1AC

Plan
Plan: The United Stated federal government should substantially increase its
cooperation on emissions standards and comparison, emissions trading
systems, and nuclear fusion technology development with the Peoples
Republic of China, including financing and lifting of regulations.
 Warming
Warming is real, anthropogenic, and presents clear danger Newest evidence
proves consensus.
Griffin 15 David, Claremont philosophy professor The climate is ruined. So can civilization
even survive?, 4-14, http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/14/opinion/co2-crisis-griffin/

Although most of us worry about other things, climate scientists have become increasingly worried about the survival of
civilization. For example, Lonnie Thompson, who received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 2010, said that virtually all climatologists "are
now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization." Informed
journalists share this concern. The climate crisis "threatens the survival of our civilization," said Pulitzer Prize-

winner Ross Gelbspan. Mark Hertsgaard agrees , saying that the continuation of global
warming "would create planetary conditions all but certains to end civilization as we know
it." These scientists and journalists, moreover, are worried not only about the distant future but about the condition of the planet for their own children and grandchildren. James Hansen, often considered the
world's leading climate scientist, entitled his book "Storms of My Grandchildren." The threat to civilization comes primarily from the increase

of the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere , due largely to the burning of fossil fuels. Before the rise of the industrial age, CO2
constituted only 275 ppm (parts per million) of the atmosphere. But it is now above 400 and rising about 2.5 ppm per year. Because of the CO2 increase, the planet's

average temperature has increased 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit). Although this
increase may not seem much, it has already brought about serious changes. The idea that we will be safe from "dangerous
climate change" if we do not exceed a temperature rise of 2C (3.6F) has been widely accepted. But many informed people have rejected this assumption. In the opinion of journalist-turned-activist Bill McKibben,
"the one degree we've raised the temperature already has melted the Arctic, so we're fools to find out what two will do." His warning is supported by James Hansen, who declared that "a target of two degrees

The burning of coal, oil, and natural gas has made the planet warmer
(Celsius) is actually a prescription for long-term disaster."

than it had been since the rise of civilization 10,000 years ago. Civilization was made possible by
the emergence about 12,000 years ago of the "Holocene" epoch, which turned out to be the
Goldilocks zone - not too hot, not too cold. But now, says physicist Stefan Rahmstorf, "We are catapulting ourselves way out of the Holocene." This
catapult is dangerous, because we have no evidence civilization can long survive with
significantly higher temperatures. And yet, the world is on a trajectory that would lead to an increase of 4C (7F) in this century. In the opinion of many scientists and the
World Bank, this could happen as early as the 2060s. What would "a 4C world" be like? According to Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (at the University of East Anglia), "during

about 10% of the

New York's summer heat waves the warmest days would be around 10-12C (18-21.6F) hotter [than today's]." Moreover, he has said, above an increase of 4C only

human population will survive. Believe it or not, some scientists consider Anderson overly optimistic.
The main reason for pessimism is the fear that the planet's temperature may be close to a tipping
point that would initiate a "low-end runaway greenhouse," involving "out-of-control amplifying
feedbacks." This condition would result, says Hansen, if all fossil fuels are burned (which is the intention of all fossil-fuel corporations and many governments). This result
"would make most of the planet uninhabitable by humans." Moreover, many scientists
believe that runaway global warming could occur much more quickly, because the rising
temperature caused by CO2 could release massive amounts of methane (CH4), which is, during
its first 20 years, 86 times more powerful than CO2 . Warmer weather induces this release from carbon that has been stored in methane hydrates, in which
enormous amounts of carbon -- four times as much as that emitted from fossil fuels since 1850 -- has been frozen in the Arctic's permafrost. And yet now the Arctic's temperature is warmer than it had been for
120,000 years -- in other words, more than 10 times longer than civilization has existed. According to Joe Romm, a physicist who created the Climate Progress website, methane release from thawing permafrost in
the Arctic "is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle." The amplifying feedback works like this: The warmer temperature releases millions of tons of methane, which then further raise the

The resulting threat of runaway global warming may not be merely

temperature, which in turn releases more methane.

theoretical. Scientists have long been convinced that methane was central to the fastest period of
global warming in geological history, which occurred 55 million years ago. Now a group of
scientists have accumulated evidence that methane was also central to the greatest extinction of
life thus far: the end-Permian extinction about 252 million years ago. Worse yet, whereas it was previously thought that significant
amounts of permafrost would not melt, releasing its methane, until the planet's temperature has risen several degrees Celsius, recent studies indicate that a rise of 1.5 degrees would be enough to start the melting.

What can be done then? Given the failure of political leaders to deal with the CO2 problem, it is
now too late to prevent terrible developments. But it may -- just may -- be possible to keep
global warming from bringing about the destruction of civilization. To have a chance, we
must, as Hansen says, do everything possible to "keep climate close to the Holocene range"
-- which means, mobilize the whole world to replace dirty energy with clean as soon as
possible.

Global climate action is locked in a pattern of distrust and shallow

cooperation---incremental, bilateral progress is the only way to build the trust
necessary for global cooperation
David Roberts 16, writer on energy and climate change for Vox, formerly of Grist, citing
Robert Keohane and David Victor, The argument for incrementalism in international climate
negotiations, 5/26/16, http://www.vox.com/2016/5/26/11766252/international-climate-
incrementalism
[Table omitted]
But most people (some more grudgingly and despairingly than others) are coming around to the realization that a binding global treaty just
isn't in the cards, and the quest to achieve it is standing in the way of more small-scale, concrete
steps. The clearest articulation I've seen of the latter school of thought was just published in Nature Climate Change by Robert Keohane of Princeton
and David Victor of UC San Diego, in a paper entitled "Cooperation and discord in global climate policy." It's part of a larger package of papers on "the
role of society in energy transitions," which is an overdue focus for academic attention. There's tons of great stuff in it, but it's all behind a paywall, which
is really a damn shame. So I'll just briefly summarize the Keohane-Victor argument. The structure of climate change resists collective action
Climate change is a global commons problem. The costs of action are localized, but the benefits
accrue globally, over long time periods. A safe climate is a public good, and "public goods are typically underprovided in the
absence of a governing authority," write Keohane and Victor, "because each actor has an incentive to free-ride to gain a beneficial climate while failing
to pay its share." Because of this malign incentive structure, it
has proven extremely difficult to achieve the deep
cooperation that will be required to solve the problem. To get beyond shallow coordination requires more trust,
reciprocity, and international governing authority than currently exists. Coordination is easy, cooperation is hard
Keohane and Victor's analysis turns on a distinction between coordination and cooperation. They explain the distinction this way: Collaboration can take
many forms along a continuum from coordination to cooperation. In situations of coordination, agreements are self-enforcing, that is, once an agreement
has been made, the parties do not have incentives to defect from it. For instance, once everyone in the United States understands that Americans drive on
the right-hand side of the road, no rational driver has an incentive to drive on the left, and vice versa for drivers in the United Kingdom.
Cooperation, by contrast, is not self-enforcing. In the famous game of Prisoners Dilemma, for instance, each player has an incentive
to confess, implicating his partner in crime in return for a lighter sentence. The deep coordination needed between states to provide public goods has a
similar structure. Moving from coordination to cooperation requires relationships of trust and institutions
that can counter this incentive to free-ride, through rewards or punishments. And for a global public good like
climate mitigation, the problem is particularly severe , since there are dozens of big emitters, which all have strong domestic
incentives to free-ride. Success is only possible with near-universal cooperation, and there is, as yet, no central authority for global
governance. (The UNFCCC itself has virtually no power to sanction or reward its members.) Keohane and Victor offer this simple matrix to
divide international agreements into four types, based on two variables. One is whether the level of agreement is self-reinforcing (coordination) or not
(cooperation). The other is the level of "joint gains" that could potentially be achieved through agreements. Here's a chart: They run through examples of
international agreements that fit in all four boxes. For our purposes, the problem is that international
climate action has long been
stuck in the lower left box because collaboration is relatively shallow, only a modest amount of joint gains are being achieved.
Last year's US-China climate accord and the Paris agreement are good examples; both amount to
codifying their respective members' national interests . There's little to push countries beyond
their immediate interests, so the joint gains (in terms of climate mitigation) remain far lower than what's
possible. International climate change agreements need to be lifted to the upper-left box. As an example of international
collaboration that has made that ascent, Keohane and Victor cite trade. More open trade began with
smaller, bi- and multi-lateral agreements to lower or remove the worst, costliest tariffs, actions clearly in participating countries'
interests. As countries worked together and developed reciprocal relationships, they built up the trust needed to create
institutions like the WTO, which provided a level of central governance that enabled greater cooperation and greater joint gains. In
other words, it was not enough merely to agree on the abstract desirability of more trade. There was a long,
deliberate process of ratcheting up, building trust, and forming institutions.
China has a strong commitment to emissions trading now US coop sends an
international signal builds foundation for strong multilateral regulations
Jeff Swartz 16, International Policy Director, International Emissions Trading Association,
Chinas National Emissions Trading System: Implications for Carbon Markets and Trade,
March 2016,
http://www.ieta.org/resources/China/Chinas_National_ETS_Implications_for_Carbon_Markets_a
nd_Trade_ICTSD_March2016_Jeff_Swartz.pdf
Chinas ETS pilots and its commitment to a national ETS has sent a political signal that has the
potential to create a dynamic towards an increasing uptake of ETSs, which, in turn, could enhance
cooperation on carbon pricing through linkages and the development of a plurilateral carbon market
club. Whether or not China would link its ETS or join such a club will become clear over time, although the national ETS is only likely to move from
free allocation to auctioning. Before this policy change takes place, it will be difficult to envisage any other ETS linking with Chinas as there will likely
be little demand for extra allowances during the free allocation period given that the NDRC is expected to generously issue allowances to operators
during the first or second phases of the ETS, and it is rather unlikely that China would increase its carbon intensity reduction target before 2020. Chinas
non-participation in a plurilateral carbon market would not, however, stop other countries from forming one. Several INDCs Canada, Mexico, New
Zealand, Switzerland, or South Korea, amongst others have firmly stated that they need access to international market mechanisms in order to achieve
their respective emission reduction targets. These countries are the likely candidates for creating a plurilateral carbon market, or a club, and they will do
so regardless of policy outcomes from China. Moreover, 18 countries led by New Zealand and including Canada, the US, Australia, Korea, and Japan,
signed a ministerial declaration on carbon markets at COP 21.53 This declaration features a pledge by countries to work together to quickly develop
standards and guidelines for international market mechanisms to support the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC. The countries who signed up to this
declaration would be the likely candidates to form a plurilateral carbon market club and to develop standards and norms for carbon market cooperation in
the future. These countries may decide that in order for them to fulfil the targets they set out in their respective INDCs, it
is easier to agree on
provisions for accounting, offset use, and allowance transfers outside of the UNFCCC process
rather than within it. They could, for example, agree on mutual rules for international carbon trading
which could then feed into the UNFCCC process on similar rules under Article 6 of the Paris
Agreement. Considering the nature of the countries who signed up to the Declaration they are mostly members of the OECD and have export-driven
economies the rules
and standards they would set for international carbon markets in a plurilateral trading
club might be of a higher calibre than what could be established under the UNFCCC with over 190
countries as part of the multilateral decisionmaking process. Moreover, the US and Canada, as signatories of this declaration,
would bring real-world experience to the discussion from their cross-border carbon trading cooperation between California and Qubec. China was not
one of the declarations signatories, and does not seem to be posturing to the wider group of countries with carbon markets that intends to lead on carbon
market cooperation in the pre-2020 period. However, Chinas policy officials responsible for the implementation of the national ETS have expressed an
interest in potential linkage with South Korea over recent months.54 China did not take a vocal lead on the development of Article 6 at COP 21, and
instead used its pavilion within the COP grounds to highlight the experiences and challenges from its ETS pilots and what is to come next under the
national ETS. It is quite clear from the set-up of Chinas ETS that the government wants to perfect emissions trading in China before looking abroad for
any type of cooperation. China should weigh cautiously joining any plurilateral trading club until it has undergone at least one compliance phase and all
aspects of its ETS have been properly tested and evaluated by its ETS regulator. It is difficult to foresee whether China would be a net seller or buyer in
a carbon trading club, but its intensity target will be a factor in any scenario in which China participates. If Chinese firms subject to an intensity target buy
less expensive units from an international club, it could lead to a scenario where production costs are then less expensive in China and unnecessary
production increases in China would occur. Cheaper units from a club could be used for compliance by firms in China and, therefore, it would cost them
less to comply with the overall target and emissions may actually grow. This would undermine the effectiveness of reducing emissions through the ETS.
If firms from China sell Chinese-issued units into a club, there could be unforeseen variations in the level of Chinese units made available depending on
the level of economic activity in China at any given time. This could lead to a club whereby its members with absolute caps are subject to a higher degree
of price volatility compared to their domestic systems. A carbon market club would need a fungible trading unit in order to function effectively.
However, if it was to allow Chinas intensity based ETS to participate, it might have to impose trading restrictions on the number of units that could be
imported into or exported from the club by China, or establish an exchange-rate mechanism specifically for China or other members with intensity-based
targets. With that in mind, China
might explore linking first with one of its strongest trading partners or
joining a smaller regional club where it also has well-established economic and trading ties.
This could reduce the risks that may emerge when Chinese firms were to be market price makers
or price takers. Any potential ETS linkage by China would first require that its carbon market is designed in a way so that it can be harmonised
with other systems in the future. The EU has invested in both the Chinese and Korean ETSs through EuropeAid projects that aim to ensure lessons
learned from the EU ETS are applied in both systems.55 This project, along with policy officials in China and Korea steadfastly ensuring that their
systems are designed so they are linking ready in the future, could go a long way to ensuring a future carbon market club does emerge.
Cooperation is vital to develop and link emissions trading schemes---that
creates a cascade effect and resolves equity concerns
Joseph Aldy 16, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government,
Bilateral Cooperation between China and the United States: Facilitating Progress on Climate-
Change Policy, February 2016, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/harvard-nscs-paper-
final-160224.pdf
[ETS = Emissions Trading Scheme]
One approach to bilateral collaboration is to mutually review the lessons learned from emissions
trading in both countries and in other parts of the world, as a guide to further developing domestic ETSs.
Among the important lessons that might usefully be studied: Interaction of various policies (in the same or
overlapping jurisdictions) that reduce GHG emissionseither directly or indirectlymay be problematic for ETS
performance. One example is Californias Low Carbon Fuel Standard in the presence of the California ETS. If such complementary policies
affect emitters with obligations under the ETS, they provide no additional environmental benefit (allowances will simply be re-allocated by the market),
they depress allowance prices (by reducing demand), drive up aggregate abatement costs (by introducing abatement-cost heterogeneity), and can
constrain technological innovation in the longer term, as a result of depressed prices (Goulder and Stavins, 2011). Policy regarding offsets
must be considered carefully. Offsets can reduce compliance costs, but limiting their geographic origin so that emissions reduction
occurs only within the ETS jurisdiction makes little sense with regard to climate change, which is a global commons problem. On the other hand, co-
benefitsespecially from reduced use of coal for generating electricityare indeed geographically specific. There are other issues to be considered with
offsets, as well, beyond the scope of this paperincluding inherent verification problems in offset systems. In general, the narrower the
geographic and sectoral coverage of an ETS, the more leakage there will be, where leakage refers to the
migration of emitters outside the jurisdiction to seek lower production costs. (With regard to electricity markets, such migration may be virtual, as
injurisdiction utilities purchase potentially lower-cost power from outside the jurisdiction.)22. Upstream systems with broad
geographic coverage will experience relatively less leakage . An advantage that emissions trading systems have over
carbon tax systems is that the initial allocation of allowances may be used to secure political support for the system and otherwise enhance equity
(because allowances have cash value). This can be accomplished without adversely affecting the environmental performance of the system, because the
manner in which allowances are initially allocated will not typically affect the incentives facing firms with mitigation obligations (Hahn and Stavins,
2011); these incentives depend on marginal abatement costs, which are not affected by the initial allocation of allowances. Finally, leakage and
competitiveness concerns may be addressed in an emissions trading system by distributing free allowances in proportion to firms output or production (a
so-called updating, output-based allocation system, used in the California ETS, as noted above). Exchanging
insights into these and other
lessons is
a major way that China and the United States can continue to cooperate with regard to the
development of emissions trading. As a next step in identifying opportunities for cooperation, it is useful to examine how the
political and economic context in China and the United States differs. A first significant difference lies in the policy-
making processes in the two countries. In the United States, the political parties have polarized perspectives on climate change, and carbon markets have
emerged principally in the more liberal states, in the absence of a national framework. National climate policy can be affected by the results of
presidential and congressional elections. In contrast, in China, consensus on policy making is reached at different levels of government. Once consensus
is built, political will can be translated into policies that are then implemented by ministries and various levels of governments. Since the development of
a national carbon emissions trading market was included in the Twelfth Five Year Plan, which is Chinas highest-level national plan and one that the
Chinese government takes seriously, stakeholders can have reasonable confidence that the central government will launch its national ETS in the coming
years. Second, China
and the United States offer different socioeconomic contexts for the implementation
of climate policy. Compared to the United States, which has achieved a relatively homogeneous state of economic development, different
regions of China are at very different stages of economic development . While the coastal provinces increasingly
face a problem of excess production capacity, the inland provinces are still in the process of industrialization and rapid urbanization. Thus, a national cap-
and-trade scheme for China will largely be shaped by centrallocal interactions in the allocation of emission allowances to different provinces, taking into
consideration the uneven social and economic development status of these provinces. How to avoid leakage and balance economic growth and emissions
reductions in the less developed provinces presents a major challenge in the design of national ETS for China. Third,
the U.S. economy is
a mature market economy with comprehensive rules, regulations, and mechanisms for resolving conflicts.
In contrast, China has a market economy with many features remaining from the central planning era. A number of these features could create challenges
for a national ETS, which relies on well-functioning market mechanisms. As an example, researchers have pointed to potential problems associated with
Chinas highly regulated electricity market. Regulated electricity prices could mean the cost of carbon emissions in electricity production will not be
passed through to electricity consumers in a timely manner. However, in 2015 the government announced a plan to deepen electricity-system reform that
would introduce competition and allow market-based electricity-price setting in non-public sectors. How to make a market-based solution work in an
environment with many non-market features remains an important question for scholars and policy makers. Given their similarities and differences,
substantial opportunities for ChinaU.S. cooperation exist at both the micro and macro levels.
China has strong political will and the ability to quickly put that will into action, but lacks experience, institutional
capacity, and research and technical support from academia. The United States can help China overcome
these deficits by collaborating on the design of a national trading system, including detailed rules to
handle issues such as allowance allocation, entry and exit from the ETS, price ceilings and floors, and allowance banking and borrowing. China
also needs to improve its market environment at the macro level and reform policies that prevent market
mechanisms from functioning as intended. Close communication between scholars in the two countries can also help China build its
research capacity in a field that has been unfamiliar to many Chinese academics until recently. Other forms of collaborationfor
example, to accelerate the transfer of low-carbon technologies and expertise can help Chinese enterprises comply
with new climate policies. (There has been considerable collaboration between the two countries on energy-technology innovation in the past; see
bibliography at the end of this paper.) Meanwhile, quick
action by China to launch regional and national ETS
programs can help motivate the United States to initiate more cap-and-trade systems and speed
progress toward a more comprehensive national approach to climate mitigation . There has already been considerable
collaboration between the state of California and the various Chinese jurisdictions that are implementing the pilot ETSs discussed in the previous section,
as well as some interaction between the national NDRC and California.23 This collaboration has been useful, given that there
are a number of
similarities between the ETSs in China and the U nited States. The programs in both countries have
shaped initial carbon markets and achieved certain policy goals, but are also imperfect in some
respects. In both countries, issues have emerged with respect to specific design features and impacts (e.g., in terms of leakage, competitiveness, and
barriers to linkage). Finally, an
important area for longer-term ChinaU.S. cooperation is direct linkage
that is, establishing
trading connections between different national and sub-national policy systems
that allow emission reduction efforts to be recognized and redistributed across systems. Linkage brings
several potential benefits. It can reduce abatement costs across linked regions by allowing regions with higher abatement costs to take advantage of
abatement opportunities in regions with lower costs. By expanding the geographic scope of an emissions trading system, linkage can also effectively
reduce the influence of local market power in carbon markets and mitigate price volatility. Finallyby creating opportunities for regions with lower-cost
abatement opportunities to benefit from investment from higher-cost regions linkagecan advance the goal of distributional
equity, as exemplified by the UNFCCCs principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, without sacrificing cost-
effectiveness. However, effective linkage also requires coordination on a number of key issues, such as the
definition of key terms and standards and procedures for emissions accounting.24

The plan solves warming the U.S. and China are the top emitters and
further coop drives down costs of global renewables
Li 14 MA in Global Studies @ U Denver, Int'l Affairs Coordinator @ UN (Xiaoyu, "China-US
Cooperation: Key to the Global Future," China Institute of International
Studies,http://www.ciis.org.cn/english/2014-01/13/content_6606656.htm)

Cooperation on climate change mitigation, adaptation, and consequence management. China-US

cooperation will be increasingly critical to the global response to climate change . New
scientific studies warn that the worst-case scenarios for climate change impacts are the most
likely outcomes. Scientific assessments also maintain that anthropomorphic climate change is partly
responsible for extreme weather events that the world is already experiencing at an increasing rate, from the floods
in Pakistan and the heat wave in Russia to the melting glaciers and ice sheets and the superstorm Sandy
that inflicted unprecedented destruction on New York and New Jersey. It is highly likely that
global climate change will be a key issue in the coming two decades as the world faces
increasing climate-induced humanitarian disasters and infrastructure destruction requiring
immediate and expensive relief as well as costly, long-term adaptation. Climate change likely will increase social and political
instability in many areas of the world, including emerging economies and developed countries. It also will likely renew political
pressure for emissions reductions, especially by China and the United States, the worlds two biggest emitters. China-US
cooperation in all these areas will be critical to whether the world cooperates and how effective
any cooperation is in responding to the potentially existential threat posed by global climate
change. The two countries also can build on decades of bilateral cooperation on energy and
environment to seize opportunities for lucrative joint energy technology development that
would substantially benefit Chinese and US businesses as well as lower costs and widely
disseminate clean energy technologies.
Warming causes extinction---triggers tipping points and positive feedbacks
which make the planet uninhabitable
Naomi Klein 14, award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, former Miliband Fellow at
the London School of Economics, member of the board of directors of 350.org, This Changes
Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, pp. 12-14
In a 2012 report, the World Bank laid out the gamble implied by that target. As global warming approaches and
exceeds 2-degrees Celsius, there is a risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements. Examples
include the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale Amazon
dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods .
This would further add to 21st-century global warming and impact entire continents. In other words, once we allow temperatures to
climb past a certain point, where the mercury stops is not in our control. But the bigger problemand the reason Copenhagen caused
such great despairis that because governments did not agree to binding targets, they are free to pretty much ignore their
commitments. Which is precisely what is happening. Indeed, emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something radical changes
within our economic structure, 2 degrees now looks like a utopian dream. And its not just environmentalists who are raising the
alarm. The World Bank also warned when it released its report that were
on track to a 4-C warmer world [by centurys
end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and
biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise. And the report cautioned that, there is also no certainty
that adaptation to a 4-C world is possible. Kevin Anderson, former director (now deputy director) of the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change, which has quickly established itself as one of the U.Ks premier climate research institutions, is even
blunter; he says 4 degrees Celsius warming7.2 degrees Fahrenheitis incompatible with an organized,
equitable, and civilized global community. We dont know exactly what a 4 degree Celsius world would look like,
but even the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous. Four degrees of warming could raise global sea levels
by 1 or possibly even 2 meters by 2100 (and would lock in at least a few additional meters over future centuries). This
would drown some island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the
Netherlands to much of California and the northeastern United States as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia. Major cities
likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Meanwhile, brutal heat waves that can kill tens of thousands of people , even in wealthy countries, would
become entirely unremarkable summer events on every continent but Antarctica . The heat would
also cause staple crops to suffer dramatic yield losses across the globe (it is possible that Indian wheat and
U.S. could plummet by as much as 60 percent), this at a time when demand will be surging due to population
growth and a growing demand for meat. And since crops will be facing not just heat stress but also extreme events such
as wide-ranging droughts, flooding, or pest outbreaks, the losses could easily turn out to be more severe than the
models have predicted. When you add ruinous hurricanes, raging wildfires, fisheries collapses,
widespread disruptions to water supplies, extinctions, and globe-trotting diseases to the mix, it
indeed becomes difficult to imagine that a peaceful, ordered society could be sustained (that is, where
such a thing exists in the first place). And keep in mind that these are the optimistic scenarios in which warming is more or less
stabilized at 4 degrees Celsius and does not trigger tipping points beyond which runaway warming would occur. Based on the latest
modeling, it is becoming safer to assume that 4
degrees could bring about a number of extremely dangerous
feedback loopsan Arctic that is regularly ice-free in September, for instance, or, according to one recent study, global
vegetation that is too saturated to act as a reliable sink , leading to more carbon being emitted rather than stored.
Once this happens, any hope of predicting impacts pretty much goes out the window. And this process may be starting sooner than
anyone predicted. In May 2014, NASA and the University of California, Irvine scientists revealed that glacier melt in a section of
West Antarctica roughly the size of France now appears unstoppable. This likely spells down for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet,
which according to lead study author Eric Rignot comes with a sea level rise between three and five metres. Such an event will
displace millions of people worldwide. The disintegration, however, could unfold over centuries and there is still time for emission
reductions to slow down the process and prevent the worst. Much more frightening than any of this is the fact that plenty
of
mainstream analysts think that on our current emissions trajectory, we are headed for even more than 4
degrees of warming. In 2011, the usually staid International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report predicting that we are
actually on track for 6 degrees Celsius10.8 degrees Fahrenheitof warming. And as the IEAs chief economist put it:
Everybody, even the school children, knows that this will have catastrophic implications for all of us . (The
evidence indicates that 6 degrees of warming is likely to set in motion several major tipping points not
only slower ones such as the aforementioned breakdown of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but possibly more abrupt ones, like
massive releases of methane from Arctic permafrost .) The accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers as also
published a report warning businesses that we are headed for 4-C , or even 6-C of warming. These various projections are the
equivalent of every alarm in your house going off simultaneously. And then every alarm on your street going off as well, one by one
by one. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human
species. The only historical precedent for a crisis of this depth and scale was the Cold War fear that we were headed toward nuclear
holocaust, which would have made much of the planet uninhabitable. But that was (and remains) a threat; a slim possibility, should
geopolitics spiral out of control. The vast majority of nuclear scientists never told us that we were almost certainly going to put our
civilization in peril if we kept going about our daily lives as usual, doing exactly what we were already going, which is what climate
scientists have been telling us for years. As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G. Thompson, a world-renowned
specialist on glacier melt, explained in 2010, Climatologists, like other scientists, tend
to be a stolid group. We are
not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data
in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. When then are climatologists
speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global
warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.

Warming disproportionately impacts women and the

poorest and most vulnerable
Cuomo 11
(Chris Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, and an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics
Certificate Program and the Institute for African-American Studies. The author and editor of many articles and several
books in feminist, postcolonial, and environmental philosophy, Cuomo served as Director of the Institute for Women's
Studies from 2006-2009. Her book, The Philosopher Queen, a reflection on post-9/11 anti-war feminist politics, was
nominated for a Lambda Award and an APA book award, and her work in ecofeminist philosophy and creative
interdiciplinary practice has been influential among those seeking to bring together social justice and environmental
concerns, as well as theory and practice. She has been a recipient of research grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the
National Science Foundation, the Ms. Foundation, the National Council for Research on Women, and the Institute for
Sustainability and Technology Policy, and she has been a visiting faculty member at Cornell University, Amherst College,
and Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Responsibility, Hypatia 26 no4 Fall 2011
structural inequalities produced
p. 690-714, AM) The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina made it plain that
by racism can determine who is most affected by severe weather events, and
in turn disasters can greatly intensify social and political inequalities. In
addition, within nearly any society the poorest and most vulnerable includes
disproportionate numbers of females, people of color, and children. Research
shows that large-scale disasters are especially devastating for those who lack
economic and decision-making power, and that economic insecurity is a key factor increasing the
impact of disasters on women as caregivers, producers, and community actors (Enarson 2000, viii). But economic
Existing social roles and divisions of
security is not the only factor influencing female vulnerabilities.
labor can also set the stage for increased susceptibility to harm . The tsunami that
struck Asia in late 2004 resulted in a much greater loss of life among women and girls in many locations, because women
stayed behind to look for their children and other relatives; men more often than women can swim; men more often than
women can climb trees, and at the time the waves struck, many men and boys were working in small boats or doing
errands away from home (Oxfam 2005; see also American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 2006).
Extreme droughts, already occurring due to climate change, exacerbate
gender inequalities in places where it is womens and girls responsibility to
gather daily water, for when water becomes more scarce, many poor people, but
particularly women and girls, will have to spend more time and energy
fetching water from further away (Stern 2009, 70). Physical hardship for
women and girls is multiplied, but there are also auxiliary effects, such as
decreased opportunities for girls to attend school and increased risk of
assault (American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists 2006; Stern 2009; UN News Centre 2009). And
wealthier high emitters with running water are not immune to such ecological
pressures. In southeast Australia previously prosperous farmers are suffering due to reduced water availability and
 Women married to men in farming families report that
accompanying distribution policies.
their burden is greatly increased, because drought reduces farm income , and
when wages are needed women find more opportunities for off-farm work. Some must travel far or
temporarily relocate for employment, although their caretaking
responsibilities remain. Male partners respond to the compounding impacts of
loss of financial security, livelihood, and identity with increased incidences of
depression and domestic violence (Alston 2008). Not surprisingly, their vulnerabilities are also shaped
by norms of sex and gender.
 Nuclear Fusion
Nuclear power cant compete with other energy sources in the market
because of illogical government regulations---action is necessary to sustain the
industry
Arthur T. Motta 8/17/16, Professor of Nuclear Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, "Nuclear
power deserves a level playing field", The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/nuclear-power-deserves-a-level-playing-field-62149

the characteristics of an ideal electricity production portfolio for the

In one of the courses I teach at Penn State, we discuss

United States and consider what form of energy policy would best achieve it. The class typically identifies the most important factors as cost,
reliability of supply, public safety and environmental impact . Students also cite other characteristics, such as national
security, domestic availability of fuels and technologies, and electric grid stability. Because no
real-world energy source fulfills all of these characteristics, we have to make compromises to find
an optimal combination of energy sources. Ideally a well-designed national energy policy would
give us a framework for making these choices by balancing short-term goals, such as cost, against
long-term goals, such as environmental protection. However, there really is no coherent long-term
energy policy in the United States. What exists instead is an ad hoc hodgepodge of subsidies,
taxes and regulations differing across regions of the country, that, along with the free market, end up
determining what energy sources are used for the production of electricity . In particular, we have no carbon tax to penalize
carbon-emitting technologies. As a result, long-term goals are often neglected. Under this ad hoc approach we currently reward some

sources, such as renewables, for providing carbon-free electricity, but not others, such as hydro and
nuclear power. In my view this is wrongheaded and inconsistent. The United States would do better by
following the example of New York, which recently decided to support nuclear power plants to
keep them from closing because of competition from cheap natural gas. Natural gas: A mixed blessing In the past
decade U.S. domestic natural gas production has increased by 50 percent . Natural gas, which emits half as much carbon dioxide
as coal when burned, is replacing coal for electricity generation. As a result, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation have actually decreased over the last decade, even as electricity consumption
has increased. This is very good news for the environment. Also, the low price of natural gas puts money in peoples wallets. However, natural gas is still a carbon-emitting technology and contributes to climate

Thus, as concerns about climate change have grown, Congress and the states have adopted
change.

subsidies and tax credits to expand electricity production from low-carbon and carbon-free
renewable fuels in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Such subsidies acknowledge that the monetary cost of energy production
which is now the primary factor in whether an energy source is developed and used is in fact an imperfect tool for shaping medium- and long-term energy policy. A long-term energy policy to achieve

At a recent Department of Energy summit on improving the economics of U.S. nuclear

environmental goals

power plants, speakers noted that, along with cost, factors such as production of carbon-free
electricity, reliability, grid stability and diversity of fuel supply should influence decisions about
energy supply. But energy sources do not consistently receive credit for helping to attain these
goals, and are not consistently penalized if they fail to do so. The subsidies and tax credits mentioned above are a step in that direction, and
have increased development of renewable energy sources. As a result, the percentage of electricity from renewables has significantly increased in recent years, which is great. Solar and wind together currently

Unfortunately, increasing reliance on renewable energy also has a downside.

provide about five percent of U.S. electricity.

The intermittency of renewable energy and unavailability of energy storage means that the
installed capacity of renewable sources has to be considerably higher than the desired output (by a factor
of three or more). In other words, we have to build more than we need, and other energy sources are needed

to provide backup when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. The Shepherds Flat wind farm in Oregon has 338
turbines over 32,100 acres and a maximum generating capacity of 845 megawatts. Such a plant would generate an average of 205 megawatts over a year at a capacity factor of about 25 percent, which is the level that

Moreover, at
the Department of Energy forecasts for Shepherds Flat. A typical nuclear power plant generates about 1,000 megawatts with capacity factors over 90 percent. U.S. Department of Energy

present renewable sources are not economically competitive without subsidies, but they become
very competitive with them. With subsidies, wind power is practically free in some markets. This distorts the market because utilities
have to produce less energy in cheaper nuclear power plants so they can use subsidized renewable
energy. This causes utilities to operate nuclear power plants in an up and down mode rather than
their normal baseload operation, making them even less competitive. Recognizing the benefits of nuclear power properly However,
subsidizing carbon-free sources is justifiable to provide for the future greater good of the country because they
provide climate change and clean air benefits. Perversely, however, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and most states have declined
to consider rewarding the same benefits from existing nuclear power plants. The main argument for
not including existing nuclear power plants as well as electricity from large hydropower dams in clean air mandates and subsidies is that contributions from these

conventional sources would dwarf new renewable generation, which the federal government
wishes to encourage. According to this twisted logic, environmental benefits from new nuclear
power plants do receive proper credit under the Obama administrations Clean Power Plan. But the plan
includes no economic rewards for keeping existing efficient, well-run plants in operation. This
makes no sense. If these plants are shuttered, their output will be replaced in many cases by natural gas generation, which will increase greenhouse gas emissions, as has occurred after recent
nuclear plant closures in Vermont and Wisconsin. Nuclear power provides other benefits in addition to clean air. Nuclear plants also provide stability to the electrical grid, as their output is constant and reliable. They

nuclear power is a
are available at nearly all times and especially in times of need for example, during severe winter weather when coal deliveries may be disrupted. Additionally,

technology-intensive industry in which the United States has traditionally led the world. With
each closure of an operating U.S. nuclear power plant, the infrastructure built over the past 50
years including suppliers, vendors, operators, maintenance and manpower becomes
increasingly imperiled as it serves a dwindling number of plants. If the industry disappears
here, it will be very difficult to rebuild as China and Russia becomes world leaders in
nuclear technology. Finally, nuclear power is also one of the rare industries that generates many high-paying jobs for engineers and technicians, as well as blue-collar jobs for plant workers
all of which must be sited in the United States. This is one reason why regulators in New York recently adopted a Clean Energy Standard that will provide significant yearly subsidies through 2029 to keep several
existing reactors operating. Other states should consider taking similar steps to recognize the benefits of nuclear power and prevent premature plant closures. This would support their environmental goals. In sum,

there is a case for government intervention to improve the economic competitiveness of nuclear
plants and avoid early closures. The nuclear industry does not need handouts, but a coherent U.S.
energy policy should provide a level playing field in the electric markets by recognizing the
essential contributions that nuclear power plants make toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions, ensuring reliable electricity and preserving grid
stability. Failure to act could foreclose the nuclear power option in this country and make the road to clean air and energy
independence in the future that much harder.

Collaborative nuclear fusion research with China is happening now but slows
absent further international commitment past research functions as an
efficient model for necessary future cooperation
General Atomics 15 (Nov. 16, 2015. Press Release from General Atomics, Daring Move for
First US-China Fusion Team. https://fusion.gat.com/fusion-
wiki/images/6/6a/Ren_Garofalo_GA8.pdf ZT)
SAVANNAH, GA (NOV. 16) The
way to lower costs and increase the power of magnetic fusion energy
may be to risk running the plasma hotter than 100-million-degrees C -- closer than ever to the edge, according to
new experimental results achieved by the first U.S.-China fusion research team. The teams most recent
results will be discussed in an invited talk at the 57th American Physical Society conference this week by a teammember from one of Chinas leading
scientific labs, the Institute of Plasma Physics in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ASIPP). The
multinational fusion research
team is led by Dr. Xianzu Gong of ASIPP, and Dr. Andrea Garofalo of General Atomics (GA), where scientists have
pursued advancing their work in high-bootstrap current scenario , which is the selfgenerated
plasma current that could lead to lowering the cost of fusion energy production. This joint
experiment directly demonstrates for the first time the stabilizing effect of reducing the
plasmawall distance on a high beta plasma with achievement of good performance and high bootstrap
current fraction, according to Dr. Gong, who said, I think, in simple terms, these experiments may provide better
physics and operation foundation for ITER (fusion energy) plasmas. A challenging and critical issue for advanced
plasmas is the integrated demonstration of high normalized fusion performance operation with a high bootstrap current fraction, he noted. This is unlike
any other regime, said Dr. Garofalo. The
team has been working in both China and at DIII-D National Fusion
Facility, operated by GA for the U.S. Department of Energy and site of the most recent experiments. Focus was on
resolving the kink mode instability with a scientifically daring move of moving the plasma closer to the vessels edge, he explained. Operating closer to
the wall suppresses the kink mode and enables higher pressure inside the tokamak, the toroidal or doughnut-shaped steel-lined fusion device. Magnetic
fusion energy research uses magnetic fields to confine fusion fuel in the form of a plasma (ionized gas) heated to temperatures hotter than the Suns core,
necessary to fuse the ions and release excess energy that can be turned into electricity -- harnessing the Suns power on Earth. The most developed
approach uses tokamaks, which is the basis for ITER, a 500- megawatt fusion plant currently being built in France by a consortium of 35 nations
including China and the U.S. Positive
results from the experiments, Dr. Garofalo said, could have direct relevance
for future production-level fusion devices including the ITER fusion-energy program. The process
involved creating a transport barrier inside the DIII-D plasma, Dr. Garofalo explained. You gain by needing less power and you lower the cost, which
helps reach the breakeven point for fusion power. The downside has been that a steep transport barrier produces stronger kink instability, until the DIII-
D-ASIPP team found a way around that challenge. They tried a daring experiment, by moving the plasma closer to the steel walls of the tokamak, and
discovered they were able to stabilize the kink mode and achieve the pressure-driven plasma flows that maintain the confinement quality even with
lower external injection of velocity. As Dr. Garofalo said, Its very risky to move the plasma that close to the wall , the
chief operator said, You cant do that anymore, youre going to damage the machine, so it was a struggle to prove our theory was correct. Their risk
paid off. Moving the plasma closer to the wall removed the kink mode, a wobbling effect that reduces plasma performance, and enabled higher plasma
pressure, which, in turn, makes the plasma less dependent on externally injected flow. This is important because in a tokamak reactor, such as ITER, it
is very difficult and expensive to drive a rapid plasma flow with external means. The DIII-D-China team
performed the bootstrap exploration following-up work on the recordsetting milestone in clean-energy science achieved at Chinas EAST tokamak, where
GA scientists have also been collaborating. An ASIPP scientist Dr. Qilong Ren will deliver the invited talk on the topic of Magnetic Confinement-
Experiments. While
fusion has been open source since the 1950s and its advances achieved by teams
around the world, this U.S.-China team is setting new milestones in global cooperation . For
realization of magnetic fusion energy, global cooperation is needed , said Dr. Gong of ASIPP, who cited the
EAST/DIII-D partnership as an efficient and effective new model for international science
collaborations that benefits both partners and the field of study. We have made a very good start
of international collaboration in fusion research between China and the U.S. , and we are very proud to be a
pioneer in this field, said Dr. Gong.

That solves warming fusion is safe, produces no waste, is technologically

feasible and integratable
Dyer 14 Gwinne Dyer Hello fusion power, good-bye fossil fuels? Quoting Dr. Thomas
McGuire, the director of the Revolutionary Technology division at Lockheed Martin, in Aviation
Week Magazine, the most prestigious defense periodical.
http://www.straight.com/news/756716/gwynne-dyer-hello-fusion-power-good-bye-fossil-fuels
Nuclear fusion is clean energy
So suppose there really is a full-scale prototype of a 100-megawatt nuclear fusion reactor, ready to go into volume production, in just 10 years.

no radioactive waste, no risk of meltdown, and of course no carbon dioxide emissionsso

if it is competitive in cost, it could easily sweep the field . Fusion power would not replace the
renewables (wind, solar, and bio power), whose cost would probably fall fast enough to
stay competitive. But it would rapidly replace the fossil fuels, mainly coal and gas, that are
used to generate base load powerpower that is always available even if the sun is down
and the wind dropsespecially because the compact reactors would easily plug into the
existing gas turbine power infrastructure. Lockheed Martins T4 project reduces the size of
the reactor tenfold for the same output, so nuclear fusion could also replace oil directly in a
great many uses, like powering large ships. Its abundant, cheap electricity from a compact
source could also eventually drive oil out of most other transportation uses, including
automobiles and aircraft. Lockheed Martin talks about meeting global base load energy
demand with fusion power by 2050. Lockheed Martin is not alone in the field. EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. is working on a similar concept in New Mexico, and
other significant players in the field include Helion Energy in Washington state, Canadian-based General Fusion, and Tri-Alpha Energy in California. After half a century of desultory tinkering with fusion power, this

is an idea whose time has come. Assuming that it really happens, what would that do to the world? For a start , it would kill off the coal industry entirely. Gas
would be the next to go, but the demand for oil (and therefore its price) would also go into a long-term decline. The existing nuclear power plants, which

depend upon fission for their energy, would be replaced with fusion plants on both cost and
safety grounds. The geopolitical impacts would also be very large, as major countries that live on oil exports see their cash flow dry up. Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and other countries whose
precarious prosperity and stability depend on large oil exports might face revolution or civil war when their income collapsed. So might Mexico, Indonesia, Iran, and perhaps some Arab countries. On the other hand,

But above all, the

countries that currently spend a lot of their income on energy imports would suddenly find themselves much richer. (The United States leads the pack in this regard.)

threat of runaway global warming would go away. Its already too late to avoid some very
large impacts, because there is a great deal of carbon dioxide in the air that has not yet
produced its full warming effect, and there are a lot more emissions to come even if fossil
fuels are successfully phased out in a matter of decades. If fusion power became available
soon enough, however, we would never exceed 2 degrees C higher average global
temperature and trigger a global catastrophe.

Nuclear shift is sustainable and the only viable alternative to coal dependence
Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, 04
(Patrick, chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd, Going Nuclear,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html,
1/13/13,)
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with
nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky
northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and
the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy
may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic
climate change. Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36
percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas
responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that
can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these
days it can do so safely. I say that guardedly, of course, just days after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country had
enriched uranium. "The nuclear technology is only for the purpose of peace and nothing else," he said. But there is widespread speculation that, even
though the process is ostensibly dedicated to producing electricity, it is in fact a cover for building nuclear weapons. And although I don't want to
underestimate the very real dangers of nuclear technology in the hands of rogue states, we cannot simply ban every technology that is dangerous. That
was the all-or-nothing mentality at the height of the Cold War, when anything nuclear seemed to spell doom for humanity and the environment. In 1979,
Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon produced a frisson of fear with their starring roles in "The China Syndrome," a fictional evocation of nuclear disaster in
which a reactor meltdown threatens a city's survival. Less than two weeks after the blockbuster film opened, a reactor core meltdown at Pennsylvania's
Three Mile Island nuclear power plant sent shivers of very real anguish throughout the country. What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three
Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do -- prevent radiation from escaping into the
environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was
the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the
technology: There hasn't been a nuclear plant ordered up since then. Today, there are 103 nuclear reactors quietly delivering just 20 percent of America's
electricity. Eighty percent of the people living within 10 miles of these plants approve of them (that's not including the nuclear workers). Although I don't
live near a nuclear plant, I am now squarely in their camp. And I am not alone among seasoned environmental activists in changing my mind on this
subject. British
atmospheric scientist James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, believes that nuclear energy is
the only way to avoid catastrophic climate change. Stewart Brand, founder of the "Whole Earth
Catalog," says the environmental movement must embrace nuclear energy to wean ourselves from
fossil fuels. On occasion, such opinions have been met with excommunication from the anti-nuclear priesthood: The late British Bishop Hugh
Montefiore, founder and director of Friends of the Earth, was forced to resign from the group's board after he wrote a pro-nuclear article in a church
newsletter. There are signs of a new willingness to listen, though, even among the staunchest anti-nuclear campaigners. When I attended the Kyoto
climate meeting in Montreal last December, I spoke to a packed house on the question of a sustainable energy future. I argued that the only way to reduce
fossil fuel emissions from electrical production is through an aggressive program of renewable energy sources (hydroelectric, geothermal heat pumps,
wind, etc.) plus nuclear. The Greenpeace spokesperson was first at the mike for the question period, and I expected a tongue-lashing. Instead, he began by
saying he agreed with much of what I said -- not the nuclear bit, of course, but there was a clear feeling that all options must be explored. Here's why:
Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply
can't replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already,
and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants. Given that hydroelectric resources are built pretty much to capacity, nuclear is, by
elimination, the only viable substitute for coal . It's that simple. That's not to say that there aren't real problems -- as well as various
myths -- associated with nuclear energy. Each concern deserves careful consideration: Nuclear energy is expensive. It is in fact one of the least
expensive energy sources. In 2004, the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour,
comparable with coal and hydroelectric. Advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future. Nuclear plants are not safe. Although
Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen.
This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N.
Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while
fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one
has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program. (And although hundreds of uranium mine workers did
die from radiation exposure underground in the early years of that industry, that problem was long ago corrected.) Nuclear waste will be dangerous for
thousands of years. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is
incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has
removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal.
Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind. Nuclear reactors
are vulnerable to terrorist attack. The six-feet-thick reinforced concrete containment vessel protects the contents from the outside as well as the inside.
And even if a jumbo jet did crash into a reactor and breach the containment, the reactor would not explode. There are many types of facilities that are far
more vulnerable, including liquid natural gas plants, chemical plants and numerous political targets. Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear
weapons. This is the most serious issue associated with nuclear energy and the most difficult to address, as the example of Iran shows. But just because
nuclear technology can be put to evil purposes is not an argument to ban its use. Over the past 20 years, one of the simplest tools -- the machete -- has
been used to kill more than a million people in Africa, far more than were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings combined. What are
car bombs made of? Diesel oil, fertilizer and cars. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire. The only
practical approach to the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation is to put it higher on the international agenda and to use diplomacy and, where necessary,
force to prevent countries or terrorists from using nuclear materials for destructive ends. And new technologies such as the reprocessing system recently
introduced in Japan (in which the plutonium is never separated from the uranium) can make it much more difficult for terrorists or rogue states to use
civilian materials to manufacture weapons. The 600-plus coal-fired plantsemit nearly 2 billion tons of CO2annually --
the equivalent of the exhaust from about 300 million automobiles. In addition, the Clean Air Council reports
that coal plants are responsible for 64 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, 26 percent of nitrous
oxides and 33 percent of mercury emissions. These pollutants are eroding the health of our environment,
producing acid rain, smog, respiratory illness and mercury contamination. Meanwhile, the 103 nuclear plants operating in the
United States effectively avoid the release of 700 million tons of CO2emissions annually -- the equivalent of the exhaust from
more than 100 million automobiles. Imagine if the ratio of coal to nuclear were reversed so that only 20 percent of our
electricity was generated from coal and 60 percent from nuclear. This would go a long way toward cleaning the air
and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Every responsible environmentalist should support
a move in that direction.

The coal industry is a nexus of structural violence kills or poisons millions.

Stevenson 8 [Heidi, produces Gaia Health, Coal Is the Worst Polluter of All, Gaia Health, 2008, www.gaia-
health.com/articles/000032-Coal-Pollution.shtml, 08/22/14]

Image a list of the worst pollutants. Whatever is on your list almost certainly is produced by coal
mining or burning, usually in greater quantities than any other polluting industry. Pollutants produced by burning coal
include: Carbon dioxide, the primary global warming gas. Sulphur dioxide, which causes acid rain. Nitrogen oxide, which creates
ozone that leads to smog. Hydrocarbons, which help create ozone that leads to smog. Carbon monoxide, which causes headaches and
is particularly harmful to people with heart disease. Arsenic, which causes cancer. Lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals.
Uranium and thorium, radioactive elements. Mercury, known to cause autism and a host of other neurological and developmental
disorders. Coal-fired plants produce 100 times the radiation of nuclear plants to yield the same amount of energy. Here's the kicker:
Coal ash, the remains of the burning process, is more radioactive than nuclear wasteand we
have not figured out what to do with the waste from nuclear energy production. Back in 1978, a scientist with the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (ORNL) reported in Science that the
amount of radiation in the bones of people who live near
coal plants is 3-6 times greater than in those who live near nuclear facilities. In fact, according to
ORNL Associate Lab Director Dana Christensen and the aforementioned 1978 paper, when the amount of radiation produced by the
two types of power plants is compared in terms of their energy output, the story is even worse. Coal-fired plants produce 100 times the
radiation of nuclear plants to yield the same amount of energy. Clean coal is a myth. The technology does not exist today and no one
knows whenor ifit will exist. Yet the coal companies continue to push the idea, and politicians help them. In the U.K. the Labour
Party pushes the false idea of clean coal as a necessary element of dealing with climate change. In the United States, President Obama
has ballyhooed the lie. The term "clean coal" is misleading in two ways. First is the fact that the technology for creating it doesn't
exist, and even if it did, estimates are that it would cost several trillion dollars in the U.S. alone to switch to it, making it prohibitively
expensive. Worse, though, is that the term references only the production of carbon dioxide. It has nothing to do with any of the other
pollutants, including radiation. The Sierra Club reports that coal-fired plants in the U.S. produce 59% of
sulphur dioxide pollution and 18% of nitrogen oxide. The EPA has reported that coal plants produce
about 40% of America's mercury pollution, more than any other source. No other industry is doing as
much to poison the fish that we eat, resulting in warnings to people not to eat fish too often. Three-time Emmy award
winner, Jeremy Piven, recently fell ill from eating mercury-laced sushi. It is responsible for untold numbers of
babies being born with neurological problems, including autism, mental retardation,
blindness, and a variety of other neurological problems . It is found in mothers' breast milk,
putting children at risk even after birth. It is known to increase and worsen coronary disease in men. The
EPA reports that the number of pregnant women affected by mercury poisoning is so high that as many as 630,000 children in the U.S.
are born each year with a strong likelihood of developing health problems. The American Lung Association says that 24,000
people die annually in the U.S. from coal plant pollution, and there are 38,000 more heart
attacks and 550,000 more asthma attacks. The American Journal of Public Health reports
higher rates of cardiopulmonary disease, hypertension, diabetes, and lung and kidney
disease in coal mining areas. Lead contamination is known to cause brain shrinkage,
retardation, and violence, as documented in Lead Shrinks the Brain and Causes Violent Crime. Arsenic is an
insidious poison, causing convulsions, difficulty in urination and defecation, delirium, cell death, cancer,
hemorrhages, and damage to the body's ability to metabolize food for energy. The general term,
arsenicosis, refers to arsenic poisoning that results from long term exposure to arsenic in drinking water. As little as 0.17 parts of lead
per billion in water has been shown to be harmful. Climatechange. Pollution. Health devastation. Mental
retardation. Cancer. Devastation of food supplies. All of these can be laid at the doorstep of coal
corporations. Big Coal is fighting to make us believe that coal power is the best thing since Europe was covered with forests.
Continuing to use coal for energy can only destroy us. It destroys the lives of humans, animals, plants,
and Gaia herself. Clean coal is a myth.

Structural violence is the largest proximate cause of war- creates priming that
psychologically structures escalation
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. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). 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 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 systematically 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).
 Framing
You should privilege everyday violence for two reasons- A) social bias
underrepresents its effects B) its effects are exponential, not linear which means
even if the only causes a small amount of structural violence, its terminal impacts
are huge
Nixon 11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of
the Poor, pgs. 2-3)

Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-
politically, imaginatively, and theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that
occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and
space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived
as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant
sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither
spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing
out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational ,
narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate
change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths
of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental
catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to
mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and
ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic planning
as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his
proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial
invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however,
requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence . Such a
rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly
visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for
how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a
variety of social afflictions-from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental
calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the
pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional
but
also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term,
proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become
increasingly but gradually degraded.
Demanding the state produce change does not affirm its power. Murderers
should not murder doesnt make us align with murderers. The aff highlights
the states failure and destabilizes its sovereign hegemony. Politics of absolute
rejection is a fantasy that actually reinforces state power.
Newman 10
Saul Newman is Professor in Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. The Politics
of Postanarchism, p. 114-115.
Despite the obvious pitfalls of the Leninist vanguard strategy, we should nevertheless take Zizek's challenge to Critchley seriously: that, in other words,
the problem with the strategy of working outside the state is that it may essentially leave the state
intact, and entail an irresponsible and even self-indulgent politics of demand that hides a secret
reliance on the state to take care of the everyday running of society. Is there some truth to this claim? There are two
aspects that I would like to address here. First, the notion of demand: making certain demands on the state - say for
higher wages, equal rights for excluded groups, to not go to war or an end to draconian policing - is one of the
basic strategies of social movements and radical groups. Making such demands does not necessarily
mean working within the state or reaffirming its legitimacy . On the contrary, demands are
made from a position outside the established political order, and they often exceed the question
of the implementation of this or that specific measure. They implicitly call into question the legitimacy and even
the sovereignty of the state by highlighting fundamental inconsistencies between, for instance, a formal
constitutional order that guarantees certain rights and equalities, and state practices that in reality violate and deny them.
Jacques Ranciere gives a succinct example 0f this when he discusses Olympe de Gouges, who, at the time of the French Revolution,
demanded that women be given the right to go to the Assembly. In doing so, she demonstrated the
inconsistency between the promise of equality - invoked in a general sense and yet denied in the particular by the Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen - and the political order which was formally based on this: women could make a twofold demonstration. They
could demonstrate that they were deprived of the rights that they had, thanks to the Declaration of Rights. And they could demonstrate, through their
public action, that they had the rights that the constitution denied to them, that they could enact those rights. So they could act as subjects of the Rights of
Man in the precise sense that I have mentioned. They acted as subjects that did not have the rights that they had and had the rights that they had not.21
While this was a demand for inclusion within the political order, it at the same time exposed a
fissure or inconsistency in this order that was potentially destabilising, thus seeking to transcend
the limits of that order.

Utilitarian appeals to survival and extinction justify measures at the expense

of marginalized populations
CALLAHAN 73
[Daniel J. Callahan, The Tyranny of Survival: And other pathologies of civilized life. Pg 91-
93//delo-ku]
That individuals, tribes, communities and nations have committed so much will, energy and intelligence to survival has meant that
they have survived, and their descendants are present to tell the tale. Nothing is so powerful a motive force, for self or society, as the
threat of annihilation, nothing so energizing as the necessity to live. Without life, all else is in vain. Leaving aside the
question of whether we need more enlightened attitudes toward suicide in our society, which we may. it is still not for nothing that
suicide has been looked upon with abhorrence, whether from a religious or a psycho- logical perspective. It seems to violate the most
The value of survival
fundamental of human drives, and has always required a special explana- tion or justification.
could not be so readily abused were it not for its evocative power.2 But abused it has
been. In the name of survival, all manner of social and political evils have been
committed against the rights of individuals, including the right to life. The purported threat of
Communist domination has for over two decades fueled the drive of militarists for ever-larger
defense budgets, no matter what the cost to other social needs. During World War II, native Japanese-
Ameri- cans were herded, without due process of law, into detention camps. This policy was later upheld
by the Supreme Court in Korematsu v. United States (1944) in the general context that a threat to
national security can justify acts otherwise bla- tantly unjustifiable. The survival of the
Aryan race was one of the official legitimations of Nazism. Under the banner of survival, the government
of South Africa imposes a ruthless apartheid, heedless of the most elementary human rights . The
Vietnamese war has seen one of the greatest of the many absurdities tolerated in the name
of survival: the destruction of villages in order to save them. But it is not only in a political setting that
survival has been evoked as a final and unarguable value. The main rationale B. F. Skinner offers in Beyond Freedom and
Dignity for the controlled and conditioned society is the need for survival.3 For Jacques Monod, in
Chance and Necessity, sur- vival requires that we overthrow almost every known religious, ethical and political system.4 In genetics,
the survival of the gene pool has been put forward as sufficient grounds for a forceful
prohibition of bearers of offensive genetic traits from marrying and bearing children. Some have even
suggested that we do the cause of survival no good by our misguided medical efforts to find means by which those suffering from such
com- mon genetically based diseases as diabetes can live a normal life, and thus procreate even more diabetics. In the field of
population and environment, one can do no better than to cite Paul Ehrlich, whose works have shown a high dedication to survival,
and in its holy name a willingness to contemplate governmentally enforced abortions and a denial of food to starving populations of
nations which have not enacted popu- lation-control policies. For all these reasons, it
is possible to counterpoise
over against the need for survival a "tyranny of survival." There seems to be no
imaginable evil which some group is not willing to inflict on another for the sake of
survival, no rights. liberties or dignities which it is not ready to suppress. It is easy, of course, to recognize
the danger when survival is falsely and manipulatively invoked. Dictators never talk about their aggressions, but only about the need
to defend the fatherland, to save it from destruction at the hands of its enemies. But my point goes deeper than that. It is directed even
at a legitimate concern for survival, when that concern is allowed to reach an intensity which would ignore, suppress or destroy other
funda- mental human rights and values.
The potential tyranny of survival as a value is that it is
capable, if not treated sanely, of wiping out all other values. Survival can become an obsession
and a disease, provoking a destructive singlemindedness that will stop at nothing. We come
here to the fundamental moral dilemma. If, both biologically and psychologically, the need for survival is basic to man, and if survival
is the precondition for any and all human achievements, and if no other rights make much sense without the premise of a right to life-
then how will it be possible to honor and act upon the need for survival without, in the process, destroying everything in human beings
which makes them worthy of survival? To put it more strongly, if
the price of survival is human degradation, then
there is no moral reason why an effort should be made to ensure that survival . It would be the Pyrrhic
victory to end all Pyrrhic victories. Yet it would be the defeat of all defeats if, because human beings could not properly manage their
one can take one's pick
need to survive, they suc- ceeded in not doing so. Either way, then, would represent a failure, and
about which failure would be worse, that of survival at the cost of everything decent in man
or outright extinction.