects for the American Peace Movements, I

First, let us look back over the economic factors and

movements of the previous century to see if the trends are likely to continue. 1. Wars are likely
to continue because, for the most part, their economic causes remain as strong as ever: 1) cyclical
crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor colonial and neo-colonial
countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and investment
areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the "free world" - i.e. the part
of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial speculation
and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. The fourth factor is not as prominent since the collapse of the
shall begin with trends from the past and then consider different factors for the future?

Soviet Union, but there is still evidence of this factor at work: for example, the attempted overthrow of the government of Venezuela in spring, 2002, was apparently linked to its developing ties
with socialist Cuba, especially in terms of its oil resources. Although the coup d'etat failed, there was a risk of plunging Venezuela into warfare, especially considering the increasingly

. Although the "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan, Philippines, etc. and

the associated military buildup is usually justified as revenge for the attacks of September 11,
there seems little doubt that there are economic motives involved as well, including the control
of oil resources from Central Asia as a supplement to those of the Middle East. At the same time,
the massive expansion of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. appears at some level to be
intended as an increase in government spending to hedge against declining non-military
production, unemployment and financial crises in the stock markets. 2. The American peace
movements have been reactive in the past, developing in response to specific wars or threats of
war, and then disappearing when the war is over or the threat is perceived to have decreased. In fact,
internationalized war next door in Colombia

this observation at the macro level is mirrored by an observation that I have made previously at a micro level: participants in peace movements have been motivated to an important degree by
anger against the injustice of war. This dynamic seems likely to continue. Governments, worried about the reactive potential of peace movements may attempt to engage in very brief wars, just as
the U.S. government cut short the 1991 Gulf War after several weeks to avoid an escalating peace movement. In the future, peace movements need to be broadened by linkages to other issues and
by international solidarity and unity; otherwise they risk being only temporary influences on the course of history, growing in response to particular wars and then disappearing again afterwards

The world needs a sustained opposition to the entire culture of war, not just to particular wars.

To
be fully successful, the future peace movement needs to be positive as well as negative. It needs to be for a culture of peace at the same time as it is against the culture of war. This requires that
activists in the future peace movement develop a shared vision of the future towards which the movement can aspire. I have found evidence, presented in the recent revision of my book
Psychology for Peace Activists (note 17), that such a shared, positive vision is now becoming possible, and, as a result, human consciousness can take on a new and powerful dimension in this
particular moment of history.

alternative

2nc alt solves

Cross-apply frameworkdiscussions at the academic level are more productive
creates better a relationship to policy which is more important than trivial
simulationif this approach is better we should win
Bilgin 5 Assistant Prof of International Relations at Bilkent University, REGIONAL SECURITY
IN THE MIDDLE EAST A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE, p54The point is that a

broader security agenda requires students of security to look at agents other than the state ,
of restricting their analysis to the states
agency. This is essential not only because states are not always able (or willing) to fulfil their side of the
bargain in providing for their citizens security, as noted above, but also because there already are agents
other than states be it social movements or intellectuals who are striving to provide for the differing
needs of peoples (themselves and others). This is not meant to deny the salience of the roles states play in the realm of security; on the contrary, they
remain significant actors with crucial roles to play.25 Rather, the argument is that the states dominant position as an actor
well endowed to provide (certain dimensions of) security does not justify privileging its agency. Furthermore,
broadening the security agenda without attempting a reconceptualisation of agency would result in
falling back upon the agency of the state in meeting non-military threats. The problem with resorting to
the agency of the state in meeting non-military threats is that states may not be the most suitable actors
to cope with them. In other words, the state being the most qualified actor in coping with some kinds of threats does not necessarily mean it is
competent (or willing) enough to cope with all. This is why students of critical approaches aim to re-conceptualise
agency and practice. Critical approaches view non-state actors, in particular, social movements and intellectuals, as potential agents for change (Cox
1981, 1999; Walker 1990b; Hoffman 1993; Wyn Jones 1995a, 1999). This echoes feminist approaches that have emphasised the role
of womens agency and maintained that women must act in the provision of their own security if they
are to make a change in a world where their security needs and concerns are marginalised (Tickner 1997; also
see Sylvester 1994). This is not necessarily wishful thinking on the part of a few academics; on the contrary,
practice indicates that peoples (as individuals and social groups) have taken certain aspects of their own and others
security into their own hands (Marsh 1995: 1305; Turner 1998). Three successful examples from the Cold War era the Nestl boycott, the
such as social movements, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and individuals, instead

anti-apartheid campaign for South Africa and the campaign against nuclear missile deployments in Europe are often viewed as having inspired the social
movements of the post-Cold War era (Lopez et al. 1997: 2301; Marsh 1995). Christine Sylvester (1994) has also pointed to the examples of the Greenham
Common Peace Camp in Britain (198089) and womens producer cooperatives in Harare, Zimbabwe (198890) to show how women have intervened to
enhance their own and others security. These are excellent examples of how a

broader conception of security needs to be coupled

with a broader conception of agency. It should be noted here that the call of critical approaches for looking at the agency of non-state actors
should not be viewed as allocating tasks to preconceived agents. Rather, critical approaches aim to empower nonstate actors (who
may or may not be aware of their own potential to make a change) to constitute themselves as agents of security to meet this
broadened agenda. Nor should it be taken to suggest that all non-state actors practices are
emancipatory. Then, paying more attention to the agency of non-state actors will enable students of security to see how, in the absence of interest at the
governmental level (as is the case with the Middle East), non-state actors could imagine, create and nurture
community-building projects and could help in getting state-level actors interested in the formation of
a security community. It should, however, be noted that not all non-state actors are community-minded just as not all governments are sceptical of
the virtues of community building. Indeed, looking at the agency of nonstate actors is also useful because it enables
one to see how non-state actors could stall community-building projects. In the Middle East, womens
movements and networks have been cooperating across borders from the beginning of the Intifada
onwards. Womens agency, however, is often left unnoticed, because , as Simona Sharoni (1996) has argued, the eyes
of security analysts are often focused on the state as the primary security agent . However, the Intifada was marked
by Palestinian and Israeli-Jewish womens adoption of non-zerosum, non-military practices that questioned and challenged the boundaries of their political
communities as they dared to explore new forms of political communities (Mikhail-Ashrawi 1995; Sharoni 1995). Such activities included organising a
conference entitled Give Peace a Chance Women Speak Out in Brussels in May 1989. The first of its kind, the conference brought together about 50 Israeli
and Palestinian women from the West Bank and Gaza Strip together with PLO representatives to discuss the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. The follow-up event
took place in Jerusalem in December 1989 where representatives of the Palestinian Womens Working Committees and the Israeli Women and Peace Coalition
organised a womens day for peace which, Sharoni noted, culminated in a march of 6,000 women from West to East Jerusalem under the banner Women Go
For Peace (Sharoni 1996: 107). Aside from such events that were designed to alert public opinion of the unacceptability of the Israel/Palestine impasse as well
as finding alternative ways of peacemaking, women also undertook direct action to alleviate the condition of Palestinians whose predicament had been worsening

since the beginning of the Intifada (Mikhail-Ashrawi 1995). In this process, they were aided by their Western European counterparts who provided financial,
institutional as well as moral support. In

sum, womens agency helped make the Intifada possible on the part of the
Palestinian women, whilst their Israeli- Jewish counterparts helped enhance its impact by way of
questioning the moral boundaries of the Israeli state. The Intifada is also exemplary of how non-state
actors could initiate processes of resistance that might later be taken up by policy-makers. The Intifada
began in 1987 as a spontaneous grassroots reaction to the Israeli occupation and took the PLO
leadership (along with others) by surprise. It was only some weeks into the Intifada that the PLO
leadership embraced it and put its material resources into furthering the cause, which was making occupation as
difficult as possible for the Israeli government. Although not much came out of the Intifada in terms of an agree- ment with Israel on issues of concern for the
people living in the occupied territories, the

process generated a momentum that culminated in 1988 with the PLOs

denouncement of terrorism. The change in the PLOs policies, in turn, enabled the 1993 Oslo Accords,
which was also initiated by non-state actors, in this case intellectuals (Sharoni 1996). The point here is that it has been a
combination of top-down and bottom-up politics that has been at the heart of political change, be it the 1989 revolutions in
Eastern Europe, or Intifada in Israel/Palestine. Emphasising the roles some non-state actors, notably womens networks, have played as agents of security is not
to suggest that all non-state agents practices are non-zero-sum and/or non-violent. For instance, there are the cases of Islamist movements such as FIS (the
Islamic Salvation Front) in Algeria and Hamas in the Occupied Territories that have resorted, over the years, to violent practices as a part of their strategies that
were designed to capture the state mechanism. However, although they may constitute threats to security in the Middle East in view of their violent practices,
what needs to be remembered is that both FIS and Hamas function as providers for security for some peoples in the Middle East those who are often neglected
by their own states (Esposito 1995: 16283). In other words, some Islamist movements do not only offer a sense of identity, but also propose alternative practices
and provide tangible economic, social and moral support to their members. However, the treatment women receive under the mastery of such Islamist movements
serves to remind us that there clearly are problems involved in an unthinking reliance on non-governmental actors as agents for peace and security or an
uncritical adoption of their agendas. Middle Eastern history is replete with examples of non-state actors resorting to violence and/or adopting zero-sum practices
in the attempt to capture state power. In fact, it is often such violent practices of nonstate actors (that is, terrorism or assassination of political leaders) that are
mentioned in security analyses. Nevertheless, the fact that not all non-state actors are fit to take up the role of serving as agents of emancipatory change should
not lead one to downplay the significant work some have done in the past, and could do in the future. After all, not all states serve as providers of security; yet
Security Studies continues to rely on their agency. Then,

in order to be able to fulfil the role allocated to them by critical

approaches, non-state actors should be encouraged to move away from traditional forms of resistance
that are based on exclusionist identities, that solely aim to capture state power or that adopt zero-sum
thinking and practices. Arguably, this is a task for intellectuals to fulfil. This is not to suggest that intellectuals should direct or
instruct non-state actors. As Wyn Jones (1999: 162) has noted, the relationship between intellectuals and social movements is based on reciprocity. The
1980s peace movements, for instance, are good examples of intellectuals getting involved with social
movements in bringing about change in this case, the end of the Cold War (Galtung 1995; Kaldor 1997). The
relationship between intellectuals and peace movements in Europe was a mutually interactive one in
that the intellectuals encouraged and led whilst drawing strength from these movements . Emphasising
the mutually interactive relationship between intellectuals and social movements should not be taken
to suggest that to make a change, intellectuals should get directly involved in political action . They
could also intervene to provide a critique of the existing situation, what future outcomes may result if
necessary action is not taken at present, and by pointing to potential for change immanent in world
politics. Students of security could help create the political space that would enable the emergence of a
Gorbachev, by presenting such critique. It should, however, be emphasised that such thinking should be anchored in the potential immanent
in world politics. In other words, intellectuals should be informed by the practices of social movements themselves
(as was the case in Europe in the 1980s). The hope is that non-state actors such as social movements and intellectuals
(who may or may not be aware of their potential to make a change) may constitute themselves as agents when presented with an alternative
reading of their situation. Lastly, intellectuals could make a change even if they limit their practices to thinking,
writing and self-reflection. During the Cold War very few security analysts were conscious and open about the impact their thinking and writing
could make. Richard Wyn Jones cites the example of Edward N. Luttwak as one such exception who admitted that strategy is not a neutral pursuit and its only
purpose is to strengthen ones own side in the contention of nations (cited in Wyn Jones 1999: 150). Still, such explicit acknowledgement of the political
dimension of strategic thinking was rare during the Cold War. On the contrary, students

of International Relations in general and

Security Studies in particular have been characterised by limited or no self-reflection as to the
potential impact their research could make on the subject of research (Wyn Jones 1999: 14850). To go back to the
argument made above about the role of the intellectual as an agent of security and the mutually constitutive relationship between theory and practice,

students of critical approaches to security could function as agents of security by way of reflecting
upon the practical implications of their own thinking and writing . Self-reflection becomes crucial when the relationship
between theory and practice is conceptualised as one of mutual constitution. State-centric approaches to security do not simply
reflect a reality out there but help reinforce statism. Although it may be true that the consequences of these scholarly activities are
sometimes unintended, there nevertheless should be a sense of selfreflection on the part of scholars upon the potential consequences of their research and
teaching. The point here is that critical

approaches that show an awareness of the socially constructed character of

reality need not stop short of reflecting upon the constitutive relationship between theory and
practice when they themselves are theorising about security. Otherwise, they run the risk of
constituting threats to the future (Kublkov 1998: 193201).

All their spillover claims link harder to themits more pragmatic to reflect on
social dynamics than pretend we can reform politics from the campus, even if
theres no exact blueprintthis is also a DA to the perm
Pepper 10 Prof Geography Oxford, Utopianism and Environmentalism, Environmental
Politics, 14:1, 3-22, SAGE
Conclusion
Academic and activist opinion nonetheless frequently argues that

Utopian endeavour is necessary

for radical environmentalism and for related

Utopianism is important within these movements to inspire hope

and provide 'transgressive' spaces , conceptual and real, in which to experiment within
alternative paradigms . To be truly transgressive, rather than lapsing into
reactionary fantasy , ecotopias need to emphasise heuristic spaces and processes

movements such as feminism, anarchism and socialism.

rather than laying down blueprints , and must be rooted in existing social and economic relations rather than being merely a form of abstraction
unrelated to the processes and situations operating in today's 'real' world.

Deep ecological and bioregional

literature, for instance, can seem regressively removed from today's world. Anti-modernism is evident, for instance, in the
form of future primitivism and the predilection for small-scale 're-embedded' societies echoing "traditional cultures'. Blueprinting is also
suggested by the strong metanarratives driven by (ecological) science. There is a remarkable
consensus amongst ideologically diverse ecotopian perspectives about what should be in
ecotopia, leaving relatively little as provisional and reflexive. Additionally, idealism in the negative sense is often rife in
This paper suggests that by these criteria, the transgressiveness of ecotopianism is ambiguous and limited.

ecotopianism.

However, idealism pervades reformist as well as radical environmentalism , and the

principles behind ecological modernisation - the much-favoured
environment

mainstream policy discourse

about the

are founded on premises that can be described as 'Utopian* in the

pejorative sense

used by Marxists.

That is, they do not adequately and accurately take

into account the socioeconomic dynamics of the capitalist system they are meant
to reform . Thus they fail to recognise that social-democratic and 'third way' attempts to realise
an environmentally sound, humane, inclusive and egalitarian capitalism are ultimately
headed for failure .
Notwithstanding these limitations of ecotopianism, given that the environmental problems featured in dystopian fiction for over a century seem increasingly to be materialising, it may be that we
will soon be clutching at ecotopias as beacons affirming Bloch's 'principle of hope* (1986).

And what of those who, despite these deepening environmental problems, still maintain that 'ecotopia' is Utopian fantasy in the worst sense, while
considering their reformist visions to be pragmatic and attainable? These "hard-nosed

realists*, as Terry Eagleton (2000, p.33) ironically

behave as though chocolate chip cookies and the IMF will be with us in another
3000 years time", should realise that although the future may or may not be pleasant:
to deny that it will be quite different in the manner of post-histoire philosophising, is to offend
against the very realism on which such theorists usually pride themselves. To claim that human
affairs might feasibly be much improved is an eminently realistic proposition .
calls them, "who

Moving toward CRITIQUE of structures INSTEAD of production fixes is best

EVEN IF they win some truth claims
Zehner 12
Green illusions,
Ozzie Zehner is the author of Green Illusions and a visiting scholar at the University of
California, Berkeley. His recent publications include public science pieces in Christian Science
Monitor, The American Scholar, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Humanist, The Futurist,
and Womens Studies Quarterly. He has appeared on PBS, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and regularly
guest lectures at universities
Since this book represents a critique of alternative energy, it may seem an unlikely manual for alternative-energy proponents. But it is. Building
alternative-energy infrastructure atop America's present economic, social, and cultural landscape is akin to
building a sandcastle in a rising tide. A taller sand castle won't help. The first steps in this book sketch a partial
blueprint for making alternative-energy technologies relevant into the future. Technological development alone will do little to
bring about a durable alternative-energy future. Reimagining the social conditions of energy
use will. Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves if environmentalists should be involved in the business of
energy production (of any sort) while so many more important issues remain vastly underserved. Over the next several
decades, it's quite likely that our power production cocktail will look very much like the mix of today,
save for a few adjustments in market share. Wind and biofuel generation will become more prevalent and the stage is set for nuclear
power as well, despite recent catastrophes. Nevertheless, these changes will occur over timethey will seem slow. Every
power production mechanism has side effects and limitations of its own, and a global shift to new
forms of power production simply means that humanity will have to deal with new side effects and
limitations in the future. This simple observation seems to have gotten lost in the cheerleading for alternativeenergy technologies. The mainstream environmental movement should throw down the green energy pom-poms and pull
out the bifocals. It is entirely reasonable for environmentalists to criticize fossil-fuel industries for the harms they instigate. It is, however, entirely
unreasonable for environmentalists to become spokespeople for the next round of ecological disaster
machines such as solar cells, ethanol, and battery-powered vehicles. Environmentalists pack the largest punch when
they instead act as power production watchdogs (regardless of the production method); past environmentalist pressures have cleaned
the air and made previously polluted waterways swimmable. This watchdog role will be vital in the future as biofuels, nuclear
plants, alternative fossil fuels, solar cells, and other energy technologies import new harms and risks. Beyond a
watchdog role, environmentalists yield the greatest progress when addressing our social
fundamentals, whether by supporting human rights, cleaning up elections, imagining new economic structures, strengthening communities, revitalizing
democracy, or imagining more prosperous modes of consumption. Unsustainable energy use is a symptom of suboptimal
social conditions. Energy use will come down when we improve these conditions: consumption patterns that lead to debt and
depression; commercials aimed at children; lonely seniors stuck in their homes because they can no longer drive; kids left to fend for themselves when it
comes to mobility or sexuality; corporate influence trumping citizen representation; measurements of the nation's health in dollars rather than well-being; a media
concerned with advertising over insight, and so on. These may not seem like environmental issues, and they certainly don't seem like energy policy issues, but in

they are the most important energy and environmental issues of our day. Addressing them won't require sacrifice or
social engineering. They are congruent with the interests of many Americans, which will make them easier to initiate and fulfill . They are entirely
realistic (as many are already enjoyed by other societies on the planet). They are, in a sense, boring. In fact, the only thing shocking
about them is the degree to which they have been underappreciated in contemporary environmental thought, sidelined
in the media, and ignored by politicians. Even though these first steps don't represent a grand solution, they
are necessary preconditions if we intend to democratically design and implement more comprehensive solutions
in the future. Ultimately, clean energy is less energy. Alternative-energy alchemy has so
greatly consumed the public imagination over recent decades that the most vital and durable environmental essentials
remain overlooked and underfunded. Today energy executives hiss silver-tongued fairy tales about clean-coal
technologies, safe nuclear reactors, and renewable sources such as solar, wind, and biofuels to quench growing energy demands,
reality

fostering the illusion that we can maintain our expanding patterns of energy consumption
without consequence. At the same time, they claim that these technologies can be made environmentally, socially, and
politically sound while ignoring a history that has repeatedly shown otherwise. If we give in to
accepting their conceptual frames,

such as those

pitting production versus production , or

, then we have
already lost. We forfeit our right to critical democratic engagement and instead allow the
powers that be to regurgitate their own terms of debate into our open upstretched mouths. Alternativeenergy technologies don't clean the air. They don't clean the water. They don't protect wildlife. They don't support human rights. They don't
improve neighborhoods. They don't strengthen democracy. They don't regulate themselves. They don't lower atmospheric carbon dioxide.
They don't reduce consumption. They produce power. That power can lead to durable benefits, but only given
the appropriate context. Ultimately, it's not a question of whether American society possesses the technological prowess to construct an alternativeif we parrot their terms

such as clean coal, bridge fuels, peacetime atom, smart growth, and clean energy

energy nation. The real question is the reverse. Do we have a society capable of being powered by alternative energy? The answer today is clearly no. But we can

Future environmentalists will drop solar, wind, biofuels, nuclear, hydrogen, and hybrids
to focus instead on women's rights, consumer culture, walkable neighborhoods, military spending,
zoning, health care, wealth disparities, citizen governance, economic reform, and democratic institutions. As environmentalists and global
citizens, it's not enough to say that we would benefit by shifting our focus. Our very relevance depends on it.
change that.

at: cede the political

Focusing on policy first absolves individual contribution and cedes the political---ensures
their impacts are inevitable and is an independent reason to vote negative
Trennel 6 Paul, Ph.D of the University of Wales, Department of International Politics, The
(Im)possibility of Environmental Security
Thirdly, it can be claimed that the

security mindset channels the obligation to address environmental issues

in an unwelcome direction. Due to terms laid out by the social contract security is essentially something done
by statesthere is no obligation or moral duty on citizens to provide securityIn this sense security
is essentially emptyit is not a sign of positive political initiative (Dalby, 1992a: 97-8). Therefore, casting
an issue in security terms puts the onus of action onto governments, creating a docile citizenry
who await instructions from their leaders as to the next step rather than taking it on their own backs to do
something about pressing concerns. This is unwelcome because governments have limited incentives to act
on environmental issues, as their collectively poor track record to date reveals. Paul Brown notes that at present in all the
large democracies the short-term politics of winning the next election and the need to increase
the annual profits of industry rule over the long term interests of the human race (1996: 10; see also
Booth 1991: 348). There is no clearer evidence for this than the grounds on which George W. Bush
explained his decision to opt out of the Kyoto Protocol: I told the world I thought that Kyoto was a lousy deal for
AmericaIt meant that we had to cut emissions below 1990 levels, which would have meant I would have presided over massive layoffs and
economic destruction (BBC: 2006). The

short-term focus of government elites and the long-term nature of

the environmental threat means that any policy which puts the burden of responsibility on the
shoulders of governments should be viewed with scepticism as this may have the effect of
breeding inaction on environmental issues. Moreover, governmental legislation may not be the most appropriate route to
solving the problem at hand. If environmental vulnerabilities are to be effectively addressed [t]he routine
behaviour of practically everyone must be altered (Deudney, 1990: 465). In the case of the environmental sector it is not large
scale and intentional assaults but the cumulative effect of small and seemingly innocent acts such as driving a car or taking a flight that do the
damage. Exactly how a legislative response could serve to alter non-criminal apolitical acts by individuals (Prins, 1993: 176- 177) which lie
beyond established categories of the political is unclear. Andrew Dobson has covered this ground in claiming that the

solution to
environmental hazards lies not in piecemeal legislation but in the fostering of a culture of
ecological citizenship. His call is made on the grounds that legislating on the environment, forcing people to adapt,
does not reach the necessary depth to produce long-lasting change, but merely plugs the problem temporarily. He cites
Italian car-free city days as evidence of this, noting that whilst selected cities may be free of
automobiles on a single predetermined day, numbers return to previous levels immediately
thereafter (2003: 3). This indicates that the deeper message underlying the policy is not being successfully conveyed. Enduring
environmental solutions are likely to emerge only when citizens choose to change their ways
because they understand that there exists a pressing need to do so. Such a realisation is unlikely to be prompted by the
top-down, state oriented focus supplied by a security framework.

Only risk of a link turntech fixes create scientific authoritarianismonly the alt
enables deliberative citizenship
Byrne and Toly 6
http://seedconsortium.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/45925604/Byrne_etal.pdf
Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Established in 1980 at the University of Delaware,
the Center is a leading institution for interdisciplinary graduate education, research, and

advocacy in energy and environmental policy. CEEP is led by Dr. John Byrne, Distinguished
Professor of Energy & Climate Policy at the University. For his contributions to Working Group
III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1992, he shares the 2007
Nobel Peace Prize with the Panel's authors and review editors.
The Technique of Modern Energy Governance
While moderns usually declare strong preferences for democratic governance, their
preoccupation with technique and efficiency may preclude the achievement of such ambitions, or
require changes in the meaning of democracy that are so extensive as to raise doubts about its
coherence. A veneration of technical monuments typifies both conventional and
sustainable energy strategies and reflects a shared belief in technological advance
as commensurate with, and even a cause of, contemporary social progress. The modern
proclivity to search for human destiny in the march of scientific discovery has led some to warn
of a technological politics (Ellul, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Winner, 1977, 1986) in which social
values are sublimated by the objective norms of technical success (e.g., the celebration of
efficiency in all things). In this politics, technology and its use become the end of society and
members have the responsibility, as rational beings, to learn from the technical milieu what
should be valorized. An encroaching autonomy of technique (Ellul, 1964: 133 146) replaces
critical thinking about modern life with an awed sense and acceptance of its inevitable
reality. From dreams of endless energy provided by Green Fossil Fuels and Giant Power, to
the utopian promises of Big Wind and Small-Is-Beautiful Solar, technical excellence powers
modernist energy transition s. Refinement of technical accomplishments and/or technological
revolutions are conceived to drive social transformation, despite the unending inequality that
has accompanied two centuries of modern energys social project. As one observer has noted
(Roszak, 1972: 479), the great paradox of the technological mystique [is] its remarkable ability
to grow strong by chronic failure. While the treachery of our technology may provide many
occasions for disenchantment, the sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence
on technical expertise. Even the vanguard of a sustainable energy transition seems swayed by
the magnetism of technical acumen, leading to the result that enthusiast and critic alike embrace
a strain of technological politics. Necessarily, the elevation of technique in both strategies to
authoritative status vests political power in experts most familiar with energy technologies and
systems. Such a governance structure derives from the democratic-authoritarian bargain
described by Mumford (1964). Governance by the people consists of authorizing qualified
experts to assist political leaders in finding the efficient, modern solution. In the narratives of
both conventional and sustainable energy, citizens are empowered to consume the products of
the energy regime while largely divesting themselves of authority to govern its operations.
Indeed, systems of the sort envisioned by advocates of conventional and sustainable strategies
are not governable in a democratic manner. Mumford suggests (1964: 1) that the classical idea of
democracy includes a group of related ideas and practices... [including] communal selfgovernment... unimpeded access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary
external controls, and a sense of moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole
community. Modern conventional and sustainable energy strategies invest in external controls,
authorize abstract, depersonalized interactions of suppliers and demanders, and celebrate

economic growth and technical excellence without end. Their social consequences are

relegated in both paradigms to the status of problems-to-be-solved, rather than being recognized
as the emblems of modernist politics. As a result, modernist democratic practice becomes
imbued with an authoritarian quality, which deliberately eliminates the whole human
personality, ignores the historic process, [and] overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and
makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of
existence (Mumford, 1964: 5). Meaningful democratic governance is willingly sacrificed for an
energy transition that is regarded as scientifically and technologically unassailable.

at: energy not key

Energy is the crux of neolibneed to denaturalize their assumptions about
sustainability
Abramsky, former Institute of Advanced Studies in Science, Technology and Society fellow,
2010
(Kolya, Sparking a Worldwide Energy Revolution: Social Struggles in the Transition to a PostPetrol World, pg 13-14, ldg)
Whether for pragmatic or ideological reasons, it is common to downplay the centrality of
capitalist social relations and their role in climate change and energy production, trade, and
consumption. Consequently, the conflicting nature of the transition process towards a new
energy system is also downplayed.
An important result of all this is the widely-held belief that capital does not need to be expansive
or at least that it doesn't have to be based on ever-expanding energy consumption. 'The liberal
capitalists' discourse is based on a value judgment that says that continuous capitalist growth is
desirable. That judgment is then naturalized, and becomes a tacit assumption that then forms the
basis of pragmatic solutions to the material requirements of energy production and consumption
in a given context of class relations. The closely-related "environmental" approach is based on a
strong ethical desire for "change, but does not imagine challenging the fundamental value
premises of capitalisin or the material relations behind it.
Neither of these premises, nor the material requirements for their satisfaction, can be wished
away for the sake of a pragmatic engagement. States and corporations will do anything in their
power to maintain capitalist social relations as the fundamental form of reproducing our
livelihoods. Furthermore, the experience of capitalist renewable energy regimes of the past
stands as a reminder that social relations of production, based on enclosures and exploitation, are
not exclusively associated with fossil fuels and nuclear energy. There is nothing automatically
emancipatory about renewable energies.
Energy looks set to play a crucial role in the realignment of economic and social planning,
following the deepening world financial-economic and, in all probability, a soon-to-follow
political crisis. In order to re-launch a new cycle of accumulation. capital must tackle this energy
crisis, and the world economic crisis creates a context in which to promote new attacks on the
current composition of the waged and unwaged working class, on its forms of organization and
resistance. A new wave of structural adjustments, expropriations, enclosures, market and state
discipline will most likely be attempted, together with new and creative forms of capitalist
governance of social conflicts.
What is clear is that, when discussing solutions to the energy crisis, economic liberal ideologues
are quite open-minded. Rather than sticking to any one technology to meet capitalisms everincreasing energy need, which will never go away as long as capitalist social relations continue,
all possibilities are left open. These options consist of a combination of oil, so-called "clean
coal, natural gas, nuclear energy, and a whole host of "renewable technologies. Whether a new
post-petrol regime crystalizes in the face of different struggles is of course open-and what kind of
regime and at what pace it might take shape remains to be seen.

at: permutation
The perm failsad hoc reconfiguration of your relation to consumptive
environmental practices undermines critical thinkingthe alt alone is the only
conceptually coherent approachthis also proves they cede the political through
expertism and the logic of fungibility and competition
Glover et al 2006 *Policy Fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy,
University of Delaware, **Directs the Urban Studies and Wheaton in Chicago programs,
selected to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leaders Program for 2011-2013,
***2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Distinguished Professor of Energy & Climate Policy at the
University of Delaware, Head of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy (Leigh Glover,
Noah Toly, John Byrne, Energy as a Social Project: Recovering a Discourse, in Transforming
Power: Energy, Environment, and Society in Conflict, p. 1-32,
http://www.ceep.udel.edu/energy/publications/2006_es_energy_as_a_social_project.pdf, WEA)
the current energy discourse appears impoverished. Many of its leading
voices proclaim great things will issue from the adoption of their strategies (conventional or sustainable),
yet inquiry into the social and political-economic interests that power promises of greatness by either camp is
mostly absent. In reply, some participants may petition for a progressive middle ground, acknowledging
that energy regimes are only part of larger institutional formations that organize political and economic power. It is true that the
political economy of energy is only a component of systemic power in the modern order, but it hardly follows that pragmatism
toward energy policy and politics is the reasonable social response. Advocates of energy strategies associate their
When measured in social and political-economic terms,

contributions with distinct pathways of social development and define the choice of energy strategy as central to the types of future(s) that can unfold. Therefore,

acceptance of appeals for pragmatist assessments of energy proposals, that hardly envision
incremental consequences, would indulge a form of self-deception rather than represent a
serious discursive position. An extensive social analysis of energy regimes of the type that Mumford (1934; 1966; 1970), Nye (1999), and
others have envisioned is overdue. The preceding examinations of the two strategies potentiate conclusions about both the governance ideology and the political
economy of modernist energy transitions that, by design, leave modernism undisturbed (except, perhaps, for its environmental performance). The Technique of

While moderns usually declare strong preferences for democratic governance, their
preoccupation with technique and efficiency may preclude the achievement of such ambitions, or require changes in the
meaning of democracy that are so extensive as to raise doubts about its coherence. A veneration of technical monuments
typifies both conventional and sustainable energy strategies and reflects a shared belief in
technological advance as commensurate with, and even a cause of, contemporary social progress. The modern proclivity to
Modern Energy Governance

search for human destiny in the march of scientific discovery has led some to warn of a technological politics (Ellul, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Winner, 1977, 1986) in

social values are sublimated by the objective norms of technical success (e.g., the celebration of efficiency in
technology and its use become the end of society and members have the
responsibility, as rational beings, to learn from the technical milieu what should be valorized. An
encroaching autonomy of technique (Ellul, 1964: 133 146) replaces critical thinking about modern life with an
awed sense and acceptance of its inevitable reality. From dreams of endless energy provided by Green Fossil Fuels and Giant Power, to
the utopian promises of Big Wind and Small-Is-Beautiful Solar, technical excellence powers modernist energy transitions. Refinement of technical
accomplishments and/or technological revolutions are conceived to drive social transformation, despite the
unending inequality that has accompanied two centuries of modern energys social project. As one observer
which

all things). In this politics,

has noted (Roszak, 1972: 479), the great paradox of the technological mystique [is] its remarkable ability to grow strong by chronic failure. While the treachery of

Even
the vanguard of a sustainable energy transition seems swayed by the magnetism of technical
acumen, leading to the result that enthusiast and critic alike embrace a strain of
technological politics. Necessarily, the elevation of technique in both strategies to authoritative status vests
our technology may provide many occasions for disenchantment, the sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence on technical expertise.

political power in experts most familiar with energy technologies and systems. Such a governance structure derives
from the democratic-authoritarian bargain described by Mumford (1964). Governance by the people
consists of authorizing qualified experts to assist political leaders in finding the efficient, modern solution. In
the narratives of both conventional and sustainable energy, citizens are empowered to consume the products of the energy regime
while largely divesting themselves of authority to govern its operations. Indeed, systems of the sort
envisioned by advocates of conventional and sustainable strategies are not governable in a democratic manner. Mumford suggests
(1964: 1) that the classical idea of democracy includes a group of related ideas and practices... [including] communal self-government... unimpeded access to the
common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a sense of moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community.

energy strategies invest in external controls, authorize abstract, depersonalized

interactions of suppliers and demanders, and celebrate economic growth and technical excellence without
end. Their social consequences are relegated in both paradigms to the status of problems-to-be-solved,
rather than being recognized as the emblems of modernist politics. As a result, modernist democratic practice
becomes imbued with an authoritarian quality, which deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic
Modern conventional and sustainable

process, [and] overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately control over man himself, the chief purpose of
existence (Mumford, 1964: 5). Meaningful democratic governance is willingly sacrificed for an energy transition that is regarded as scientifically and
technologically unassailable. Triumphant Energy Capitalism

Where the power to govern is not vested in experts, it is

given over to market forces in both the conventional and sustainable energy programs. Just as the transitions envisioned in the two paradigms are
alike in their technical preoccupations and governance ideologies, they are also alike in their political-economic commitments. Specifically, modernist energy

convinced that conventional techno-fixes

will expand productivity and increase prosperity to levels that will erase the current distortions of inequality. Expectably,
transitions operate in, and evolve from, a capitalist political economy. Huber and Mills (2005) are

conventional energys aspirations present little threat to the current energy political economy; indeed, the aim is to reinforce and deepen the current infrastructure in

The existing alliance of government and business interests is judged

to have produced social success and, with a few environmental correctives that amount to the modernization of
ecosystem performance, the conventional energy project fervently anticipates an intact energy capitalism that willingly
invests in its own perpetuation. While advocates of sustainable energy openly doubt the viability of the conventional program and emphasize
order to minimize costs and sustain economic growth.

its social and environmental failings, there is little indication that capitalist organization of the energy system is faulted or would be significantly changed with the

The modern cornucopia will be powered by the profits of a redirected

market economy that diffuses technologies whose energy sources are available to all and are found everywhere. The
ascendance of a renewables-based regime.

sustainable energy project, according to its architects, aims to harness natures services with technologies and distributed generation designs that can sustain the

Neither its corporate character, nor the

class interests that propel capitalisms advance, are seriously questioned. The only glaring difference with the conventional energy regime
same impulses of growth and consumption that underpin the social project of conventional energy.

is the effort to modernize social relations with nature. In sum, conventional and sustainable energy strategies are mostly quiet about matters of concentration of
wealth and privilege that are the legacy of energy capitalism, although both are vocal about support for changes consistent with middle class values and lifestyles. We
are left to wonder why such steadfast reluctance exists to engaging problems of political economy. Does it stem from a lack of understanding? Is it reflective of a
measure of satisfaction with the existing order? Or is there a fear that critical inquiry might jeopardize strategic victories or diminish the central role of energy in
the movements quest? Transition without Change: A Failing Discourse After more than thirty years of contested discourse, the major energy futures under
consideration appear committed to the prevailing systems of governance and political economy that animate late modernity. The new technologiesconventional or
sustainablethat will govern the energy sector and accumulate capital might be described as centaurian technics 21 in which the crude efficiency of the fossil
energy era is bestowed a new sheen by high technologies and modernized ecosystems: capitalism without smoky cities, contaminated industrial landscapes, or an
excessively carbonized atmosphere. Emerging energy solutions are poised to realize a postmodern transition (Roosevelt, 2002), but their shared commitment to
capitalist political economy and the democratic-authoritarian bargain lend credence to Jamesons assessment (1991) of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late

Differences in ecological commitments between conventional and sustainable energy strategies still demarcate a
battleground that, we agree, is importanteven fundamental. But so also are the common aspirations of the two camps. Each sublimates
social considerations in favor of a politics of more-is-better, and each regards the advance of energy capitalism with a
capitalism.

sense of inevitability and triumph. Conventional and sustainable energy visions equally presume that a social order governed by a democratic ideal of cornucopia,
marked by economic plenty, and delivered by technological marvels will eventually lance the wounds of poverty and inequality and start the healing process.

Consequently, silence on questions of governance and social justice is studiously observed by both proposals.
Likewise, both agree to, or demur on, the question of capitalisms sustainability. 22 Nothing is said on these questions because, apparently, nothing needs to be. If
the above assessment of the contemporary energy discourse is correct, then the enterprise is not at a crossroad; rather, it has reached a point of acquiescence to things

inquiry into energy as a social project will require the recovery of a critical voice that
can interrogate, rather than concede, the discourses current moorings in technological politics and
capitalist political economy. A fertile direction in this regard is to investigate an energy-society order in which energy systems evolve
in response to social values and goals, and not simply according to the dictates of technique, prices, or capital. Initial
as they are. Building an

interest in renewable energy by the sustainability camp no doubt emanated, at least in part, from the fact that its fuel price is non-existent and that capitalization of
systems to collect renewable sources need not involve the extravagant, convoluted corporate forms that manage the conventional energy regime. But forgotten, or

misunderstood, in the attraction of renewable energy have been the social origins of such emergent

possibilities. Communities exist today who address energy needs outside the global marketplace: they
are often rural in character and organize energy services that are immune to oil price spikes and do not require water heated to between 550 and 900 Fahrenheit
(300 and 500 Celsius) (the typical temperatures in nuclear reactors). No energy bills are sent or paid and governance of the serving infrastructure is based on local

sustainability is embodied in the life-world of these

communities, unlike the modern strategy that hopes to design sustainability into its technology
and economics so as not to seriously change its otherwise unsustainable way of life. Predictably, modern society
(rather than distantly developed professional) knowledge. Needless to say,

will underscore its wealth and technical acumen as evidence of its superiority over alternatives. But smugness cannot overcome the fact that energy-society relations
are evident in which the bribe of democratic-authoritarianism and the unsustainability of energy capitalism are successfully declined. In 1928, Mahatma Gandhi
(cited in Gandhi, 1965: 52) explained why

the democratic-authoritarian bargain and Western capitalism should be

rejected: God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom
(England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it
would strip the world bare like locusts. Unless the capitalists of India help to avert that tragedy by becoming trustees of the welfare of
the masses and by devoting their talents not to amassing wealth for themselves but to the service of the masses in an altruistic spirit, they will end either by

social inequality resides not in access to electric light

but in a world order that places efficiency and wealth above life-affirming ways
of life. This is our social problem, our energy problem, our ecological problem, and, generally, our political-economic problem. The
challenge of a social inquiry into energy-society relations awaits.
destroying the masses or being destroyed by them. As Gandhis remark reveals,
and other accoutrements of modernity,

Reconstructing unsustainable environmental practices to be sustainable is worse

De Angelis, East London political economy professor, 2009
(Massimo, The tragedy of the capitalist commons, December,
http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/capitalist-commons/, DOA: 7-2-12, ldg)
This platform of management of the global commons is based on one key assumption: that capitalist
disciplinary markets are a force for good, if only states are able to guide them onto a path of
environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive growth. What this view forgets is that there is little
evidence that global economic growth could be achieved with lower greenhouse gas emissions, in
spite of increasingly energy-efficient new technologies, which in turn implies that alternatives might just be
necessary to stop climate change. This raises the question of how we disentangle ourselves from the kind of conception of commons offered
by Stiglitz, which allow solutions based on capitalist growth. COMMON INTERESTS? Commons also refer to common interests. To stay with
the example of climate change, if

there is any chance of significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions

without this implying some form of green authoritarianism it is because there is a common interest in doing
so. But common interests do not exist per se, they have to be constructed, a process that has historically
proven to be riddled with difficulties witness the feminist movements attempts to construct a global sisterhood; or the
workers movements project of a global proletariat. This is partly the case because capitalism stratifies women, workers or any other
collective subject in and through hierarchies of wages and power. And therein lies the rub, because it is on the terrain of the construction of
common global interests (not just around ecological issues, but also intellectual commons, energy commons, etc.) that the class struggle of the
21st century will be played out. This is where the centre of gravity of a new politics will lie. There are thus two possibilities. Either: social
movements will face up to the challenge and re-found the commons on values of social justice in spite of, and beyond, these capitalist hierarchies.
Or: capital will seize the historical moment to use them to initiate a new round of accumulation (i.e. growth). The previous discussion of Stiglitzs
arguments highlights the dangers here. Because Stiglitz

moves swiftly from the presumed tragedy of the global

commons to the need to preserve and sustain them for the purpose of economic growth. Similar
arguments can be found in UN and World Bank reports on sustainable development, that
oxymoron invented to couple environmental and social sustainability to economic growth.
Sustainable development is simply the sustainability of capital. This approach asserts capitalist growth as the sine qua non common interest of
humanity. I

call commons that are tied to capitalist growth distorted commons, where capital has
successfully subordinated non-monetary values to its primary goal of accumulation. The reason why
common interests cannot simply be postulated is that we do not reproduce our livelihoods by
way of postulations we cannot eat them, in short. By and large, we reproduce our livelihoods by
entering into relations with others, and by following the rules of these relations. To the extent that the rules that we follow in
reproducing ourselves are the rules of capitalist production i.e. to the extent that our reproduction depends on money we should question the

operational value of any postulation of a common interest, because capitalist social relations imply precisely the existence of injustices, and
conflicts of interest. These exist, on the one hand, between those who produce value, and those who expropriate it; and, on the other, between
different layers of the planetary hierarchy. And, it

is not only pro-growth discourses that advocate the distorted

commons that perpetuate these conflicts at the same time as they try to negate them. The same is
true of environmental discourses that do not challenge the existing social relations of production
through which we reproduce our livelihoods. Given that these assertions are somewhat abstract,
let us try to substantiate them by testing a central environmental postulate on subjects who
depend on capitalist markets for the reproduction of their livelihoods.

Theoretical starting points are keyif their plan emerged from bad methodological
process you shouldnt endorse it
Holleman 2012 assistant professor of sociology at Amherst, PhD in sociology from the
University of Oregon (June, Hannah, sociology dissertation, University of Oregon, Energy
justice and foundations for a sustainable sociology of energy,
https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/12419/Holleman_oregon_0171A
_10410.pdf?sequence=1, WEA)
Problems associated with our energy regime are especially dramatic and represent one of the most formidable obstacles to realizing a society
that functions within ecological limits and free of oppression. Energy

studies thus provide an avenue in which the

problems of the system may be viewed through the lens of one of the limiting factors of social and ecological
change: our energy regime. This makes the critical sociology of energy a perfect site for more inclusive
theory that shines light on the workings of the system as a whole and the relationship of its
parts. Recap: Energy justice and a sociology of energy for survival In 1988, Rosa, Machlis, and Keating called for renewed attention to
energy by sociologists given that energy plays a crucial role, perhaps the crucial role, in the link between societies and their biophysical
environments (155). They noted that energy is a persistent predicament for all societies, a chronic problem that requires continuous attention
and that, if there is a sustained lapse in attention, can turn into a crisis (168). Climate change, representing precisely the kind of crisis scholars
have anticipated for over 100 years, though they were treated as so many Cassandras for saying so, indeed has renewed scholarly attention to
energy. However, sociology as a discipline still pays little attention to energy. Several explanations for this were offered throughout this study.
These include persistent disciplinary boundaries, specialization within sociology, and the lack of penetration of ecological concerns into the
discipline as a whole. Other reasons are related to the blinders imposed by capitalist ideology, including the pervasiveness of modernization
perspectives in social science, economic reductionism, and the related denial of social inequality and ecological degradation as inherent and
functional aspects of the capitalist system. Moreover, as many critical scholars have pointed out, the experiences and insights of too many
people are left out of our theoretical developments. Our analytical tools carry sociological bias, that is to say, as long as its constructs are
formulated in the absence of inputs by class, race, and sex-gendered others (Salleh 2010, 215). Perspectives are too often missing from people
of the global South, poor people, people of color, women, lgbt people, and other historically oppressed and disenfranchised social groups. The
experience of other countries, like Cuba, which has defied capitalist logic in so many ways, especially while experiencing its own version of
peak oil, is rarely treated seriously in the mainstream literature (Hernndez 2002). This reflects that fact that social science has a long way to
go toward becoming a peoples science with a basis in ecology (Lewontin and Levins 2007, 98). Without

theoretical starting
points that make the invisible visible, it is difficult for empirical work to proceed that is focused on the
interface between social inequalities and ecological depredations, or energy injustices, of the current energy regime. Therefore, much
contemporary work on energy, especially that beholden to the dominate ideology, such as
modernization perspectives, is neither truly sociological nor ecological. It therefore does not offer a good
starting point for energy studies. The theoretical perspective offered here builds on the work of environmental sociologists
such as feminist ecologists, environmental justice scholars, and energy scholars, suggesting these have much to offer energy scholars by way of
theoretical starting points. It also builds on ecological theory through the case study of Ecuador and includes insights from my own research in
Cuba. The point in this thesis is to put these developments in a context in which they may complement one another so that they may inform the
further development of the sociology of energy. This context is the ecological rift theory of environmental sociology. This approach to the
sociology of energy thus begins with the general recognition that the social system inevitably confronts natural systems and affects their
ability to sustain life (Clark and York 2005, 395-96). The global patterns of ecological destruction, which threaten entire biospheric systems,
and have resulted in species and cultural extinction at unprecedented rates, can be attributed in each and every case to a primary cause: the
current pattern of global socioeconomic development, that is the capitalist mode of production and its expansionary tendencies (Foster, Clark,
and York 2010, 18). The ecohistorical period of capitalism is defined by these depredations. The whole problem can be called the global
ecological rift, referring to the overall break in the human relation to nature arising from an alienated system of capital accumulation without
end (18). The modern energy regime is foundational to capitalist development, as the classical theorists already understood. Indeed, no energy
regime in history can be understood outside of the broader social contexts that drive energy developments and structure their outcomes.

Energy regimes reflect the social and ecological priorities of any society. And, in a dialectical manner,
key features of social structure and change are conditioned by the availability of energy, the technical means for converting energy into usable
forms, and the ways energy is ultimately used (Rosa, Machlis, and Keating 1988, 149). Moreover, from this perspective, it is understood that
the ecological rift is, at bottom, the product of a social rift: the domination of human being by human being. The driving force is a society
based on class, inequality, and acquisition without end. At the global level it is represented bythe imperial division betweenNorth and
South, rich and poor countries (Foster, Clark, and York 2010, 47). This interface identified between ecological degradation, oppression, and
inequality, indicate the centrality of environmental justice within the broader ecological rift theory in environmental sociology. The further
development of the ecological rift framework, as presented in this study, illustrates the way in which the ecological rift is inherently bound with
the development of the modern race, gender, class, and colonial order of capitalism. Developed in this way, it both complements and draws
extensively on the work of feminist ecologists and other environmental justice scholars. Feminist ecologists have called for such further
theoretical integration in environmental sociology, citing the ecological rift framework as a basis for such a synthesis (Salleh 2010). This study
explicates the links between the ecological and social rift. On this basis, energy injustice, as the interface between social inequalities and
ecological depredations of the modern energy regime are made clear and the social limitations to facing energy crises, such as climate change,
are more recognizable. A sociology of energy concerned with energy justice works toward exposing the inequalities embedded in the modern
energy regime, and better explaining historical trends. For example, with an energy justice perspective it is much easier to see why it is not the
type of energy that is the problem, it is the role of energy in capitalist development that drives the abuses we associate with oil, for example.
Lacking an energy justice perspective, it took a long time for environmentalists and academics in wealthy countries to see the social and
ecological tragedies of biofuel developments, a popular alternative energy. By the time reports emerged documenting the routine ecological
and social abuses in the biofuel industry, it already had received enough policy support to entrench its growth as a fuel sector for the foreseeable
future (Holleman 2012). Moreover, as York (2012) has made clear, alternative energy does not displace fossil fuel demand, and therefore
cannot address climate change, but only adds to an ever-growing energy throughput with major ecological and social consequences. The case
of biofuel, as an example of this, proves that it is impossible to understand social energy choices without linking critical ecology and social
thought. It also is impossible to solve ecological crises, like global climate change, without addressing social inequality. As Anderson (1976)
wrote, the fact is that environmental degradation and social inequality are interrelated in numerous ways and neither can be reversed without
fundamentally altering the course of the other (139). Feminist ecologists and Marxist scholars, among others, have linked ecological and
social degradation to the immorality of capitalism, which unabashedly celebrates wealth while commonly ignoring poverty and environmental
destruction generated in its wake (Foster 2002, 88; see also Waring 1999 and Salleh 2010). This immorality is in fact so institutionalized in
society that it hardly appears immoral at all. Nevertheless all other moral standards and bases of community are forced to give way before it
(88): If landis turned into mere real estate to be bought and sold by the highest bidder, if the commons are enclosed and then exploited
outside of any collective restraints, it is due to this reduction of everything to mere economic valueIn a society of this kind, people are
forced to regard everything about themthe land, the rivers, the natural resources of the earth, as well as their own labor poweras mere
commodities, to be exploited for greater gain. (Foster 2002, 88) These scholars have emphasized the need to transcend this system of
institutionalized immorality, which treats the reproductive work of humans and nature as value-less. This is in spite of the fact that capitalism
is in the end dependent upon these labors. As noted above, the immorality of capitalism is reflected in its economic reductionism wherein the
bottom line is always the primary basis for assessing the worth any activity, person, or the environment. Transcending this

economic reductionism requires methods of assessment based on completely different theoretical

and methodological tools, reflecting an alternative morality. This requires replacing the focus on economic
efficiency, with what Salleh (2010) calls eco-sufficiency, which emphasizes the long-term provisioning of social and ecological reproduction
and has nothing to do with exchange value, prices, or the bottom line of capital. Salleh proposes the concept of metabolic value as new criteria
for assessment. Metabolic

value refers to the intrinsic capacity for organic reproduction of

ecosystems and the regenerative labor done off capitalisms accounting books especially by women, peasants, etc. in supporting
ecological integrity and the social metabolism (210, 212). Howard T. Odums work in systems ecology reflects just
such a system of assessment in terms of metabolic value, or what Odum calls emergy. Odum
developed emergy analysis as a framework for understanding the economy in ecological
accounting terms focused on the long-term provisioning necessary for the reproduction of
ecosystems and egalitarian social development. Emergy analysis provides a basis for
understanding economic processes, such as trade, individual commodities, and entire societies, in terms of their ecological and
social costs. This is accomplished by bringing the reproductive work of humans and ecosystems under a common ecological, non-exchange
oriented accounting framework, making this invisible embodied energy visible. In this study emergy

analysis is brought into

social science as an alternative methodology and theoretical framework for understanding
ecological exchange and sustainability. Odums work provides a material basis for a wider conception of sustainability, and
its violation in the form of unequal exchange, connecting social and ecological injustice. Emergy helps make sense, in
ecological terms, of the magnitude of the accumulated debts associated with the ecological rift
of capitalism and the modern energy regime. Emergy analysis thus provides further empirical
evidence of the enormity of the ecological debt owed by the North to the South, and between
extractive regions within countries and the wealthier areas they supply. Odums work on Ecuador illustrates the strength of emergy
analysis as an approach to making sense of energy flows and inequalities within the modern energy regime. Emergy can help us evaluate and
develop real energy alternatives, with ecology and equality as the criteria.

framework

2nc framework
Turns case and shuts down deliberationimplementation focus is reductionist and
displaces agencyour argument is that the framework for analysis is itself a
political choice
Adaman and Madra 2012 *economic professor at Bogazici University in Istanbul, **PhD
from UMass-Amherst, economics professor (Fikret and Yahya, Bogazici University,
Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology,
http://www.econ.boun.edu.tr/content/wp/EC2012_04.pdf, WEA)
States as agents of economization

Neoliberal reason is therefore not simply about market expansion and the withdrawal of the welfare
state, but more broadly about reconfiguring the state and its functions so that the state governs its subjects
through a filter of economic incentives rather than direct coercion. In other words, supposed subjects
of the neoliberal state are not citizen-subjects with political and social rights, but rather economic
subjects who are supposed to comprehend (hence, calculative) and respond predictably (hence, calculable) to
economic incentives (and disincentives). There are mainly two ways in which states under the sway of neoliberal reason aim to
manipulate the conduct of their subjects. The first is through markets, or market-like incentive-compatible institutional
mechanisms that economic experts design based on the behaviorist assumption that economic agents
respond predictably to economic (but not necessarily pecuniary) incentives, to achieve certain discrete
objectives. The second involves a revision of the way the bureaucracy functions. Here, the neoliberal reason functions as an internal
critique of the way bureaucratic dispositifs organize themselves: The typical modus operandi of this critique is to submit the bureaucracy to
efficiency audits and subsequently advocate the subcontracting of various functions of the state to the private sector either by fullblown
privatization or by public-private partnerships.
While in the first case citizen-subjects are treated solely as economic beings, in the second case the

state is conceived as an
enterprise, i.e., a production unit, an economic agency whose functions are persistently submitted to various forms of
economic auditing, thereby suppressing all other (social, political, ecological) priorities through a
permanent economic criticism. Subcontracting, public-private partnerships, and privatization are
all different mechanisms through which contemporary governments embrace the discourses and practices of
contemporary multinational corporations. In either case, however, economic policy decisions (whether they involve
macroeconomic or microeconomic matters) are isolated from public debate and deliberation, and treated as
matters of technocratic design and implementation, while regulation, to the extent it is warranted, is mostly conducted by experts
outside political lifethe so-called independent regulatory agencies. In the process, democratic participation in
decision-making is either limited to an already highly-commodified, spectacularized, mediatized electoral politics,
or to the calculus of opinion polls where consumer discontent can be managed through public relations experts. As a result, a
highly reductionist notion of economic efficiency ends up being the only criteria with which to
measure the success or failure of such decisions. Meanwhile, individuals with financial means are free to provide support to those in
need through charity organizations or corporations via their social responsibility channels.
Here, two related caveats should be noted to sharpen the central thrust of the argument proposed in this chapter. First, the separation

of
the economic sphere from the social-ecological whole is not an ontological given, but rather a
political project. By treating social subjectivity solely in economic terms and deliberately trying to insulate policymaking from popular politics and democratic participation, the neoliberal project of economization makes a
political choice. Since there are no economic decisions without a multitude of complex and over-determined social consequences, the
attempt to block (through economization) all political modes of dissent, objection and negotiation available
(e.g., voice) to those who are affected from the said economic decisions is itself a political choice. In short, economization
is itself a political project.
Yet, this drive towards technocratization and economizationwhich constitutes the second caveatdoes not mean that

the dirty and messy distortions of politics are gradually being removed from policy-making. On the
contrary, to the extent that policy making is being insulated from popular and democratic control, it becomes
exposed to the distortions of a politics of rent-seeking and speculationironically, as predicted by the
representatives of the Virginia School. Most public-private partnerships are hammered behind closed doors of
a bureaucracy where states and multinational corporations divide the economic rent among
themselves. The growing concentration of capital at the global scale gives various industries (armament,
chemical, health care, petroleum, etc.see, e.g., Klein, 2008) enormous amount of leverage over the governments (especially the
developing ones). It is extremely important, however, to note that this tendency toward rent-seeking is not a perversion of the
neoliberal reason. For much of neoliberal theory (in particular, for the Austrian and the Chicago schools), private
monopolies and other forms of concentration of capital are preferred to government control and
ownership. And furthermore, for some (such as the Virginia and the Chicago schools), rent-seeking is a natural implication of the
opportunism of human beings, even though neoliberal thinkers disagree whether rent-seeking is essentially economically efficient (as in
capture theories of the Chicago school imply) or inefficient (as in rent-seeking theories of the Virginia school imply) (Madra and Adaman,
2010).

This reconfiguration of the way modern states in advanced capitalist social formations govern the social manifests itself in all
domains of public and social policy-making. From education to health, and employment to insurance, there is an
observable shift from rights-based policymaking forged through public deliberation and participation, to
policy-making based solely on economic viability where policy issues are treated as matters of
technocratic calculation. In this regard, as noted above, the treatment of subjectivity solely in
behaviorist terms of economic incentives functions as the key conceptual choice that makes the
technocratization of public policy possible. Neoliberal thinking and practices certainly have a significant impact on the ecology. The next
section will focus on the different means through which various forms of neoliberal governmentality propose and actualize the economization of
the ecology.

Use the ballot to reclaim social pedagogyskills and knowledge are force
multipliers for inequality unless we prioritize resistance in educationits your
academic responsibility
Giroux, cultural studies prof, 5Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural
Studies at McMaster University, selected as the Barstow Visiting Scholar for 2003 at Saginaw
Valley State University, named as Distinguished Scholar at multiple institutions, Ph.D. (Henry,
Fast Capitalism, 1.2 2005, Cultural Studies in Dark Times: Public Pedagogy and the Challenge
of Neoliberalism, RBatra)
In opposition to these positions, I want to reclaim a tradition in radical educational theory and cultural studies in which pedagogy as a critical practice is central to any

Pedagogy as both a language of critique and

possibility looms large in these critical traditions, not as a technique or a priori set of methods,
but as a political and moral practice. As a political practice, pedagogy is viewed as the outgrowth of
struggles and illuminates the relationships among power, knowledge, and ideology, while selfconsciously, if not self-critically, recognizing the role it plays as a deliberate attempt to influence how and
what knowledge and identities are produced within particular sets of social relations. As a moral practice,
viable notion of agency, inclusive democracy, and a broader global public sphere.

pedagogy recognizes that what cultural workers, artists, activists, media workers, and others teach cannot be abstracted from what it means to invest in public life,

The moral implications of pedagogy also suggest

that our responsibility as intellectuals for the public cannot be separated from the consequences
of the knowledge we produce, the social relations we legitimate, and the ideologies and identities
we offer up to students as well as colleagues. Refusing to decouple politics from pedagogy
means, in part, creating those public spaces for engaging students in robust dialogue, challenging
them to think critically about received knowledge and energizing them to recognize their own power as
individual and social agents. Pedagogy has a relationship to social change in that it should not
presuppose some notion of the future, or locate oneself in a public discourse.

only help students frame their sense of understanding, imagination, and knowledge within a
wider sense of history, politics, and democracy but should also enable them to recognize that
they can do something to alleviate human suffering, as the late Susan Sontag (2003) has suggested. Part of this task necessitates
that cultural studies theorists and educators anchor their own work, however diverse, in a radical project that seriously engages the promise of an unrealized
democracy against its really existing and greviously incomplete forms. Of crucial importance to such a project is rejecting the assumption that theorists can understand

any viable cultural politics needs a socially

committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of the
good society. Zygmunt Bauman (2002) is right in arguing that "if there is no room for the idea of wrong society, there is hardly much chance for the idea of
social problems without contesting their appearance in public life. More specifically,

good society to be born, let alone make waves" (p. 170). Cultural studies' theorists need to be more forceful, if not more committed, to linking their overall politics to

democratic societies are never too just, which means

that a democratic society must constantly nurture the possibilities for self-critique, collective
agency, and forms of citizenship in which people play a fundamental role in shaping the material
relations of power and ideological forces that affect their everyday lives. Within the ongoing
process of democratization lies the promise of a society that is open to exchange, questioning,
and self-criticism, a democracy that is never finished, and one that opposes neoliberal and
neoconservative attempts to supplant the concept of an open society with a fundamentalist
market-driven or authoritarian one. Cultural studies theorists who work in higher education need to make clear that
the issue is not whether higher education has become contaminated by politics, as much as
recognizing that education is already a space of politics, power, and authority. At the same time, they
can make visible their opposition to those approaches to pedagogy that reduce it to a set of
skills to enhance one's visibility in the corporate sector or an ideological litmus test that
measures one's patriotism or ratings on the rapture index. There is a disquieting refusal in the contemporary academy to raise broader questions
modes of critique and collective action that address the presupposition that

about the social, economic, and political forces shaping the very terrain of higher educationparticularly unbridled market forces, fundamentalist groups, and racist

teacher
authority can be used to create the pedagogical conditions for critical forms of education without
necessarily falling into the trap of simply indoctrinating students. For instance, many conservative and liberal educators believe that any notion of
and sexist forces that unequally value diverse groups within relations of academic power. There is also a general misunderstanding of how

critical pedagogy that is self-conscious about its politics and engages students in ways that offer them the possibility for becoming criticalwhat Lani Guinier
(2003:6) calls the need to educate students "to participate in civic life, and to encourage graduates to give back to the community, which through taxes, made their
education possible"leaves students out of the conversation or presupposes too much or simply represents a form of pedagogical tyranny. While such educators
believe in practices that open up the possibility of questioning among students, they often refuse to connect the pedagogical conditions that challenge how and what
students think at the moment to the next task of prompting them to imagine changing the world around them so as to expand and deepen its democratic possibilities.
Teaching students how to argue, draw on their own experiences, or engage in rigorous dialogue says nothing about why they should engage in these actions in the first

the culture of argumentation and questioning relates to giving students the tools they need
to fight oppressive forms of power, make the world a more meaningful and just place, and develop a sense of social responsibility is missing
place. How

in contemporary, progressive frameworks of education. While no pedagogical intervention should fall to the level of propaganda, a pedagogy which attempts to

Pedagogy must address the relationships between politics

and agency, knowledge and power, subject positions and values, and learning and social change
while always being open to debate, resistance, and a culture of questioning. Liberal educators
committed to simply raising questions have no language for linking learning to forms of public
minded scholarship that would enable students to consider the important relationship between democratic public life and education, or that
would encourage students pedagogically to enter the sphere of the political, enabling them to think about how they
empower critical citizens can't and shouldn't try to avoid politics.

might participate in a democracy by taking what they learn into new locations and battlegroundsa fourth grade classroom, a church, the media, a politician's office,
the courts, a campusor for that matter taking on collaborative projects that address the myriad of problems citizens face on a local, national, and global level in a

academics in the field of cultural studies need to do more

pedagogically than simply teach students how to argue and question. Students need much more from their
educational experience. Democratic societies need educated citizens who are steeped in more than the skills of argumentation. And it is precisely this
democratic project that affirms the critical function of education and refuses to narrow its goals
and aspirations to methodological considerations. As Amy Gutmann (1999) argues, education is always
political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency, the ability to struggle with ongoing
relations of power, and is a precondition for creating informed and critical citizens who act on
the world. This is not a notion of education tied to the alleged neutrality of the academy or the new conservative call for "intellectual diversity" but to a vision
diminishing democracy. In spite of the professional pretense to neutrality,

of pedagogy that is directive and interventionist on the side of producing a substantive democratic society. This is what makes critical pedagogy different from
training. And it is precisely the failure to connect learning to its democratic functions and goals that provides rationales for pedagogical approaches that strip critical

and democratic possibilities from what it means to be educated. Cultural studies theorists and educators would do well to take account of the profound
transformations taking place in the public sphere and reclaim pedagogy as a central element of cultural politics. In part, this means once again recognizing, as Pierre

the "power of the dominant order is not just economic, but intellectual
lying in the realm of beliefs"(p. 66), and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a sense of
utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm. Such a task suggests that academics and
other cultural workers actively resist the ways in which neoliberalism discourages teachers and students
from becoming critical intellectuals by turning them into human data banks. Educators and other cultural workers
Bourdieu (2003) has insisted, that

need to build alliances across differences, academic disciplines, and national boundaries as part of broader efforts to develop social movements in defense of the
public good and social justice. No small part of this task requires that such groups make visible the connection between the war at home and abroad. If the growing
authoritarianism in the U.S. is to be challenged, it is necessary to oppose not only an imperial foreign policy, but also the shameful tax cuts for the rich, the

Opposing the
authoritarian politics of neoliberalism, militarism, and neoconservatism means developing
enclaves of resistance in order to stop the incarceration of a generation of young black and brown men and women, the privatization of the commons,
dismantling of the welfare state, the attack on unions, and those policies that sacrifice civil liberties in the cause of national security.

the attack on public schools, the increasing corporatization of higher education, the growing militarization of public life, and the use of power based on the assumption
that empire abroad entails tyranny and repression at home. But resistance needs to be more than local or rooted in the specificity of particular struggles. Progressives
need to develop national and international movements designed to fight the new authoritarianism emerging in the United States and elsewhere. In part, this means
revitalizing social movements such as civil rights, labor, environmental, and anti-globalization on the basis of shared values and a moral vision rather than simply

This suggests organizing workers, intellectuals, students, youth, and others through a
language of critique and possibility in which diverse forms of oppression are addressed through a
larger discourse of radical democracy, a discourse that addresses not only what it means to think
in terms of a general notion of freedom capable of challenging corporate rule, religious
fundamentalism, and the new ideologies of empire, but also what it might mean to link freedom to a shared sense of hope,
issue-based coalitions.

happiness, community, equality, and social justice. Democracy implies a level of shared beliefs, practices, and a commitment to build a more humane future. Politics

this
fundamentally requires something priora reclaiming of the social and cultural basis of a
critical education that makes the very struggle over democratic politics meaningful and understandable as part of a broader affective, intellectual, and
in this sense points to a struggle over those social, economic, cultural, and institutional forces that make democracy purposeful for all people. But

theoretical investment in public life (Couldry 2004).

This comes before any alt or perm argsplan focus rigs debate against investigating
assumptionstheir model trains you not to defend the process by which you make
conclusions, which distorts policy analysis
Gunder et al, Aukland University senior planning lecturer, 2009
(Michael, Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning pgs
111-2)
The hegemonic network, or bloc, initially shapes the debates and draws on appropriate policies
of desired success, such as the needs of bohemians, knowledge clusters, or talented knowledge workers, as to what constitutes their
desired enjoyment (cobblestones, chrome and cappuccinos at sidewalk cafes) and what is therefore lacking in local competitiveness. In tum,

this defines what is blighted and dysfunctional and in need of economic, spatial planning, or other,
remedy. Such an argument is predicated on a logic, or more accurately a rhetoric, that a lack of a
particular defined type of enjoyment, or competitiveness (for surely they are one and the same) is inherently
unhealthy for the aggregate social body. Lack and its resolution are generally presented as technical,
rather than political issues. Consequently, technocrats in partnership with their "dominant stakeholders can ensure the
impression of rationally seeking to produce happiness for the many, whilst, of course, achieving their
stakeholders' specific interests (Gunder and Hillier 2007a, 469).
The current post-democratic milieu facilitates the above through avoidance of critical policy
debate challenging favoured orthodox positions and policy approaches. Consideration of policy deficiencies, or
alternative solutions, are eradicated from political debate so that while token institutions of
liberal democracy: are retained, conflicting positions and arguments are negated (Stavrakakis 2003, 59).
Consequently, the safe names in the field who feed the policy orthodoxy are repeatedly used, or

their work drawn upon, by different stakeholders, while

more critical voices are silenced by their inability to

shape policy debates' (Boland 2007, 1032). The economic development or spatial planning policy analyst thus
continues to partition reality ideologically by deploying only the orthodox "successful' or "best practice'
economic development or spatial planning responses. This further maintains the dominant, or hegemonic, status quo
while providing "a cover and shield against critical thought by acting in the manner of a "buffer"
isolating the political held from any research that is independent and radical in its conception as in
its implications for public policy' (Wacquant 2004, 99). At the same time, adoption of the hegemonic orthodoxy tends to
generate similar policy responses for every competing local area or city-region, largely resulting in a zero-sum
game (Blair and Kumar 1997).

at: econ rationality good

Mainstream economics has been discreditedtheir valorization of market solutions
is the root cause of recent crises
Krugman 8 (Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate in economics, professor of economics at Princeton
University, 2008, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html)
I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH Its hard to believe now, but not

long ago economists were congratulating

themselves over the success of their field. Those successes or so they believed were both theoretical and
practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus,
in a 2008 paper titled The State of Macro (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T.,
now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that the state of macro is good. The battles of yesteryear, he said, were
over, and there had been a broad convergence of vision. And in the real world, economists

believed they had things under

control: the central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, declared Robert Lucas
of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton
professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous
two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making. Last year, everything came apart. Few

economists saw
our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the fields problems. More important
was the professions blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During
the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable indeed, that stocks and
other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that
happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that freemarket economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of
prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails
despite the Feds best efforts. And in the wake of the crisis, the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says
the Obama administrations stimulus plans are schlock economics, and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says theyre based on discredited
fairy tales. In response, Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, writes of the intellectual collapse of the Chicago School, and
I myself have written that comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge
has been forgotten. What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here? As I see it, the economics profession

went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for
truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or
nearly perfect system. That vision wasnt sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression
faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals
interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a
response to shifting political winds, partly

a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution

central cause of the professions failure was the
desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their
mathematical prowess. Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore
all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality
that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets
and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the

especially financial markets that can cause the economys operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers
created when regulators dont believe in regulation. Its much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But whats almost
certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the
importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant
economic theory of everything is a long way off. In

practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy

advice and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all
problems.

at: neolib concept fails

Ditching the neolib concept is uselesseven if some populists use it unfairly, there
are distinct practices were critiquing with historical origins in the 20th century
Economist 2012 (10/13, New brooms: How three Viennese thinkers changed the world, from
the print edition, http://www.economist.com/node/21564533, WEA)
Mr Stedman Jones teases out the professorial squabbles. Hayek and Mises wanted their message
to be radical. Popper sought to woo as many as possible, even liberals and socialists. No
hardliner, Popper later saw flaws in market ideology, comparing it to a religion. Hayek, ever the
Utopian, pressed ahead. He started the Mont Pelerin Society to foster his ideas. Thus was
neoliberalism founded. One hitch with writing about it is that the word is frequently misused
today. Leftists use neoliberal to describe people whom they essentially do not like. Mr
Stedman Jones seems to think the word should not be ditched; the original pugilists against state
control happily went by that name.
Milton Friedman, a Chicago economist who headed the second wave of state-bashers, preferred
the word neoliberal in a 1951 essay entitled, Neoliberalism and Its Prospects. He argued for
a middle way between the enemy of collectivism and the excesses of 19th-century liberalism.
Victorian liberals failed to grasp that laissez-faire could produce over-mighty individuals,
Friedman thought. The goal should not be laissez-faire, but market competition: this, he said,
would protect men from each other.
Friedman called for a new liberalism, seeing himself as the heir to Adam Smith, the 18th-century
defender of the individual. But the line between Smith and Friedman is not a straight one, as Mr
Stedman Jones points out. Smith thought one of the states jobs should be to build public works
and forge institutions that would otherwise fail under market pressure. Here he sounds more like
Franklin Roosevelt. Smith believed the state should fund schools, bridges and roads. Friedman
said that was the job of the private sector.

at: policy relevance

Owens wrong theory doesnt kill relevance need to ask epistemological
questions to avoid policy failure this card will win us the debate
Reus-Smit 12 Professor of International Relations at the European University Institute,
Florence (Christian, International Relations, Irrelevant? Dont Blame Theory, Millennium - Journal of International Studies June 2012 vol.
40 no. 3 525-540, dml)
However widespread it might be, the

notion that IRs lack of practical relevance stems from excessive

theorising rests more on vigorous assertion than weighty evidence. As noted above, we lack good data
on the fields practical relevance, and the difficulties establishing appropriate measures are all too apparent in the fraught attempts
by several governments to quantify the impact of the humanities and social sciences more generally. Beyond this, though, we lack any
credible evidence that any fluctuations in the fields relevance are due to more or less high theory.
We hear that policymakers complain of not being able to understand or apply much that appears in our leading journals, but it is unclear why we
should be any more concerned about this than physicists or economists, who take theory, even high theory, to be the bedrock of advancement in
knowledge. Moreover, there

is now a wealth of research, inside and outside IR, that shows that policy
communities are not open epistemic or cognitive realms, simply awaiting well-communicated, non-jargonistic
knowledge they are bureaucracies, deeply susceptible to groupthink, that filter information through their own
intersubjective frames. 10 Beyond this, however, there are good reasons to believe that precisely the reverse of the theory
versus relevance thesis might be true; that theoretical inquiry may be a necessary prerequisite
for the generation of practically relevant knowledge. I will focus here on the value of metatheory, as this attracts most
contemporary criticism and would appear the most difficult of theoretical forms to defend.
Metatheories take other theories as their subject. Indeed, their precepts establish the conditions of possibility for second-order theories. In general,
metatheories divide into three broad categories: epistemology, ontology and meta-ethics. The first concerns the nature, validity and acquisition of
knowledge; the second, the nature of being (what can be said to exist, how things might be categorised and how they stand in relation to one
another); and the third, the nature of right and wrong, what constitutes moral argument, and how moral arguments might be sustained. Secondorder theories are constructed within, and on the basis of, assumptions formulated at the metatheoretical level. Epistemological

assumptions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge and how it is legitimately acquired delimit the questions we ask
and the kinds of information we can enlist in answering them. 11 Can social scientists ask
normative questions? Is literature a valid source of social-scientific knowledge? Ontological assumptions about the nature
and distinctiveness of the social universe affect not only what we see but also how we order what we see; how
we relate the material to the ideational, agents to structures, interests to beliefs, and so on. If we assume, for example, that
individuals are rational actors, engaged in the efficient pursuit of primarily material interests,
then phenomena such as faith-motivated politics will remain at the far periphery of our vision. 12 Lastly, metaethical assumptions about the nature of the good, and about what constitutes a valid moral argument, frame how we reason about concrete ethical
problems. Both deontology and consequentialism are meta-ethical positions, operationalised, for example, in the differing arguments of Charles
Beitz and Peter Singer on global distributive justice. 13

Most scholars would acknowledge the background, structuring role that metatheory plays, but argue that we can take our
metatheoretical assumptions off the shelf, get on with the serious business of research and leave explicit
metatheoretical reflection and debate to the philosophers. If practical relevance is one of our
concerns, however, there are several reasons why this is misguided.
Firstly, whether IR is practically relevant depends, in large measure, on the kinds of questions that
animate our research. I am not referring here to the commonly held notion that we should be addressing questions that practitioners
want answered. Indeed, our work will at times be most relevant when we pursue questions that
policymakers and others would prefer left buried. My point is a different one, which I return to in greater detail below. It
is sufficient to note here that being practically relevant involves asking questions of practice; not just
retrospective questions about past practices their nature, sources and consequences but prospective questions about what

human agents should do. As I have argued elsewhere, being

practically relevant means asking questions of how we,

ourselves, or some other actors (states, policymakers, citizens, NGOs, IOs, etc.) should act. 14 Yet our ability, nay willingness, to
ask such questions is determined by the metatheoretical assumptions that structure our research
and arguments. This is partly an issue of ontology what we see affects how we understand the conditions of
action, rendering some practices possible or impossible, mandatory or beyond the pale. If, for example, we think that political
change is driven by material forces, then we are unlikely to see communicative practices of
argument and persuasion as potentially successful sources of change. More than this, though, it is also an issue of
epistemology. If we assume that the proper domain of IR as a social science is the acquisition of
empirically verifiable knowledge, then we will struggle to comprehend, let alone answer,
normative questions of how we should act. We will either reduce ought questions to is questions, or place them off the
agenda altogether. 15 Our metatheoretical assumptions thus determine the macro-orientation of IR
towards questions of practice, directly affecting the fields practical relevance.
Secondly, metatheoretical revolutions license new second-order theoretical and analytical possibilities while
foreclosing others, directly affecting those forms of scholarship widely considered most
practically relevant. The rise of analytical eclecticism illustrates this. As noted above, Katzenstein and Sils call for a pragmatic
approach to the study of world politics, one that addresses real-world problematics by combining insights from diverse research traditions,
resonates with the mood of much of the field, especially within the American mainstream. Epistemological

and ontological

debates are widely considered irresolvable dead ends , grand theorising is unfashionable, and gladiatorial
contests between rival paradigms appear, increasingly, as unimaginative rituals. Boredom and fatigue are partly responsible for this new mood,
but something deeper is at work. Twenty-five years ago, Sil and Katzensteins call would have fallen on deaf ears; the

neo-neo debate
that preoccupied the American mainstream occurred within a metatheoretical consensus, one that
combined a neo-positivist epistemology with a rationalist ontology. This singular metatheoretical framework defined
the rules of the game; analytical eclecticism was unimaginable. The Third Debate of the 1980s and early 1990s destabilised all of this;
not because American IR scholars converted in their droves to critical theory or poststructuralism (far from it), but because metatheoretical
absolutism became less and less tenable. The anti-foundationalist critique of the idea that there is any single measure of truth did not produce a
wave of relativism, but it did generate a widespread sense that battles on the terrain of epistemology were unwinnable. Similarly, the Third
Debate emphasis on identity politics and cultural particularity, which later found expression in constructivism, did not vanquish rationalism. It
did, however, establish a more pluralistic, if nevertheless heated, debate about ontology, a terrain on which many scholars felt more comfortable
than that of epistemology. One can plausibly argue, therefore, that the

metatheoretical struggles of the Third Debate created a

space for even made possible the rise of analytical eclecticism and its aversion to metatheoretical
absolutes, a principal benefit of which is said to be greater practical relevance.
Lastly, most of us would agree that for our research to be practically relevant, it has to be good it has
to be the product of sound inquiry, and our conclusions have to be plausible. The pluralists among us would also agree that different research
questions require different methods of inquiry and strategies of argument. Yet across

this diversity there are several

practices widely recognised as essential to good research. Among these are clarity of purpose, logical coherence,
engagement with alternative arguments and the provision of good reasons (empirical evidence, corroborating arguments textual interpretations,
etc.). Less often noted, however, is

the importance of metatheoretical reflexivity . If our

epistemological assumptions affect the questions we ask, then being conscious of these
assumptions is necessary to ensure that we are not fencing off questions of importance, and that if
we are, we can justify our choices. Likewise, if our ontological assumptions affect how we see the social
universe, determining what is in or outside our field of vision, then reflecting on these assumptions can prevent us
being blind to things that matter. A similar argument applies to our meta-ethical assumptions. Indeed, if deontology and
consequentialism are both meta-ethical positions, as I suggested earlier, then reflecting on our choice of one or other
position is part and parcel of weighing rival ethical arguments (on issues as diverse as global poverty and human
rights). Finally, our epistemological, ontological and meta-ethical assumptions are not metatheoretical silos;
assumptions we make in one have a tendency to shape those we make in another. The oft-heard refrain
that if we cant measure it, it doesnt matter is an unfortunate example of epistemology supervening on ontology, something that metatheoretical
reflexivity can help guard against. In sum, like clarity, coherence, consideration

of alternative arguments and the

provision of good reasons, metatheoretical reflexivity is part of keeping us honest, making it

practically relevant despite its abstraction.

at: scenario planning

Energy scenario planning is political, not scientificeven if the exercise is good in
the abstract, their application of it for strategic gain is ideological blackmailthis
card is way more specific
Labban 12 Preempting Possibility: Critical Assessment of the IEA's World Energy Outlook
2010 (e-mail: labban@rci.rutgers.edu) is visiting assistant professor of Geography at Rutgers
University, Lucy Stone Hall, 54 Joyce Kilmer Ave, Piscataway, NJ 08854. His research interests
include critical theory, political economy, development, energy, petroleum, geopolitics,
international law, and finance. He is the author of Space, Oil and Capital (Routledge, 2008).
Growing uncertainty about energy markets following the crises of the 1970s boosted long-term energy
forecasting as a planning device to prepare for an increasingly unpredictable future, on one hand, and as a techno -scientific
(read: politically neutral and respectable) support for public policies ostensibly aimed at increasing energy security
and environmental protection, on the other. Long-range forecasts, however, have invariably failed to produce
accurate predictions about all aspects of energy markets: primary energy supplies, energy substitutions, the
relative shares of different fuels in the energy mix, aggregate and sectoral energy demand, as well as carbon emissions.6 Because they rely on trend projections,

forecasts also rely on an assumption that the future is a smooth, gradual extension of the present at a
constant rate with no structural changes or major interruptions or aberrations. They also rely on empirical correlation rather
than causality and cannot therefore explain underlying forces that drive demand, price, etc. Thus forecasts
cannot predict a future that looks very different from the present, let alone explain how possible futures might
unfold, which makes them useful only in short-term, business-as-usual projections. Because of such inherent limitations, which prevent forecasts from accurately
predicting long-term technical developments, capital markets and investment climates, let alone even more unpredictable processes such as government policies and
geopolitical conflict, energy analysts, including the economists at the IEA, have shifted from long-range predictive forecasts towards more normative scenario
building in the analysis of long-range energy-related developments. This technical move has a political dimension that is worth pondering in order to shed critical light

Scenario analysis has its origins in corporate and military strategic planning.7 It was developed
by Herman Kahn at the RAND corporation in the 1950s to help the US Air Force think about the unthinkable and pioneered
by Shell in the early 1960s, initially as an internal communications vehicle, to help the company respond more readily to unexpected
developments in energy markets that might affect the price of oil. Whereas forecasts predict what is most likely to happen in the future
on the significance of the WEO 2010 scenarios.

given current trends and projections, scenarios contemplate what is possible if certain choices are made from within a hypothetical range of possibilities which
typically includes a reference case describing what would happen if no action is taken to alter the existing state of affairs in any fundamental manner. For this reason,
scenarios not only describe hypothetical futures but must also prescribe pathways and roadmaps, policies and actions, and identify ways and means to arrive at a
desirable future and avoid undesirable fate. Unlike forecasts, in which the future is determined by projections of current trends, scenarios assume a less deterministic
development that allows subjects to make choices and whose agency, not the correlation of empirical facts, determines possible futures.

Scenarios are

desiring machines' , to borrow a term from Deleuze and Guattari (1983): at the same time that they produce the desired

future, they also produce the subject and mechanism by which to actualize it. This occasionally
operates in the form of blackmail: coercing action in the present by showing the dire
consequences of not acting. Despite obvious differences and assertions to the contrary, energy scenarios are one type
of predictive forecast which, however, does not treat current circumstances and trends as immutable, therefore allowing itself flexibility in projecting
into the future (and an about-face if the future turns out differently) in order to effect change in the present. For one, energy scenarios rely on forecasts about economic
growth, population growth, energy demand, production and generation capacities, prices and costs, etc., hence the possibilities they construct are based on a set of

forecasting is

negatively implicit in scenario analysis

predictions. Also,
often
. The authors of WEO 2010, as of other Outlooks,
are adamant that their scenarios are not forecasts. Yet, all three WEO 2010 scenarios are forecasts about the state of the global economy in that they assume continued
economic growth. They also assert that no matter what it will look like, the future is certainly not going to look like the present because WEO 2010 predicts that
governments will act on their policy promises, no matter how weakly, and in predictable manner: it is certain that energy and climate policies in many if not most
countries will change, possibly in the way we assume in the New Policies Scenario (p. 62). Thus, eliminating the abominable which is also impossible, WEO 2010

The possible becomes what

ensues from action according to the scenario's prescriptions or from absolute lack of action and this is effected by
scenarios lay out two alternative futures that differ only quantitatively one desirable, the other realistic, or likely.

actualizing future events and processes that may or may not occur, depending on what course of action governments take or fail to take in the present.

Scenarios

limit what is possible to what is desirable for their authors, or to its exact opposite, and exclude possibilities that do not fall
within this range. At the moment that scenarios produce possibilities they negate the very notion of possibility.
Disaster consumerism means there is zero spillover from their politics and explicit
ignorance of solutions ---causes political anesthesia
Recuber 11 Timothy Recuber is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center of the
City. University of New York. He has taught at Hunter College in Manhattan "CONSUMING
CATASTROPHE: AUTHENTICITY AND EMOTION IN MASS-MEDIATED DISASTER"
gradworks.umi.com/3477831.pdf
The emotional component of disaster consumption is therefore an important part of these
processes. Sociologists who study disaster have long disputed the conventional wisdom that
mass panic is the defacto public response to disasters, especially on the ground in affected
communities (Quarantelli, 2001; Tierny, 2007). But while it is true that disaster-struck
communities tend to exhibit a whole host of positive, pro-social responses, it does not mean that
mass media accounts of disaster may not inspire panic in distant spectators who are less
directly affected . Divorced from the kinds of sustaining, ad-hoc, local communities that
maintain order and provide support during and in the immediate aftermath of disasters (see
Solnit, 2009), those who merely consume distressing stories and images at a distance may be
more likely to take drastic measures or respond with maudlin or hysterical emotional displays.
Of course, mass media today tend to operate in crisis mode at all times , even over
seemingly trivial matters (McRobbie and Thornton, 1995), making the shock and immediacy
of disaster-related stories an overly familiar style of communication and thus, at times,
contributing to the onset of what has come to be known as compassion fatigue (Moeller, 1999).
On the other hand, and at the very least, American audiences of disasters have demonstrated over
the past decade that distant or unaffected spectators are likely to feel that they too have been
vicariously traumatized, and thus enfranchised to participate in mass-mediated rituals of
commemoration, or to claim the social and political status of victim (see Savage, 2006; Kaplan,
2005). 12
Such vicarious trauma is often the result of very genuine emotional responses by these distant
spectators. In fact, as discussed in Chapter Three, one of the most powerful norms that has
emerged regarding the role of the spectator of disaster is the obligation to show empathy towards
those directly affected. Media texts have particular ways of presenting the suffering others
designed to draw out these reactions, as I show through an analysis of two news programs, one
reality television show, and one documentary film devoted to Hurricane Katrina and the Virginia
Tech shootings. This empathy for the suffering of distant others is rehearsed today even in nondisaster related media programming, but it is particularly prevalent when large-scale tragedies
result in not only live television news broadcasts, but also the many commemorative events and
products whose proceeds are supposed to benefit those distant others. Consuming such
experiences and products marks one as an ethical, moral person with the capacity to understand
the pain of others. Unlike classical forms of Enlightenment sympathy, however, in which
detached spectators sought to actually alleviate the suffering of unfortunate others whose causes
they found worthy, the empathy on display when one buys a Virginia Tech t-shirt or a record
benefitting New Orleans musicians, or when one watches television programs devoted to these

disasters, seems to be as much about self-improvement as the improvement of the conditions of

those less fortunate. This is not to say that such consumption is not driven by sincere concern for
disaster victims, but simply that mass culture tends to direct such concern towards viewing habits
and consumption practices that help the self-image of the viewer or purchaser at least as much as
they help any disaster-stricken communities.
The consumption of disaster thus encourages a kind of political anesthesia that reduces ones
ability to recognize the collective solutions to problems, as well as ones willingness to work
towards them (Szasz, 2007). Instead, the authentically threatening quality of disasters often
nurtures a paradoxically fantastic desire to secure the safety of oneself and ones family through
private acts of consumerism . But these fantasies are often backwards looking; they
envision the next disaster as a similar chain of catastrophic events that , having
recently happened, is actually unlikely to happen again due either to officialdoms new
awareness of this problem or simply to the remote odds of two similar disasters happening in
such close succession. Of course, in the current American political moment of ascendant neoliberal governance, such individualistic strategies of preventative consumption may constitute
the only preventative measures being taken on ones behalf.

at: social science

IR is not a social scienceand even if it were, that wouldnt be nearly enough for
objective evaluation
BERNSTEIN ET AL. 00 --- Steven , Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein and Steven
Weber, University of Toronto, The Ohio State University, University of Toronto and University
of California at Berkeley. European Journal of International Relations 2000; 6; 43.
A deep irony is embedded in the history of the scientific study of international relations. Recent generations of
scholars separated policy from theory to gain an intellectual distance from decision-making, in the belief that this

But five decades of well-funded eorts to

develop theories of international relations have produced precious little in
the way of useful, high confidence results. Theories abound, but few meet the
most relaxed 'scientific' tests of validity. Even the most robust
generalizations or laws we can state war is more likely between
neighboring states, weaker states are less likely to attack stronger states
are close to trivial , have important exceptions, and for the most part stand
outside any consistent body of theory . A generation ago, we might have
excused our performance on the grounds that we were a young science still
in the process of defining problems, developing analytical tools and
collecting data. This excuse is neither credible nor sucient; there is no
reason to suppose that another 50 years of well-funded research would result
in anything resembling a valid theory in the Popperian sense. We suggest that the
would enhance the 'scientific' quality of their work.

nature, goals and criteria for judging social science theory should be rethought, if theory is to be more helpful in
understanding the real world. We begin by justifying our pessimism, both conceptually and empirically, and argue

the quest for predictive theory rests on a mistaken analogy between

physical and social phenomena. Evolutionary biology is a more productive analogy for social
that

science. We explore the value of this analogy in its 'hard' and 'soft' versions, and examine the implications of both
for theory and research in international relations.' We develop the case for forward `tracking' of international
relations on the basis of local and general knowledge as an alternative to backward-looking attempts to build
deductive, nomothetic theory. We then apply this strategy to some emerging trends in international relations.

This

article is not a nihilistic diatribe against 'modern' conceptions of social

science. Rather, it is a plea for constructive humility in the current context of
attraction to deductive logic, falsifiable hypothesis and large- n statistical
'tests' of narrow propositions. We propose a practical alternative for social
scientists to pursue in addition, and in a complementary fashion, to `scientific' theory-testing. Physical
and chemical laws make two kinds of predictions. Some phenomena the trajectories of individual planets can
be predicted with a reasonable degree of certainty. Only a few variables need to be taken into account and they can
be measured with precision. Other mechanical problems, like the break of balls on a pool table, while subject to
deterministic laws, are inherently unpredictable because of their complexity. Small dierences in the lay of the
table, the nap of the felt, the curvature of each ball and where they make contact, amplify the variance of each
collision and lead to what appears as a near random distribution of balls. Most predictions in science are
probabilistic, like the freezing point of liquids, the expansion rate of gases and all chemical reactions. Point
predictions appear possible only because of the large numbers of units involved in interactions. In the case of

In
international relations, even more than in other domains of social science, it
is often impossible to assign metrics to what we think are relevant variables
(Coleman, 1964: especially Chapter 2). The concepts of polarity, relative power and the
balance of power are among the most widely used independent variables,
nuclear decay or the expansion of gases, we are talking about trillions of atoms and molecules.

but there are no commonly accepted definitions or measures for them.

Yet without consensus on definition and measurement, almost every
statement or hypothesis will have too much wiggle room to be
`tested' decisively against evidence. What we take to be dependent variables fare little better.
Unresolved controversies rage over the definition and evaluation of deterrence outcomes, and about the criteria for
democratic governance and their application to specific countries at dierent points in their history.

Dierences in coding for even a few cases have significant implications for
tests of theories of deterrence or of the democratic peace (Lebow and Stein, 1990;
Chan, 1997). The lack of consensus about terms and their measurement is not
merely the result of intellectual anarchy or sloppiness although the latter cannot
entirely be dismissed. Fundamentally, it has more to do with the arbitrary nature of
the concepts themselves. Key terms in physics, like mass, temperature and
velocity, refer to aspects of the physical universe that we cannot directly observe. However, they are embedded
in theories with deductive implications that have been verified through empirical research. Propositions containing

are legitimate assertions about reality because their truth-value can

be assessed. Social science theories are for the most part built on
'idealizations', that is, on concepts that cannot be anchored to
observable phenomena through rules of correspondence. Most of these
terms(e.g. rational actor, balance of power) are not descriptions of reality but
implicit 'theories' about actors and contexts that do not exist (Hempel, 1952; Rudner,
1966; Gunnell, 1975; Moe, 1979; Searle, 1995: 68-72).The inevitable dierences in
interpretation of these concepts lead to dierent predictions in some
contexts, and these outcomes may eventually produce widely varying
futures (Taylor, 1985: 55). If problems of definition, measurement and coding could
be resolved, we would still find it dicult, if not impossible, to construct large
enough samples of comparable cases to permit statistical analysis . It is now
these terms

almost generally accepted that in the analysis of the causes of wars, the variation across time and the complexity
of the interaction among putative causes make the likelihood of a general theory extraordinarily low. Multivariate

international relations rarely

generates data sets in the high double digits. Where larger samples do exist, they
often group together cases that dier from one another in theoretically
important ways.' Complexity in the form of multiple causation and equifinality can also make simple
theories run into the problem of negative degrees of freedom, yet

statistical comparisons misleading. But it is hard to elaborate more sophisticated statistical tests until one has a
deeper baseline understanding of the nature of the phenomenon under investigation, as well as the categories and
variables that make up candidate causes (Geddes, 1990: 131-50; Lustick, 1996: 505-18; Jervis, 1997). Wars to
continue with the same example are similar to chemical and nuclear reactions in that they have underlying and
immediate causes. Even when all the underlying conditions are present, these processes generally require a
catalyst to begin. Chain reactions are triggered by the decay of atomic nuclei. Some of the neutrons they emit strike
other nuclei prompting them to fission and emit more neutrons, which strike still more nuclei. Physicists can
calculate how many kilograms of Uranium 235 or Plutonium at given pressures are necessary to produce a chain
reaction. They can take it for granted that if a 'critical mass' is achieved, a chain reaction will follow. This is because
trillions of atoms are present, and at any given moment enough of them will decay to provide the neutrons needed
to start thereaction. In a large enough sample, catalysts will be present in a statistical sense. Wars involve relatively
few actors. Unlike the weak force responsible for nuclear decay, their catalysts are probably not inherent properties
of the units. Catalysts may or may not be present, and their potentially random distribution relative to underlying
causes makes it dicult to predict when or if an appropriate catalyst will occur. If in the course of time underlying
conditions change, reducing basic incentives for one or more parties to use force, catalysts that would have

This uncertain and evolving relationship between

underlying and immediate causes makes point prediction extraordinarily
difficult . It also makes more general statements about the causation of war
problematic, since we have no way of knowing what wars would have
occurred in the presence of appropriate catalysts. It is probably impossible to
triggered war will no longer do so.

define the universe of would-be wars or to construct a representative sample

of them. Statistical inference requires knowledge about the state of
independence of cases, but in a practical sense that knowledge is often
impossible to obtain in the analysis of international relations. Molecules do not learn
from experience. People do, or think they do. Relationships among cases exist in the minds of decision-makers,
which makes it very hard to access that information reliably and for more than just a very small number of cases.

The
deterrence strategies pursued by the United States throughout much of the
Cold War were one kind of response to the failure of appeasement to prevent
World War II. Appeasement was at least in part a reaction to the belief of British leaders that the deterrent
We know that expectations and behavior are influenced by experience, one's own and others.

policies pursued by the continental powers earlier in the century had helped to provoke World War I. Neither
appeasement nor deterrence can be explained without understanding the context in which they were formulated;
that context is ultimately a set of mental constructs. We have descriptive terms like 'chain reaction' or 'contagion
eect' to describe these patterns, and hazard analysis among other techniques in statistics to measure their
strength. But neither explains how and why these patterns emerge and persist. The broader point is that the
relationship between human beings and their environment is not nearly so reactive as with inanimate objects.
Social relations are not clock-like because the values and behavioral repertories of actors are not fixed; people have

Law-like
relationships even if they existed could not explain the most interesting
social outcomes, since these are precisely the outcomes about which actors
have the most incentive to learn and adapt their behavior. Any regularities would be
memories, learn from experience and undergo shifts in the vocabulary they use to construct reality.

`soft'; they would be the outcome of processes that areembedded in history and have a short half-life. They would
decay quickly because of the memories, creative searching and learning by political leaders. Ironically, the
`findings' of social science contribute to this decay (Weber, 1969; Almond and Genco, 1977: 496-522; Gunnell,
1982: Ch. 2; Ball, 1987: Ch. 4; Kratochwil, 1989; Rorty, 1989; Hollis, 1994: Ch. 9). Beyond these conceptual and
empirical diculties lies a familiar but fundamental dierence of purpose. Boyle's Law, half-lives, or any other
scientific principle based on probability, says nothing about the behavior of single units such as molecules. For
many theoretical and practical purposes this is adequate. But social science ultimately aspires or should aspire
to provide insight into practical world problems that are generally part of a small or very small n. In international
relations, the dynamicsa nd outcomes of single cases are often much more important than any statistical

The conception of causality on which deductive-nomological models

are based, in classical physics as well as social science, requires empirical
invariance under specified boundary conditions. The standard form of such a statement is
this given A, B and C, if X then (not) Y.4 This kind of bounded invariance can be found in closed systems . Open
systems can be influenced by external stimuli, and their structure and causal
mechanisms evolve as a result. Rules that describe the functioning of an open system at time T do
regularities.

not necessarily do so at T + 1 or T + 2. The boundary conditions may have changed, rendering the statement
irrelevant. Another axiomaticcondition may have been added, and the outcome subject to multiple conjunctural
causation. There is no way to know this a priori from the causal statement itself. Nor will complete knowledge (if it
were possible) about the system at time T necessarily allow us to project its future course of development. In a
practical sense, all social systems (and many physical and biological systems) are open. Empirical invariance does
not exist in such systems, andseemingly probabilistic invariances may be causally unrelated (Harre and Secord,

As physicists readily admit,

prediction in open systems, especially non-linear ones, is dicult, and often
impossible. The risk in saying that social scientists can 'predict' the value of
variables in past history is that the value of these variables is already known
to us, and thus we are not really making predictions. Rather, we are trying to convince
1973; Bhaskar, 1979; Collier, 1994; Patomaki, 1996; Jervis, 1997).

each other of the logic that connects a statement of theory to an expectation about the value of a variable that
derives from that theory. As long as we can establish the parameters within which the theoretical statement is valid,
which is a prerequisite of generating expectations in any case, this 'theory-testing' or 'evaluating' activity is not
dierent in a logical sense when done in past or future time.5

Aff --- Consumption Answers

2ac consumption
Consumption is inevitable we reform it
Doran and Barry 6 worked at all levels in the environment and sustainable development
policy arena - at the United Nations, at the Northern Ireland Assembly and Dil ireann, and in
the Irish NGO sector. PhD--AND-- Reader in Politics, Queen's University School of Politics,
International Studies, and Philosophy. PhD Glasgow (Peter and John, Refining Green Political
Economy: From Ecological Modernisation to Economic Security and Sufficiency, Analyse &
Kritik 28/2006, p. 250275, http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/20062/AK_Barry_Doran_2006.pdf)
The aim of this article is to offer a draft of a realistic, but critical, version of green political economy to underpin the economic dimensions of
radical views of sustainable development. It is written explicitly with a view to encouraging others to respond to it in the necessary
collaborative effort to think through this aspect of sustainable development. Our position is informed by two important observations. As a
sign of our times, the crises that we are addressing under the banner of sustainable development (however inadequately) render the
distinction between what is realistic and radical problematic. It seems to us that the only realistic course is to revisit the most basic
assumptions embedded within the dominant model of development and economics. Realistically the only longterm option available is
radical. Secondly, we cannot build or seek to create a sustainable economy ab nihilo, but must begin in an
agonistic fashionfrom

where we are, with the structures, institutions, modes of production, laws,

regulations and so on that we have. We make this point in Ireland with a story about the motorist who stops at the side of the
road to ask directions, only to be told: Now Mam, I wouldnt start from here if I were you. This does not mean simply
accepting these as immutable or set in stone after all, some of the current institutions, principles and structures
underpinning the dominant economic model are the very causes of unsustainable development but we do need to recognise
that we must work with (and throughin the terms of the original German Green Partys slogan of marching through
the institutions) these existing structures as well as changing and reforming and in some cases
abandoning them as either unnecessary or positively harmful to the creation and maintenance of a sustainable economy and society.
Moreover, we have a particular responsibility under the current dominant economic trends to name the neo-liberal project as the hegemonic
influence on economic thinking and practice. In the words of Bourdieu/Wacquant (2001), neoliberalism is the new planetary vulgate, which
provides the global context for much of the contemporary political and academic debate on sustainable development. For example, there is a
clear hierarchy of trade (WTO) over the environment (Multilateral Environmental Agreements) in the international rules-based systems. At
the boundaries or limits of the sustainable development debate in both the UK and the European Union it is also evident that the objectives of
competitiveness and trade policy are sacrosanct. As Tim Luke (1999) has observed, the relative success or failure of national economies in
head-to-head global competition is taken by geo-economics as the definitive register of any one nation-states waxing or waning
international power, as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic prowess. In this context,
many believe ecological considerations can, at best, be given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the continuing quest to mobilise the
Earths material resources. Our realism is rooted in the demos. The realism with which this paper is concerned to promote

recognises that the path to an alternative economy and society must begin with a recognition of
the reality that most people (in the West) will not democratically vote (or be given the opportunity to
vote) for a completely different type of society and economy overnight . This is true even as the merits
of a green economy are increasingly recognised and accepted by most people as the logical basis for safeguards and
guarantees for their basic needs and aspirations (within limits). The realistic character of the thinking behind this article accepts that
consumption and materialistic lifestyles are here to stay. (The most we can probably aspire

to is a
widening and deepening of popular movements towards ethical consumption, responsible investment,
and fair trade.) And indeed there is little to be gained by proposing alternative economic systems
which start from a complete rejection of consumption and materialism. The appeal to realism is
in part an attempt to correct the common misperception (and self-perception) of green politics and economics requiring an excessive degree
of self-denial and a puritanical asceticism (see Goodin 1992, 18; Allison 1991, 170 78). While rejecting the claim that green political theory
calls for the complete disavowal of materialistic lifestyles, it is true that green politics does require the collective reassessment of such lifestyles, and does require new

economic signals and pedagogical attempts to encourage a

delinkingin the minds of the general populusof the good life and the goods life. This does
not mean that we need necessarily require the complete and across the board rejection of materialistic
lifestyles. It must be the case that there is room and tolerance in a green economy for people to choose to live diverse lifestylessome
more sustainable than othersso long as these do not harm others, threaten long-term ecological sustainability or create unjust levels of
socio-economic inequalities. Thus, realism in this context is in part another name for the acceptance of a broadly liberal or post-liberal
(but certainly not anti-liberal) green perspective.2 1. Setting Out At the same time, while critical of the abstract and unrealistic

utopianism that peppers green and radical thinking in this area, we do not intend to reject utopianism. Indeed, with Oscar Wilde we agree that
a map of the world that does not have utopia on it, isnt worth looking at. The spirit in which this article is written is more in

keeping with framing green and sustainability concerns within a concrete utopian perspective or
what the Marxist geographer David Harvey (1996, 433435) calls a utopianism of process, to be distinguished from
closed, blueprint-like and abstract utopian visions. Accordingly, the model of green political economy
outlined here is in keeping with Steven Lukes suggestion that a concrete utopianism depends on
the knowledge of a self-transforming present, not an ideal future (Lukes 1984, 158). It accepts the
current dominance of one particular model of green political economynamely ecological
modernisation (hereafter referred to EM)as the preferred political economy underpinning
contemporary state and market forms of sustainable development, and further accepts the
necessity for green politics to positively engage in the debates and policies around EM from a
strategic (as well as a normative) point of view. However, it is also conscious of the limits and problems with
ecological modernisation, particularly in terms of its technocratic, supply-side and reformist business as usual approach, and
seeks to explore the potential to radicalise EM or use it as a jumping off point for more radical
views of greening the economy. Ecological modernisation is a work in progress; and thats the
point. The article begins by outlining EM in theory and practice, specifically in relation to the British states sustainable development
policy agenda under New Labour.3 While EM as currently practised by the British state is weak and largely turns on the centrality of
innovation and eco-efficiency, the paper then goes on to investigate in more detail the role of the market within current conceptualisations
of EM and other models of green political economy. In particular, a potentially powerful distinction (both conceptually and in
policy debates) between

the market and capitalism has yet to be sufficiently explored and exploited as a
starting point for the development of radical, viable and attractive conceptions of green political
economy as alternatives to both EM and the orthodox economic paradigm. We contend that there is a role for the market in
innovation and as part of the governance for sustainable development in which eco-efficiency and
EM of the economy is linked to non-ecological demands of green politics and sustainable
development such as social and global justice, egalitarianism, democratic regulation of the market and
the conceptual (and policy) expansion of the economy to include social, informal and noncash
economic activity and a progressive role for the state (especially at the local/municipal level). Here we suggest that
the environmental argument or basis of green political economy in terms of the need for the economy to
become more resource efficient, minimise pollution and waste and so on, has largely been won. What that means is that
no one is disputing the need for greater resource productivity , energy and eco-efficiency. Both state and
corporate/business actors have accepted the environmental bottom line (often rhetorically, but nonetheless important) as a conditioning
factor in the pursuit of the economic bottom line.

And, no impact impossible to actualize an alternative system

Jones 11Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most
Influential People on the Left' for 2011, author of "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working
Class", The Independent, UK, "Owen Jones: Protest without politics will change nothing",
2011, www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-protest-without-politicswill-change-nothing-2373612.ht
My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak. The turn-of-the-century anti-capitalist movement feels
largely forgotten today, but it was a big deal at the time. To a left-wing teenager growing up in an age of unchallenged neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have "anti-capitalism" flash up in the
headlines was thrilling. Thousands of apparently unstoppable protesters chased the world's rulers from IMF to World Bank summits from Seattle to Prague to Genoa and the authorities

Today, as protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the world follow the example set by
Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened to the anti-globalisation movement . Its
activists did not lack passion or determination. But they did lack a coherent alternative to the
neo-liberal project. With no clear political direction, the movement was easily swept away by the
jingoism and turmoil that followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa. Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a glimmer of sanity amid today's
were rattled.
the

economic madness. By descending on the West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes a clich) has
been cynically transformed into a crisis of public spending. The founding statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their
fire at the top 1 per cent, and rightly so as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're
winning." The Occupy movement has provoked fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain who predictably labelled it "anti-American". They're

But a coherent
alternative to the tottering global economic order remains, it seems, as distant as ever. Neoright to be worried: those camping outside banks threaten to refocus attention on the real villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent.

liberalism crashes around, half-dead, with no-one to administer the killer blow. There's always a presumption
that a crisis of capitalism is good news for the left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism consumed much of Europe. The economic crisis of the 1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism

This time round, there

d oesn't even seem to be an alternative for the right to defeat . That's not the fault of the protesters. In truth, the left has
never recovered from being virtually smothered out of existence . It was the victim of a perfect
storm: the rise of the New Right; neo-liberal globalisation; and the repeated defeats suffered by the
trade union movement. But, above all, it was the aftermath of the collapse of Communism that did for the left. As US neo-conservative Midge
Decter triumphantly put it: "It's time to say: We've won. Goodbye." From the British Labour Party to the African National
Congress, left-wing movements across the world hurtled to the right in an almost synchronised fashion. It was as though the left wing of the global
political spectrum had been sliced off. That's why , although we live in an age of revolt, there
remains no left to give it direction and purpose.
on both left and right. But, spearheaded by Thatcherism and Reaganism, the New Right definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s.

Abandoning nature causes extinction

Soul 95 Natural Resources Professor, California (Michael and Gary Lease, Reinventing Nature?, p 159-60, AG)
The decision has already been made in most places. Some of the ecological myths discussed here contain, either explicitly or implicitly, the

idea that nature is self-regulating and capable of caring for itself. This notion leads to the theory of management known as
benign neglectnature will do fine, thank you, if human beings just leave it alone. Indeed, a century ago, a hands-off policy was the
best policy. Now it is not. Given nature's current fragmented and stressed condition, neglect will result
in an accelerating spiral of deterioration. Once people create large gaps in forests, isolate and disturb habitats, pollute, overexploit,
and introduce species from other continents, the viability of many ecosystems and native species is compromised, resiliency dissipates, and
diversity can collapse. When artificial disturbance reaches a certain threshold, even small changes can produce large effects, and these will be
compounded by climate change.' For example, a storm that would be considered normal and beneficial may, following widespread clearcutting,
cause disastrous blow-downs, landslides, and erosion. If global warming occurs, tropical storms are predicted to have greater force than now.
Homeostasis, balance, and Gaia are dangerous models when applied at the wrong spatial and temporal scales. Even fifty

years ago, neglect

might have been the best medicine, but that

number of people, and a world largely

was a world with a lot more big, unhumanized, connected spaces, a world with one-third the
unaffected by chain saws, bulldozers, pesticides, and exotic, weedy

species. The alternative to neglect is active caringin today's parlance, an affirmative approach to wildlands: to maintain and restore them, to
become stewards, accepting all the domineering baggage that word carries. Until humans are able to control their numbers
and their technologies, management is the only viable alternative to massive attrition of living
nature.

The systems sustainable

Kaletsky 10
(Anatole, Masters in Economics from Harvard, Honour-Degree Graduate at Kings College and
Cambrdige, editor-at-large of The Times of London, founding partner and chief economist of
GaveKal Capital, He is on the governing board of the New York based Institute for New
Economic Theory (INET), a nonprofit created after the 2007 2009 crisis to promote and finance
academic research in economics outside the orthodoxy of efficient markets. From 1976 to
1990, Kaletsky was New York bureau chief and Washington correspondent of the Financial
Times and a business writer on The Economist,
Despite all the forebodings of disaster in the 2007 09 financial crisis, the first decade of the
twenty-first century passed rather uneventfully into the second. The riots, soup kitchens, and bankruptcies predicted by
many of the worlds most respected economists did not materialize and no one any longer expects the
global capitalist system to collapse, whatever that emotive word might mean. Yet the capitalist systems survival does not mean that the precrisis faith in
The world did not end.

the wisdom of financial markets and the efficiency of free enterprise will ever again be what it was before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008. A return to
decent economic growth and normal financial conditions is likely by the middle of 2010, but will this imply a return to business as usual for politicians, economists, and financiers?

Although globalization will continue and many parts of the world will gradually regain their
prosperity of the precrisis period, the traumatic effects of 2007 09 will not be quickly forgotten. And the economic costs will linger
for decades in the debts squeezing taxpayers and government budgets, the disrupted lives of the jobless, and the vanished dreams of homeowners and investors around the world. For

what collapsed on September 15, 2008, was not just a bank or a financial system. What fell apart that day was an entire political philosophy and economic system, a way of thinking
about and living in the world. The question now is what will replace the global capitalism that crumbled in the autumn of 2008. The central argument of this book is that

global capitalism will be replaced by nothing other than global capitalism.

The

traumatic events of 2007 09 will neither destroy nor diminish the fundamental human urges that
have always powered the capitalist system ambition, initiative, individualism, the competitive spirit. These natural human
qualities will instead be redirected and reenergized to create a new version of capitalism
that will ultimately be even more successful and productive than the system it
replaced . To explain this process of renewal, and identify some of the most important features of the reinvigorated capitalist system, is the ambition of this book. This
transformation will take many years to complete, but some of its consequences can already be discerned.
With the benefit of even a years hindsight, it is clear that these consequences will be different from the nihilistic predictions from both ends of the political spectrum at the height of

anticapitalist ideologues seemed honestly to believe that a few weeks of financial chaos
could bring about the disintegration of a politico-economic system that had survived two
the crisis. On the Left,

hundred years of revolutions , depressions, and world wars. On the Right, free-market zealots insisted that private enterprise would be destroyed
by government interventions that were clearly necessary to save the system and many continue to believe that the crisis could have been resolved much better if governments had

A balanced reassessment of the crisis must challenge both left-wing

hysteria and right-wing hubris. Rather than blaming the meltdown of the global financial system on greedy bankers, incompetent regulators, gullible
simply allowed financial institutions to collapse.

homeowners, or foolish Chinese bureaucrats, this book puts what happened into historical and ideological perspective. It reinterprets the crisis in the context of the economic reforms
and geopolitical upheavals that have repeatedly transformed the nature of capitalism since the late eighteenth century, most recently in the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of 1979 89.

capitalism has never been a static system

The central argument is that

that follows a fixed set of rules, characterized by a permanent division of
responsibilities between private enterprise and governments. Contrary to the teachings of modern economic theory, no immutable laws govern the behavior of a capitalist economy.

capitalism is an adaptive social system that mutates and evolves in response to a changing
environment. When capitalism is seriously threatened by a systemic crisis, a new
Instead,

version emerges that is better suited to the changing environment and replaces
the previously dominant form.

Once we recognize that capitalism is not a static set of institutions, but an evolutionary system that reinvents and

reinvigorates itself through crises, we can see the events of 2007 09 in another light: as the catalyst for the fourth systemic transformation of capitalism, comparable to the
transformations triggered by the crises of the 1970s, the crises of the 1930s, and the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 15. Hence the title of this book.

Consumption is inevitable reducing resource consumption will lead to

consumption of other goods that results in resource production
Wapner and Willoughby, 5 (Paul, Associate Professor and Director of the Global Environmental
Politics program, School of International Service at American University, and John, Professor of
Economics at American University, Chair of the Department of Economics, The Irony of
Environmentalism: The Ecological Futility but Political Necessity of Lifestyle Change, Ethics
& International Affairs, Volume 19, Issue 3, December 2005, pg. 77-89, Wiley Online Library,
pdf, Tashma)
Considering what would happen if a group of environmentalists decided to cut back on their use of a key resource can also make this
point. Lets say, for example, that I reduce my water consumption in an effort to save fresh water . There is no question that
this immediately reduces demand on water and thus helps to conserve a limited resource. But, in the act of doing so, I also pay
less to the water utility provider , and thus have more discretionary income . If I spend the money I
save by not consuming water on other resource-involved goods or activities, especially ones that indirectly use water
(such as many manufactured goods), the net environmental impact of my decision may be hard to discern . If I
invest my savings in conventional financial mechanisms, I will probably still end up inducing environmental harm. In short, resource restraint by
some may not translate directly into a collective reduction in resource use. This

underlines the difculty of protecting the

environment through campaigns to change individual consumption patterns .

Alt fails cant overcome societal trends

Carolan, 4 (Michael S., Departments of Sociology and Environmental Studies, Whitman

College, Ecological Modernization Theory: What About Consumption?, Society & Natural
Resources, Volume 17, Issue 3, pg. 247-260, Taylor and Francis, pdf, Tashma)
While in some respects our age is a postmaterial one, it is in other respects still very much the proverbial 800-pound
material gorilla . Few in this world are ready to give up on jewelry , cars , big-screen televisions , and
computers , although many would like them produced in as green a manner as possible. And the billions that do not yet
possess these items are far from giving up on the idea of one day having them in their possession (Renner
and Sampat 2002). We must not base our hopes on a total dematerializing of the economy, for such hope is a chimera .
Consumption will always be tied to the material world , to some extent, and as such consumption will always be tied
to the environment . As noted by Michael Redclift (1996, 3), increased production requires increased consumption in both volume and
kind.

Engagement with technocracy is more effective than passive rejection

Jimnez-Aleixandre, professor of education University of Santiago de Compostela, and
Pereiro-Muoz High School Castelao, Vigo (Spain), 2
(Maria-Pilar and Cristina, Knowledge producers or knowledge consumers? Argumentation and
decision making about environmental management, International Journal of Science Education
Vol. 24, No. 11, p. 11711190)
If science education and environmental education have as a goal to develop critical thinking and to
promote decision making, it seems that the acknowledgement of a variety of experts and expertise is of
relevance to both. Otherwise citizens could be unable to challenge a common view that places
economical issues and technical features over other types of values or concerns. As McGinn and Roth (1999) argue,
citizens should be prepared to participate in scientific practice, to be involved in situations where
science is, if not created, at least used. The assessment of environmental management is, in our opinion, one of these, and citizens do not
need to possess all the technical knowledge to be able to examine the positive and negative impacts and to weigh them up. The identification of
instances of scientific practice in classroom discourse is difficult especially if this practice is viewed as a complex process, not as fixed steps.
Several instances were identified when it could be said that students

acted as a knowledge-producing community in

spite of the fact that the students, particularly at the beginning of the sequence, expressed doubts about their
capacities to assess a project written by experts and endorsed by a government office. Perhaps these doubts relate to the nature of the
project, a real life object that made its way into the classroom, into the school life. As Brown et al. (1989) point out, there is usually a
difference between practitioners tasks and stereotyped school tasks and, it could be added, students are not used to being confronted with the
complexity of life-size problems. However, as

the sequence proceeded, the students assumed the role of

experts, exposing inconsistencies in the project, offering alternatives and discussing it with one of its authors.
The issue of expertise is worthy of attention and it needs to be explored in different contexts where the relationships among technical expertise,
values hierarchies and possible biases caused by the subject matter could be unravelled. One

of the objectives of
environmental education is to empower people with the capacity of decision making ; for this
purpose the acknowledging of multiple expertise is crucial.

1ar consumption
Policies matter---effective energy choices depend on technical political literacy
Hodson 10 Derek, professor of education Ontario Institute for Studies @ University of
Toronto, Science Education as a Call to Action, Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and
Technology Education, Vol. 10, Issue 3, p. 197-206
**note: SSI = socioscientific issues
The final (fourth) level of sophistication in this issues-based approach is concerned with students findings ways of
putting their values and convictions into action, helping them to prepare for and engage in
responsible action, and assisting them in developing the skills, attitudes, and values that will enable
them to take control of their lives, cooperate with others to bring about change , and work toward a
more just and sustainable world in which power, wealth, and resources are more equitably
shared. Socially and environmentally responsible behavior will not necessarily follow from knowledge of key concepts and possession of the
right attitudes. As Curtin (1991) reminded us, it is important to distinguish between caring about and caring for. It is almost always much easier
to proclaim that one cares about an issue than to do something about it. Put simply, our values are worth nothing until we live them. Rhetoric and
espoused values will not bring about social justice and will not save the planet. We must change our actions. A politicized

ethic of
care (caring for) entails active involvement in a local manifestation of a particular problem or issue,
exploration of the complex sociopolitical contexts in which the problem/issue is located, and
attempts to resolve conflicts of interest. FROM STSE RHETORIC TO SOCIOPOLITICAL ACTION Writing from the
perspective of environmental education, Jensen (2002) categorized the knowledge that is likely to promote
sociopolitical action and encourage pro-environmental behavior into four dimensions: (a) scientific and
technological knowledge that informs the issue or problem; (b) knowledge about the underlying
social, political, and economic issues, conditions, and structures and how they contribute to creating social and
environmental problems; (c) knowledge about how to bring about changes in society through direct or indirect action;
and (d) knowledge about the likely outcome or direction of possible actions and the desirability
of those outcomes. Although formulated as a model for environmental education, it is reasonable to suppose that Jensen's arguments
are applicable to all forms of SSI-oriented action. Little needs to be said about dimensions 1 and 2 in Jensen's framework beyond the discussion
earlier in the article. With regard to dimension 3, students

need knowledge of actions that are likely to have

positive impact and knowledge of how to engage in them. It is essential that they gain robust
knowledge of the social, legal, and political system(s) that prevail in the communities in which they live and
develop a clear understanding of how decisions are made within local, regional, and national
government and within industry, commerce, and the military. Without knowledge of where and with
whom power of decision making is located and awareness of the mechanisms by which
decisions are reached, intervention is not possible. Thus, the curriculum I propose requires a
concurrent program designed to achieve a measure of political literacy, including knowledge of how to engage in
collective action with individuals who have different competencies, backgrounds, and attitudes but
share a common interest in a particular SSI. Dimension 3 also includes knowledge of likely sympathizers and potential allies and strategies for
encouraging cooperative action and group interventions. What Jensen did not mention but would seem to be a part of dimension 3 knowledge is
the nature of science-oriented

knowledge that would enable students to appraise the statements,

reports, and arguments of scientists, politicians, and journalists and to present their own
supporting or opposing arguments in a coherent, robust, and convincing way (see Hodson [2009b] for a
lengthy discussion of this aspect of science education). Jensen's fourth category includes awareness of how (and why) others have sought to bring
about change and entails formulation of a vision of the kind of world in which we (and our families and communities) wish to live. It is important
for students to explore and develop their ideas, dreams, and aspirations for themselves, their neighbors and families and for the wider
communities at local, regional, national, and global levelsa clear overlap with futures studies/education. An

essential step in
cultivating the critical scientific and technological literacy on which sociopolitical action
depends is the application of a social and political critique capable of challenging the notion of technological
determinism. We can control technology and its environmental and social impact. More significantly, we can control the controllers and

redirect technology in such a way that adverse environmental impact is substantially reduced (if
not entirely eliminated) and issues of freedom, equality, and justice are kept in the forefront of
discussion during the establishment of policy.

Changing consumption isnt enough. Simulating public positions in debate is vital

to refashioning environmental citizenship.
MacGregor and Szerszynski, Institute for Environment, Philosophy & Public Policy at
Lancaster University, 3 (Sherilyn and Bronislaw, Environmental Citizenship and the
Administration of Life, July,
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/geps/research/politics/MacGregorandSzerszynskipap.doc)
Firstly, in relation to changing ones mind, we want to argue that environmental citizenship should focus not on listing ways of changing values
and priorities but on participatory expertise (Torgerson, 1999:81, Fischer, 2000), on basic skills of citizenship such as informed scepticism
towards expert knowledge, on bringing a reflexive questioning angle to public debates, and so on. Environmental citizenship should not be about
changing ones mind from wrong to right, but continuously cultivating a citizenly attitude towards environmental and other issues. This does not
mean simply changing private thoughts, but learning the habits of engaging in public thought. It is from this, rather than from the following of

In individual decisions such as those involved in consumption

practices, what should be encouraged is not rule-following but enlarged (Arendt, 1978) or dilemmatic (Billig
et al., 1988) thinking. Rather than such decisions being conceived as resulting from the monological operation of an isolated mind,
based on fixed knowledge and values, they should be seen as the result of an internal dialogue, a simulacrum of
public debate between different positions in the ideological dilemmas involved in ecological and other contemporary issues.
rules, that changes in practices should flow.

Rather than encouraging people to seek a pure, green self or subjectivity, securing an untroubled, private green goodness through the application
of green knowledge and values for example by following the Earth Charter environmental citizenship should involve a continual openness to
the dilemmas and uncertainties of green action.
Secondly, concerning doing ones bit, it

is problematic that environmental citizenship tends to be reduced to

lifestyle changes that can be confined to the private sphere. Not only does this risk obscuring questions of fairness
and equality (especially as regards the gendered division of unpaid domestic work), but it also obscures the structural (i.e., social,
economic, political) causes of environmental unsustainability. It seems nave, even dangerous, to
assume that the cumulative effect of each small individual bit will be enough to make up for
the tangled mess of much bigger bits of ecological destruction that occur (rather are allowed to occur)
simultaneously. (How much industrial pollution is emitted whilst aluminium cans are being washed and squashed in 25 million
households?) Green lifestyle is here being conflated with citizenship, closing off the larger debate about the common good. Private acts
such as green consumer choices and recycling are about maintaining purity within oneself and following
rules rather than putting oneself at risk, getting ones hands dirty thorough appearing to others
in the political realm . It is not that we are arguing against recycling and green consumerism; rather we are arguing that it is
possible to do it and think about it differently; lifestyle
and enlarged thinking.

change has be informed by public thought, reflective judgement

Permutation do both solves better and the aff is a net-benefit

Bryant and Goodman 4 - * PhD in Politics from the School of Oriental and
African Studies, **Professor of Communication Studies
Raymond and Michael, Consuming Narratives: The Political Ecology of 'Alternative'
Consumption, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 29, No. 3
The consumption practices of the conservation- and solidarity-seeking commodity cultures described here offer one

alternative to the call for a politics of redistribution. In the end, these cultures offer a privileged notion of transnational 'commun- ity' given
the relatively high cost of purchasing commodities such as organic cereal and fair trade coffee. True, commodities that 'speak' to 'altern- ative' consumers can possibly
make them more aware of what is happening to tropical environ- ments and small-scale producers. And yet, only those that can afford to pay the economic premium
can take part in this form of 'resistance'. Thus, 'moral' commodities may become 'alternative' in the larger sense by eschewing more progressive re- constructions of
'moral economy'. The creation of niche markets gives the North, albeit in geographi- cally variable ways, the ability to 'tune in but drop out' of both conventional

political ecology oriented

towards the conceptual- ization of production and consumption dynamics is uniquely situated to explore
the ambiguities of North/South connections evinced by alternative consumption-related politics.
Third, this paper builds on work that challenges dualistic thinking that has bedevilled human geo- graphy for some
global economies and more demanding forms of resistance to social injus- tice and environmental degradation. A field of

time. Examples of these schisms (and authors that challenge them) include those of nature/society (e.g. Murdoch 1997; Whatmore 2002), discursive/material (e.g.

Considering together consumption and the

commoditization of political ecology narrat- ives further complicates the 'hybrid' or 'mutant' notions of landscape change and
development (Escobar 1999; Arce and Long 2000; Bebbington 2000). Breaking down the dualisms of production
and consumption thus should provide critical space from which to examine the political ecologies
of (alternative) development.9 In some ways, starting from processes of commoditization and associated narratives of development allows
the researcher to go 'forward' into the processes and meanings of consumption as well as
'backwards' along the powerful socio-economic and ecological networks of production and
Cook and Crang 1996) and cultural/economic (e.g. Jackson 2002b; Sayer 2001).

development.

Alt doesnt solve macroany practical implementation wouldnt make a dent in

individual or macro-level consumption patterns
Rpke 05 [Inge Rpke, Department for Manufacturing Engineering and Management Technical University of Denmark, Consumption in
ecological economics, International Society for Ecological Economics, April 2005, http://www.ecoeco.org/pdf/consumption_in_ee.pdf]
Compared to the other research questions, the

question about how to change consumption patterns in a more

sustainable direction is relatively under-researched in ecological economics. In relation to the fields of
consumer behaviour, economic psychology and environmental psychology, research on 'sustainable consumption' developed, and energy studies
provided new knowledge about energy saving behaviour research that is sometimes reflected in ecological economics (an extensive review of
literature on consumer behaviour and behavioural change in relation to sustainable consumption can be found in (Jackson 2005)). The main focus
of this research is consumer choice and individual consumer behaviour, and sustainable

consumption is about choosing

more environmentally friendly products and services (e.g. organic food) and about recycling behaviour, water saving,
room temperature etc. The question is how to encourage consumers to make the environmentally correct choices, and measures such as labelling
and information campaigns are studied. This research has also tried to distinguish between different social groups or lifestyles to consider whether
the political measures should be tailored to different target groups (Empacher and Gtz 2004). A successful contribution from this field has been
the NOA-model that describes consumer behaviour as the result of the consumer's Needs, Opportunities and Abilities (lander and Thgersen
1995; Gatersleben and Vlek 1998). For instance, the model is used as an organizing device in the OECD publication Towards Sustainable
Household Consumption 11(OECD 2002). The model opens up for public initiatives that can improve the opportunities for more sustainable
household behaviour, but neither the social construction of needs, nor the macro aspects of the model akre well developed. However, the idea
works well together with strategies for increased technological efficiency: more efficient products and services are provided, and the consumers
are encouraged to buy them. Whereas

the behavioural research usually focuses on individual consumers or

households and how they can be motivated to change behaviour, others have taken an interest in
bottom-up initiatives where consumers or citizens organize collectively to change their lifestyle
and consumption patterns initiatives varying from mutual help to be 'green consumers' to the
establishment of eco-communities (Georg 1999; Michaelis 2004). Unfortunately, such initiatives still seem to
have marginal importance. In general, organizational measures are increasingly studied, both bottom-up initiatives and commercial
enterprises for instance, car-sharing has been arranged in both ways (Prettenthaler and Steininger 1999). A widely promoted idea is to reduce
resource use by selling services instead of products, the so-called product-service system concept (Mont 2000; Mont 2004). In this way the final
services can be provided with fewer resources, as the provider will have an incentive to reduce costs also in the use phase, and as hardware can
sometimes be shared by several consumers. Most

of the practical steps to change consumption patterns and

most of the related research concern relatively marginal changes that are like a snowball in hell
compared to the challenge we face, if consumption patterns should deserve to be called
sustainable consistent with a level of consumption that could be generalized to all humans
without jeopardizing the basic environmental life support systems. Very little is done to face the 'quantity
problem'. At the level of research it is difficult to translate the complexity of driving forces behind the ever-increasing consumption into

suggestions for workable solutions, and at

the level of politics it is hard to imagine how to achieve support for

such solutions. As the driving forces are as strong as ever, all the small steps towards 'sustainable
consumption' co-exist with a general worsening of the situation although many of these
steps can be fine, they are far from sufficient.

Individual focus failsconsumers are always embedded in social normality.

Bartiaux 09 [Francoise Bartiaux, Institute of Demography at the Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL), Changing energy-related
practices and behaviours in the residential sector: Sociological approaches, 2009]

Consumers are definitely members of societies and not individual consumers, rational or not,
obeying to price signals and applying energy advice. They are living in socio-technical systems
and their practices of energy use and savings are embedded in social definitions of comfort,
convenience, cleanliness and connectedness (Shove, 2003; Gram-Hansen, 2008). Although there is a growing convergence
between societies, these definitions are time and location specific. So environmentalists should argue for social and cultural
diversity. They should do all that can be done to engender multiple meanings of comfort, diverse conventions of cleanliness and forms of social
order less reliant on individual modes of co-ordination concludes Shove (2003, p. 199). Escalating

energy consumption has

been explained by the interplay between technological developments and the co-evolution of
practices and norms. Will declining consumption and energy savings be brought about by similar
but reverse co-evolution patterns? It a micro-analytical scale now, these co-evolutions may be transposed
into combinations of several factors or domain, which are not only numerous and complex,
but also in competition and even paradoxical: the same factor has a double valence, being
possibly a lever or a brake to changes in a more energy-saving behaviour. This is summarised in the table
below, presenting the major levers and barriers to changes in energy-related practices. Most domains are made of social factors (e.g. technological
developments) and aggregate charac-teristics (e.g. proportion of owners). Three points are important to underline. Firstly, the

same factor
can be experienced as a brake or as a lever; there is thus no straightforward solution. Secondly, the
weight that is given to the different lever factors also depends on the action to be undertaken or
on the practice to be changed. This process of priorities-setting is often non conscious, except of
course in situations where explicit advices are given, for example by an energy expert. Thirdly, there is always
a combination of several lever factors: none will thus be sufficient by itself. However, one brake
factor will be sufficient. (Bartiaux et al., 2006). If energy consumption is to be divided by a factour four (von Weiszcker, Lovins 8
and Lovins, 1997), or more, all the dimensions mentioned above indicate potential policy implications in
various forms, either for energy policies as such or more broadly in terms of urban planning, employment and training policies
and so on. On the whole, this synthesis calls for visible policies of sustainable energy consumption, as
these policies would provide discursive consciousness, social legitimacy and relief from making
individual choice that would be conflicting with social normality, as contextually defined.

Consumption focus fails-~--political action key

Bryant 12prof of philosophy at Collin College (Levi, Black Ecology: A Pessimistic Moment,
larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/19/black-ecology-a-pessimistic-moment/)
So why is this an issue? Its an issue because while environmentalists prescribe all sorts of action we need to take to avert the climate
catastrophe, it seems to me that in failing to engage in an ecology of social and political institutions they
are whistling past the graveyard by failing to address the question of the conditions under which
action is possible. Heres the part where everyone gets angry with me. Given the way in which government and corporations
are today intertwined , I dont think theres much we can do to avert the coming
catastrophe . As Morton says, referring to logical time, the catastrophe has already happened. So what would it mean, I wonder, to take Mortons thesis
seriously? Here I know Tim will disagree with me. When I look at environmental discussions in popular media and from many around me, I see the discussion revolving almost entirely around consumers. Were told
that we have to consume differently to solve this problem. I agree that we need to consume differently, but I dont see any

feasible way in which driving fuel efficient cars, using less heat and AC, eating less meat, etc will solve these problems. This is because the lions
share of our climate change problems arise from the production and distribution end of the equation, rather than the
consumption end. They are problems arising from agricultural practices, factories, and how we ship goods
throughout countries and the world. The problem is that given the way in which governments and corporations are
intertwined with one another, and given the way in which third world countries are dependent on fossil fuels for their development, and
given the fact that only governmental solutions can address problems of production and distribution, were left with no
recourse for action. We can only watch helplessly while our bought and sold politicians continue to fiddle as the world burns.

Shifting consumption cannot solve

Alcott 8 (Blake ALCOTT Ecological Economist Masters from Cambridge in Land Economy 8
The sufficiency strategy: Would rich-world frugality lower environmental impact? Ecological
Economics 64 (4) p. Science Direct
The environmental sufficiency strategy of greater consumer frugality has become popular in
ecological economics, its attractiveness increasing along with awareness that not much can be done to stem population growth and that energyefficiency measures are either not enough or, due to backfire, part of the problem. Concerning the strategy's feasibility, effectiveness, and
common rationale, several conclusions can be drawn. The

consequences of the strategy's frugality demand shift

price reduction and the ensuing consumption rebound are not yet part of mainstream
discussion. Contrary to what is implied by the strategy's advocates, the frugality shift cannot achieve a one-toone reduction in world aggregate consumption or impact: Poorer marginal consumers increase
their consumption. The size of the sufficiency rebound is an open question. The concepts of North and South are not relevant to
the consumption discussion. Even if the voluntary material consumption cuts by the rich would effect
some lowering of total world consumption, changing human behaviour through argument and
exhortation is exceedingly difficult. While our moral concern for present others is stronger than that for future others, this
intragenerational equity is in no way incompatible with non-sustainable impact. Since savings
effected by any one country or individual can be (more than) compensated by other countries and
individuals, the relevant scale of any strategy is the world. No single strategy to change any
given right-side factor in I = f(P,A,T) guarantees any effect on impact whatsoever. Right-side strategies
in combination are conceptually complicated and perhaps more costly than explicitly political
left-side strategies directly lowering impact. Research emphasis should be shifted towards
measures to directly lower impact both in terms of depletion and emissions. Lower consumption may
have advantages on the individual, community, or regional level. There is for instance some truth in the view of Diogenes that happiness and
quantity of consumption do not necessarily rise proportionally. Living lightly can offer not only less stress and more free time but also the
personal boon of a better sense of integrity, fulfilling the Kantian criterion that ones acts should be possible universally (worldwide). Locally it
could mean cleaner air, less acid rain, less noise, less garbage, and more free space. And in the form of explicit, guaranteed shifts of purchasing
power to poorer people it would enable others to eat better or to buy goods such as petrol and cars. However, given

global markets
and marginal consumers, one persons doing without enables another to do with: In the near run
the former consumption of a newly sufficient person can get fully replaced. And given the extent
of poverty and the temptations of luxury and prestige consumption, this near run is likely to
be longer than the time horizon required for a relevant strategy to stem climate change and
the loss of vital species and natural resources.

2ac alternative
Desire for continued neoliberal growth is innate poor countries wont sign onto the
alt
Aligica 03 (Paul Aligica, Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and
Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute, The Great Transition and the Social Limits to Growth:
Herman Kahn on Social Change and Global Economic Development, April 21,
http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2827)
Stopping things would mean if not to engage in an experiment to change the human nature, at least in an equally difficult experiment in altering
powerful cultural forces: "We firmly believe that despite

the arguments put forward by people who would like to

'stop the earth and get off,' it is simply impractical to do so. Propensity to change may not be inherent in
human nature, but it is firmly embedded in most contemporary cultures. People have almost everywhere
become curious, future oriented, and dissatisfied with their conditions. They want more material goods and covet higher
status and greater control of nature. Despite much propaganda to the contrary, they believe in progress and future" (Kahn, 1976,
164). As regarding the critics of growth that stressed the issue of the gap between rich and poor countries and the issue of redistribution, Kahn
noted that what

most people everywhere want was visible, rapid improvement in their economic
status and living standards, and not a closing of the gap (Kahn, 1976, 165). The people from poor
countries have as a basic goal the transition from poor to middle class. The other implications of
social change are secondary for them. Thus a crucial factor to be taken into account is that while the zero-growth
advocates and their followers may be satisfied to stop at the present point, most others are not.
Any serious attempt to frustrate these expectations or desires of that majority is likely to fail
and/or create disastrous counter reactions. Kahn was convinced that "any concerted attempt to stop or
even slow 'progress' appreciably (that is, to be satisfied with the moment) is catastrophe-prone". At the
minimum, "it would probably require the creation of extraordinarily repressive governments or
movements-and probably a repressive international system" (Kahn, 1976, 165; 1979, 140-153). The pressures of
overpopulation, national security challenges and poverty as well as the revolution of rising
expectations could be solved only in a continuing growth environment. Kahn rejected the idea that
continuous growth would generate political repression and absolute poverty. On the contrary, it is the limits-to-growth position
"which creates low morale, destroys assurance, undermines the legitimacy of governments
everywhere, erodes personal and group commitment to constructive activities and encourages
obstructiveness to reasonable policies and hopes". Hence this position "increases enormously the
costs of creating the resources needed for expansion, makes more likely misleading debate and
misformulation of the issues, and make less likely constructive and creative lives". Ultimately "it is
precisely this position the one that increases the potential for the kinds of disasters which most at
its advocates are trying to avoid" (Kahn, 1976, 210; 1984).

No impact every credible measure proves the world is getting better now
Ridley, visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, former science editor of The
Economist, and award-winning science writer, 2010
(Matt, The Rational Optimist, pg. 13-15)
If my fictional family is not to your taste, perhaps you prefer statistics. Since

1800, the population of the world has

multiplied six times, yet average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has
risen more than nine times. Taking a shorter perspective, in 2005, compared with 1955, the average

human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate onethird more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live
one-third longer. She was less likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents,
tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid,
measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio. She was less likely, at any given age, to get cancer, heart disease or
stroke. She was more likely to be literate and to have finished school. She was more likely to own
a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator and a bicycle. All this during a half-century when the
world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure,
the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an
astonishing human achievement. Averages conceal a lot. But even if you break down the world into bits , it
is hard to find any region that was worse off in 2005 than it was in 1955. Over that half-century, real
income per head ended a little lower in only six countries (Afghanistan, Haiti, Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Somalia), life expectancy in
three (Russia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), and infant survival in none. In the rest they have rocketed upward. Africas rate of improvement has
been distressingly slow and patchy compared with the rest of the world, and many southern African countries saw life expectancy plunge in the
1990s as the AIDS epidemic took hold (before recovering in recent years). There were also moments in the half-century when you could have
caught countries in episodes of dreadful deterioration of living standards or life chances China in the 1960s, Cambodia in the 1970s, Ethiopia in
the 1980s, Rwanda in the 1990s, Congo in the 2000s, North Korea throughout. Argentina had a disappointingly stagnant twentieth century. But

overall, after fifty years, the outcome for the world is remarkably, astonishingly, dramatically positive.
The average South Korean lives twenty-six more years and earns fifteen times as much income each year as he did in 1955 (and earns fifteen
times as much as his North Korean counter part). The

average Mexican lives longer now than the average Briton

did in 1955. The average Botswanan earns more than the average Finn did in 1955. Infant
mortality is lower today in Nepal than it was in Italy in 1951. The proportion of Vietnamese
living on less than $2 a day has dropped from 90 per cent to 30 per cent in twenty years. The rich
have got richer, but the poor have done even better. The poor in the developing world grew
their consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole between 1980 and 2000. The Chinese are
ten times as rich, one-third as fecund and twenty-eight years longer-lived than they were fifty years ago. Even Nigerians are twice as rich, 25 per
cent less fecund and nine years longer-lived than they were in 1955. Despite

a doubling of the world population, even

the raw number of people living in absolute poverty (defined as less than a 1985 dollar a day) has fallen
since the 1950s. The percentage living in such absolute poverty has dropped by more than half
to less than 18 per cent. That number is, of course, still all too horribly high, but the trend is hardly a cause for despair: at the
current rate of decline, it would hit zero around 2035 though it probably wont. The United Nations estimates that
poverty was reduced more in the last fifty years than in the previous 500.

Alt doesnt solve the case institutional focus key

Doran and Barry 6 worked at all levels in the environment and sustainable development
policy arena - at the United Nations, at the Northern Ireland Assembly and Dil ireann, and in
the Irish NGO sector. PhD--AND-- Reader in Politics, Queen's University School of Politics,
International Studies, and Philosophy. PhD Glasgow (Peter and John, Refining Green Political
Economy: From Ecological Modernisation to Economic Security and Sufficiency, Analyse &
Kritik 28/2006, p. 250275, http://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/20062/AK_Barry_Doran_2006.pdf)
The aim of this article is to offer a draft of a realistic, but critical, version of green political economy to underpin the economic dimensions of
radical views of sustainable development. It is written explicitly with a view to encouraging others to respond to it in the necessary
collaborative effort to think through this aspect of sustainable development. Our position is informed by two important observations. As a
sign of our times, the crises that we are addressing under the banner of sustainable development (however inadequately) render the
distinction between what is realistic and radical problematic. It seems to us that the only realistic course is to revisit the most basic
assumptions embedded within the dominant model of development and economics. Realistically the only longterm option available is
radical. Secondly, we cannot build or seek to create a sustainable economy ab nihilo, but must begin in an
agonistic fashionfrom

where we are, with the structures, institutions, modes of production, laws,

regulations and so on that we have. We make this point in Ireland with a story about the motorist who stops at the side of the
road to ask directions, only to be told: Now Mam, I wouldnt start from here if I were you. This does not mean simply
accepting these as immutable or set in stone after all, some of the current institutions, principles and structures
underpinning the dominant economic model are the very causes of unsustainable development but we do need to recognise
that we must work with (and throughin the terms of the original German Green Partys slogan of marching through
the institutions) these existing structures as well as changing and reforming and in some cases
abandoning them as either unnecessary or positively harmful to the creation and maintenance of a sustainable economy and society.
Moreover, we have a particular responsibility under the current dominant economic trends to name the neo-liberal project as the hegemonic
influence on economic thinking and practice. In the words of Bourdieu/Wacquant (2001), neoliberalism is the new planetary vulgate, which
provides the global context for much of the contemporary political and academic debate on sustainable development. For example, there is a
clear hierarchy of trade (WTO) over the environment (Multilateral Environmental Agreements) in the international rules-based systems. At
the boundaries or limits of the sustainable development debate in both the UK and the European Union it is also evident that the objectives of
competitiveness and trade policy are sacrosanct. As Tim Luke (1999) has observed, the relative success or failure of national economies in
head-to-head global competition is taken by geo-economics as the definitive register of any one nation-states waxing or waning
international power, as well as its rising or falling industrial competitiveness, technological vitality and economic prowess. In this context,
many believe ecological considerations can, at best, be given only meaningless symbolic responses, in the continuing quest to mobilise the
Earths material resources. Our realism is rooted in the demos. The realism with which this paper is concerned to promote

recognises that the path to an alternative economy and society must begin with a recognition of
the reality that most people (in the West) will not democratically vote (or be given the opportunity to
vote) for a completely different type of society and economy overnight . This is true even as the merits
of a green economy are increasingly recognised and accepted by most people as the logical basis for safeguards and
guarantees for their basic needs and aspirations (within limits). The realistic character of the thinking behind this article accepts that
consumption and materialistic lifestyles are here to stay. (The most we can probably aspire

to is a
widening and deepening of popular movements towards ethical consumption, responsible investment,
and fair trade.) And indeed there is little to be gained by proposing alternative economic systems
which start from a complete rejection of consumption and materialism. The appeal to realism is
in part an attempt to correct the common misperception (and self-perception) of green politics and economics requiring an excessive degree
of self-denial and a puritanical asceticism (see Goodin 1992, 18; Allison 1991, 170 78). While rejecting the claim that green political theory
calls for the complete disavowal of materialistic lifestyles, it is true that green politics does require the collective reassessment of such lifestyles, and does require new

economic signals and pedagogical attempts to encourage a

delinkingin the minds of the general populusof the good life and the goods life. This does
not mean that we need necessarily require the complete and across the board rejection of materialistic
lifestyles. It must be the case that there is room and tolerance in a green economy for people to choose to live diverse lifestylessome
more sustainable than othersso long as these do not harm others, threaten long-term ecological sustainability or create unjust levels of
socio-economic inequalities. Thus, realism in this context is in part another name for the acceptance of a broadly liberal or post-liberal
(but certainly not anti-liberal) green perspective.2 1. Setting Out At the same time, while critical of the abstract and unrealistic
utopianism that peppers green and radical thinking in this area, we do not intend to reject utopianism. Indeed, with Oscar Wilde we agree that
a map of the world that does not have utopia on it, isnt worth looking at. The spirit in which this article is written is more in

keeping with framing green and sustainability concerns within a concrete utopian perspective or
what the Marxist geographer David Harvey (1996, 433435) calls a utopianism of process, to be distinguished from
closed, blueprint-like and abstract utopian visions. Accordingly, the model of green political economy
outlined here is in keeping with Steven Lukes suggestion that a concrete utopianism depends on
the knowledge of a self-transforming present, not an ideal future (Lukes 1984, 158). It accepts the
current dominance of one particular model of green political economynamely ecological
modernisation (hereafter referred to EM)as the preferred political economy underpinning
contemporary state and market forms of sustainable development, and further accepts the
necessity for green politics to positively engage in the debates and policies around EM from a
strategic (as well as a normative) point of view. However, it is also conscious of the limits and problems with
ecological modernisation, particularly in terms of its technocratic, supply-side and reformist business as usual approach, and
seeks to explore the potential to radicalise EM or use it as a jumping off point for more radical
views of greening the economy. Ecological modernisation is a work in progress; and thats the
point. The article begins by outlining EM in theory and practice, specifically in relation to the British states sustainable development
policy agenda under New Labour.3 While EM as currently practised by the British state is weak and largely turns on the centrality of
innovation and eco-efficiency, the paper then goes on to investigate in more detail the role of the market within current conceptualisations
of EM and other models of green political economy. In particular, a potentially powerful distinction (both conceptually and in

policy debates) between

the market and capitalism has yet to be sufficiently explored and exploited as a
starting point for the development of radical, viable and attractive conceptions of green political
economy as alternatives to both EM and the orthodox economic paradigm. We contend that there is a role for the market in
innovation and as part of the governance for sustainable development in which eco-efficiency and
EM of the economy is linked to non-ecological demands of green politics and sustainable
development such as social and global justice, egalitarianism, democratic regulation of the market and
the conceptual (and policy) expansion of the economy to include social, informal and noncash
economic activity and a progressive role for the state (especially at the local/municipal level). Here we suggest that
the environmental argument or basis of green political economy in terms of the need for the economy to
become more resource efficient, minimise pollution and waste and so on, has largely been won. What that means is that
no one is disputing the need for greater resource productivity , energy and eco-efficiency. Both state and
corporate/business actors have accepted the environmental bottom line (often rhetorically, but nonetheless important) as a conditioning
factor in the pursuit of the economic bottom line.

2ac energy solves

Plan creates a paradigm shift in resource usage that can foster global access to
electricity without increasing structural violence
Blees 9 [Integral Fast Reactors for the masses, Brave New Climate, Posted on 12 February
2009 on post by Barry Brook, Professor of Climate Change @ University of Adelaide, Tom
Blees, National Center for Atmospheric Research]
Chris, advances in technology include very real advances in efficiency of our electrical devices, which is
why California has been able to maintain a flat per capita electricity consumption for 30 years, and as someone who lives in California I can
assure you that our efficiency is far from draconian, and that we could do a LOT better with little effort. There is no reason to believe

that new technologies will cause us to require ever-greater amounts of electricity. On the contrary, in fact.
Besides, youre not going to get away from new technology, its an unstoppable evolutionary process
(barring utter catastrophe). Watch Star Trek. Maybe itll give you a little more optimistic view. Developing countries,
however, will demand much more energy (electrical and otherwise) per person as they improve their
standard of living. With IFR technology it shouldnt be a problem providing it safely, economically,
and cleanly. We neednt go backwards, nor do we need to discourage every country from working
toward a standard of living that those in the developed countries take for granted, just so long as we recycle
everything as I describe in Prescription for the Planet. Between effortless recycling using plasma recyclers and power
provided by IFRs, we can achieve standard of living fairness without being worried about running
out of resources. I realize that breaking free of the zero-sum paradigm is a bit of a mind
stretch, but its doable. Thats what P4TP is really all about: illuminating the path to a post-scarcity society. The technologies are only
the tools to get there. There is nothing particularly virtuous about a regression to some mythical good
old days. And if we manage to utilize technologies that allow us to be even profligate consumers of
energy (though thats really not necessary) without damaging the environment or being unfair to our fellow
man, that is not inherently a bad thing. There are a lot of mental constructs that will have to be re-examined
in light of the sort of resource revolution I propose in my book. It wont really matter if you drive around in a boronpowered zero-emission Hummer thats made of garbage, what my son Shanti calls a guilt-free car. I urge you to read it not necessarily for the
technological details but to get a picture of what the future could look like, a far brighter future than you might imagine.

Alt fails rampant consumerism inevitable absent the plan

Blees 9 [Integral Fast Reactors for the masses, Brave New Climate, Posted on 12 February
2009 on post by Barry Brook, Professor of Climate Change @ University of Adelaide, Tom
Blees, National Center for Atmospheric Research]
The approach in P4TP is one that recognizes the futility of relying on behavioral modification to
effect full compliance with guidelines of any kind. Look at recycling: Some people have 3 or 4 trash
cans in their kitchen to recycle in a still-not-entirely-effective manner. Most people have one, or two at most. Same with
energy conservation. Many people screw in twisty light bulbs and turn lights out when they leave a room. Yet many people dont do one
or the other of these things, or both, even highly educated people who consider themselves environmentally conscious. If were trying to
save the planet, it behooves us to try to set things up in such a way that even egregiously
irresponsible people wont be harming the environment when they proceed with their daily lives .
And that CAN be done. It might not sit well with those who consider frugality or responsible
behavior or asceticism as virtues, but thats really beside the point. Those are value judgements about which
our biosphere couldnt care less. Do you find rampant consumerism foolish? Me too. But Id rather
that people who dont could pursue their lifestyle in such a way that our planetary health doesnt
suffer because of it. Can that be done? I believe so, and that is the sort of resource revolution that I sketch out in P4TP. We
can still achieve a certain level of energy responsibility by metering electricity, even if the fuel for

the power plants is free, and we should because thatll prevent a lot of profligacy in energy use and
thus prevent us having to build lots more power plants needlessly. But to a great extent such
behavioral modification is difficult in other spheres (like recycling), and thats where technological
solutions are preferable. Likewise with driving: if our cars pollute, we should drive less. If our cars dont pollute, and if acquiring
their fuel doesnt require any sort of environmental insult, should we care? If our cultures are dysfunctional, we can try to
improve them, but if we have the means to end the environmental damage caused by cultural
dysfunction, lets work on that and worry about the dysfunction on a different level . Too often the
dissatisfaction (or even disgust) that those who consider themselves environmentalists feel about what they perceive as their less mature fellow
humans is reflected in a drive toward neo-primitivism, claiming that we MUST diminish our standard of living (however that may be measured)
if we are to avoid environmental catastrophe. They often express a determination to force such changes in the sort of lifestyle of which they
disapprove, whether through legislation, rationing, or other means. It all gets very religion-like, with a disdain for the

unvirtuous. Why not create a world where the environmental impact of personal behavior is
inconsequential, if possible. Lets leave virtue out of it. It certainly doesnt seem like appealing to
personal responsibility works too well anyway. When you get right down to it, are our societies today more dysfunctional
than they ever were? I have my doubts about that. Were evolving as a species. If we can manage to not despoil our habitat
to the point where it becomes unlivable perhaps we can continue the progress . Its pretty discouraging
sometimes, I grant you that. But were all stuck on this ball for a short ride, so we might as well make the best
of it.

Aff --- Capitalism Answers

at: alternative
Alt fails no transition
Kliman, 4 PhD, Professor of Economics at Pace University
(Andrew, Andrew Klimans Writings, Alternatives to Capitalism: What Happens After the Revolution?
http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/)

Have we faced the harsh reality that, unless th[e] inseparability between the dialectics of thought and of revolution does exist,
any country that does succeed in its revolution may retrogress, since the world revolution cannot
occur at one stroke everywhere and world capitalism continues to exist? [Lenins] practice of the dialectic
of thought as well as of revolution underlined his call for a Third International. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1985-86
I. Concretizing the Vision of a New Human Society We

live at a moment in which it is harder than ever to

articulate a liberatory alternative to capitalism . As we all know, the collapse of state-capitalist
regimes that called themselves Communist, as well as the widespread failures of social democracy to remake society,
have given rise to a widespread acceptance of Margaret Thatchers TINA the belief that there is
no alternative. Yet the difficulty in articulating a liberatory alternative is not mostly the product of these events. It is an inheritance from
the past. To what extent has such an alternative ever been articulated? There has been a lot of progress in theory and especially in practice on
the problem of forms of organization but new

organizational forms by themselves are not yet an alternative. A

great many leftists, even revolutionaries, did of course regard nationalized property and the State
Plan, under the control of the vanguard Party, as socialism, or at least as the basis for a
transition to socialism. But even before events refuted this notion, it represented, at best, an
evasion of the problem. It was largely a matter of leftists with authoritarian personalities
subordinating themselves and others to institutions and power with a blind faith that substituted
for thought. How such institutions and such power would result in human liberation was never
made clear. Vague references to transition were used to wave the problem away. Yet as MarxistHumanism has stressed for more than a decade, the anti-Stalinist left is also partly responsible for the crisis in thought. It, too, failed to articulate
a liberatory alternative, offering in place of private- and state-capitalism little more than what Hegel (Science of Logic, Miller trans., pp. 841-42)
called the empty negative a presumed absolute: The impatience that insists merely on getting beyond the determinate and finding itself
immediately in the absolute, has before it as cognition nothing but the empty negative, the abstract infinite; in other words, a presumed absolute,
that is presumed because it is not posited, not grasped; grasped it can only be through the mediation of cognition . The

question that
confronts us nowadays is whether we can do better. Is it possible to make the vision of a new
human society more concrete and determinate than it now is, through the mediation of cognition?
According to a long-standing view in the movement, it is not possible. The character of the new
society can only be concretized by practice alone, in the course of trying to remake society. Yet if
this is true, we are faced with a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape, because
acceptance of TINA is creating barriers in practice. In the perceived absence of an alternative, practical
struggles have proven to be self-limiting at best. They stop short of even trying to remake society
totally and for good reason. As Bertell Ollman has noted (Introduction to Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists,
Routledge, 1998, p. 1), People who believe [that there is no alternative] will put up with almost any
degree of suffering. Why bother to struggle for a change that cannot be? people [need to]
have a good reason for choosing one path into the future rather than another.

Alt doesnt solve the case gotta have a blueprint

Kliman, 4 PhD, Professor of Economics at Pace University
(Andrew, Andrew Klimans Writings, Alternatives to Capitalism: What Happens After the Revolution?
http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/)

Have we faced the harsh reality that, unless th[e] inseparability between the dialectics of thought and of revolution does exist,
any country that does succeed in its revolution may retrogress, since the world revolution cannot
occur at one stroke everywhere and world capitalism continues to exist? [Lenins] practice of the dialectic

of thought as well as of revolution underlined his call for a Third International. Raya Dunayevskaya, Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 1985-86
I. Concretizing the Vision of a New Human Society We

live at a moment in which it is harder than ever to

articulate a liberatory alternative to capitalism . As we all know, the collapse of state-capitalist
regimes that called themselves Communist, as well as the widespread failures of social democracy to remake society,
have given rise to a widespread acceptance of Margaret Thatchers TINA the belief that there is
no alternative. Yet the difficulty in articulating a liberatory alternative is not mostly the product of these events. It is an inheritance from
the past. To what extent has such an alternative ever been articulated? There has been a lot of progress in theory and especially in practice on
the problem of forms of organization but new

organizational forms by themselves are not yet an alternative. A

great many leftists, even revolutionaries, did of course regard nationalized property and the State
Plan, under the control of the vanguard Party, as socialism, or at least as the basis for a
transition to socialism. But even before events refuted this notion, it represented, at best, an
evasion of the problem. It was largely a matter of leftists with authoritarian personalities
subordinating themselves and others to institutions and power with a blind faith that substituted
for thought. How such institutions and such power would result in human liberation was never
made clear. Vague references to transition were used to wave the problem away. Yet as MarxistHumanism has stressed for more than a decade, the anti-Stalinist left is also partly responsible for the crisis in thought. It, too, failed to articulate
a liberatory alternative, offering in place of private- and state-capitalism little more than what Hegel (Science of Logic, Miller trans., pp. 841-42)
called the empty negative a presumed absolute: The impatience that insists merely on getting beyond the determinate and finding itself
immediately in the absolute, has before it as cognition nothing but the empty negative, the abstract infinite; in other words, a presumed absolute,
that is presumed because it is not posited, not grasped; grasped it can only be through the mediation of cognition . The

question that
confronts us nowadays is whether we can do better. Is it possible to make the vision of a new
human society more concrete and determinate than it now is, through the mediation of cognition?
According to a long-standing view in the movement, it is not possible. The character of the new
society can only be concretized by practice alone, in the course of trying to remake society. Yet if
this is true, we are faced with a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape, because
acceptance of TINA is creating barriers in practice. In the perceived absence of an alternative, practical
struggles have proven to be self-limiting at best. They stop short of even trying to remake society
totally and for good reason. As Bertell Ollman has noted (Introduction to Market Socialism: The Debate among Socialists,
Routledge, 1998, p. 1), People who believe [that there is no alternative] will put up with almost any
degree of suffering. Why bother to struggle for a change that cannot be? people [need to]
have a good reason for choosing one path into the future rather than another.

2ac environment
Cap net good for environment property rights
Veer 12 (Pierre-Guy, Independent journalist writing for the Von Mises Institute, 5/2, Cheer for the Environment, Cheer for Capitalism,
http://www.mises.ca/posts/blog/cheer-for-the-environment-cheer-for-capitalism/)
No Ownership, No Responsibility How

can such a negligence have happened? Its simple: no one was the
legitimate owner of the resources (water, air, ground). When a property is state-owned as was the case under
communism government has generally little incentive to sustainably exploit it. In communist
Europe, governments wanted to industrialize their country in order, they hoped, to catch up with
capitalist economies. Objectives were set, and they had to be met no matter what. This included
the use of brown coal, high in sulfur and that creates heavy smoke when burned[4], and questionable
farming methods, which depleted the soil. This lack of vision can also be seen in the public sector of capitalist countries. In the US, the
Department of Defense creates more dangerous waste than the top five chemical product companies put together. In fact, pollution is such that
cleanup costs are estimated at $20 billion. The same goes for agriculture, where Washington encourages overfarming or even farming not adapted
for the environment its in[5]. Capitalism, the Green Solution In

order to solve most of the pollution problems, there

exists a simple solution: laissez-faire capitalism, i.e. make sure property rights and
profitability can be applied. The latter helped Eastern Europe; when communism fell, capitalism made
the countries seek profitable and not just cheap ways to produce, which greatly reduced pollution[6].
As for the former, it proved its effectiveness, notably with the Love Canal[7]. Property rights are also thought of in order to
protect some resources, be it fish[8] or endangered species[9]. Why such efficiency? Because an
owners self-interest is directed towards the maximum profitability of his piece of land. By containing
pollution as Hooker Chemicals did with its canal he keeps away from costly lawsuit for
property violation. At the same time, badly managed pollution can diminish the value of the land, and
therefore profits. Any entrepreneur with a long-term vision and whose property is safe from arbitrary government
decisions thinks about all that in order to protect his investment. One isnt foolish enough to sack ones property! In
conclusion, I have to mention that I agree with environmentalists that it is importance to preserve the environment in order to protect mother
nature and humans. However, I strongly disagree with their means, i.e. government intervention. Considering it very seldom has a long-term
vision, it is the worst thing that can happen. In fact, one could says that most

environmental disasters are, directly or indirectly,

caused by the State, mainly by a lack of clear property rights. Were they clearer, they would let each and everyone of us, out
of self-interest, protect the environment in a better manner. That way, everyones a winner.

1ar environment
And, no environment impact
Norberg, 3 (Johan Norberg, Senior Fellow at Cato Institute, In Defense of Global Capitalism, p. 223)
It is a mistake, then, to believe that growth automatically ruins the environment. And claims that we
would need this or that number of planets for the whole world to attain a Western standard of consumptionthose ecological footprint
calculationsare equally untruthful. Such a claim is usually made by environmentalists, and it is concerned, not so much with emissions and
pollution, as with resources running out if everyone were to live as we do in the affluent world. Clearly,

certain of the raw

materials we use today, in present day quantities, would not suffice for the whole world if
everyone consumed the same things. But that information is just about as interesting as if a prosperous Stone Age man
were to say that, if everyone attained his level of consumption, there would not be enough stone, salt, and furs to go around. Raw
material consumption is not static. With more and more people achieving a high level of
prosperity, we start looking for ways of using other raw materials. Humanity is constantly
improving technology so as to get at raw materials that were previously inaccessible, and we are
attaining a level of prosperity that makes this possible. New innovations make it possible for old raw materials
to be put to better use and for garbage to be turned into new raw materials. A century and a half ago, oil
was just something black and sticky that people preferred not to step in and definitely did not want to find beneath their land. But our interest
in finding better energy sources led to methods being devised for using oil, and today it is one of our prime resources. Sand has never been
all that exciting or precious, but today it is a vital raw material in the most powerful technology of our age, the computer. In the form of

There is a simple market

mechanism that averts shortages . If a certain raw material comes to be in short supply, its
price goes up. This makes everyone more interested in economizing on that resource, in
finding more of it, in reusing it, and in trying to find substitutes for it.
siliconwhich makes up a quarter of the earth's crust it is a key component in computer chips.

Cap solves the environmenthistory is on our side

Bhagwati 4 Economics Professor, Columbia (Jagdish, In Defense of Globalization, p 144-5, AG)
The belief that specific pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, resulting from increased economic activity will rise in urban areas as per capita income
increases depends on two assumptions: that all activities expand uniformly and that pollution per unit output in an activity will not diminish. But
neither assumption is realistic. As income rises, activities that cause more pollution may contract and those that cause less pollution may expand,
so the sulfur dioxide concentration may fall instead of rise. In fact, as

development occurs, economies typically shift from

primary production, which is often pollution intensive, to manufactures, which are often less so, and then to traded services,
which are currently even less pollution-intensive. This natural evolution itself could then reduce the pollution-intensity of
income as development proceeds. Then again, the available technology used, and technology newly invented, may become more environmentfriendly over time. Both phenomena constitute an ongoing, observed process. The shift to environment-friendly technology can occur naturally as
households, for example, become less poor and shift away from indoor cooking with smoke-causing coal-based fires to stoves using fuels that
cause little smoke. 19 But this shift is often a result also of environment-friendly technological innovation prompted by regulation. Thus,
restrictions on allowable fuel efficiency have promoted research by the car firms to produce engines that yield more miles per gallon. But these

regulations are created by increased environmental consciousness, for which the environmental groups can
take credit. And the rise of these environmental groups is, in turn, associated with increased incomes. Also, revelations about
the astonishing environmental degradation in the Soviet Union and its satellites underline how the
absence of democratic feedback and controls is a surefire recipe for environmental neglect. The fact that economic growth
generally promotes democracy, as discussed in Chapter 8, is yet another way in which rising income creates a better environment. In all these
ways, then, increasing incomes can reduce rather than increase pollution. In fact, for several pollutants, empirical studies have found a bellshaped curve: pollution levels first rise with income but then fall with it. 20 The economists Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger, who estimated the
levels of different pollutants such as sulfur dioxide in several cities worldwide, were among the first to show this, estimating that for sulfur
dioxide levels, the peak occurred in their sample at per capita incomes of $5,0006,000. 21 Several historical

examples can also

be adduced: the reduction in smog today compared to what the industrial revolution produced in European cities in the
nineteenth century, and the reduced deforestation of United States compared to a century ago.

2ac resilience
Capitalism is sustainable and resilient
Seabra 12 (Leo, has a background in Communication and Broadcasting and a broad experience
which includes activities in Marketing, Advertising, Sales and Public Relations, 2/27,
Capitalism can drive Sustainability and also innovation,
http://seabraaffairs.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/capitalism-can-drive-sustainability-and-alsoinnovation/)
There are those who say that if the world does not change their habits, even the end of economic
growth, and assuming alternative ways of living, will be a catastrophe. Our lifestyles are unsustainable. Our
expectations of consumption are predatory.Either we change this, or will be chaos. Others

say that the pursuit of unbridled

economic growth and the inclusion of more people in consumption is killing the Earth. We have to
create alternative because economic growth is pointing to the global collapse. What will happen when billions of Chinese decide to adopt the
lifestyle of Americans? Ill disagree if you dont mind They

might be wrong. Completely wrong .. Even very intelligent

In the vast scale of time
(today, decades, not centuries) it is the opposite of what expected, because they start from a false
assumption: the future is the extrapolation of this. But not necessarily be. How do I know?
Looking at history. What story? The history of innovation, this thing generates increases in
productivity, wealth, quality of life in an unimaginable level. It is innovation that will defeat
pessimism as it always did. It was innovation that made life today is incomparably better than at
any other time in human history. And will further improve. Einstein, who was not a stupid person, believed
that capitalism would generate crisis, instability, and growing impoverishment. He said: The economic
people wrongly interpret the implications of what they observe when they lose the perspective of time.

anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the true source of evil. The only way to eliminate this evil, he thought, was to
establish socialism, with the means of production are owned by the company. A centrally controlled economy would adjust the production of
goods and services the needs of people, and would distribute the work that needed to be done among those in a position to do so. This would
guarantee a livelihood to every man, women and children. Each according to his possibilities. To each according to their needs. And

guess
what? What happened was the opposite of what Einstein predicted. Who tried the model he
suggested, impoverished, screwed up. Peter Drucker says that almost of all thinking people of the late
nineteenth century thought that Marx was right: there would be increased exploitation of workers by employers. They
would become poorer, until one day, the thing would explode. Capitalist society was considered inherently
unsustainable. It is more or less the same chat today. Bullshit. Capitalism, with all appropriate
regulations, self-corrects. It is an adaptive system that learns and changes by design. The
design is just for the system to learn and change. There was the opposite of what Einstein
predicted, and held the opposite of what many predict, but the logic that unlike only becomes
evident over time. It wasnt obvious that the workers are those whom would profit from the productivity
gains that the management science has begun to generate by organizing innovations like the
railroad, the telegraph, the telephone .. to increase the scale of production and cheapen things. The
living conditions of workers today are infinitely better than they were in 1900. They got richer,
not poorer .. You do not need to work harder to produce more (as everyone thought), you can work less and produce
more through a mechanism that is only now becoming apparent, and that brilliant people like Caetano Veloso still ignores. The output is
pursuing growth through innovation, growth is not giving up. More of the same will become
unsustainable to the planet, but most of it is not what will happen, will happen more different,
than we do not know what is right. More innovative. Experts, such as Lester Brown, insist on statements like this: if the
Chinese also want to have three cars for every four inhabitants, as in the U.S. today, there will be 1.1 billion cars there in 2030, and there is no
way to build roads unless ends with the whole area used for agriculture. You will need 98 million barrels of oil per day, but the world only
produces about 90 million today, and probably never produce much more. The mistake is to extrapolate todays solutions for the future. We can

how can
we encourage the stream of innovations that will enable the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians,
continue living here for 20 years by exploiting the same resources that we explore today? Of course not. But the other question is:

Africans .. to live so as prosperous as Americans live today? Hey, wake up what can not stop
the engine of innovation is that the free market engenders. This system is self correcting, that is
its beauty. We do not need to do nothing but ensure the conditions for it to work without
distortion. The rest he does himself. It regulates itself.

2ac permutation
Perm do the plan and _______ the alt doesnt solve capitalism the perm is key
Wolfenstein 2k PhD in politics from Princeton, professor of political science at UCLA, PhD in psychoanalysis (Victor,
Inside/outside Nietzsche, p 235-6, AG)
As to the matter of political aims, we

have no choice but to live with the disjunction between the potential
for realizing the project of human emancipation and the recognition that this potential is not going to
be realized any time soon. In the foreseeable future, we are not going to be able to go beyond capitalism.
We cannot hope for the emergence of a society in which the free development of each individual is a condition for the free development of all.
Capitalism is a system of structurally determined inequality; its normal and necessary operations preclude genuine social democracy. This is the
sobering premise of contemporary emancipatory politics. Yet from its inception, capitalism

has combined emancipatory and

oppressive tendencies. We must resist the temptation of one-dimensionalizing it one way or the other.
Putting the point pragmatically, we can hope and work for the realization of progressive policy
aims so long as these do not (unduly?) inhibit the process of capital accumulation or threaten
the power relationships that maintain them. This defines a substantial field for political
action, one in which outcomes are contingent and not determinable in advance. It is an abnegation of political
responsibility not to take advantage of these potentialities, even if social injustices and metabolic
imbalances cannot be altogether eliminated. To carry the argument a bit further, the realization of
progressive political aims depends on collective action, ultimately at national or even
international levels. Local action, vital as it may be, just is not enough. We critical theoristsmust be
prepared for a war on two fronts: against the hegemonic power of capitalist ruling classes, on the one side, and against
sometimes diffuse, sometimes organizationally embodied, ur-fascistic tendencies, on the other. The fissiparous tendency in leftist
politics, sometimes celebrated in postmodern discourse, puts us at a terrible strategic and
tactical disadvantage. The dangers of a dissent-stiffling leftist hegemony, although not a mere phantasy, are far less pressing than the
risks of self-fragmentation and political incoherence. In this regard, the more things change, the more they stay the same: resistance politics must
be both dialectically self-unifying and perspectivally self-differentiating.

2ac sustainability
Capitalism is sustainable no alternative
Rogoff, 12/23/11[Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and was formerly chief economist at the IMF.
Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable?, http://www.namibian.com.na/news/full-story/archive/2011/december/article/is-modern-capitalismsustainable/]
CAMBRIDGE I

am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of
is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable
replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to
todays dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism. Continental European capitalism,
which combines generous health and social benefits with reasonable working hours, long vacation periods, early retirement, and
relatively equal income distributions, would seem to have everything to recommend it except
sustainability. Chinas Darwinian capitalism, with its fierce competition among export firms, a
weak social-safety net, and widespread government intervention, is widely touted as the
inevitable heir to Western capitalism, if only because of Chinas huge size and consistent outsize
growth rate. Yet Chinas economic system is continually evolving. Indeed, it is far from clear how far Chinas
modern capitalism. It

political, economic, and financial structures will continue to transform themselves, and whether China will eventually morph into capitalisms
new exemplar. In any case, China is still encumbered by the usual social, economic, and financial vulnerabilities of a rapidly growing lowerincome country. Perhaps the real

point is that, in the broad sweep of history, all current forms of capitalism
are ultimately transitional. Modern-day capitalism has had an extraordinary run since the start of
the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago, lifting billions of ordinary people out of abject
poverty. Marxism and heavy-handed socialism have disastrous records by comparison. But, as
industrialisation and technological progress spread to Asia (and now to Africa), someday the struggle for subsistence will no longer be a primary
imperative, and contemporary capitalisms numerous flaws may loom larger. First, even the leading capitalist economies have failed to price
public goods such as clean air and water effectively. The failure of efforts to conclude a new global climate-change agreement is symptomatic of
the paralysis. Second, along with great wealth, capitalism has produced extraordinary levels of inequality. The growing gap is partly a simple
byproduct of innovation and entrepreneurship. People do not complain about Steve Jobss success; his contributions are obvious. But this is not
always the case: great wealth enables groups and individuals to buy political power and influence, which in turn helps to generate even more
wealth. Only a few countries Sweden, for example have been able to curtail this vicious circle without causing growth to collapse. A third
problem is the provision and distribution of medical care, a market that fails to satisfy several of the basic requirements necessary for the price
mechanism to produce economic efficiency, beginning with the difficulty that consumers have in assessing the quality of their treatment. The
problem will only get worse: health-care costs as a proportion of income are sure to rise as societies get richer and older, possibly exceeding 30%
of GDP within a few decades. In health care, perhaps more than in any other market, many countries are struggling with the moral dilemma of
how to maintain incentives to produce and consume efficiently without producing unacceptably large disparities in access to care. It is ironic that
modern capitalist societies engage in public campaigns to urge individuals to be more attentive to their health, while fostering an economic
ecosystem that seduces many consumers into an extremely unhealthy diet. According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, 34% of
Americans are obese. Clearly, conventionally measured economic growth which implies higher consumption cannot be an end in itself.
Fourth, todays capitalist systems vastly undervalue the welfare of unborn generations. For most of the era since the Industrial Revolution, this
has not mattered, as the continuing boon of technological advance has trumped short-sighted policies. By and large, each generation has found
itself significantly better off than the last. But, with the worlds population surging above seven billion, and harbingers of resource constraints
becoming ever more apparent, there is no guarantee that this trajectory can be maintained. Financial crises are of course a fifth problem, perhaps
the one that has provoked the most soul-searching of late. In the world of finance, continual technological innovation has not conspicuously
reduced risks, and might well have magnified them. In principle, none

of capitalisms problems is insurmountable, and

economists have offered a variety of market-based solutions. A high global price for carbon would induce firms and
individuals to internalise the cost of their polluting activities. Tax systems can be designed to provide a greater measure of redistribution of
income without necessarily involving crippling distortions, by minimising non-transparent tax expenditures and keeping marginal rates low.
Effective pricing of health care, including the pricing of waiting times, could encourage a better balance between equality and efficiency.
Financial systems could be better regulated, with stricter attention to excessive accumulations of debt. Will capitalism be a victim of its own
success in producing massive wealth? For

now, as fashionable as the topic of capitalisms demise might be,

the possibility seems remote. Nevertheless, as pollution, financial instability, health problems, and inequality continue to grow,
and as political systems remain paralysed, capitalisms future might not seem so secure in a few decades as it seems now.

2ac cap solves war

Cap net decreases warcapitalist peace theory
Harrison 11 (Mark, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of
Birmingham, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, Stanford University, Capitalism at War, Oct 19
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/harrison/papers/capitalism.pdf)
Capitalisms Wars America is the worlds preeminent capitalist power. According to a poll of more than 21,000 citizens of 21 countries in the
second half of 2008, people tend on average to evaluate U.S. foreign policy as inferior to that of their own country in the moral dimension. 4
While this survey does not disaggregate respondents by educational status, many apparently knowledgeable people also seem

to
believe that, in the modern world, most wars are caused by America; this impression is based on my experience
of presenting work on the frequency of wars to academic seminars in several European countries. According to the evidence,
however, these beliefs are mistaken. We are all aware of Americas wars, but they make only a small
contribution to the total. Counting all bilateral conflicts involving at least the show of force from
1870 to 2001, it turns out that the countries that originated them come from all parts of the global
income distribution (Harrison and Wolf 2011). Countries that are richer, measured by GDP per head, such
as America do not tend to start more conflicts, although there is a tendency for countries with larger GDPs to do so.
Ranking countries by the numbers of conflicts they initiated, the United States, with the largest
economy, comes only in second place; third place belongs to China. In first place is Russia (the
USSR between 1917 and 1991). What do capitalist institutions contribute to the empirical patterns in the
data? Erik Gartzke (2007) has re-examined the hypothesis of the democratic peace based on the possibility that, since capitalism
and democracy are highly correlated across countries and time, both democracy and peace
might be products of the same underlying cause, the spread of capitalist institutions. It is a
problem that our historical datasets have measured the spread of capitalist property rights and economic freedoms over
shorter time spans or on fewer dimensions than political variables. For the period from 1950 to 1992, Gartzke uses a measure of external financial
and trade liberalization as most likely to signal robust markets and a laissez faire policy. Countries

that share this attribute

of capitalism above a certain level, he finds, do not fight each other, so there is capitalist
peace as well as democratic peace. Second, economic liberalization (of the less liberalized of the pair of countries)
is a more powerful predictor of bilateral peace than democratization, controlling for the level of
economic development and measures of political affinity.

1ar cap solves war

Cap solves warcauses economic, not military competition
Gartzke 5Former associate prof of pol sci, Columbia. Former associate prof of pol sci,
USCD. PhD in International Relations, Formal/Quantitative Methods from U Iowa (Erik, Future
Depends on Capitalizing on Capitalist Peace, 1 October 2005,
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5133,)
With terrorism achieving "global reach" and conflict raging in Africa and the Middle East, you may have missed a startling fact - we

are
living in remarkably peaceable times. For six decades, developed nations have not fought each other.
France and the United States may chafe, but the resulting conflict pitted french fries against "freedom fries," rather than French soldiers against
U.S. "freedom fighters." Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac had a nasty spat over the EU, but the English aren't going to storm Calais any time soon.
The present peace is unusual. Historically, powerful nations are the most war prone. The conventional wisdom is that
democracy fosters peace but this claim fails scrutiny. It is based on statistical studies that show democracies typically don't fight other
democracies. Yet, the same studies show that democratic nations go to war about as much as other nations overall. And more recent research
makes clear that only the affluent

democracies are less likely to fight each other. Poor democracies behave much like
powerful explanation is emerging from
newer, and older, empirical research - the "capitalist peace." As predicted by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Norman
Angell and others, nations with high levels of economic freedom not only fight each other less, they go to war less
often, period. Economic freedom is a measure of the depth of free market institutions or, put another way, of capitalism. The "democratic
peace" is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and political freedom. Democracy and economic freedom typically co-exist. Thus ,
if economic freedom causes peace, then statistically democracy will also appear to cause peace.
non-democracies when it comes to war and lesser forms of conflict. A more

When democracy and economic freedom are both included in a statistical model, the results reveal that economic freedom is considerably more
potent in encouraging peace than democracy, 50 times more potent, in fact, according to my own research. Economic freedom is highly
statistically significant (at the one-per-cent level). Democracy does not have a measurable impact, while nations with very low levels of economic
freedom are 14 times more prone to conflict than those with very high levels. But, why would free markets cause peace? Capitalism is not only an
immense generator of prosperity; it is also a revolutionary source of economic, social and political change. Wealth no longer arises primarily
through land or control of natural resources. New Kind of Wealth Prosperity

in modern societies is created by market

competition and the efficient production that arises from it. This new kind of wealth is hard for nations to "steal"
through conquest. In days of old, when the English did occasionally storm Calais, nobles dreamed of wealth and power in conquered
lands, while visions of booty danced in the heads of peasant soldiers. Victory in war meant new property. In a free
market economy, war destroys immense wealth for victor and loser alike. Even if capital stock is restored, efficient
production requires property rights and free decisions by market participants that are difficult or impossible to co-ordinate to the victor's
advantage. The

Iraqi war, despite Iraq's immense oil wealth, will not be a money-maker for the United
States. Economic freedom is not a guarantee of peace. Other factors, like ideology or the perceived need for self-defence, can still result in
violence. But, where economic freedom has taken hold, it has made war less likely. Research on the capitalist
peace has profound implications in today's world. Emerging democracies, which have not stabilized the institutions of economic freedom, appear
to be at least as warlike - perhaps more so - than emerging dictatorships. Yet, the United States and other western nations are putting immense
resources into democratization even in nations that lack functioning free markets. This is in part based on the faulty premise of a "democratic
peace." It may also in part be due to public perception. Everyone

approves of democracy, but "capitalism" is often a

dirty word. However, in recent decades, an increasing number of people have rediscovered the economic virtues of the "invisible hand" of
free markets. We now have an additional benefit of economic freedom - international peace. The actual
presence of peace in much of the world sets this era apart from others. The empirical basis for optimistic claims - about either democracy or
capitalism - can be tested and refined. The

way forward is to capitalize on the capitalist peace, to deepen its

roots and extend it to more countries through expanding markets, development, and a common sense of
international purpose. The risk today is that faulty analysis and anti-market activists may distract the developed nations
from this historic opportunity.

at: cap root cause

Capitalisms not the root cause of anything
Larrivee 10 PF ECONOMICS AT MOUNT ST MARYS UNIVERSITY MASTERS
FROM THE HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL AND PHD IN ECONOMICS FROM
WISCONSIN, 10 [JOHN, A FRAMEWORK FOR THE MORAL ANALYSIS OF MARKETS,
10/1, http://www.teacheconomicfreedom.org/files/larrivee-paper-1.pdf]
The Second Focal Point: Moral, Social, and Cultural Issues of Capitalism Logical errors abound in critical
commentary on capitalism. Some critics observe a problem and conclude: I see X in our society.
We have a capitalist economy. Therefore capitalism causes X. They draw their conclusion by looking at a
phenomenon as it appears only in one system. Others merely follow a host of popular theories according to which capitalism is particularly
bad. 6 The solution to such flawed reasoning is to be comprehensive, to look at the good and bad , in
market and non-market systems. Thus the following section considers a number of issuesgreed, selfishness and human relationships,
honesty and truth, alienation and work satisfaction, moral decay, and religious participationthat have often been associated with
capitalism, but have also been problematic in other systems and usually in more extreme form . I
conclude with some evidence for the view that markets foster (at least some) virtues rather than undermining them. My purpose is not to
smear communism or to make the simplistic argument that capitalism isnt so bad because other systems have problems too. The

critical point is that certain people thought various social ills resulted from capitalism, and on
this basis they took action to establish alternative economic systems to solve the problems they
had identified. That they failed to solve the problems , and in fact exacerbated them while also
creating new problems, implies that capitalism itself wasnt the cause of the problems in the first
place, at least not to the degree theorized.

Cap isnt the root cause of war

MacKenzie 3prof of economics at Coast Guard Academy. Former prof of economics at Kean. BA in Economics and
Management Science at Kean. MA in Economics from U Connecticut. PhD in economics from George mason (DW, Does Capitalism Require
War?, 7 April 2003, http://mises.org/story/1201,)
Perhaps the oddest aspect of these various, but similar, claims is that their proponents appeal so often to historical examples. They often

claim that history shows how capitalism is imperialistic and warlike or at least benefits from war. Capitalism supposedly
needs a boost from some war spending from time to time, and history shows this. Robert Higgs demonstrated that the wartime
prosperity during the Second World War was illusory[i]. This should come to no surprise to those who lived through
the deprivations of wartime rationing. We do not need wars for prosperity, but does capitalism breed war and imperialism anyway? History is
rife with examples of imperialism. The Romans, Alexander, and many others of the ancient world waged imperialistic wars. The Incan
Empire and the empire of Ancient China stand as examples of the universal character of imperialism. Who could possibly claim that
imperialism grew out of the prosperity of these ancient civilizations? Imperialism precedes
modern industrial capitalism by many centuries. Uneven wealth distribution or underconsumption under capitalism
obviously did not cause these instances of imperialism. Of course, this fact does not prove that modern capitalism
lacks its own imperialistic tendencies. The notion that income gets underspent or maldistributed lies at the heart of most claims that capitalism
either needs or produces imperialistic wars. As J.B. Say argued, supply creates its own demand through payments to factors of production.
Demand Side economists Hobson and Keynes argued that there would be too little consumption and too little investment for continuous full
employment. We save too much to have peace and prosperity. The difficulty we face is not in oversaving, but in underestimating the workings of
markets and the desires of consumers. Doomsayers have been downplaying consumer demand for ages. As demand side economist J.K. Galbraith
claimed, we live in an affluent society, where most private demands have been met. Of course, Hobson made the same claim much earlier. Earlier
and stranger still, mercantilists claimed that 'wasteful acts' such as tea drinking, gathering at alehouses, taking snuff, and the wearing of ribbons
were unnecessary luxuries that detracted from productive endeavors. The prognostications of esteemed opponents of capitalism have consistently
failed to predict consumer demand. Today, consumers consume at levels that few long ago could have imagined possible. There is no reason to
doubt that consumers will continue to press for ever higher levels of consumption. Though it is only a movie, Brewster's Millions illustrates how
creative people can be at spending money. People who do actually inherit, win, or earn large sums of money have little trouble spending it.
Indeed, wealthy individuals usually have more trouble holding on to their fortunes than in finding ways to spend them. We are never going to run
out of ways to spend money. Many of the complaints about capitalism center on how people save too much. One should remember that there
really is no such thing as saving. Consumers defer consumption to the future only. As economist Eugen Bhm-Bawerk demonstrated, people save
according to time preference. Savings diverts resources into capital formation. This increases future production. Interest enhanced savings then
can purchase these goods as some consumers cease to defer their consumption. Keynes' claim that animal spirits drive investment has no rational

basis. Consumer preferences are the basis for investment. Investors forecast future consumer demand. Interest rates convey knowledge of these
demands. The intertemporal coordination of production through capital markets and interest rates is not a simple matter. But Keynes' marginal
propensities to save and Hobson's concentration of wealth arguments fail to account for the real determinants of production through time. Say's
Law of Markets holds precisely because people always want a better life for themselves and those close to them. Falling interest rates deter
saving and increase investment. Rising interest rates induce saving and deter investment. This simple logic of supply and demand derives from a
quite basic notion of self interest. Keynes denied that the world worked this way. Instead, he claimed that bond holders hoard money outside of
the banking system, investment periodically collapses from 'the dark forces of time and uncertainty, and consumers save income in a mechanical
fashion according to marginal propensities to save. None of these propositions hold up to scrutiny, either deductive or empirical. Speculators do
not hoard cash outside of banks. To do this means a loss of interest on assets. People do move assets from one part of the financial system to
another. This does not cause deficient aggregate demand. Most money exists in the banking system, and is always available for lending. In fact,
the advent of e-banking makes such a practice even less sensible. Why hoard cash when you can move money around with your computer? It is
common knowledge that people save for homes, education, and other expensive items, not because they have some innate urge to squirrel some
portion of their income away. This renders half of the market for credit rational. Investors do in fact calculate rates of return on investment. This
is not a simple matter. Investment entails some speculation. Long term investment projects entail some uncertainty, but investors who want to
actually reap profits will estimate the returns on investment using the best available data. Keynes feared that the dark forces of time and
uncertainty could scare investors. This possibility, he thought, called for government intervention. However, government intervention (especially
warfare) generally serves to increase uncertainty. Private markets have enough uncertainties without throwing politics into the fray. The vagaries
of political intervention serve only to darken an already uncertain future. Capital markets are best left to capitalists. Nor is capital not extracted
surplus value. It comes not from exploitation. It is simply a matter of people valuing their future wellbeing. Capitalists will hire workers up to the
point where the discounted marginal product of their labor equals the wage rate. To do otherwise would mean a loss of potential profit. Since
workers earn the marginal product of labor and capital derives from deferred consumption, Marxist arguments about reserve armies of the
unemployed and surplus extraction fail. It is quite odd to worry about capitalists oversaving when many complain about how the savings rate in
the U.S. is too low. Why does the U.S., as the world's 'greatest capitalist/imperialist power', attract so much foreign investment? Many Americans
worry about America's international accounts. Fears about foreigners buying up America are unfounded, but not because this does not happen.
America does have a relatively low national savings rate. It does attract much foreign investment, precisely because it has relatively secure
property rights. Indeed, much of the third world suffers from too little investment. The claims of Marxists, and Hobson, directly contradict the
historical record. Sound theory tells us that it should. The Marxist claim that capitalists must find investments overseas fails miserably. Larry
Kudlow has put his own spin on the false connection between capitalism and war. We need the War as shock therapy to get the economy on its
feet. Kudlow also endorses massive airline subsidies as a means of restoring economic prosperity. Kudlow and Krugman both endorse the alleged
destructive creation of warfare and terrorism. Kudlow has rechristened the Broken Window fallacy the Broken Window principle. Kudlow claims
that may lose money and wealth in one way, but we gain it back many time over when the rebuilding is done. Kudlow and Krugman have quite
an affinity for deficits. Krugman sees debt as a sponge to absorb excess saving. Kudlow see debt as a short term nuisance that we can dispel by
maximizing growth. One would think that such famous economists would realize that competition does work to achieve the goal of optimum
growth based on time preference, but this is not the case. While these economists have expressed their belief in writing, they could do more. If the
destruction of assets leads to increased prosperity, then they should teach this principle by example. Kudlow and Krugman could, for instance,
help build the economy by demolishing their own private homes. This would have the immediate effect of stimulating demand for demolition
experts, and the longer term affect of stimulating the demand for construction workers. They can create additional wealth by financing the
reconstruction of their homes through debt. By borrowing funds, they draw idle resources into use and stimulate financial activity. Of course, they
would both initially lose wealth in one way. But if their thinking is sound, they will gain it back many times over as they rebuild. The truth is that
their beliefs are fallacious. Bastiat demonstrated the absurdity of destructive creation in his original explanation of the opportunity costs from
repairing broken windows. Kudlow is quite clear about his intentions. He wants to grow the economy to finance the war. As Kudlow told some
students, "The trick here is to grow the economy and let the economic growth raise the revenue for the war effort"[ii]. Kudlow also praises the
Reagan Administration for growing the economy to fund national defense. Here Kudlow's attempts to give economic advice cease completely.
His argument here is not that capitalism needs a shot in the arm. It is that resources should be redirected towards ends that he sees fit. Kudlow is a
war hawk who, obviously, cannot fund this or any war personally. He instead favors using the state to tax others to fund what he wants, but
cannot afford. He seems to think that his values matter more than any other's. Why should anyone else agree with this? Kudlow tarnishes the
image of laissez faire economics by parading his faulty reasoning and his claims that his wants should reign supreme as a pro-market stance.
Unfortunately, it is sometimes necessary to defend capitalism from alleged advocates of liberty, who employ false dogmas in pursuit of their own
militaristic desires. Capitalism

neither requires nor promotes imperialist expansion. Capitalism did not

create imperialism or warfare. Warlike societies predate societies with secure private property. The idea that inequity or underspending
give rise to militarism lacks any rational basis. Imperialistic tendencies exist due to ethnic and nationalistic
bigotries, and the want for power. Prosperity depends upon our ability to prevent destructive acts. The dogma
of destructive creation fails as a silver lining to the cloud of warfare. Destructive acts entail real costs that diminish available opportunities. The
idea that we need to find work for idle hands in capitalism at best leads to a kind of Sisyphus economy where unproductive industries garner
subsidies from productive people. At worst, it serves as a supporting argument for war. The more recent versions of the false charges against
capitalism do nothing to invalidate two simple facts. Capitalism

generates prosperity by creating new products. War inflicts

poverty by destroying existing wealth. There is no sound reason to think otherwise.

2ac at ethics
And, that means the plan and the perm are the most moral option
Crouch, 12 [Sustainability, Neoliberalism, and the Moral Quality of Capitalism Colin Crouch
Professor Emeritus, University of Warwick, UK, Business & Professional Ethics Journal, 31:2,
2012 pp. 363374 DOI: 10.5840/bpej201231218]
To ask such a question as whether capitalism might have become evil implies that capitalism
might also be moral, and that takes us to the heart of a deep, long-running debate . For orthodox economic
theory, a firm has neither the duty nor the right to decide what is moral behaviour (Jensen 2001; Sternberg 2000). Its task is to maximize profits.
If it tries to do this in ways that morally offends customers, it will lose business and therefore have to change its behaviour if it wants to achieve
its goal. In this way, morality would be imposed in the market on firms, not hierarchically by them. If not many customers are interested in

Capitalism by itself is not capable of being either moral or evil. It

responds to the society around it, and cannot display a higher morality than that society.
Furthermore, it is not democratic if an economic system imposes certain moral values on people ,
as state socialism used to do . It is better, it can be argued, if the economy enables us to express our
morality, then so be it.

own moral preferencesor not, if we have noneand the capitalist market does this better
than any other system . An amoral but open, liberal capitalism is thus seen as the best vehicle for
morality in complex, multi-cultural, secularized societies in which many people would like to act in an ethical way,
many do not care, and where there is in any case diversity and disagreement over how ethical behaviour is to be defined.