GW Neg

Warming Advantage Answers

No Solvency- It’s too late

Can’t stopIt is impossible to prevent 2°C warmingPage, Michael. "The Climate Fact No One Will Admit: 2 °C Warming Is Inevitable." New Scientist. N.p., 30 Oct. 2015. Web. 16 May 2016.

It is time to start preparing for a world more than 2 °C warmer than now. The UN’s own analysis of what countries are offering to do to limit greenhouse gas emissions shows they fall far short of what’s required. In fact,

they suggest the world will have emitted enough carbon dioxide to warm the planet 2 °C by around 2036. These offers, formally known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs, will be the basis of the global treaty on climate change to be finalized in Paris in December. It was always clear that this treaty would not go nearly far enough to limit warming to 2 °C by 2100, but now the numbers are in. Ahead of the meeting, 119 INDCs have been submitted, representing 147 countries and 88 per cent of current emissions. The UN has now released a synthesis report analyzing what impact they will have. It concludes that even if countries stick to them, annual global emissions will hit 43 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) by 2030 – and will still be rising. It has been calculated that to have a 66 per cent chance of limiting warming to 2 °C, cumulative emissions from 2011 must be limited to 1000 GtCO2. The UN report, however, says we’ll have burned through 75 per cent of this carbon budget by 2030. That means we could only emit another 250 GtCO2 after 2030 – which means

we’ll bust the budget in around 2036 assuming emissions stay above 40 GtCO2 per year. “I think it is clear that the INDCs will fall well short of what is required for any reasonable probability of avoiding 2 °C,” says Alice Bows-Larkin of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Manchester, UK. And what happens after 2030 is crucial, too, she says. “We can’t assume that emissions will

immediately decline.” At a meeting in London on 28 October, New Scientist asked the chief UN climate negotiator, Christiana Figueres, if it was now time for the world to accept that limiting warming to 2 °C is unrealistic and to start preparing for even greater warming. Figueres vehemently rejected this idea. “Would you want that for your children,” she responded. “This is about the quality of life on this planet.” The Paris treaty would “build a pathway” to 2 °C, she said, by paving the way for further cuts. This claim is repeated in the official UN press release accompanying the latest report, which says the INDCs “keep the door open to” the 2 °C limit. But the grim numbers in the report tell a very different story. So why do some reports still claim that 2 °C is achievable? The answer is that they almost always assume that the world will resort to geoengineering and somehow suck vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere, so-called “negative emissions”. But many scientists are extremely skeptical about the idea that this can be done on the stupendous scale required. Even if it is now too late to limit warming to 2 °C, we may at least be able to keep it well under 4 °C by 2100. Independent analyses of the INDCs suggest they could put the world on track to limit warming to between 2.7 and 3.5 °C by 2100, depending on what assumptions are made about emissions after 2030. The 2.7 °C figure does not depend on negative emissions, says Bill Hare, head of the Climate Analytics group that came up with the figure.

Globalization increases global warming-as a country’s GDP increases, so does its emissions Lane 2015

Jan-Erik Lane: fellow with Public Policy Institute in Belgrade. “Coping with Global Warming” Applied Economics and Finance, August 2015, v. 2, iss. 3, pp. 92-101. Accessed 7-1-16. http://redfame.com/journal/index.php/aef/article/viewFile/937/885. Modified for gendered language.

It was once stated that when the population masses in China and India started to adopt the American life style, then Planet Earth would run into problems. This theme was explored in the Limits to Growth literature. However, this literature

underlined the scarcity of all resources on the planet, but climate change refers basically to one potentially catastrophic change: the composition of the atmosphere. The emission of greenhouse gases has increased enormously in a short period when affluence has spread around the globe: all the cars, the huge sea and air traffic, the building of cement structures everywhere, urbanization, communications lines, air-conditioning, meat production, cows and pigs, conspicuous

consumption, private jets and yachts, one person – several houses or apartments, etc. The middle classes are more numerous in China and India today than in Germany. And the super-rich number the same as in the US. This life style is based upon

one thing, namely a massive increase in energy consumption, which is necessary to produce all these goods

and services including food, i.e. agriculture and fishing industry. Men and women [people] must work, eat and sleep. Thus, they search for the economic activities that help procure basic necessities for them. The global market economy engulfs all

countries in the world, as self-sufficiency only is self-defeating. During the post-war period, total production has risen enormously, as global trade has increased year in and year out. Economic development and growth has lifted millions into affluence or even super-affluence. But it has come with a specific cost besides general environmental degradation, namely the emission of greenhouse gases (Figure 1). The bigger total output is in a country, the more emissions it emits! This implies that the nations with the largest GDP must take the brunt of the reductions in emissions, if this ever would come about. The link between GDP and emissions is energy consumption. All forms of energy are used in the production of goods and services. And energy consumption goes up all the time – see Figure 2 the US agency Energy Information Administration (EIA) not only documents the especially strong increase in energy consumption since 1980 when the process of globalisation picks up speed. The EIA also predicts future developments towards even much higher levels of energy consumption . From what

sources of energy? - One may ask. One can only fear the consequences for emissions growth of such dramatic increases in energy consumption the next decade, if they are at all realistic. Figure 3 depicts the link between energy consumption and emissions. What appears in Figure 3 is the global level link between energy and emissions. It does in no way exclude that energy consumption or production can be carbon neutral. This has been demonstrated in several micro level projects. The problem is that traditional economic development tends to be highly energy consuming that in turn still is pollution, in general or an average projects. Summing

Up: The basic argument here is that affluence is the major determinant of global warming, i.e. life style. Let us look shortly at water consumption to see what matters most: population size or total GDP.

There is no way to stop climate change-emissions will continue to build up and the impacts will occurLane 2015

Jan-Erik Lane: fellow with Public Policy Institute in Belgrade. “Coping with Global Warming” Applied Economics and Finance, August 2015, v. 2, iss. 3, pp. 92-101. Accessed 7-1-16. http://redfame.com/journal/index.php/aef/article/viewFile/937/885. Modified for gendered language.

The global response to climate change is going to be: resilience – wait and see, act afterwards. Total emissions of

greenhouse gases may go down somewhat due to slower economic growth as well as many new ways of employing renewable

sources of energy. But the basic fact will not change, viz. that the emissions of 50 trillion kilos of greenhouse gases

into the atmosphere year in and year out will change global climate in a very dangerous manner for mankind and other

living species. Resilience is rational when one does not know the real situation and cannot predict the outcomes of

alternative policies. However, resilience may end up in the worst possible scenario: steady increase in global temperature: air, land and sea. First, we will have the environmental refugees from the islands, then the population migrations from flooded coats, afterwards the draughts and desertification, the elimination of the rest of the rain forests, and finally the water and food shortages. Climate change is evolutionary, and as such unstoppable.

Coping with climate change entails resilience, or doing the best you can ex post. It will lead to people migration and the resettlement of millions. The oceans will be transformed – hotter, more acid, less life. People will go to new places where it is cooler, abandoning popular sites. There will be shortages: fresh water, food and energy. But men and

women can cope with much environmental change including damages, although costly indeed! The G7 has recently proclaimed its ―ambitious ‖ goal to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases by 50% by 2050, at the same time as the information arrives

that the first half of 2015 is the warmest ever, The G7 policy-making is typical of ―wait and see‖ - no plan, no commitments in the short-run, just pushing the problem into a distant future. People will thus have to learn hos to adapt when the changes arrive, hoping that mankind [humankind] will be resilient in this major coping process. 2050 will be too late as policy target.

Global warming is irreversible – thermal expansion guarantees rise ocean levels, CO2 levels to continue rising for centuriesPearce 13 – environmental consultant for New Scientist magazine with over 20 years of experience reporting on the environment, winner of 2002 CGIAR agricultural research science journalism award [9/25, Fred, The New Scientist, www.newscientist.com/article/dn24261-world-wont-cool-without-geoengineering-warns-report.html#.VENB0VevdqO 07/01/16]

Global warming is irreversible without massive geoengineering of the atmosphere's chemistry. This stark warning comes from the draft summary of the latest climate assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Delegates from national governments are discussing the draft this week, prior to its release on Friday morning. According to one of its lead authors, and the latest draft seen by New

Scientist, the report will say: "CO2-induced warming is projected to remain approximately constant for many centuries following a complete cessation of emission. A large fraction of climate change is thus irreversible on a human

timescale, except if net anthropogenic CO2 emissions were strongly negative over a sustained period." In other words, even if all the world ran on carbon-free energy and deforestation ceased, the only way of lowering temperatures would be to devise a scheme for sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Much of this week's report, the fifth assessment of the IPCC working group on the physical science of climate change, will reaffirm the findings of the previous four assessments, published regularly since 1990. It will point out that to limit global warming to 2 °C will require cumulative CO2 emissions from all human sources since the start of the industrial revolution to be kept below about a trillion tonnes of carbon. So far, we have emitted about half this. Current emissions are around 10.5 billion tonnes of carbon annually, and rising. Since the last assessment, published in 2007Speaker, the IPCC has almost doubled its estimate of the maximum sea-level rise likely in the coming century to

about 1 metre. They also conclude that it is now "virtually certain" that sea levels will continue to rise for many centuries,

even if warming ceases, due to the delayed effects of thermal expansion of warming oceans and melting ice sheets.

AdaptionAdaption is key-government inaction ensures that it is too late to prevent warmingLane 2015

Jan-Erik Lane: fellow with Public Policy Institute in Belgrade. “Coping with Global Warming” Applied Economics and Finance, August 2015, v. 2, iss. 3, pp. 92-101. Accessed 7-1-16. http://redfame.com/journal/index.php/aef/article/viewFile/937/885

The manifestations of the global warming process show up in daily evidence about sea level rise, warming oceans, the melting of ice, the decrease of lakes and rivers, draughts and desertification, etc. Together with other trends towards the

overexploitation of the environment, Planet Earth is heading towards an ecological crisis, if not catastrophe. No one can tell exactly how much average global temperature will rise, but given that the emissions and the overexploitation of nature

continues, it cannot be excluded that global temperature will rise more than 6 degrees , which would spell disaster

for mankind. Yet, little is done as the process of global warming gathers momentum. On the one hand, it is business as usual: energy consumption goes up year in and year out as more and more people reach higher levels of living

standards, the turn to shale oil and gas leads to lower energy prices for the foreseeable future and the employment of renewable resources or carbon neutral technology is not strong enough to offset the dependency upon fossil fuels and the emissions there-off. On the other hand, global ecology policy-making falters. Domestically, many countries have too weak states to control environmental resources, which put incredible pressure upon wild-life and ocean

organisms. Internationally, a series of global meetings as well as a well-funded UN programe for environmental protection has failed to halt the ―global tragedy of the commons ‖ , as governments make promises but delivers little or simply reneges. What is needed is the combination of domestic and international policies to stop global

warming and protect environmental resources of all kinds. But it will not come about, as the governments of the world choose resilience – wait and see – ahead of precaution – take action now. The human race will have to adapt to the process of global warming, as islanders and costal inhabitants have already started to do.

The brink of climate change is knocking, change is needed nowYasmin Tayag 2016 March 7

Tayag, Yasmin; “Yasmin Tayag is a writer and former biologist living in New York City. A Toronto girl at heart, her writing also appears in The Last Magazine and SciArt in America, and you might recognize her as a former host of Scientific American's YouTube series Instant Egghead. My work experience and education focused both on science and writing, and I seek to combine the two in future projects. I am an experienced writer, researcher, and copy editor with an extensive background in health and life sciences, currently working as a scientific copy editor at Nature Publishing Group. At Scientific American, I wrote and hosted several episodes of the Instant Egghead video series. I co-founded and currently help direct the organization SciArt Center, which aims to build a community of scientists and artists in New York City. I am also a contributing writer and copy editor for The Last Magazine, an arts and culture magazine targeting a highly literate, arts-focused audience.” When It Comes to Climate Change, It's Too Late Now to Say Sorry, Inverse.com, https://www.inverse.com/article/12516-when-it-comes-to-climate-change-it-s-too-late-now-to-say-sorry

Any discussion of climate change inevitably boils down to a single phrase: two degrees Celsius. The somewhat

arbitrary number represents the hard limit to the amount of global warming we can permit before we hit the point of no return. Last year, experts at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change contended that while

the window to slow down carbon emissions was closing, there was still time to slow down the Earth’s

irreversible demise by increasing the share of renewable energy to 80 percent up from 30 percent. But a new report from meteorologist Eric Holthaus in Slate makes it clear that the northern hemisphere has breached that two-degree mark over normal, pre-Industrial temperatures. We have, it seems, already failed. He explains that February was somewhere between 1.15 and 1.4 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, making it “the most above-average month ever measured.” While the “official” temperature data sets haven’t been released yet — data from NOAA’s MLOST, NASA’s GISTEMP, and the UK’s HadCRUT are the most highly cited — Holthaus argues that it really doesn’t matter because the recent numbers are so high that tiny fluctuations wouldn’t make much of a difference. Emphasizing that temperatures are not only rising but that the rate at which they’re increasing is speeding up, he writes: Keep in

mind that it took from the dawn of the industrial age until October 2015 to reach the first 1.0°C rise. That

means we have come as much as an extra 0.4°C further in just the last five months. We already know 2015 was the hottest year on record, with the effect of our flagging efforts at curbing emissions exacerbated by the crazy-strong El Niño effect. If Holthaus

is right — that it’s too late to turn back — it signals a need to switch the focus of our climate change plans from prevention to contingency. Scientists like Stanford University’s Rob Jackson, Ph.D., already skeptical of the efficacy of the two-degree limit, have suggested chasing options such as “negative-emission energy,” which will allow us to retract the emissions we’ve already dumped into the atmosphere. That technology doesn’t exist yet, but it’s clear that it’s going to have to happen much sooner rather than later. “This is a milestone moment for our species,” Holthaus writes. “Climate change deserves our greatest possible attention.”

Too late to prevent climate change – research into adaptation is key to prevent impactsMIT 2015

MIT Technology Review Editors. “What’s next?” technologyreview.com. 12-22-15. Webpage. Accessed 7-1-16. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/544676/whats-next/

The pledges from countries around the world on how they intend to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other

greenhouse gases make for remarkable reading. It’s true that even if they are fully implemented, these pledges—

submitted as the nations prepared for the Paris climate conference beginning in late November—will fall dangerously short of keeping the average global rise in temperature below 2 °C. Still, they signal an international consensus about the dangers of climate change, and they communicate a sense of how urgent it is to transform our energy infrastructure. Many of the nations’ plans contain poignant descriptions of damage that is already happening. Says the document from Bangladesh: “Extreme temperatures, erratic rainfall, floods, drought, tropical cyclones, rising sea levels, tidal surges, salinity intrusion and ocean acidification are causing serious negative impacts on the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in Bangladesh, and are gradually offsetting the remarkable

socio-economic development gained over the past 30 years, as well as jeopardising future economic growth.” These fears are supported by research into the social and economic effects of climate change . But we know what needs to be

done. It is essential that a price be put on carbon emissions to account for the real cost of burning fossil fuels. And we need to increase our funding both for research into new energy sources and for widespread deployment of promising technology. Meanwhile, improvements in agriculture, such as drought-

resistant crops, and in other areas of technology can help us adapt to climate change . In 2006, MIT Technology

Review ran a cover story titled “It’s Not Too Late.” Now, despite a decade of inaction, it is still not too late to lessen the damage. It will be an immense and expensive undertaking to transform our energy infrastructure and help those most harmed by the changing climate. And, as climate scientist Ken Caldeira reminds us, we must also change our attitudes and stop allowing carbon waste to be dumped into the air. —The Editors

Alt causes

GenericPlan can’t solve – intellectual property rights, education, funding and infrastructure are all reasons why plan doesn’t do enoughSuzuki et al 2016

Masachika Suzuki: School of Global Environmental Studies, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan; Norichika Kanie: school of Media and Governance, Keio University, Japan; and Mashahiko Iguchi: Department of International Relations, Kyoto Sangyo University, Japan. “New approaches for transitions to low fossil carbon societies: promoting opportunities for effective development, diffusion and implementation of technologies, policies and strategies” Ebscohost. Journal of Cleaner Production. Aug2016, Vol. 128, p1-5. 5p. accessed 7-1-16

The status of current and evolving institutional frameworks designed to facilitate various low fossil carbon technology networks is at the heart of materializing effective institutional frameworks for low fossil carbon

technology governance. One critical issue is intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes itself is worked as a barrier to effective transfer of the technologies, especially due to the fact that UNFCCC overlaps with TRIPS Agreement on the subject matter of technology transfer, as argued by Oh and Matsuoka (2015). By examining the bi-polar contestation between the ‘IPR as a catalyst approach’ and the IPR as barrier to the transfer of environmentally sound technologies approach, authors explored for ‘complementary institutional designs’ under the

climate change regime that are compatible with the TRIPS Agreement. Huenteler et al. (2014) discussed local and global technological learning to reduce the cost associating with clean infrastructure technologies in developing countries. They found the largest potential for reducing the cost lies in local learning, by drawing

case study from Thailand's electricity sector. Hence, authors pointed out that to foster technological learning cross the wide range of clean technologies, international support need to consider both the global perspective and local context and framework conditions. Aggarwal and Jain (2015) analyzed road transportation in Delhi region with focus on energy demand and carbon dioxide emissions. The authors point out that while there is fewer

transport related Clean Development Mechanism projects, there is huge scope for reduction in carbon emissions from transport sector. By considering five scenarios for the year 2021, they seek implications for transport related Nationally Appropriate

Mitigation Actions under the UNFCCC. Carafa et al. (2015) assessed high upfront costs and investment risks as barriers for investments in low-carbon infrastructure technologies in the Middle East and North Africa.

They found that electricity policy legacies and practices are hard to change in the region, hence, technical and financial assistance, namely capacity building on project assessment, project finance, and grid management should target such region.

Another important aspect of effective low fossil carbon technology diffusion and widespread implementation is new ideas for existing and new financial arrangements. Kameyama et al. (2015) illustrated how investment towards low-carbon development could be materialized in Asia. They estimated that USD125-149 billion per year would be needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the region by 2035. They also pointed out that the role of

private sector investment would be indispensable in fulfilling all the long-term investment needs related to climate mitigation. Vasileiadou et al. (2015) explored the potential of crowdfunding for renewable energy break through and transform both the energy and the financial regimes by focusing on a case study from Netherlands. The authors demonstrated how governmental market regulation and support mechanisms are shaping crowdfunding as a business model. As a result, they found despite the low volume of crowdfunding today, but there would be a good potential.

Agriculture

Agriculture and food waste accounts for 20% of global GHG emissions—it’s set to increase massively due to changing lifestyles in India and China—this will directly undermine the affirmative.PIK 16 Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). "Reducing food waste could help mitigate climate change." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, April 7 2016 www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160407111701.htm PBM UMKC

"Reducing food waste can contribute to fighting hunger, but to some extent also prevent climate impacts like more intense weather extremes and sea-level rise," lead author Ceren Hic says. Even though food availability on a global average has been higher than required in theory, some developing countries still have to fight undernourishment or hunger. "At the same time,

agriculture is a major driver of climate change, accounting for more than 20 Percent of overall global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2010. Avoiding food loss and waste would therefore avoid unnecessary greenhouse-gas emissions and help mitigate climate change," co-author Prajal Pradhan explains. The researchers analyzed body types and food requirements for the past and different future scenarios, accounting for demographic changes as well as food

demand and availability and associated emissions. They found that while the global average food demand per person remains almost constant, in the last five decades already food availability has rapidly increased . "More importantly, food availability and requirement ratio show a linear relationship with human development, indicating that richer countries

consume more food than is healthy or simply waste it," Pradhan adds. Consequently, greenhouse-gas emissions associated with food waste could increase tremendously from today 0.5 to 1.9-2.5 Gigatons of CO2 equivalents per year by 2050, the study shows. Emissions from agriculture will become more and more important Due to an unbridled demographic growth and lifestyle changes, emissions from agriculture alone are expected to rise by up to 18 Gigatons of CO2 equivalents by 2050, previous research already showed. "Thus,

emissions related to discarded food are just the tip of the iceberg," Prajal Pradhan explains. "However, it is quite astounding that up to 14 percent of overall agricultural emissions in 2050 could easily be avoided by a better management of food utilisation and distribution. Changing individual behavior could be one key towards mitigating the climate crisis." "Currently, 1.3 billion tons of food per year are discarded," explains Jürgen Kropp, co-author and deputy chair of PIK research domain Climate Impacts and Vulnerabilities. While food losses occur mostly in developing countries due to less efficient agricultural infrastructures, food waste in contrast is common in rich countries.

"As many emerging economies like China or India are projected to rapidly increase their food waste as a consequence of changing lifestyle, increasing welfare and dietary habits towards a larger share of animal-based products, this could over proportionally increase greenhouse-gas emissions associated with food waste -- at the same time undermining efforts for an ambitious climate protection . "

CAFOsCAFOs contribute more to climate change than the entire transportation sector- and they release more damaging chemicalsCummins 13 Ronnie Cummins in 2013, How Factory Farming Contributes to Global Warming, EcoWatch, http://ecowatch.com/2013/01/21/factory-farming-global-warming/

CAFOs contribute directly to global warming by releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere— more than the entire global transportation industry . The air at some factory farm test sites in the U.S. is dirtier than in America’s most polluted cities, according to the Environmental Integrity Project.

According to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of all human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, including 37 percent of methane emissions and 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions. The methane releases from billions of imprisoned animals on

factory farms are 70 times more damaging per ton to the earth’s atmosphere than CO2. Indirectly, factory farms contribute to climate disruption by their impact on deforestation and draining of wetlands, and

because of the nitrous oxide emissions from huge amounts of pesticides used to grow the genetically engineered corn and soy fed to animals raised in CAFOs. Nitrous oxide pollution is even worse than methane—200 times more damaging per ton than CO2 . And just as animal waste leaches antibiotics and hormones into ground and water, pesticides and fertilizers also eventually find their way into our waterways, further damaging the environment.

No Solvency- Econ Growth

Growth = Warming

Climate change and economic growth are positively related- impossible to solve warming without destroy economyKevin Anderson, Professor of Economics, and Alice Bows, reporter, 13 January 2011, “Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world”, Volume 369, issue 1934, http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/20.short#abstract-1

This already demanding conclusion becomes even more challenging when assumptions about the rates of viable emission reductions are considered alongside an upgrading of the severity of impacts for 2°C. Within global emission

scenarios, such as those developed by Stern [6], the CCC [8] and ADAM [47], annual rates of emission reduction beyond the peak years are constrained to levels thought to be compatible with economic growth—normally 3 per cent to 4

per cent per year. However, on closer examination these analyses suggest such reduction rates are no longer sufficient to avoid dangerous climate change. For example, in discussing arguments for and against carbon markets the CCC state ‘rich developed economies need to start demonstrating that a low-carbon economy is possible and compatible with economic prosperity’ [8, p. 160]. However, given the CCC acknowledge ‘it is not now possible to ensure with high likelihood that a temperature rise of more than 2°C is avoided ’ and given the view that

reductions in emissions in excess of 3–4% per year are not compatible with economic growth, the CCC are, in effect,

conceding that avoiding dangerous (and even extremely dangerous) climate change is no longer compatible with economic prosperity. In prioritizing such economic prosperity over avoiding extremely dangerous climate change, the CCC, Stern, ADAM and similar analyses suggest they are guided by what is feasible.34 However, while in terms of emission reduction rates their analyses favour the ‘challenging though still feasible’ end of orthodox assessments, the approach they adopt in relation to peaking dates is very different. All premise their principal analyses and economic assessments on the ‘infeasible’ assumption of global emissions peaking between 2010 and 2016; a profound departure from the more ‘feasible’ assumptions framing the majority of such reports. The scale of this departure is further emphasized when disaggregating global emissions into Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 nations, as the scenario pathways developed within this paper

demonstrate. Only if Annex 1 nations reduce emissions immediately35 at rates far beyond those typically countenanced and only then if non-Annex 1 emissions peak between 2020 and 2025 before reducing at unprecedented rates, do global emissions peak by 2020. Consequently, the 2010 global peak central to many integrated assessment model scenarios as well as the 2015–2016 date enshrined in the CCC, Stern and ADAM analyses, do not reflect any orthodox

‘feasibility’. By contrast, the logic of such studies suggests (extremely) dangerous climate change can only be avoided if economic growth is exchanged, at least temporarily, for a period of planned austerity within Annex 1 nations36 and a rapid transition away from fossil-fuelled development within non-Annex 1 nations . The

analysis within this paper offers a stark and unremitting assessment of the climate change challenge facing the global community. There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global mean surface temperature at below 2°C, despite

repeated high-level statements to the contrary. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upwards

(e.g. [20,21]), sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between dangerous and

extremely dangerous climate change. Consequently, and with tentative signs of global emissions returning to their earlier levels of growth, 2010 represents a political tipping point. The science of climate change allied with emission pathways for Annex 1 and non-Annex 1 nations suggests a profound departure in the scale and scope of the mitigation and adaption challenge from that detailed in many other analyses, particularly those directly informing policy.

The existing economic system will not be able to solve Climate Change- radical change is neededMinqi Li, a Chinese political economista Chinese political economist, 2008 › Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August), “Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism”, http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/climate-change-limits-to-growth-and-the-imperative-for-socialism/

As the global ecological crisis deepens, some among the upper middle class recognize or sense that the existing capitalist “life style” is in serious trouble and cannot be sustained indefinitely. Yet, they are unable or unwilling to imagine anything beyond the capitalist system, on which their relatively privileged material life depends. They are not yet ready to give up their implicit political support for the capitalist class. Their living conditions and experiences are very much detached from those of the working class. It is therefore difficult for

them to see that only with a massive mobilization and organization of the working class could there be any hope for the social transformation required for ecological sustainability to be accomplished. The upper-middle-class environmentalists, as a result, have to put their desperate hope (or faith) in technological miracles on the one hand and the power

of moral persuasion on the other hand (which they hope would convince the capitalist class to behave morally and rationally). However, the laws of motion of capitalism will keep operating so long as the capitalist system remains intact , independent

of the individual wills and against the best wishes of the upper-middle-class environmentalists. Sooner or later, those truly conscientious environmentalists will have to choose between the commitment to ecological sustainability and the commitment to an exploitative and oppressive social system. Furthermore, with the deepening of the global ecological crisis and the crisis of global capitalism in general, it may soon become

increasingly difficult for the capitalist system to accommodate the material privileges of the upper middle class

while simultaneously meeting the requirements of production for profit and accumulation. As I discussed earlier, there are many technical obstacles to the de-carbonization of the world’s energy system. Brown and Lovins have greatly

exaggerated the potentials of technical change. But even if many of the proposed highly efficient energy technologies using renewables become available right away, their application will be delayed by the inherent obstacles to technological diffusion in the capitalist system. In an economic system based on production for profit, a new technology is “intellectual property.” People or countries that cannot afford to pay are denied access. Even today hundreds of millions of people in the world have no access to electricity. How many decades would it take before they start to have access to solar-powered electric cars? Moreover, unlike consumer novelties such as cell phones or lap tops, which can be readily manufactured

by the existing industrial system, the de-carbonization of the world’s energy system requires fundamental transformation of the world’s economic infrastructure. This basically means that the pace of de-carbonization, even under the most ideal conditions, cannot really be faster than the rate of depreciation of long-lasting fixed assets. Considering that many buildings and other long-lasting structures will stand for half a century or even longer, the assumed rates of de-carbonization presented in tables 1 and 2 must be seen as extremely optimistic. From a purely

technical point of view, the most simple and straightforward solution to the crisis of climate change is immediately to stop all economic growth and start to downsize world material consumption in an orderly manner until

the greenhouse gases emissions fall to reasonable levels. This can obviously be accomplished with the existing technology. If all the current and potentially available de-carbonization technologies are introduced to all parts of the world as rapidly as possible, the world should still have the material production capacity to meet the basic needs of the entire world’s population even with a much smaller world economy (scenarios 1 to 3 in table 2 would roughly correspond to a return to the 1960s material living standards).

Cap = WarmingCapitalism places economic growth over the lives of humans- current economic system cannot solve for climate changeMariano Torras, a professor of economics, 2016 › Volume 68, Issue 01 (May), “Orthodox Economics and the Science of Climate Change”, http://monthlyreview.org/2016/05/01/orthodox-economics-and-the-science-of-climate-change/

Climate change presents capitalism with an unprecedented problem. For the first time, the world faces a largely human-made challenge that jeopardizes the very viability of our species . But capitalism is incurably short-sighted, with the imperative for continued growth trumping everything else. Even if it were to come at the expense of future generations of capitalists, the corporate elite would not accommodate any meaningful change in policy if it meant a reduced surplus. Consequently, the message that climate change can be “managed” by balancing the benefits against the costs, effectively denying any existential risk, is indispensable, at least in allowing capitalists to buy time. Enter orthodox economics. A critical advantage of mathematically sophisticated models is that they mystify all but the few who “speak the language,” conferring greater credibility on those using them. Mainstream economics helps capitalism “manage” climate change by (1) redefining uncertainty as “near-certainty,” where we know all the possible outcomes and their probabilities, (2) disregarding the possibility of existential risk to humanity without explicitly denying it, and (3) reducing to a single number critical moral questions that should inform future policy. The result, effectively, is that climate change is transformed from a

complex mystery into a precise science. For a challenge as complex as climate change, social cost-benefit is worse than worthless. The beguiling precision of quantitative models gives the impression that they are useful for policy, when it is in reality highly misleading with possibly disastrous consequences. Despite their allure, numbers are frequently not based on objective science or study.

In the case of climate change, to say that they are fabricated is not much of an exaggeration. Vast uncertainty should be cause for aggressive action, not complacency. Instead, averse to meaningful change that might reduce capitalist surplus, the corporate media, with the sometimes unwitting assistance of the economics mainstream, will resist efforts to inform the public about the urgency of action, to say nothing of the incessant economic growth most culpable for climate change in the first place. Absent a shift to a system that places priority on human needs over private profits, it is difficult to imagine that quantitative methods will loosen their grip on the political imagination of economists, governments, and corporations.

Limits on economic growth are the only way to mitigate climate change- the capitalist system is a contradiction that refuses to look at the real problemsJohn Bellamy Foster, a professor of sociology, September 19, 2015, “Climate Change, Limits to Growth, and the Imperative for Socialism” http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/climate-change-limits-to-growth-and-the-imperative-for-socialism/

If economic growth in the wealthy countries continues as at present—even by the standards of our current period of relative economic stagnation—there is very little or no chance of avoiding breaking the world climate budget with disastrous global consequences. It is the growth in the scale of the economy, and the destructive tendencies of our ecologically inefficient, technologically destructive society , geared to roundabout production—whereby plastic spoons are made in China and shipped to the United States where they have a lifetime use of a few minutes before reentering the waste stream, generating all sorts of toxic chemicals in the process—that are threatening the biogeochemical processes

of the entire planet. Capital’s social metabolic processes attempt to recreate the planet in its own image, treating all planetary boundaries as mere barriers to surmount, thus generating a global metabolic rift on a rapidly warming planet. All of this points to the need to place limits on economic growth, and specifically on the expansion of today’s disaster capitalism. Second, capitalism is suffering at present from

an epochal crisis—both economic and environmental. This is manifested in overaccumulation, stagnation, and financialization, on the one hand, and ecological rifts and disruptions, both within each and every ecosystem and on the level of the planet

as a whole, on the other.50 These two long-term structural crises of the system are not reducible to each other, except in the

sense that they are both induced by the logic of capital accumulation. What we have called ecological crisis proper is

largely invisible to the value accounting of the capitalist system, and is systematically given a lower priority in relation to economic imperatives. Society is constantly told that the solution to economic stagnation is economic growth by any means: usually involving the promotion of neoliberal disaster capitalism. Yet such an economic solution—which is beyond the power of the system to effect in a long-term, stable way, but only on

a temporary, ad-hoc basis—would be fatal to the planetary environment, which requires less, not more expansion of the economic treadmill. The epochal crisis of economy and ecology within the capitalist system is thus likely to continue, with both

fault lines widening, as long as the logic of capital prevails. This conflict between economic and ecological objectives is not a contradiction of analysis, but of the capitalist system itself.

No Solvency- Modeling

GlobalGovernments will not come to an agreement-too many variables create a huge prisoners dilemma gameLane 2015

Jan-Erik Lane: fellow with Public Policy Institute in Belgrade. “Coping with Global Warming” Applied Economics and Finance, August 2015, v. 2, iss. 3, pp. 92-101. Accessed 7-1-16. http://redfame.com/journal/index.php/aef/article/viewFile/937/885. Modified for gendered language.

The climate change problematic is severely aggravated by profound coordination difficulties, as governments simply

cannot cooperate easily to cut back emissions. Governments have one major priority, namely economic development or economic growth, and when this goal collides with costs for the environment and climate change, then governments renege or postpone action. Or they begin arguing about who is to reduce the most. Carbon neutral technology is sometimes available for investments in new projects, but it is only employed in a piecemeal fashion. Some countries boast that they are the leaders of carbon neutral economic development, but at the same time they have the highest emissions per capita in the

world: Qatar, Kuwait, UAE and Singapore to some extent! Two difficulties make for coordination failure: (1) Free riding:

Warming’s insight 1911 The pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gases is like much environmental degradation a prisoners’ dilemma game due to open access, creating the externality problematic in Stern’s vocabulary (Stern, 2006). When a resources lies in open access, then it will not be allocated in a Pareto-optimal fashion, not even in the long-run. Instead, the players involved in harvesting the resources will capture as much as they can individually and myopically (Nash equilibrium). There are two situations, already discovered by Danish economist J. Warming, anticipating the tragedy of the commons (Scott, Gordon, Hardin): 1) If the use of the open access resources involves costs, then the resources will be exploited until average cost = average value, depleting the

economic rent completely; 2) If the use of the open access resource is free without any charge, then its use will be driven to extinction. At first, the emission of greenhouse gases could be done freely, meaning that nobody cared. Secondly, small groups of people concerned by the local effects of climate change began to complain –

environmental refugees. Now, several governments have started to realize the dangers as the pollution costs mount, but how can they handle the transaction costs involved in managing a gigantic PD game with 200 players? The costs of global warming differ locally, but they are an obvious concern for all governments. Now, how are the costs of reducing the emission of

greenhouse gases to be divided onto the various governments = N? If this requires accepting lower economic growth rates in a few countries, should the costs be shared by all somehow? Suppose the total cost of reducing emissions by 50 per

cent is C. A single small country would argue that it could not take its share C/N, because there would be no real difference if it was left out of the global agreement, i.e. C/N-1. Or a huge country could argue that it would not wish to take on a major part of the cost, because it is only one of many polluting countries and whatever sacrifice it makes will be shared with the others, i.e. 1/N.

Modeling isn’t enough anyway – Africa and Middle Eastern emissions are increasing while developed nations' are decreasing – continued impactsBannaga 16 [Sharaf Eldin Ibrahim, civil engineer graduate from Khartoum University in 1971 and MSc and Phd graduate in Environmental Engineering from Loughborough University, Future Cities and Environment December 2016, 2:4, "The need for UN climate change policy reformation" accessed 07/01/16, Springer]

Inability to implement climate change mitigation measures by developing cities Developing cities are in need of the use of whatever source of energy. They can’t: Afford green technology Poor countries are unable to implement policies that provide safe energy supply because of the prohibitive cost envisaged for the reduction of GHGs which requires use of alternate or renewable energy. They will not consider using alternative energy unless it becomes affordable to their nations - they are in need to run their factories and provide mobility to their urban dwellers which is already in limited supply. Establish large capacity public transport systems Nothing can be done by

most developing countries to solve the transportation problem – there is - insufficient public transport capacity and low traffic speed in addition to a limited network of paved roads. Growth rates of private vehicle ownership in the developing world continue to soar despite the fact that the rates of private cars ownership in the developed countries is exceptionally high and more than tens times the rate in the developing countries. According to Table 4, for example the number of motor vehicles in some European countries e.g.; Finland and the Unites State varies between 612 and 797 vehicles per 1000 people respectively, while this number is in the range 3 - 27 in Ethiopia and Sudan respectively. Large capacity systems such as trains, metros, transit rails, and large capacity buses are not expected to operate in the near future, but instead - private vehicles utilization rates will increase because cities will not inhibit their use due to absence of alternatives. Adopt “Compact City” model of physical development It is known that a negative correlation exists between population density and atmospheric GHG emissions; spatially compact and mixed-use urban developments have generally significant benefits in terms of GHG emissions reduction. The development pattern adopted by the majority of developing cities is urban sprawl which is contrary to ‘Compact City’ model resulting in reduction of energy and services cost. The incessant displacement of rural people, the continuous exodus towards cities; and the excessive expansion of makeshift settlements and uncontrolled development produce huge subdivisions of sprawled physical development overwhelmed

by poor dwellers living in shanty settlements. The substantial horizontal expansion of Greater Khartoum in Sudan and Addis Ababa

in Ethiopia is a typical example and has been encouraged by abundance of land serviced with water, construction of cheap building forms and lack of development control. In both cities the population density decreases by time as

indicated in Table 5. In conclusion, when considering the above prevailing situations in developing cities and the expectation that these cities become centres of powerful forces of economic growth and wealth so they will be expected soon to emit very large volumes of GHGs more than what developed cities are generating . This argument is supported by the circulated data produced by reputable agencies. According to data from Statista [11], three of the largest five producers of CO2 emissions worldwide in 2014, based on their share of global CO2emissions and which were not expected to generate CO2 more than the industrial countries were China, India and Brazil. The five largest producers were China 23.4 %, USA 16.69 %, India 5.7 % - Russia 4.87 % and Brazil 4.17 %. Also, the evidences from the IEA Annual Reports [12] - and the 2015 data on the Statista Website show that the CO2 emissions of OECD countries dropped from 66.1 % in 1983 to 41 % in 2010 and - 38 % in 2012. The CO2emission of Non-OECD Europe and Eurasia dropped from 16.2 % in 1973 to reach 8.6 % in 2012 while the CO2 emissions of China increased from 5.9 % in 1973 to 24.1 % in 2010 and 26 % in 2012. The CO2 emissions of Africa have almost doubled from 1973 at 1.8 % to 3.3 % in 2012, while that of Asia has more than tripled, increasing from 3 to 11.6 % in 2012. The CO2 emissions of Middle East have jumped from 0.8 % in 1973 to 5.2 % in 2012. In addition, the CO2 emissions of North America and Europe were almost equal to the rest of the world in 1990 but currently they are less than one third as indicated in Fig. 8showing that emissions from developing countries are constantly increasing from year to year. Although they were not part of the binding framework to reduce emissions, the substantial emissions from Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa – has compelled them to take a

more progressive role in international climate negotiations. For all the above reasons, climate change cannot be combated without the exertion of enough efforts by developing cities or finding cheaper alternative energy affordable to them.

IndiaIndia’s commitment to reducing emissions is sketchy - BY EMILY ATKIN JUL 2, 2015 12:59 PM

In disappointing news for watchers of global warming, an Indian government official has said the country won’t announce a target date for reducing the total amount of carbon it emits. India is the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, which causes climate change. First reported by the BBC, the comments came from Indian environment minister Prakash Javadekar, who said that the country will submit a plan to cut emissions to the U.N., which is hosting international climate talks at the end of the year. But India will not give a target date for when it expects to peak its total carbon emissions. “The world is not expecting… India to announce its peaking year,” Javadekar told the BBC. “Countries know where India stands and what its requirements [development needs] are and therefore nobody has asked us for [the] peaking year.” The comments are not exactly new ground for Javadekar, who has said before that India will need to keep emitting carbon in order to combat its poverty problem. Last year, in an interview with the New York Times, Javadekar said “that his government’s first priority was to alleviate poverty and improve the nation’s

economy, which he said would necessarily involve an increase in emissions through new coal-powered electricity and transportation.” He said that the idea of peaking carbon emissions is more “for developed countries.” The United States, the second-largest carbon emitter, has pledged to cut its carbon emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025. China, the largest carbon emitter, announced on Tuesday a commitment to peak its emissions around 2030. China’s peak may even happen sooner, according to ClimateProgress’ Joe Romm, who after a recent trip to Beijing found that it’s “a widely held view … that China will peak its carbon dioxide emissions around 2025.” India does, for its part, recognize the threat of human-caused climate change. After a recent heat wave killed more than 2,300 people, making it the 5th deadliest in recorded world history, the country’s minister of earth sciences was clear about what was driving the disaster. “Let us not fool ourselves that there is no connection between the unusual number of deaths from the ongoing heat wave and the certainty of another failed monsoon,”

Harsh Vardhan said in comments to Reuters. “It’s not just an unusually hot summer, it is climate change.” But instead of announcing concrete goals, India seems to be looking more toward getting funding for clean energy projects .

Alt cause – India is now the world’s largest GHG emitter Jose 2015

Sajai Jose. “India is now world's fastest-growing major polluter” business-standard.com. 6-27-15. Website. Accessed 7-1-16. http://www.business-standard.com/article/specials/india-is-now-world-s-fastest-growing-major-polluter-115062700303_1.html?utm_content=bufferde934&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

For the first time ever, the year 2014 saw India’s carbon dioxide emissions growth accounting for the largest share of global emissions growth, according to a new global report. India’s CO2 emissions from energy use had increased by 8.1% during the year, making it the world’s fastest-growing major polluter . It was the single-most significant trend revealed in the latest edition of British Petroleum’s comprehensive Statistical Review of World Energy, but the Indian media got the story upside down. Most coverage celebrated India’s sky-high

energy-consumption figures, while glossing over its record-breaking emissions growth, a historical milestone with serious implications. India’s contribution amounted to 28%, or almost a third of global emissions growth in 2014. That number alone does not

convey the magnitude of the larger shift it reflects. Consider these supplementary facts: Those countries whose CO2 emissions increased in 2014 together added an extra 572 million tonnes (MT) of CO2 to the atmosphere. India’s share was by far the largest at 157 MT of CO2, substantially ahead of China (85 MT) and US (53 MT), the world’s leading polluters for decades. India’s share of emissions growth (157 MT of CO2) was not only the largest volumetric contribution

in its own history, but for the first time made it the world’s biggest contributor to emissions growth. While every other major polluter saw emissions growth decline considerably, some even managed to cut emissions significantly over 2013 levels. The EU,

for instance, cut more emissions (211 MT of CO2) in 2014 than India added. The additional CO2 India added to the

atmosphere in 2014 (157 MT) was greater than that added by the US (155 MT) in 2013. The US’ economy is ten times as big as India’s and consumes nearly four times as much energy. Trends are reversible, but the pattern that emerges from these numbers clearly point to a pivotal shift. India has bucked a global trend to emerge as the single-most critical player when it comes to carbon emissions, and thereby, climate change.

RussiaNo modeling – Russia’s climate plan causes carbon emissions increaseHomewood 15 [Paul Homewood, writer for “Most people don’t know that…”, citing Globe International’s policy report on the Paris Talks. OCTOBER 18, 2015. Accessed 07/01/16 https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/fe506-cartinarussia.jpg?w=500&h=322]

A promise of 25% reduction from 1990 levels does not sound unreasonable, though less than promised by the EU. However, as ever, the devil is

in the detail. As we can see below, emissions of CO2 declined rapidly after 1990, with the shut down of huge swathes of old, inefficient Soviet heavy industry. Emissions have actually been below the 2030 target since 1995, and have

slightly increased since. As with other countries’ plans, the commitments cover all GHG, not just CO2, but the detail in the Russian document suggests the other gases don’t alter the above picture significantly . There

is, as well, one other catch. Russia insists that the absorbing capacity of its forests is also accounted for in these targets. This is known as LULUCF, or Land Use, Land Use Change & Forestry. The plan does not specify any numbers for this, but I think we can take it as a given that the inclusion of forests will be favourable for Russia. The Climate Action Tracker website, which is keen to see maximum GHG cuts, apparently is not too impressed anyway! On 31 March 2015, the Russian Federation submitted its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), proposing to reduce its emissions of net greenhouse gases (GHG) by 25% to 30% below the 1990 level by 2030. After accounting for forestry this is a reduction of only 6% to 11% below 1990 levels of industrial GHG emissions [1], and an increase of 30% to 38% compared to 2012 levels. Based on this target we rate Russia “inadequate”. This is because forests there have turned

into a carbon sink in recent years (presumably not chopping so many down now). Either way, it is abundantly clear that, if the plan is carried through, there will be no reduction in Russia’s GHG emissions by 2030.

No modeling – Japan and Russia won’t be reducing their emissions any time soonHomewood 14 [Paul Homewood, writer for ‘Not a lot of people know”, citing Globe International “You Lead, But I Won’t Follow!” OCTOBER 29, 2014. Accessed 07/01/16]

There’s a few snippets that are worth highlighting from the GLOBE database on countries that have enacted climate laws. Japan Note that the 2020 Pledge has turned from the original promise to cut emissions by 25% to an increase of 3.1% . This is all, of course

related to Japan’s problems with nuclear power. Nevertheless, it reemphasises the fact that Japan has no intention to make any serious cuts by 2020. It is debatable whether they ever did have any such intention, since emissions have not fallen below 1990 levels at any stage since then. Russia Two things are worth noting: 1) As GLOBE point out, the legislation is effectively no more than a Presidential Decree, which, in GLOBE’s words, is not a binding bill.

Put simply, Putin can, at a stroke of a pen, change his mind and cancel the whole thing . 2) More significantly, the impressive sounding pledge, to cut emissions by 25% from 1990 levels, is worthless. As with other ex Soviet Bloc countries, the shutting down of whole tranches of old, obsolete heavy industry led to a massive cut in emissions in the early 1990’s. Consequently, the 25% target had already been achieved by

1994! Currently, emissions have increased by 6% since 2008, when the UK passed its Climate Change Act, in the hopes everybody else would follow.

ChinaFrameworks for China and the US to reduce emissions do nothing – empirics prove – modeling won’t happen and won’t matter if it does [NOTE: DO NOT READ THIS CARD AND A ‘NO IMPACT’ CARD. DON’T]Auerbach 15 [David, Reuters, " A child born today may live to see humanity’s end, unless…" accessed 07/01/16, http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/06/18/a-child-born-today-may-live-to-see-humanitys-end-unless/]

Humans will be extinct in 100 years because the planet will be uninhabitable, said the late Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner, one of the leaders in the effort to eradicate smallpox during the 1970s. He blamed overcrowding, denuded resources and

climate change. Fenner’s prediction, made in 2010, is not a sure bet, but he is correct that there is no way emissions reductions will be enough to save us from our trend toward doom. And there doesn’t seem to be any big global rush to reduce emissions, anyway. When the G7 called on Monday for all countries to reduce carbon emissions to zero in the next 85 years, the scientific

reaction was unanimous: That’s far too late. And no possible treaty that emerges from the current United Nations Framework

Convention on Climate Change in Bonn, Germany, in preparation for November’s United Nations climate conference in Paris, will be sufficient. At this point, lowering emissions is just half the story — the easy half. The harder half will be an aggressive effort to find the technologies needed to reverse the climate apocalypse that has already begun. For years now, we have heard that we are at a tipping point. Al Gore warned us in An Inconvenient Truth that immediate action was required if we were to prevent global warming. In 2007, Sir David King, former chief scientific advisor to the British government, declared, “Avoiding dangerous climate change is impossible – dangerous climate change is already here. The question is, can we avoid catastrophic climate change?” In the years since, emissions have risen, as have global temperatures. Only two conclusions can be drawn: Either these old warnings were alarmist, or we are already in far bigger trouble than the U.N. claims. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the case. Lowering emissions and moving to cleaner energy sources is a necessary step to prevent catastrophic temperature rises. The general target is to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius. Higher increases — like the 5C increase currently projected by 2100 — run the risk of widespread flooding, famine, drought, sea-level rise, mass extinction and, worse, the potential of passing a tipping point (frequently set at 6C) that could render much of the planet uninhabitable and wipe out most species. Even the 2C figure predicts more than a meter’s rise in sea levels by 2100, enough to displace millions. It is no wonder that the Pentagon calls climate change a serious “threat multiplier” and is considering its potential disruptive impact across all its planning. This

is where the U.N. talks fall short — by a mile. The targets proffered by the United States (a 26 percent to 28 percent decrease from

2005 levels by 2025), the European Union (a 40 percent decrease from 1990 levels by 2030) and China (an unspecified emissions peak by 2030) are nowhere near enough to keep us under the 2C target. In 2012, journalist Bill McKibben, in a feature for Rolling Stone, explained much of the math behind the current thinking on global warming. He concluded that the United Nations’ figures were definitely on the rosy side. In particular, McKibben noted that the temperature has already increased 0.8C, and even if we were to stop all carbon-dioxide emissions today, it would increase another 0.8C simply due to the existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That leaves only a 0.4C buffer before hitting 2C. Even assuming the Paris conference implements everything that’s promised, we will be on track to use up the remaining “carbon budget” — the amount of carbon we can emit without blowing past the 2C threshold — within two to three decades, not even at mid-century. These emissions-reduction frameworks, it is safe to say, are simply insufficient. By themselves, they only

offer a small chance of preventing the earth from becoming mostly uninhabitable – for humans at least — over the next few centuries. For the

talks to be more than just a placebo, they need to encompass aggressive plans for climate mitigation, with the assumption that current wishful targets won’t be met

China won’t reduce emissions – carbon dioxide isn’t the problem here – underreporting and coal emissions are worseLoris 15 [Nicolas Loris, an economist, focuses on energy, environmental and regulatory issues as the Herbert and Joyce Morgan fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “Why China Shouldn’t Be Trusted on Its Climate Commitment”. December 04, 2015; accessed 07/01/16]

There has been a lot of attention given to China at the climate conference in Paris. As the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, a lot depends on what China will do—or more accurately what it won’t do. Lots of media reports have commended China for its sudden commitment to climate change. But how the media is portraying China’s commitment to combat global warming isn’t based on reality. Many stories about China and climate change mention China as the top polluter, complete with nasty pictures of factories spewing out black smoke,

while also discussing the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. It’s true that China has serious air and water quality problems. But do not associate those problems with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas. The U.N.’s push to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions is predicated solely on carbon dioxide’s alleged impact on the climate, which appears to be much smaller than the climate models are projecting. China, America’s power plants are largely clean of the pollutants that we know have adverse health effects. Be Wary of China’s ‘Commitment’ to Address Global Warming We should also be wary of any commitment from China because they’ve

been grossly underreporting their carbon dioxide emissions and use of coal. According to a recent story from the New York Times: China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, has been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than the government previously disclosed, according to newly released data . The finding could complicate

the already difficult efforts to limit global warming. Even for a country of China’s size, the scale of the correction is immense. The sharp upward revision in official figures means that China has released much more carbon dioxide—almost a billion

more tons a year according to initial calculations—than previously estimated. China is building more than 350 coal-fired power plants and has plans to build another 800. This is the country we’re going to trust to peak emissions 15 years from

now? The rest of the world should encourage China to address the issue of smog and water contamination. These environmental problems have real adverse human health and environmental impacts . Instead, international bodies are pressing for China to divert resources to address global warming—resources that country could use to truly clean up its environment. Generally speaking, there are two fundamental issues that have broken down international climate negotiations every year. The developing world’s refusal to curb economic growth to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the amount of money developing countries want compared to what the developed world is willing to shell out. Proponents of a negotiation argue that this time is different and that China is making moves to reduce its carbon footprint. China has entered into a climate pact with the U.S. to peak greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 and has set up a pilot cap-and-trade

program, and its government continues to pour billions into renewable energy. If China is not addressing its harmful smog and poor water quality issues, we should be skeptical of its commitment to address global warming . (Again, nor should we be encouraging CO2 reduction. Instead, we should focus on real environmental problems.) We should also be skeptical of the notion that China will stay true to its word 15 years into the future. Effectively, the agreement the Obama administration made with China is that American households and businesses will suffer from higher energy costs now because of carbon regulations in exchange for China maybe

doing something in 2030. Importantly, there has been no discussion of India. If China actually did follow through with its commitment to peak carbon emissions in 2030, India likely will have overtaken China as the most populous country.

Paris agreement doesn’t cause any actual change according to leading climate scientist Marans 12/12/2015 ; Daniel, “Daniel Marans is a general assignment reporter with a focus on politics and economic policy. I am a general assignment reporter in The Huffington Post's Washington bureau. I cover breaking news, and a wide array of politics, business and human interest stories. I specialize in reporting on Federal Reserve monetary policy, the Puerto Rico debt crisis, Social Security policy and U.S. gun safety laws. He was the Interview Producer at Al Jazeera America and an Executive Producer at Take Action News with David Shuster.” Legendary Climate Scientist Is Not Impressed With The Paris Talks, Huffingtonpost.com, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/james-hansen-paris-talks_us_566c48dce4b011b83a6b7acc

Global leaders may have approved a historic climate change agreement in Paris, but James Hansen, a former NASA scientist and pioneer of climate science, says it won’t matter. Hansen told The Guardian in an interview published Saturday before the deal was finalized, that, absent a commitment to tax greenhouse gases, any accord is just a vehicle for empty promises. “It’s a fraud really, a fake,” Hansen said. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a [2 degrees Celsius] warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.” The Obama administration believes that getting 190 nations to reach an agreement is an essential first step, arguing that the provisions of the accord can be strengthened afterward. “[T]he key for Paris is just to make sure

that everybody is locked in, saying, ‘We’re going to do this,’” President Barack Obama said in September. “Once we get to that point, then we can turn the dials.” The accord emerging from the Paris conference is the first deal committing all countries in the world to take action against climate change. Hansen’s 1988 testimony to Congress affirming that climate change is driven by human activity is credited as a foundational moment in the movement to combat rising global temperatures. Hansen, who retired from NASA in 2013 and still teaches at Columbia University, has in recent years become one of the country’s most outspoken climate change activists. Hansen famously argued that approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline would be “game over for the climate.” He was arrested several times while protesting against the pipeline at the White House. On Nov. 6, Obama announced that he would not permit Keystone XL’s construction, following a seven-year review process.

Paris Agreement Fails

Current climate agreements have us set up to face superstorms and revert us back to Eemian period weatherHiggins 3/29/16 ; Eoin, “Eoin Higgins is a writer and historian from Western Massachusetts. He has been writing about US politics for the past five years. Higgins also writes for a Massachusetts print-only weekly paper, The Berkshire Courier, based out of Great Barrington, MA. He is a graduate of the Masters in History program at Fordham University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.” Already Too Late: The Consequences of Climate Change, http://eoinhiggins.com/already-too-late-the-consequences-of-climate-change/

One constant in the environmental movement- and one point on which it is often critiqued- is the constant goalpost moving by scientists when talking about the consequences of climate change. When you’ve been hearing since the 1970s that catastrophe is only a few decades out, it’s

hard to take the warnings seriously. But a new study says that the past fifty years of inaction have led the planet to the point of no return. It’s already too late. The European Journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics released a paper on March 22 authored by, among others, former NASA scientist James Hansen. A New York Times

article summed the argument up succinctly: The basic claim of the paper is that by burning fossil fuels at a prodigious pace and pouring heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, humanity is about to provoke an abrupt climate shift. Specifically, the authors believe that fresh water pouring into the oceans from melting land ice will set off a feedback loop that will cause parts of the great ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to disintegrate rapidly. Subsurface warming may be speeding the process up, warn Hansen et

al, with the possibility of accelerated ice sheet loss in Greenland in the future. Subsurface warming can occur even when the ambient temperature of the planet is cool, as Hansen explains: Rasmussen et al. (2003) examined ocean cores from the southeast Labrador Sea and found that for all 11 Heinrich events “the icy surface water was overlying a relatively warm, poorly ventilated and nutrient rich intermediate water mass to a water depth of at least 1251 m”. Collapse of a Greenland ice shelf fronting the Jakoshavn ice stream during the Younger Dryas cold event has been documented (Rinterknecht et al., 2014), apparently due to subsurface warming beneath the ice shelf leading to rapid discharge of icebergs. The Younger Dryas cold event was a period of global cooling approximately 12,000 years ago. Simply put, it was when the ice sheets covered Europe to the extent that one could walk from the continent to the British Isles. While this cooling event was in full swing, the subsurface temperatures reached high enough levels to carve off chunks of the Greenland ice sheet. That ice sheet is the focus of a new NASA study, Oceans Melting Greenland, which launched last week. From the study’s blog: Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) will pave the way for improved estimates of sea level rise by investigating the extent to which the oceans are melting Greenland’s ice. OMG will

observe changing water temperatures and glaciers that reach the ocean around all of Greenland from 2015 to 2020. The paper claims that prior agreements to contain warming and climate change are insufficient and will lead to devastating climatic collapse. Even a rise of 3.6 Celsius, the cap agreed on in the 2015 Paris agreement, will lead to devastating effects worldwide, the paper warns. The warming climate will lead to an increase of freshwater from the polar regions. This in turn will lead to feedback loops in the polar oceans as the regions take on less freshwater ice than they lose. That net loss of ice will warm the ocean- and lead to an increase in superstorms. The storm systems birthed by this climatic disruption will be on par with storms from the Eemian period. The Eemian period spanned from 130,000 years ago until 115,000 years ago. It was a shorter

warming than the Holocene (our current era) but temperature spikes were far greater as shown below: That intense spike of climate warming is what Hansen et al are comparing our future to. The ice melt and subsequent freshwater intake for the oceans will begin a cyclical maelstrom of extreme weather disruption. The storm systems envisioned in the paper are sobering. The late Eemian period storms were intense and powerful. They reshaped much of the landscape in a similar manner as the glacial movements of the most recent Ice Age. Hansen included images of massive stones on the island of Eleuthra in the Bahamas to prove this point. Such natural wonders are usually the result of glacial motion. These stones were placed there by the super storms of the late Eemian era. They were dropped in place by massive waves generated by intense storm winds. If that’s an example of the

consequences of climate change we have to look forward to, then anything less than a drastic and immediate reduction will likely lead to a similar- or worse- new atmospheric conditions.

The Paris treaty is feeble – makes little reduction in capping the global temperature for billions of dollars spent in the US alone Lomborg in 2016 (Bjorn, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and a visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School; “Climate change is real, but Paris treaty won't fix it: Column;” USA Today; April 24, 2016; http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/04/21/climate-change-real-paris-treaty-costly-few-benefits-research-green-energy-column/83292440/)

World leaders will disembark from carbon-spewing jets in New York on Earth Day this Friday to sign the Paris climate treaty, the world’s costliest-ever accord. No doubt, American presidential candidates will use the spectacle to make hay. In line with President Obama, Hillary Clinton believes the treaty is a “historic step forward” against “one of the greatest challenges” of our age, while Bernie Sanders argues it “goes nowhere near far enough.” John Kasich has “serious concerns” the agreement will hurt the American economy; Donald Trump is not a “great believer” in man-made climate change and might ditch the treaty; Ted Cruz says he’d do the

same because it was agreed to by “ideologues.” Amid this political back-and-forth — man-made climate change is not real, or it is the worst threat facing humanity; the treaty is horrendous, or it is great — the facts are easily lost. The reality is that we need to respond to the real problem of climate change, but this well-intentioned treaty is a hugely expensive way of doing very little. The Paris accord talks a big game. It doesn’t just commit to capping the global temperature increase at 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The text goes even further and says the world’s leaders commit to keeping the increase “well below 2 degrees Celsius” and will try to cap it at 1.5 degrees Celsius. But this is just rhetoric. My own research and the only peer-reviewed published assessment of the Paris agreement used the United Nation’s favorite climate model to measure the impact of

every nation fulfilling every major carbon-cutting promise in the treaty between now and 2030. I found that the total temperature reduction will be just 0.086 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. Even if these promises were extended for 70 more years, then all the promises would reduce temperature rises by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. This is similar to a finding by scientists at MIT. It’s feeble. Yet, we will hear claims this week from green campaigners that the treaty will do a lot more. But we should check their math. Such claims are based on completely unrealistic scenarios in which governments do little now but embark on incredibly ambitious carbon reduction policies after 2030. Given that it’s hard to know whether the Paris treaty will withstand the results even of this

year’s U.S. presidential election, it seems foolhardy to predict that governments will suddenly become dramatically more ambitious 15 years from now. History gives us extra reason for skepticism. The only global treaty to cut carbon — the Kyoto Protocol — famously failed when it was never ratified by the U.S. and was eventually abandoned by Canada, Russia and Japan. Even before then, the treaty had holes in it so big that it was never destined to achieve anything. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we learned that the only surefire way to make substantial emissions cuts was to go through a major economic recession. Obviously, this approach is not very popular with politicians, and we are unlikely to hear even the most climate-alarmed

presidential candidate calling for an economic downturn. By the United Nations’ own reckoning, this treaty will only achieve less than 1% of the emission cuts needed to meet its target temperatures. Ninety-nine percent of the problem is left for the leaders of the 2030s to deal with. And what does it cost to make such feeble cuts? A great deal. This is likely to be among most expensive treaties in the history of the world. U.S. promises alone — to cut greenhouse gas emissions 26%-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 — would reduce gross domestic product more than $150 billion annually. Sadly, that will not be the focus of the treaty signed at the U.N. this Earth

Day. Amid the political sloganeering for and against, we should bear in mind that we need to respond to climate change, but this treaty will do very little at a very high cost.

The Paris Agreement is weak – has deadly flaws and is dangerously inadequate Bawden in 2016 (Tom, Environment Editor; “COP21: Paris deal far too weak to prevent devastating climate change, academics warn;” Independent, centrist British online newspaper; January 8, 2016; http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/cop21-paris-deal-far-too-weak-to-prevent-devastating-climate-change-academics-warn-a6803096.html)

The Paris Agreement to tackle global warming has actually dealt a major setback to the fight against climate change, leading academics will warn. The deal may have been trumpeted by world leaders but is far too weak to do help prevent devastating harm to the Earth, it is claimed. The one word that nearly killed the climate deal In a joint letter to The Independent, some of the world’s top climate scientists launch a blistering attack on the deal, warning that it offers “false hope” that could ultimately prove to be counterproductive in the battle to curb global warming. The letter, which carries eleven signatures including professors Peter Wadhams and Stephen Salter, of the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, warns that the Paris Agreement is dangerously inadequate. Because of the Paris failure, the academics say the world’s only chance of saving itself from rampant global warming is a giant push into controversial and largely untested geo-engineering technologies that seek to cool the planet by manipulating the Earth’s climate system. The scientists,

who also include University of California professor James Kennett, argues that “deadly flaws” in the deal struck in the French capital last month mean it gives the impression that global warming is now being properly addressed when in fact the measures fall woefully short of what is needed to avoid runaway climate change. This means that the kind of extreme action that needs to be taken immediately to have any chance of avoiding devastating global warming, such as massive and swift cuts to worldwide carbon emissions – which only fell by about 1 per cent last year – will not now be taken , they say. “The hollow cheering of success at the end of the Paris Agreement proved yet again that people will hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. What they disregarded were the deadly flaws lying just beneath its veneer of success,” the academics write in the the letter, also signed by Dr Alan Gadian of the University of Leeds and Professor Paul Beckwith of the University of Ottowa in Canada. “What people wanted to hear was that an agreement had been

reached on climate change that would save the world while leaving lifestyles and aspirations unchanged. The solution it proposes is not to agree on an urgent mechanism to ensure immediate cuts in emissions, but to kick the can down the road.” But they say the actions agreed are far too weak to get anywhere close to that target. Furthermore, the pledges countries have made to cut their carbon emissions are not sufficiently binding to ensure they are met, while the Paris Agreement will not force them to “rachet” them up as often as they need to. Of even greater

concern, they say, is the lack of dramatic immediate action that was agreed to tackle global warming. The Paris Agreement only comes into force in 2020 – by which point huge amounts of additional CO2 will have been pumped into the atmosphere. The signatories claim this makes it all but impossible to limit global warming to 2C, let alone 1.5C. “The Paris Agreement’s heart was in the right place but the content is worse than inept. It was a real triumph for international diplomacy and sends a strong message that the sceptics have lost their case and that the science is correct on climate change.

The rest is little more than fluff and risks locking in failure ,” said Professor Kevin Anderson of Manchester University, who has not signed the letter but agrees with its argument. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge and a

signatory of the letter, said the prospects for curbing global warming following the Paris Agreement are now so dire that he advocates a charge into geo-engineering – not something he recommends lightly. “Other things being equal I’m not a great fan of geo-engineering but I think it absolutely necessary given the situation we’re in. It’s a sticking plaster solution. But you need it because looking at the world, nobody’s instantly changing their pattern of life,” Prof Wadhams said.

The Paris accord won’t solve warming problems – slow procedure and vague outlines creates lost species and political instability Los Angeles Times in 2016 (The Times Editorial Board; “Is the Paris climate accord too little, too late?” Los Angeles Times Editorial; April 22, 2016; http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-0422-climate-change-accord-20160422-story.html)

Representatives from more than 160 nations will gather at the United Nations on Friday to sign the accord they hammered out in Paris last December to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow the effects of

climate change. But is it too little, too late? The accord was an extraordinary achievement, but in the end, it was only a nonbinding agreement, and everyone understood that the real, daunting challenge would be in working together to meet the accord's stated goals. And even that may not be enough. Experts have warned that the accord's goal of capping global warming at “well below 2 degrees Celsius” still might be insufficient to avoid a catastrophic rise in sea levels. What's more, the world is already experiencing more violent storms and cycles of drought and floods. The Paris accord came near the end of 2015, which was the warmest year earth has experienced since recordkeeping began in 1880. The first few months of 2016 have continued the upward trend — February's increase in temperatures over previous years was described by NASA officials as “a shocker.” So what will be accomplished by the signing of the agreement in New York? That's unclear. The accord requires the signatory nations to develop plans for

reducing greenhouse gases by 2030, but the plans unveiled so far fall short of what is needed. Their aggregate effect will only limit global warming to about 2.7 degrees Celsius at best. Because of that, the nations are supposed to update their plans every five years, beginning in 2020, to reach the less-than 2 degrees target. How they will reach that mark is crucial. The U.S. has pledged to cut emissions to at least 26% below 2005 levels by 2025. But

President Obama's Clean Power Plan, a linchpin of his climate change strategy, was derailed two months after the Paris accord was reached, when the U.S. Supreme Court halted implementation until legal challenges could be resolved. If it is ultimately tossed out, that would set back Obama's chances of reaching the nation's 2025 goals for reducing carbon emissions even though the administration has taken other steps, including a 54.5 mpg standard by 2025 for cars and light-duty trucks, limiting methane emissions from

future natural gas and oil wells, and declaring a moratorium on new coal mining leases on federal land. Unfortunately, climate change isn't waiting. As the global temperature rises, glaciers are retreating, shrinking polar ice is threatening Arctic species, river and lake ice has been breaking up earlier, plants and animals are shifting ranges, and flowering cycles for trees are occurring earlier in the season. The signing of the accord, while historic, won't solve those problems. While ambitious, it is also cautious, and contains vague wording that the signatory nations pledge to “reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.” The world needs to accelerate the pace. Slow and deliberate means lost species, drowned seaside cities, disappearing island nations and more political instability in the most affected nations.

The Paris agreement is worrisome – does nothing to stop humanity from being roasted, toasted, drowned, or exiled Estrin in 2016 (David, senior research fellow with the International Law Research Program; “Worrisome gaps in the Paris agreement;” CIGI, independent, non-partisan think tank focused on international governance; February 13, 2016; https://www.cigionline.org/articles/worrisome-gaps-paris-agreement)

The world’s nations recognise in the preamble to the December 2015 Paris Climate Agreement “that climate change represents an urgent and

potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet” and “that deep reductions in global emissions will be required…” Yet, in the main provisions of the agreement, the parties failed to commit to actions necessary to save the planet and protect the human rights of those most vulnerable to climate change. While admittedly the agreement is

“historic” for its ambitious aspirations, from a practical and legal perspective the Paris agreement is worrisome. The

two-week Paris meetings and side events demonstrated heightened appreciation by states, provinces, cities, and business that the carbon economy will need to be limited; and the meeting resulted in pledges of new activity for that purpose, including potentially increased funding

for green technology development and adaptation. But it is more hyperbole than reality to call the text agreed in Paris by the 196 parties to the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change a meaningful “legal agreement” that will stop the clear trajectory we are now on to a dangerous 3 degrees Celsius warming of the globe. That trajectory will imperil the homelands, lives, and livelihoods of many millions of people now living, as well as future generations. Here are the reasons why the world collectively retains its position on

that course. First, the Paris agreement lacks specific measures and enforceable means to limit emissions from existing greenhouse gas sources to ensure the globe’s average temperature does not increase well beyond the limits of safe living on the planet. Despite comments by many world leaders and those in the media, the Paris text is not a binding “legal agreement” requiring any specific country to reduce its emissions. Although world

leaders agreed to lofty goals such as keeping the global temperature rise to less than 2C and preferably to 1.5C, they failed to require individual countries or even groups of countries to reduce emissions by specific amounts or by any particular deadline. Countries committed only to a peaking of emissions “as soon as possible” (with a recognition that it would take

longer for developing countries), and a goal of net greenhouse gas neutrality “in the second half of this century.” In the meantime, the agreement sets no emission limits that any country must meet; it simply encourages best efforts. Even though all countries are to prepare voluntary emission mitigation commitments (and revise these every five years), and although they agreed to “pursue domestic measures with the aim of achieving these objectives,” there are no binding obligations to implement or achieve these

objectives. Second, the agreement specifically refrains from authorising “enforcement” action that would punish a particular country, even if it were clear that failing to reduce emission by certain amounts or times was required, which they are not. Promoting compliance is referenced in the agreement, but this is to be carried out in a

“facilitative” and “non-adversarial and non-punitive” manner. In short, the Paris agreement contains no specific legal requirements and no means to ensure that carbon emission will decrease and that humanity won’t be roasted, toasted, drowned, or exiled. Ironically, the clearest legal part of the Paris agreement prevents those countries that will suffer the greatest human rights impacts, and who had the least to do with creating climate change emissions -- island communities that will disappear and low-lying parts of other countries that will be washed away or inundated by rising sea levels, those who need help the most -- from claiming compensation to move and re-establish themselves and their livelihoods. At the insistence of the United States and some other developed countries, the agreement specifically provides that “compensation” and “liability” for such loss and

damage cannot be read into the agreement. Another major gap in the Paris agreement is the absence of any restriction on the “business as usual” approach for carbon producers. Although at least one commentator suggested

that “the biggest loser in the Paris agreement could be the fossil fuel industry,” in fact the Paris agreement does not threaten them. Their interests are well-protected. There are no lofty or indeed any specific goals in the agreement to restrict new coal mines, new coal fired power plants, or petrochemical projects and also no requirements to phase out existing carbon-based materials, such as coal, oil, or other fossil fuels by a specific date. Remarkably, the words oil, fossil fuels, and coal don’t even appear in the agreement. These carbon companies are no doubt celebrating the Paris agreement. For example, in response to the Paris agreement, the World Coal Association referred to projections by the International Energy Agency that “electricity generation from coal would grow by 24% by 2040” even under the

various emission target reductions just pledged by world states before the Paris meeting. This optimism by the coal industry is consistent with further major gaps in the agreement: It fails to mention let alone endorse the need to keep significant amounts of current carbon reserves embedded in place as a vital step to meeting the world “carbon budget.” It appears the carbon industry was successful in convincing world leaders to effectively ignore the advice of the International Energy Agency and other experts, who have advised that, to keep the global temperature rise to less than 2C, at least 66 % -- and as much as 80% -- of embedded carbon reserves must remain in the ground. And in a similar vein, goals advocated by some countries, such as “decarbonisation” and “climate neutrality” did not make the final text. By failing to even mention the objective of keeping some reserves embedded and also failing to suggest restrictions on major new coal mines and other high carbon energy production and use, some might argue the agreement in effect provides international

approval -- even legal protection -- for the world’s carbon producers to continue business as usual, potentially to the end of this century,

without any mandatory interim emission cutbacks. At that point it will be much too late to stop clearly dangerous climate impacts from becoming common. The agreement is also disappointing for failing to provide any language with respect to human rights in the operating part of the agreement. Although the concept appears in

the preamble, due to opposition by some countries, the agreement fails to provide any direction in the operational clauses to prevent future horrific human rights abuses similar to those that ironically, but tragically, occurred and continue to occur, particularly in Central and South America, in the implementation of projects approved and financed under the UNFCCC process in response to climate change.

Green Energy Fails

Plan not enough

Even with massive new investment in renewables, emissions will increaseBenjamin Hulac, E&E reporter, ClimateWire: Tuesday, June 23, 2015, Renewable energy may double, mostly without subsidies, but fail to restrict emissions growth – study, E and E Publishing, http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060020693

Global markets will see $12.2 trillion worth of new investment to finance power-generation infrastructure -- more than the gross domestic product of China in 2013 -- through 2040, with 78 percent of that growth coming from the developing world. Renewable energy sources will attract two-thirds of that money in the

next 25 years, the BNEF report found, with coal, natural gas and nuclear sources taking in more than $1 trillion apiece. Despite the renewable surge, fossil fuels will account for 44 percent of generation capacity worldwide in 2040, a

drop from about two-thirds in 2014, and CO2 emissions will tick up 13 percent by 2040 in the same period. "We will see tremendous progress towards a decarbonised power system," said Michael Liebreich, chairman of the advisory board at BNEF, in a

statement. Coal remains a big power source without further regulations "Despite this, coal will continue to play a big part in world power, with emissions continuing to rise for another decade and a half, unless further radical policy action is taken," he said. Emissions from energy generation worldwide will peak in 2029, with many economies opting to double down on solar and coal power, analysts concluded. In April, Royal Dutch Shell PLC announced a $70 billion offer for BG Group, a British oil and gas firm, which the companies have said will close early next year. The deal, to which the U.S. Federal Trade Commission gave initial antitrust approval last week, would combine the world's two largest liquefied natural gas producers. If today's BNEF report proves accurate, however, the merged energy giant may not have clear markets to tap into. Markets will add about 1,400 gigawatts' worth of natural gas capacity -- out of roughly 14,000 GW in total for new capacity of all energy types from 2014 to 2040 -- with the vast majority (86 percent) coming in developing countries. "Its role as a 'transitional fuel' looks more and more doubtful outside the US where the shale gas revolution and environmental regulations seem set to push coal out of

the market," the executive summary reads. Emerging markets will experience a power infrastructure glut, according to BNEF, with developing nations building close to three times as much new capacity as developed nations. Through 2040, China alone will have taken in $3.3 trillion in new energy financing, double that of the Americas. And coal and utility-scale photovoltaic market penetration "will be neck and neck for additions as power-hungry countries use their low-cost domestic fossil-fuel

reserves in the absence of strict pollution regulations," the report reads. "The CO2 content of the atmosphere is on course to exceed 450 parts per million by 2035 even if emissions stay constant," Seb Henbest, the report's lead author,

said in a statement. "So the trend we show of rising emissions to 2029 makes it very unlikely that the world will be able to limit temperature increases to less than two degrees Centigrade."

Multiple risks to renewable investments in developing countriesJim Wrathall in 2015,

ByJeffrey Karp, Jim Wrathall and Morgan Gerard, Sullivan & Worcester, is a member of the Energy Finance Group in Sullivan & Worcester’s Washington, D.C. office. Mr. Wrathall represents clients in energy project development and project finance transactions; Managing the Risks of Renewable Energy Projects in Developing Countries, Renewable Energy World, http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2015/05/managing-the-risks-of-renewable-energy-projects-in-developing-countries.html

Driven by rapid expansion in developing countries, renewables are becoming a significant source of the world’s power. According to the United Nations Environmental Programme’s (UNEP) 9th “Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment 2015,” investment in developing countries was up 36 percent in 2014, totaling $131.3 billion. China ($83.3 billion), Brazil ($7.6 billion), India ($7.4 billion) and South Africa ($5.5 billion) were all in the top 10 of investing countries while more than $1 billion was invested in Indonesia,

Chile, Mexico, Kenya and Turkey. As renewables continue to expand into developing nations, it is incumbent upon developers to understand the risk features of some of these environments . Best Practices for Renewable

Development in Developing Countries Geo-Political Risk Renewable developers need to be mindful of the politics when they locate their projects. Unstable governments may expropriate projects, change laws, or even change regimes due to war or internal uprisings during the life of a long-term Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). Political risk insurance may be available, but coverage plans may be costly or incomplete. Partnering with an international organization like the World Bank or International Finance Corporation (IFC) may ease some of these worries since even unstable regimes look to these international organizations

for financial stability and support in the global markets in the event of government default. Legal Risk Developing countries may lack the general rule of law that provides for predictability and transparency of business transactions. In some countries, bribing government officials to obtain required permits may be the norm . Additionally, local courts may not offer developers relief for their claims as judicial officers may also request bribes or be closely aligned with the government decision-makers. U.S. companies need to be mindful to steer clear of engaging

with such officials to avoid allegations of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Corruption risk may extend beyond just bribery; there are reported instances of local counsel threatening projects and extorting foreign developers to pay increased legal fees.

Green energy not enough, C02 levels will continue to rise and stay in atmosphere for hundreds of yearsKoningstein and Fork 14(Ross Koningstein and David Fork, November 18, 2014, engineers at Google, who worked together on the bold renewable energy initiative known as RE<C, “What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change,” IEEE Spectrum, http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change) Accessed 7/3/16 BE

Google’s boldest energy move was an effort known as RE<C, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do . The company announced that Google would help promising technologies mature by investing in start-ups and conducting its own internal R&D. Its aspirational goal: to produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant could, and to achieve this in years, not decades. Unfortunately, not every Google moon shot leaves Earth orbit. In 2011, the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the initiative. The two of us, who worked as engineers on the internal RE<C projects, were then forced to reexamine our assumptions. At the start

of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed. As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that

even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work ; we need a fundamentally different approach. So we’re issuing a call to action. There’s hope to avert disaster if our society takes a hard look at the true scale of the problem and uses that reckoning to shape its priorities. Climate scientists have definitively shown that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere poses a looming danger. Whether measured in dollars or human suffering, climate change threatens to take a

terrible toll on civilization over the next century. To radically cut the emission of greenhouse gases, the obvious first target is the energy sector, the largest single source of global emissions. RE<C invested in large-scale renewable energy projects and investigated a wide range of innovative technologies, such as self-assembling wind turbine towers, drilling systems for geothermal energy, and solar thermal power systems, which capture the sun’s energy as heat. For us, designing and building novel energy systems was hard but

rewarding work. By 2011, however, it was clear that RE<C would not be able to deliver a technology that could compete economically with coal , and Google officially ended the initiative and shut down the related internal R&D projects. Ultimately, the two of us were given a new challenge. Alfred Spector, Google’s vice president of research, asked us to reflect on the project, examine its underlying assumptions, and learn from its failures. We had some useful data at our disposal. That same year, Google had completed a study on the impact of clean energy innovation, using the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.’s low-carbon economics tool. Our study’s

best-case scenario modeled our most optimistic assumptions about cost reductions in solar power, wind power, energy storage, and electric

vehicles. In this scenario, the United States would cut greenhouse gas emissions dramatically: Emissions could be 55 percent below the business-as-usual projection for 2050. While a large emissions cut sure sounded good, this scenario still showed substantial use of natural gas in the electricity sector. That’s because today’s renewable energy sources are limited by suitable geography and their own intermittent power production. Wind farms, for example, make economic sense only in parts of the country with strong and steady winds. The study also showed continued fossil fuel use in transportation, agriculture, and construction. Even if our best-case scenario were achievable, we wondered: Would it really be a climate victory? A 2008 paper by James Hansen [PDF], former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change, showed the true gravity of the situation. In it, Hansen set out to determine what level of atmospheric CO2 society should aim for “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” His climate models showed that exceeding 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects. We’ve already blown past that limit. Right now, environmental monitoring shows concentrations around 400 ppm. That’s particularly

problematic because CO2 remains in the atmosphere for more than a century; even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant today, existing CO2 will continue to warm the planet. We decided to combine our energy innovation study’s best-case scenario results with Hansen’s climate model to see whether a 55 percent emission cut by 2050 would bring the world back below that

350-ppm threshold. Our calculations revealed otherwise. Even if every renewable energy technology advanced as quickly as imagined and they were all applied globally, atmospheric CO2 levels wouldn’t just remain above 350 ppm; they would continue to rise exponentially due to continued fossil fuel use . So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.

Reliance on green energy alone won’t solve climate change, takes too long and fossil fuel companies won’t give up their assetsChatsko 14

(Maxx Chatsko, Feb 2, 2014, Maxx has been a contributor to Fool.com since 2013 focusing on renewable energy, renewable fuels, agriculture, and engineered biology, “Why Renewable Energy Won't Save Us from Climate Change,” Fool.com, http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/02/02/why-renewable-energy-wont-save-us-from-climate-cha.aspx) Accessed 7/3/16 BE

Renewable energy installations have soared in recent years. Wind energy has grown at an average rate of 30% since 2007 and now supplies 3.4% of the nation's electricity. The photovoltaic segment of the solar industry grew at a 35% clip in the year preceding the third quarter of 2013 . More impressive is the fact that residential solar installations from companies such as REC Solar, SolarCity (NASDAQ:SCTY), and SunPower (NASDAQ:SPWR) have grown at a

nearly 50% annual clip in recent years. Even energy generators are getting in on the action. NextEra Energy (NYSE:NEE)

generates 52%, or 9.2 gigawatts, of its power from wind and another 19% from nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar power.

Numerous other power generators have increased the presence of renewables in their portfolios in the last decade. That means we can sit back and watch climate change worries vanish into the midday sun and cool summer breeze, right? Not

quite. James Hansen, the former chief climate scientist at NASA, captured headlines in early January by smacking green enthusiasts with a dose of reality at a press conference held to discuss a climate change study titled Assessing "Dangerous Climate Change": Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature. His central argument was that relying on renewable technology to save planet Earth from the devastating effects of climate change was irresponsible and impossible, instead suggesting that the world needed vast quantities of nuclear power to have any real shot at averting disaster. You may not agree with Hansen's comments, but the hard numbers prove him

correct. Here's what the data show and how it could affect your investments. Easter Bunny. Tooth Fairy. Renewables? Hansen didn't pull any

punches in delivering his message: Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. Sorry, kids. It's a bit harsh, but it accurately conveys reality. Barring a significant and overnight technological advancement that makes renewable energy drastically cheaper, more accessible, and more efficient than existing sources of energy (including

current-generation renewables), renewable technologies are not our best bet to combat climate change. For

instance, despite the impressive growth of solar installations the entire solar industry only generates 0.12% of the nation's electricity. Wind has been more successful -- and got a technological head start -- but still accounts for just 3.4%. I actually think that's quite impressive, especially considering that wind energy generation increased more than 23-fold from 2000 to 2012. But it means little in the grand scheme of things. In 2000, renewable energy as a whole -- wind, solar,

hydroelectric, geothermal, wood, and waste -- generated 9% of the nation's electricity. Despite the impressive growth in the years since, the United States will likely only generate about 13% of its electricity from renewable sources. Worse yet, traditional renewables (wind and solar) will generate slightly more than 3.5% of the total. We could -- and

probably will -- produce a majority of our energy from renewable sources one day in the future, but if that future is decades from now it will be too late. We need to take climate action now. What does it mean for your investments? Renewables alone may not help the world avert a climate disaster, but that fact doesn't alter the investment thesis for companies such as SolarCity, SunPower, or NextEra Energy. In fact, it may bolster the reasons to own the companies. Why? Each company offers a solution to one or more of the problems plaguing the large-scale adoption of renewable energy. Consider that the residential and commercial solar platforms of SolarCity and SunPower crush the obstacle of geography. The bulk of renewable resources are located in geographically remote regions far from urban centers that consume the most electricity. It simply isn't realistic to build large new transmission lines -- or even tap into existing lines -- to distribute renewable power throughout the grid. Enabling households and businesses to generate power locally certainly

solves that issue, which partially explains the exploding growth opportunities for SolarCity and SunPower. Another problem with thinking traditional renewables will quickly provide any significant portion of the nation's electricity is the obstacle of replacement. A recent article in Scientific American estimated that fossil-fuel-related infrastructure had a global value of $20 trillion. Why, then, should we expect global companies to abandon their capital-intensive assets already in the ground and with years of useful life ahead of them in favor of more capital-intensive renewable assets? The numbers simply don't work . NextEra Energy is proving that power generation portfolios don't need to rely on fossil fuels for the majority of their capacity. When older, dirtier power plants are retired and utilities search for cleaner, cheaper sources of generation, NextEra will have the national reach and expertise to answer the call. It's also difficult to argue with the combination of market growth, dividends (3% at the moment), and a swelling bottom line offered by the company. Foolish takeaway The growth of renewable energy in terms of technological advancement (increased efficiency, falling costs) and contributions to the national grid is impressive and welcome. It will certainly play a critical role in reducing the world's reliance on energy imports, and will

help in answering the challenges presented by climate change. However, renewable energy alone won't be the planet's savior.

Non-uq

Solving nowNon-unique – US and China are already cooperating on climate change in the status quoMeltzer 2015

Joshua Meltzer. “U.S.-China Joint Presidential Statement on Climate Change: The road to Paris and beyond” brookings.edu. 9-29-15. Webpage. Accessed 7-1-16. http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/planetpolicy/posts/2015/09/29-us-china-statement-climate-change-meltzer

Last week, during Xi Jingping’s visit to Washington D.C., President’s Obama and Xi issued a joint statement on climate change. This follows the announcement by both presidents during Obama’s visit to Beijing in November 2014 that the U.S. would cut its emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 and that China would peak it carbon pollution by 2030. China and the U.S. are respectively the world’s number one and two largest emitters of

greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the world’s two largest economies, so action by both countries on climate change will set the level of ambition for other countries—both in terms of the climate change action they should take

domestically and at the upcoming United Nations climate change conference in Paris in December. This Obama-Xi joint statement builds on their previous bilateral statement and includes a number of important new areas of action . This includes new fuel efficient standards for heavy-duty vehicles, developing energy efficiency standards for building and cities and further joint work to

reduce emissions from methane and HFCs. In this piece, I focus on a couple of the most significant announcements in terms of the impact on China’s emissions and the UN Paris meeting, namely: China’s announcement that it would launch a national emissions trading system by 2017; China’s decision to “green power dispatch” its energy sources; and the articulation by the U.S. and China of a common vision for the Paris UN climate change conference. A Chinese cap–and-trade

system Probably the most noticeable element of the Obama-Xi joint statement was China’s announcement that it would implement an emissions trading system in 2017. This announcement is the culmination of experience gained from pilot emissions trading schemes in seven Chinese cities over the last couple of years. The decision by China to introduce a national cap-and-trade system stands in increasingly stark contrast to the absence in the U.S. at the federal level of a national program (or even a serious political debate) on pricing carbon. That said, how China’s mitigation efforts stack up still needs to be determined. Currently, there is a commitment by China to peak its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, but the level at which China’s emissions will peak has yet to be announced. Knowing what level China plans to cap emissions for those

sectors under its proposed emissions trading system will help clarify this. Maximizing China’s low-carbon energy China also announced that it would promote “green power dispatch” to prioritize renewable power and higher efficiency fossil fuel power generation (i.e. supercritical systems). This could potentially have a significant impact on China’s greenhouse gas emissions by more fully utilizing China’s renewable energy capacity. However, the decision to include fossil fuel generation (even the higher efficiency/lower emission type) could limit the emissions gain depending on how much additional renewable capacity versus coal is utilized in practice. A better (and more ambitious) approach would have been for China to commit to green dispatch non-fossil fuel energy. This would have prioritized power from China’s growing nuclear energy sector and underpinned its commitment to increase non-fossil fuel sources of energy to 15 percent by 2020 and around 20 percent by 2030. The decision by China to introduce a national cap-and-trade system stands in increasingly stark contrast to the absence in the U.S. at the federal level of a national

program (or even a serious political debate) on pricing carbon. Climate finance Another key announcement was that China would commit $3.1 billion in climate finance for developing countries. While the finance is not being delivered through UN bodies such as the newly established Green Climate Fund (which is to provide financing from developed to developing countries),

this announcement does signal that China is prepared to play a leadership role in helping the developing world mitigate and adapt to climate change. In this regard it is also a step towards achieving the U.S. goal of overcoming the Kyoto Protocol Annex 1/non-Annex 1 divide that has contributed so much to the intractable nature of the UN climate negotiations to date. The U.S. reaffirmed its pledge of $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund. This commitment now looks positively inadequate in light of China’s equivalent level of financial support. In the lead-up to Paris, leadership by the U.S. on climate finance is going to be necessary if the developed

world is going to develop a feasible pathway to achieving the goal of mobilizing $100 billion per annum by 2020. The Paris Climate Change Conference and beyond This new round of U.S.-China climate change actions have been well-timed to further set the stage for a successful outcome from the UN climate change conference in Paris in December. In addition to stressing the importance of an ambitious and successful outcome, Obama and XI agreed on the need for a climate change agreement that leads to greater ambition over time. This is significant as the current announced climate change mitigation commitments for Paris (the so-called intended nationally determined contributions, INDCs) are not enough to keep the world on a pathway to reaching the goal of keeping warming below two degrees above pre-industrial levels. The Obama-Xi call for an agreement that ramps-up ambition over time recognizes that Paris will be a floor in terms of mitigation commitments and that it is necessary for the agreement to include a mechanism for countries to increase their mitigation commitments over time. In the lead-up to Paris, leadership by the U.S. on climate finance is going to be necessary if the developed world is going to develop a feasible pathway to

achieving the goal of mobilizing $100 billion per annum by 2020. Obama and Xi also emphasized the need for a low-carbon transformation of the global economy. This is clearly important and should be understood in the context of the need to build around $90 trillion in infrastructure over the next 15 years. Given that approximately 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from infrastructure, failure to build low carbon infrastructure will lock the world into a high carbon pathway that will miss the two degree target. By providing a framework for more ambitious mitigation commitments and financing to support such action (and to adapt to climate change), Obama and Xi correctly see the Paris climate change agreement as having the potential to be a platform that can support such a low-carbon transition.

Impact Answers

GeneralThere are no catastrophic impacts to warming – alarmist models are wrong Taylor 11 7/27/2011 [James Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism,” http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/07/27/new-nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-in-global-warming-alarmism/ Accessed 07/01/16]

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed. Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models. “The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said

in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.” In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted. The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate. Scientists on all sides of the global warming debate are in general agreement about how much heat is being directly trapped by human emissions of carbon dioxide (the answer is “not much”). However, the single most important issue in the global warming debate is whether carbon dioxide emissions will indirectly trap far more heat by causing large increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds. Alarmist computer models assume human carbon dioxide emissions indirectly cause substantial

increases in atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds (each of which are very effective at trapping heat), but real-world data have long shown that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing as much atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds as the alarmist computer models have predicted. The new NASA Terra satellite data are consistent with long-term NOAA and NASA data indicating atmospheric humidity and cirrus clouds are not increasing in the manner predicted by alarmist computer models. The Terra satellite data also support data collected by NASA’s ERBS satellite showing far more longwave radiation (and thus, heat) escaped into space between 1985 and 1999 than alarmist computer models had predicted. Together, the NASA ERBS and Terra satellite data show that for 25 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly trapped far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted. In short, the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly

trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth’s atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements,

however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth’s atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict. When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a “huge discrepancy” between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are

No extinction Global warming won’t cause extinction – science community on our sideCollins 4(Simon, Nov 18, 2004, Simon Collins is the Herald’s social issues reporter, “Global warming won’t cause extinction, just civilisation’s end,” http://www.nzherald.co.nz/climate-change/news/article.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=3611421) Accessed 7/3/16 BE

The winner of one of New Zealand's top science medal s, Professor Peter Barrett, has backed off a controversial claim that humanity faces extinction within 100 years because of global warming . Dr Barrett , who was presented with the Royal Society's Marsden Medal in Christchurch last night, gave the Christchurch Press notes for his acceptance

speech in which he planned to say: "If we continue our present growth path we are facing extinction - not in millions of years, or even millennia, but by the end of this century." After a storm of criticism, he changed the word "extinction" in his speech last night to " the end of civilisation as we know it" . Dr Barrett, 64, the director of Victoria University's Antarctic Research Centre, has used ancient air particles trapped in Antarctic ice to show changes in carbon dioxide are linked with changes in the polar ice sheets and the Earth's climate. His work has been widely cited in the world's scientific journals. But his own colleagues were embarrassed yesterday after his initial speech notes were reported. "I certainly wouldn't be using that language," said Dr Jim Salinger, the lead author for the Australia and New Zealand chapter of the next global assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr Tim Naish of the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, who has worked with Dr Barrett in Antarctica for many years, said he talked to him at length after his speech notes were reported and said, "I don't think he meant to say that in 100 years we'll all be gone.

No extinction – only 1 in 13 species will die and at most 1 in 6 which gives humanity a good chanceAP 15(The Associated Press, April 30, 2015, “Global warming will cause 1 in 13 species to go extinct, scientists say,” http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2015/04/global_warming_will_cause_1_in.html) Accessed 7/3/16 BE

Global warming will eventually push 1 out of every 13 species on Earth into extinction , a new study projects. It won't quite be as bad in North America , where only 1 in 20 species will be killed off because of climate change or Europe where the extinction rate is nearly as small. But in South America, that forecasted heat-caused extinction rate soars to 23 percent,

the worst for any continent, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Science. University of Connecticut ecologist Mark Urban compiled and analyzed 131 peer-reviewed studies on species that used various types of computer simulations and found a general average extinction rate for the globe: 7.9 percent . That's an average for all species, all regions, taking into consideration various assumptions about future emission trends of man-made

greenhouse gases. The extinction rate calculation doesn't mean all of those species will be gone; some will just be on an irreversible decline , dwindling toward oblivion, he said. "It's a sobering result," Urban said. Urban's figures are probably underestimating the real rate of species loss a little, said scientists not affiliated with the research. That's because Urban only looks at temperature, not other factors like fire or interaction with other animals, and more studies have been done in North America and Europe, where rates are lower, said outside biologists Stuart Pimm of Duke University and Terry Root of Stanford University. The projected extinction rate changes with time and how much warming there is from the burning of coal, oil and gas. At the moment, the extinction rate is

relatively low, 2.8 percent, but it rises with more carbon dioxide pollution and warmer temperatures, Urban wrote. By the end of the century, in a worst case scenario if world carbon emission trends continue to rise, 1 in 6 species will be gone or on the road to extinction , Urban said. That's higher than the overall rate because that 7.9 percent rate takes into account some projections that the world will reduce or at least slow carbon dioxide emissions. What happens is that species tend to move closer to the poles and up in elevation as it gets warmer, Urban said. But some species, especially those on mountains such as the American pika, which is

found in Oregon, run out of room to move and may die off because there's no place to escape the heat, Urban said. It's like being on an ever-shrinking island. Still, Pimm and Urban said the extinction from warming climates is dwarfed by a much higher extinction rate also caused by man: Habitat loss. A large extinction is going on, and for every species disappearing for natural causes, 1,000 are vanishing because of unnatural man-made causes , Pimm said.

United Nations agrees, climate change won’t cause extinctionBastasch 14(Michael Bastasch, March 24, 2014, “IPCC runs from claims that global warming will cause mass extinctions,” Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/24/ipcc-runs-from-claims-that-global-warming-will-cause-mass-extinctions/) Accessed 7/3/16 BE

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is distancing itself from past claims that global warming could cause mass extinctions . A leaked IPCC draft report says that there is “very little confidence that the models currently predict accurately the risk of extinction. ” The leaked report, obtained by

Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper, says that an “acute lack of data” have added to doubts over past claims made by climate scientists of mass extinctions in the future. “[B]iological findings have increased doubt over the expected species extinction,” says the IPCC. In its 2007 climate assessment, the IPCC said that there was a “medium confidence” that 20 to 30 percent of plant and animal species were at risk of going extinct if global temperatures rose between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees Celsius this century. If temperatures rose by 3.5 degrees Celsius the IPCC predicted “significant extinctions” would occur — between 40 and 70 percent of species. Environmental groups have also warned of mass extinctions due to global warming. The Nature Conservancy says that “one-fourth of Earth’s species will be headed for extinction by 2050 if the warming trend continues at its current rate.” The group adds that “polar bears may be gone from the planet in as little as 100 years and that several “U.S. states may even lose their official birds as they head for cooler climates — including the Baltimore oriole of Maryland, black-capped chickadee of Massachusetts, and the American goldfinch of Iowa.” But Der Spiegel

reports that the IPCC is shying away from such claims and gives no concrete numbers for how many plant and animal species could be at risk if global temperatures increased. While the IPCC does say that the pace of global warming is making it hard for some species to adapt, the lack of basic data makes it impossible for there to be any hard evidence to back up this

claim. Zoologists actually fear that the focus on global warming has drawn attention away from issues that actually cause extinctions, like destruction of natural habitats.

Anthropogenic global warming won’t lead to mass extinctionNewitz 12(Annalee Newitz, October 18, 2012, Editor for Gizmodo, “Five reasons why climate change doesn't lead to extinction — at least, not directly,” io9 Gizmodo, http://io9.gizmodo.com/5952758/five-reasons-why-climate-change-doesnt-lead-to-extinction--at-least-not-directly#_ga=1.114461703.1207195265.1445094960) Accessed 7/3/16 BE

The answer to that question is no, but not for the reason you might think. Climate change isn't causing extinctions directly — but

it's definitely a catalyst. In a new research paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a group of evolutionary biologists examined 136 examples of extinctions that appeared to be related to climate change. Of those, only seven turned out to be clearly connected with anthropogenic, or human-created , alterations to the climate. In these cases, temperature changes weren't the issue. Instead, climate change led to knock-on effects that caused extinction. In fact, the biggest extinction threat came from ways that climate change wound up altering the way different species interact.

GW not real [lul]Climate change is either not real or has no real impact – 5 reasonsHawkins 14

(John Hawkins, Feb 18, 2014,John Hawkins runs Right Wing News, his work has also been published at the Washington Examiner, The Hill, TPNN, Hot Air, The Huffington Post and at Human Events, “5 Scientific Reasons That Global Warming Isn't Happening,” Town Hall, townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2014/02/18/5-scientific-reasons-that-global-warming-isn’t-happening-n1796423) Accessed 7/3/16 BE

How did global warming discussions end up hinging on what's happening with polar bears , unverifiable

predictions of what will happen in a hundred years, and whether people are "climate deniers" or "global warming cultists?" If this is a scientific topic, why aren't we spending more time discussing the science involved? Why aren't we talking about the evidence and the actual data involved? Why aren't we looking at the predictions that were made and seeing if they match up to the results? If this is such an open and shut case, why are so many people who care about science skeptical? Many Americans have long since thought that the best scientific evidence available suggested that man wasn't causing any sort of global warming. However, now, we can go even further and

suggest that the planet isn't warming at all. 1) There hasn't been any global warming since 1997: If nothing changes in the next year, we're going to have kids who graduate from high school who will have never seen any "global warming" during their lifetimes.

That's right; the temperature of the planet has essentially been flat for 17 years. This isn't a controversial

assertion either. Even the former Director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, Phil Jones, admits that it's true. Since the planet was cooling from 1940-1975 and the upswing in temperature afterward only lasted 22 years, a 17 year pause is a big deal. It also begs an obvious question: How can we be experiencing global warming if there's no actual "global warming?" 2) There is no scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and caused by man: Questions are not decided by "consensus." In fact, many scientific theories that were once widely believed to be true were made irrelevant by new evidence. Just to name one of many, many examples, in the early seventies, scientists believed global cooling was occurring. However, once the planet started to warm up, they changed their minds. Yet, the primary "scientific" argument for global warming is that there is a "scientific consensus" that it's occurring. Setting aside the fact that's not a

scientific argument, even if that ever was true (and it really wasn't), it's certainly not true anymore. Over 31,000 scientists have signed on to a petition saying humans aren't causing global warming. More than 1000 scientists signed on to another report saying there is no global warming at all. There are tens of thousands of well-educated, mainstream scientists who do not agree that global warming is occurring at all and people who share their opinion are taking a position grounded in science.

3) Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012: The loss of Arctic ice has been a big talking point for people who believe global warming is

occurring. Some people have even predicted that all of the Arctic ice would melt by now because of global warming. Yet, Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012. How much Arctic ice really matters is an open question since the very limited evidence we have suggests that a few decades ago, there was less ice than there is today , but

the same people who thought the drop in ice was noteworthy should at least agree that the increase is important as well. 4) Climate models showing global warming have been wrong over and over: These future projections of what global warming will

do to the planet have been based on climate models. Essentially, scientists make assumptions about how much of an impact different factors will have; they guess how much of a change there will be and then they project changes over time. Unfortunately, almost all of these models showing huge temperature gains have turned out to be wrong. Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer says that climate models used by government agencies to create policies “have failed miserably.” Spencer analyzed 90 climate models against surface temperature and satellite temperature data, and found that more than 95 percent of the models “have over-forecast the warming trend since 1979, whether we

use their own surface temperature dataset (HadCRUT4), or our satellite dataset of lower tropospheric temperatures (UAH).” There's an old saying in programming that goes, "Garbage in, garbage out." In other words, if the assumptions and data

you put into the models are faulty, then the results will be worthless. If the climate models that show a dire impact because of global warming aren't reliable -- and they're not -- then the long term projections they make are meaningless. 5) Predictions about the impact of global warming have already been proven wrong: The debate over global warming has been going on long enough that we've had time to see whether some of the predictions people made about it have panned out in the real world . For example, Al Gore predicted all the Arctic ice would be gone by 2013. In 2005, the Independent ran an article saying that the Artic had entered a death spiral. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years....The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a “tipping point” beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea

levels dramatically. Of course, the highway is still there. Meanwhile, Arctic ice is up 50% since 2012. James Hansen of NASA fame predicted that the West Side Highway in New York would be under water by now because of global warming. If the climate models and the predictions about global warming aren't even close to being correct, wouldn't it be more scientific to reject hasty action based on faulty data so that we can further study the issue and find out what's really going on?

Bio-Diversity Impact DefenseNo impact to biodiversity loss. Davidson, 2k (Carol, 2000, “Economic Growth and the Environment: Alternatives to the Limits Paradigm”, BioScience Magazine, http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/5/433.full, accessed 7/12/14, KW)

The original rivet metaphor (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1981) referred to species extinction and biodiversity loss as a limit to human population and the

economy. A wave of species extinctions is occurring that is unprecedented in human history (Wilson 1988, 1992, Reid and Miller 1989). The decline of biodiversity represents irreplaceable and incalculable losses to future generations of humans. Is biodiversity loss a case of limits, as suggested by the rivet metaphor, or is it a continuum of degradation with local tears, as suggested by the

tapestry metaphor? In the rivet metaphor, it is not the loss of species by itself that is the proposed limit but rather some sort of ecosystem collapse that would be triggered by the species loss. But it is unclear that biodiversity loss will lead to ecosystem collapse. Research in this area is still in its infancy, and results from the limited experimental studies are mixed. Some studies show a positive relationship between diversity and some aspect of ecosystem function, such as the rate of nitrogen cycling (Kareiva 1996, Tilman et al. 1996). Others support the redundant species concept

(Lawton and Brown 1993, Andren et al. 1995), which holds that above some low number, additional species are redundant in terms of ecosystem function. Still other studies support the idiosyncratic species model (Lawton 1994), in which loss of some species reduces some aspect of ecosystem function, whereas loss of others may increase that aspect of ecosystem function.

Impacts to biodiversity are greatly exaggerated

Lomberg 1 (Bjorn Lomborg, associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, August 9, 2001, “Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse.”

We are all familiar with the litany of our ever-deteriorating environment. It is the doomsday message endlessly repeated by the media, as when Time magazine tells us that "everyone knows the planet is in bad shape", and when the New Scientist calls its environmental overview "self-

destruct". We are defiling our Earth, we are told. Our resources are running out. The population is ever-growing, leaving less and less to eat. Our air and water is more and more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers - we kill off more than 40,000 each year. Forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing, the coral reefs are dying. The fertile topsoil is vanishing. We are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world's ecosystem is breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability. Global warming is

probably taking place, though future projections are overly pessimistic and the traditional cure of radical fossil-fuel cutbacks is far more damaging than the original affliction. Moreover, its total impact will not pose a devastating problem to our future. Nor will we lose 25-50% of all species in our lifetime - in fact, we are losing probably 0.7%. Acid rain does not kill the forests, and the air and water around us are becoming less and less polluted. In fact, in terms of practically every measurable indicator, mankind's lot has improved. This does not, however, mean that everything is good enough. We can still do even better. Take, for example, starvation and the population explosion. In 1968, one of the leading environmentalists, Dr Paul R Erlich, predicted in his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, that "the battle to feed humanity is over. In the course of the 1970s, the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions - hundreds of millions of people will starve to death." This did not happen. Instead, according to the UN, agricultural production in the developing world has increased by 52% per person. The daily food intake in developing countries has increased from 1,932 calories in 1961 - barely enough for survival - to 2,650 calories in 1998, and is expected to rise to 3,020 by 2030. Likewise, the proportion of people going hungry in these countries has dropped from 45% in 1949 to 18% today, and is expected to fall even further, to 12% in 2010 and 6% in 2030. Food, in other words, is becoming not scarcer but ever more abundant. This is reflected in its price. Since 1800, food prices have decreased by more than 90%, and in 2000, according to the World Bank, prices were lower than ever before. Erlich's prediction echoed that made 170 years earlier by Thomas Malthus. Malthus claimed that, unchecked, human population would expand exponentially, while food production

Biodiversity does not lead to stabilitySasaki and Lauenroth, 11 - * Graduate School of Life Sciences, Tohoku University. PhD from the Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo. Member of the Ecological Society of Japan, and Winner of the Best Poster Prize in 2007 and 2008 at the Annual Meeting of Ecological Society of Japan (section: Plant Community and Species Diversity) – AND ** Professor at the Department of Botany at the University of Wyoming. PhD in Range Science from the University of Colorado (1/11/11, Dr. Takehiro Sasaki and Dr. William K. Lauenroth, “Dominant species, rather than diversity, regulates temporal stability of plant communities,” Oecologia, 166(3):761-8 CS)

We found a significant negative relationship between temporal stability and species richness, number of rare species, and relative abundance of rare species (Fig. 2a, d, h). This is counter to the growing body of empirical evidence that suggests that the temporal stability of communities increases with diversity (Tilman 1999; Cottingham et al. 2001; Valone and Hoffman 2003; Tilman et al. 2006). Many theoretical studies have focused on the portfolio and covariance effects (see ‘‘Materials and methods’’) in demonstrating how increased diversity can confer increased temporal stability (Tilman

1999; Yachi and Loreau 1999; Hughes and Roughgarden 2000). However, we found no significant relationships between summed variances and species richness and number of rare species (Fig. 3a, b), and we found significant positive

relationships between summed covariances and species richness and number of rare spe- cies (Fig. 3e, f). Neither the portfolio nor the covariance effect contributed significantly to temporal stability in our communities . Rare species that generally exhibit greater temporal fluctuations than common species should more often exhibit years of zero abundance than common species because of their small population sizes (Lande 1993; Valone and Schutzenhofer 2007), resulting in synchrony in response to high interannual variability in rainfall. This probably dampened the expected stabilizing effect of species richness on temporal stability (Yachi and Loreau 1999). Valone and Barber (2008) also showed that covariances between most pairs of species in natural communities were more often positive than negative, potentially because of shared responses of coexisting species to fluctuations in a common resource base, pos- sibly driven by climatic fluctuations. Moreover, the rela- tionship between summed abundance and species richness was not significant (Fig. 3i), suggesting that overyielding was not important in our communities. A previous study has indicated that functional diversity is a good predictor of the

overyielding effect of species richness (Griffin et al. 2009). Our findings suggest that, although we do not know the explicit mechanism, the lack of change in functional diversity, despite the increase in species rich- ness resulting from the removal of dominant species, might explain the absence of an overyielding effect. Thus, there were no operational stabilizing effects of greater diversity; rather, greater species richness supported by an increase in the number of rare species destabilized the communities.

Ecosystems are resilient—can adapt to changing conditionsJones, Oregon State University geoscientist, 12

(Julia, 4/6/12, Oregon State University, “Study: Impact of warming climate doesn’t always translate to streamflow,” http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2012/apr/study-impact-warming-climate-doesn%E2%80%99t-always-translate-streamflow, 7/14/14, SM)

An analysis of 35 headwater basins in the United States and Canada found that the impact of warmer air temperatures on streamflow rates was

less than expected in many locations, suggesting that some ecosystems may be resilient to certain aspects of climate change.¶ The study was just published in a special issue of the journal BioScience, in which the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network of 26 sites around the country funded by the National Science Foundation is featured.¶ Lead author Julia Jones, an Oregon State University geoscientist, said that air temperatures increased significantly at 17 of the 19 sites that had 20- to 60-year climate records, but streamflow changes correlated with temperature changes in only seven of those study sites. In fact, water flow decreased only at sites with

winter snow and ice, and there was less impact in warmer, more arid ecosystems.¶ “It appears that ecosystems may have some capacity for resilience and adapt to changing conditions,” said Jones, a professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “Various ecosystem processes may contribute to that

resilience. In Pacific Northwest forests, for example, one hypothesis is that trees control the stomatal openings on their leaves and adjust their water use in response to the amount of water in the soil.¶

DA Turns Warming

War = GWGeneral warfare causes global warmingBrenda Priddy No Date "The Impact of War on Global Warming," Alternative Daily, http://www.thealternativedaily.com/impact-of-war-on-global-warming/

“War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn’t surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.” Although Alice is not a scientist, there may be solid grounds

for her argument. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon agrees with Ms. Walker. He blames modern warfare for land contamination, water contamination, deforestation and natural resource depletion . There is clear, documented proof that wars cause huge resource depletion and can affect landscapes and habitats for 50 years or more. In Hiroshima, for example, where the atom bomb was dropped in 1945, people still suffer from cancer as a direct result of the radiation from the bomb. The bomb caused deforestation, and radiation continues to affect agriculture and contaminate water supplies. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace, only 11 countries out of more than 190 countries in the world are currently in peacetime. All other countries are at war

with another nation or involved in civil war. Wars require equipment, machinery, fuel, vehicles… the list goes on. This means that the drain on the world’s resources will continue to increase and impact the environment. This is in part due to greenhouse gases, which are created from the burning of fossil fuels to make energy. In war-torn countries, the focus is on fighting and gaining money to support war efforts. Little thought or resources are given to protecting the environment, which causes issues like water depletion, droughts, earthquakes triggered by fracking, deforestation, and the depletion of wildlife. Bombing also destroys sanitation

systems, causing wastewater to leech into the ground, which spreads disease and kills wildlife. The effects of this can been seen in Iraq. Research indicates that war in Iraq has led to significant environmental damage, and the bombing has increased the risk of cancer for the Iraqi population. A 2011 study published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) uncovered a direct link between human interaction and the climate near the Mediterranean Sea. War and other changes have altered the climate and caused the area to have 10 of the 12 driest winters on record just within the last 20 years. The NOAA report showed that greenhouse gases were responsible for about half of the increase in dry winter weather in the area. Even more worrisome, a 2015 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America indicated that increasing climate change hastened the decisions that led to the Syrian war. So not only can war cause climate change, but climate change is directly increasing the number of wars, leading to a vicious cycle that can be difficult to stop. The United States is far from blameless in the damage to the environment and resulting climate change. The U.S. uses an average of over 20 billion liters of fuel each year, with CO2 emissions equal to that of a mid-sized country. During the Iraq war, it was estimated that the U.S.

used nearly 200 million liters of oil per month. Can we stop war-related climate change? During times of war, little thought is given to the environment. The damage is often so severe that some experts are calling war “ecocide.” These statistics show that change is necessary to prevent irreversible climate change that will lead to food shortages and ultimately additional wars. Only by taking action now and voicing our concerns can we prevent permanent damage to the Earth caused by warfare.

Nuclear war causes global warming – volcanic studies proveJeffrey Masters, B.S. and M.S. degrees in Meteorology No Date, "The effect of Nuclear War on Climate Change," https://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/nuke.asp?MR=1

Well, it turns out that this portrayal of nuclear winter was overly optimistic, according to a series of papers published over the past few years by Brian Toon of the University of Colorado, Alan Robock of Rutgers University, and Rich Turco of UCLA. Their most recent paper, a December 2008 study titled, "Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War", concludes that "1980s predictions of nuclear winter effects were, if anything,

underestimates". Furthermore, they assert that even a limited nuclear war poses a significant threat to Earth's climate. The scientists used a sophisticated atmospheric/oceanic climate model that had a good

track record simulating the cooling effects of past major volcanic eruptions, such as the Philippines' Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. The scientists injected five terragrams (Tg) of soot particles into the model atmosphere over Pakistan in May of 2006.

This amount of smoke, they argued, would be the likely result of the cities burned up by a limited nuclear war involving 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs in the region. India and Pakistan are thought to have 109 to 172

nuclear weapons of unknown yield. The intense heat generated by the burning cities in the models' simulations lofted black smoke high into the stratosphere, where there is no rain to rain out the particles. The black smoke absorbed far more solar radiation than the brighter sulfuric acid aerosol particles emitted by volcanic eruptions. This caused the smoke to heat the surrounding stratospheric air by 30°C, resulting in stronger upward motion of the smoke particles higher into the stratosphere. As a result, the smoke stayed at significant levels for over a decade (by contrast, highly reflective volcanic aerosol particles do not absorb solar radiation and create such circulations, and only stay in the stratosphere 1-2 years). The black soot blocked sunlight, resulting in global cooling of over 1.2°C (2.2°F) at the surface for two years, and 0.5°C (0.9°F) for more than a decade (Figures 1 and 2). Precipitation fell up to 9% globally, and was reduced by 40% in the Asian monsoon regions. This magnitude of this cooling would bring

about the coldest temperatures observed on the globe in over 1000 years (Figure 1). The growing season would shorten by 10-30 days over much of the globe, resulting in widespread crop failures. The effects would be similar to what happened after the greatest volcanic eruption in historic times, the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. This cooling from this eruption triggered the infamous Year Without a Summer in 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere, when killing

frosts disrupted agriculture every month of the summer in New England, creating terrible hardship. Exceptionally cold and wet weather in Europe triggered widespread harvest failures, resulting in famine and economic collapse . However, the cooling effect of this eruption only lasted about a year. Cooling from a limited nuclear exchange would create two to three consecutive "Years Without a Summer", and over a decade of significantly reduced crop yields. The authors found that the smoke in the stratosphere cause a 20% reduction in Earth's protective ozone layer, with losses of 25-45% over the mid-latitudes where the majority of

Earth's population lives, and 50-70% ozone loss at northern high latitude regions such as Scandinavia, Alaska, and northern Canada. A massive increase in ultraviolet radiation at the surface would result, capable of causing widespread and severe damage to plants and animals. Thus, even a limited nuclear exchange could trigger severe global climate change capable of causing economic chaos and widespread starvation. It is sobering to realize that the nuclear weapons used in the study represented only 0.3% of the world's total nuclear arsenal of 26,000 warheads. Fortunately, significant progress was made in the 1990s and 2000s to reduce the threat of nuclear war. If the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) is fully implemented by the U.S. and Russia as planned, by 2012 the world's stockpile of nuclear

weapons will be just 6% of the 70,000 warheads that existed at the peak of the cold war in 1986. However, the threat of a more limited regional nuclear war has increased in recent decades, since more countries have been joining the nuclear club--an average of one country every five years. The 2007 move by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the hands of their Doomsday Clock two minutes closer to midnight--the figurative end of civilization--helped call attention to this increased

threat. In addition, they also mentioned climate change for the first time as part of the rationale for moving the clock closer to midnight. The twin disasters of a limited nuclear war, coupled with the devastating global climate change it could wreak, should remind us that there is no such thing as a small scale nuclear war. Even a limited nuclear war is a huge threat to Earth's climate. Thus, there is no cause more important to work for than peace.

Nuclear war outweighs global warming and is more likelyEric Worrall, blogger, 5-10-2016, "Huff Post thinks Nuclear War might do More Damage than Global Warming," Watts Up With That?, https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/10/huff-post-thinks-nuclear-war-might-do-more-damage-than-global-warming/

Huffington Post has suggested that a full scale nuclear war, and the climatic aftermath, not only might do more damage that anthropogenic global warming, but it might actually be more likely . Climate Change for the Impatient: A Nuclear Mini Ice Age Everyone has heard about climate change caused by fossil fuels, which threatens to raise Earth’s average surface temperature by about 3-5°C by the year 2100 unless we take major steps toward mitigation. But there’s an eerie silence about the other major climate change threat, which might lower Earth’s average surface temperature by 7°C: a decade-long mini ice age caused by a U.S.-

Russia nuclear war. This is colder than the 5°C cooling we endured 20,000 years ago during the last ice age. The good news is that, according to state-of-the-art climate models by Alan Robock at Rutgers University, a nuclear mini ice age would be rather brief, with about half of the cooling gone after a decade. The bad news is that this more than long enough for most people on Earth to starve to death if farming collapses. Robock’s all-out-war scenario shows cooling by about 20°C (36°F) in much of the core farming regions of the U.S., Europe, Russia and China (by 35°C in parts of Russia) for the first two summers — you don’t need to be a master farmer to figure out what freezing summers would do to food supply. It’s hard to predict exactly how devastating this famine would be if thousands of Earth’s largest cities were reduced to rubble and global infrastructure collapsed, but whatever small fraction of

all humans don’t succumb to starvation, hypothermia or epidemics would need to cope with roving, armed gangs desperate for food. Unless we take stronger action than there’s current political will for, we’re likely to face both dramatic fossil-fuel climate change and dramatic nuclear climate change within a century, give or take. Since no politician in their right mind would launch global nuclear Armageddon on purpose, the nuclear war triggering the mini ice age will most likely start by accident or miscalculation . This has has almost happened many times in the past, as this timeline shows. The annual probability of accidental nuclear war is poorly known, but it certainly isn’t zero: John F. Kennedy estimated the probability of the Cuban Missile Crisis escalating to war between 33 percent and 50 percent. We know that near-misses

keep occurring regularly, and there are probably many more close calls than haven’t been declassified. Simple math shows that even if the annual risk of global nuclear war is as low as 1 percent, we’ll probably have one within a century and almost certainly within a few hundred years. We just don’t know exactly when — it could be the day your great granddaughter gets married, or it could be next Tuesday when the Russian early-warning system suffers an unfortunate technical malfunction. Some of the near misses are truly terrifying. For example, the 1983 Soviet Nuclear False Alarm, when the world was saved because one Soviet officer stood by his judgement that the inbound ICBMs detected by their early warning systems were a software glitch; Shortly after midnight, the bunker’s computers reported that one intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet Union from the United States. Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a first-strike nuclear attack by the United States was likely to involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches in order to disable any Soviet means of a counterattack. Furthermore, the satellite system’s reliability had been questioned in the past. Petrov dismissed the warning as a false alarm, though accounts of the event differ as to whether he notified his superiors or not after he concluded that the computer detections were false and that no missile had been launched. Later, the computers identified four additional missiles in the air, all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov again suspected that the computer system was malfunctioning, despite having no other source of information to confirm his suspicions. The Soviet Union’s land radar was incapable of detecting missiles beyond the horizon, and waiting for it to positively identify the threat would limit the Soviet Union’s response time to a few minutes. It was subsequently determined that the false alarms were caused by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites’ Molniya orbits, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite. In explaining the factors leading to his decision, Petrov cited his belief and training that any U.S. first strike would be massive, so five missiles seemed an illogical start. In addition, the launch detection system was new and in his view not yet wholly trustworthy, while ground radar had failed to pick up corroborative evidence even

after several minutes of the false alarm. The risk of nuclear war has largely faded from public consciousness, but given the number of unstable states jumping onto the nuclear bandwagon, the risk of a major nuclear exchange might actually be higher now, than during the classic cold war years . Even if the nuclear threat is never realised, there are plenty of other threats likely to emerge in the near future, as our species explores the possibilities of nanotech, biotech and

artificial intelligence. The one silver lining of these rapid and accelerating changes to the global threat landscape, is that the idea that anthropogenic climate change is the worst threat we face is becoming increasingly untenable. Even the Huffington Post is starting to question this assertion.

At: Competitiveness Advantage

Hegemony Inevitable

Primacy NowUS position creates insuperable primacy hegemony is sustainable and inevitable Layne in 2006 (Christopher Layne is Professor, and Robert M. Gates Chair in Intelligence and National Security, at Texas A&M University’s George H.W. Bush School of Government and Public Service. He is the author of The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1945 to the Present (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006) and with Bradley A. Thayer, American Empire: A Debate (New York: Routledge, 2006). “The Waning of U.S. Hegemony—Myth or Reality?” International Security 34:1 150)

Whether there has been balancing against U.S. hegemony since 1991 is an intensely debated issue.8 It is beyond dispute, however, that the United

States still enjoys a commanding preponderance of power over its nearest rivals . Drawing on neorealism, hegemonic stability theory, balance of threat theory, and liberal international relations theory , a number of

prominent American international relations theorists have advanced several explanations of why U.S. hegemony has endured for nearly two decades without any major challenges and have suggested that the United

States can prolong its primacy far into the future . “Unipolar stability” realists have argued that the present unipolar distribution of capabilities in America’s favor is insurmountable and that other states will not counterbalance because they receive important security and economic beneªts from U.S. hegemony.9 Invoking balance of threat theory, other realists claim that the United States has negated counterhegemonic balancing by adopting accommodative policies that allay others’ fears of American dominance.10 Liberal

international relations theorists and balance of threat realists assert that the United States has been successful because it is a “benevolent” hegemon.11 Other states, they say, will acquiesce to U.S. hegemony if the United States displays self-restraint by exercising its

predominance multilaterally through international institutions.12 Moreover, the United States’ “soft power”—the purportedly singular attractiveness of its political and economic institutions, and its culture—draws other states into Washington’s orbit.

EconomyThe United States unipolarity will never be overcome financial flow and military might prove Brooks and Wohlforth in 2002 (Stephen G. Brooks is an Assistant Professor and William C. Wohlforth an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. “American Primacy in Perspective” Foreign Affairs July/August 2002 Issue;

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2002-07-01/american-primacy-perspective)

More than a decade ago, political columnist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed in these pages the arrival of what he called a "unipolar moment," a period in which one superpower, the United States, stood clearly above the rest of the international community ("The Unipolar Moment," America and the World 1990/91). In the following years the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia's economic and military decline accelerated, and Japan stagnated, while the United States experienced the longest and one of the most vigorous economic expansions in its history. Yet toward the close of the century readers could find political scientist Samuel Huntington arguing here that unipolarity had already given way to a "uni-multipolar" structure, which in turn would soon become unambiguously multipolar ("The Lonely

Superpower," March/April 1999). And despite the boasting rhetoric of American officials, Huntington was not alone in his views. Polls showed that more than 40 percent of Americans had come to agree that the United States was now merely one of several leading powers -- a number that had risen steadily for several years. Why did the unipolarity argument seem less persuasive to many even as

U.S. power appeared to grow? Largely because the goal posts were moved. Krauthammer's definition of unipolarity, as a system with only one pole, made sense in the immediate wake of a Cold War that had been so clearly shaped by the existence of two poles. People sensed intuitively that a world with no great power capable of sustaining a focused rivalry with the United States would be very different in important ways. But a decade later what increasingly seemed salient was less the absence of a peer rival than the persistence of a number of problems in the world that Washington could not dispose of by itself. This was the context for Huntington's new definition of unipolarity, as a system with "one superpower, no significant major powers, and many minor powers." The dominant power in such a system, he argued, would be able to "effectively resolve important international issues alone, and no combination of other states would have the power to prevent it from doing so." The United States had no such ability and thus did not qualify. The terrorist attacks last fall appeared to some to reinforce this point, revealing not only a remarkable degree of American vulnerability but also a deep vein of global anti-American resentment. Suddenly the world seemed a more threatening place, with dangers lurking at every corner and eternal vigilance the price of liberty. Yet as the success of the military campaign in Afghanistan demonstrated, vulnerability to terror has few effects on U.S. strength in

more traditional interstate affairs. If anything, America's response to the attacks -- which showed its ability to project power in several places around the globe simultaneously, and essentially unilaterally, while effortlessly increasing defense spending by nearly $50 billion -- only reinforced its unique position. If today's American primacy does not constitute unipolarity, then nothing ever will. The only things left for dispute are how long it will last and what the implications are for American foreign policy. PICK A MEASURE, ANY

MEASURE To understand just how dominant the United States is today one, needs to look at each of the standard components of national power in succession. In the military arena, the United States is poised to spend more on defense in 2003 than the next 15-20 biggest spenders combined. The United States has overwhelming nuclear superiority, the world's dominant air force, the only truly blue-water navy, and a unique capability to project power around the globe. And its military advantage is even more apparent in quality than in quantity. The United States leads the world in exploiting the military applications of advanced communications and information technology and it has demonstrated an unrivaled ability to coordinate and process information about the battlefield and destroy targets from afar with extraordinary precision.

Washington is not making it easy for others to catch up, moreover, given the massive gap in spending on military research and development (R&D), on which

the United States spends three times more than the next six powers combined. Looked at another way, the United States currently spends more on military R&D than Germany or the United Kingdom spends on defense in total. No state in the modern history of international politics has come close to the military predominance these numbers suggest. And the United States purchases this preeminence with only 3.5 percent of its GDP. As historian

Paul Kennedy notes, "being Number One at great cost is one thing; being the world's single superpower on the cheap is astonishing." America's economic dominance, meanwhile -- relative to either the next several richest powers or the rest of the world combined -- surpasses that of any great power in modern history, with the sole exception of its own position after 1945 (when World War II had temporarily laid waste every other major economy). The U.S. economy is currently twice as large as its closest rival, Japan. California's economy alone has risen to become the fifth largest in the world (using market exchange-rate estimates), ahead of France and just behind the United Kingdom. It is true that the long expansion of the 1990s has ebbed, but it would take an experience like Japan's in that decade -- that is, an extraordinarily deep and prolonged domestic recession juxtaposed with robust growth elsewhere -- for the

United States just to fall back to the economic position it occupied in 1991. The odds against such relative decline are long, however, in part because the

United States is the country in the best position to take advantage of globalization . Its status as the preferred

destination for scientifically trained foreign workers solidified during the 1990s, and it is the most popular destination for foreign firms. In 1999 it attracted more than one-third of world inflows of foreign direct investment. U.S. military and economic dominance, finally, is rooted in the country's position as the world's leading technological power. Although measuring national R&D spending is increasingly difficult in an era in which so many economic activities cross borders, efforts to do so indicate

America's continuing lead. Figures from the late 1990s showed that U.S. expenditures on R&D nearly equaled those of the next seven richest countries combined. Measuring the degree of American dominance in each category begins to place things in perspective. But what truly distinguishes the current international system is American dominance in all of them simultaneously. Previous leading states in the modern era were either great commercial and naval powers or great military powers on land, never both. The British Empire in its heyday and the United States during the Cold War, for example, each shared the world with other powers that matched or exceeded them in some areas. Following the Napoleonic Wars, the United Kingdom was clearly the world's leading commercial and naval power. But even at the height of the Pax Britannica, the United Kingdom was outspent, outmanned, and outgunned by both France and Russia. And its 24 percent share of GDP among the six leading powers in the early 1870s was matched by the United States, with Russia and Germany following close behind. Similarly, at the dawn of the Cold War the United States was clearly dominant economically as well as in air and naval capabilities. But the Soviet Union retained overall military parity, and thanks to geography and investment in land power it had a superior ability to seize territory in Eurasia. Today, in contrast, the United States has no rival in any critical dimension of power. There has never been a system of sovereign states that contained one state with this degree of dominance. The recent tendency to equate unipolarity with the ability to achieve desired outcomes single-handedly on all issues only reinforces this point; in no previous international system would it ever have occurred to anyone to apply such a yardstick.

At: Rising Powers

Rising powers cannot overcome US power; technological, military, economic, and geographicBrooks and Wohlforth in 2002 (Stephen G. Brooks is an Assistant Professor and William C. Wohlforth an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. “American Primacy in Perspective” Foreign Affairs July/August 2002 Issue;

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2002-07-01/american-primacy-perspective)

CAN IT LAST? Many who acknowledge the extent of American power, however, regard it as necessarily self-negating. Other states traditionally band together to restrain potential hegemons, they say, and this time will be no different. As German political commentator Josef Joffe has put it, "the history books say that Mr. Big always invites his own demise. Nos. 2, 3, 4 will gang up on him, form countervailing alliances and plot his downfall. That happened to Napoleon, as it happened to Louis xiv and the mighty Hapsburgs, to Hitler

and to Stalin. Power begets superior counterpower; it's the oldest rule of world politics." What such arguments fail to recognize are the features of America's post-Cold War position that make it likely to buck the historical trend. Bounded by oceans to the east and west and weak, friendly powers to the north and south, the Unit ed States is both less vulnerable than previous aspiring hegemons and also less threatening to others. The main potential

challengers to its unipolarity, meanwhile -- China, Russia, Japan, and Germany -- are in the opposite position. They cannot augment their military capabilities so as to balance the United States without simultaneously becoming an immediate threat to their neighbors. Politics, even international politics, is local. Although American power attracts a lot of attention globally, states are usually more concerned with their own neighborhoods than with the global equilibrium. Were any of the potential challengers to make a serious run at the United States, regional balancing efforts would almost certainly help contain them, as would the massive latent power capabilities of the United States, which could be mobilized as necessary to head off an emerging threat.

When analysts refer to a historical pattern of balancing against potentially preponderant powers , they rarely note that the cases in question -- the Hapsburg ascendancy, Napoleonic France, the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and so forth -- featured would-be hegemons that were vulnerable, threatening, centrally located, and dominant in only one or two components of power. Moreover, the would-be hegemons all specialized in precisely the form of power -- the ability to seize territory -- most likely to scare other states into an antihegemonic coalition. American capabilities, by contrast, are relatively greater and more comprehensive than those of past hegemonic aspirants, they are located safely offshore, and the

prospective balancers are close regional neighbors of one another. U.S. power is also at the command of one government, whereas the putative balancers would face major challenges in acting collectively to assemble and coordinate their military capabilities. Previous historical experiences of balancing, moreover, involved groups

of status quo powers seeking to contain a rising revisionist one. The balancers had much to fear if the aspiring hegemon got its way. Today, however, U.S. dominance is the status quo. Several of the major powers in the system have been closely allied with the United States for decades and derive substantial benefits from their position. Not only would they have to forego those benefits if they tried to balance, but they would have to find some way of putting together a durable, coherent alliance while America was watching. This is a profoundly important point, because although there may be several precedents for a coalition of balancers preventing a hegemon from emerging, there is none for a group of subordinate powers joining to topple a hegemon once it has already emerged, which is

what would have to happen today. The comprehensive nature of U.S. power, finally, also skews the odds against any major attempt at balancing, let alone a successful one. The United States is both big and rich, whereas the potential challengers are all either one or the other. It will take at least a generation for today's other big countries (such as China and India) to become rich, and given declining birth rates the other rich powers are not about to get big, at least in relative

terms. During the 1990s, the U.S. population increased by 32.7 million -- a figure equal to more than half the current population of France or the United Kingdom. Some might argue that the European Union is an exception to the big-or-rich rule. It is true that if Brussels were to develop impressive military capabilities and wield its latent collective power like a state, the EU would clearly constitute another pole. But the creation of an autonomous and unified defense and defense-industrial capacity that could compete with that of the United States would be a gargantuan task. The EU is struggling to put together a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force that is designed for smaller operations such as humanitarian relief, peacekeeping, and crisis management, but it still lacks military essentials such as capabilities in intelligence gathering, airlift, air-defense suppression, air-to-air refueling, sea transport, medical care, and combat search and rescue -- and even when it has those capacities, perhaps by the end of this decade, it will still rely on NATO command and control and other assets. Whatever capability the EU eventually assembles, moreover, will matter only to the extent that it is under the control of a statelike decision-making body with the authority to act quickly and decisively in Europe's name. Such authority, which does not yet exist even for international financial matters, could be purchased only at the price of a direct frontal assault on European nations' core sovereignty. And all of this would have to occur as the EU expands to add ten or more new member states, a process that will complicate further deepening. Given these obstacles, Europe is unlikely to

emerge as a dominant actor in the military realm for a very long time, if ever. Most analysts looking for a future peer competitor to the United States, therefore, focus on China, since it is the only power with the potential to match the

size of the U.S. economy over the next several decades. Yet even if China were eventually to catch up to the United States in terms of aggregate GDP, the gaps in the two states' other power capabilities -- technological, military, and geographic -- would remain. Since the mid-1990s, Chinese strategists themselves have become markedly less bullish about their country's ability to close the gap in what they call "comprehensive national power" any time soon. The latest estimates by China's intelligence agency project that in 2020 the country will possess between slightly more than a third and slightly more than half of U.S.

capabilities. Fifty percent of China's labor force is employed in agriculture, and relatively little of its economy is geared toward high technology. In the 1990s, U.S. spending on technological development was more than 20 times China's. Most of China's weapons are decades old. And nothing China can do will allow it to escape its geography, which leaves it surrounded by countries that have the motivation and ability to engage in balancing of their own should China start to build up an expansive military force. These are not

just facts about the current system; they are recognized as such by the major players involved. As a result, no global challenge to the United States is likely to emerge for the foreseeable future. No country, or group of countries, wants to maneuver itself into a situation in which it will have to contend with the focused enmity of the United States. Two of the prime causes of past great-power conflicts -- hegemonic rivalry and misperception -- are thus not currently operative in world politics. At the dawn of the twentieth century, a militarily powerful Germany challenged the United Kingdom's claim to leadership. The result was World War I. In the middle of the twentieth century, American leadership seemed under challenge by a militarily and ideologically strong Soviet Union. The result was the Cold War. U.S. dominance today militates against a comparable challenge, however, and hence against a comparable global conflict. Because the United States is too powerful to balance, moreover, there is far less danger of war emerging from the misperceptions, miscalculations, arms races, and so forth that have traditionally plagued balancing attempts. Pundits often lament the absence of a post-Cold War Bismarck. Luckily, as long as unipolarity lasts, there is no need for one.

At: China Overtakes

China comparatively is decades behind no chance of them usurping US powerBrooks and Wohlforth in 2016 (STEPHEN G. BROOKS is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. WILLIAM C. WOHLFORTH is Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. This article is adapted from their forthcoming book America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century Oxford University Press, 2016; May/June 2016 Issue; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-04-13/once-and-future-superpower)

After two and a half decades, is the United States’ run as the world’s sole superpower coming to an end? Many say yes, seeing a rising China ready to catch up to or even surpass the United States in the near future. By many measures, after all, China’s economy is on track to become the world’s biggest, and even if its growth slows, it will still outpace that of the United States for many years. Its coffers overflowing, Beijing has used its new wealth to attract friends, deter enemies, modernize its military, and aggressively assert sovereignty claims in its periphery. For many, therefore, the question is not whether China will become a superpower

but just how soon. But this is wishful, or fearful, thinking. Economic growth no longer translates as directly into military power as it did in the past, which means that it is now harder than ever for rising powers to rise and established ones to fall. And

China—the only country with the raw potential to become a true global peer of the United States—also faces a more daunting challenge than previous rising states because of how far it lags behind technologically . Even though the United States’ economic dominance has eroded from its peak, the country’s military superiority is not going anywhere, nor is the globe-spanning alliance structure that constitutes the core of the existing liberal

international order (unless Washington unwisely decides to throw it away). Rather than expecting a power transition in international politics, everyone should start getting used to a world in which the United States remains the sole superpower for decades to come. Lasting preeminence will help the United States ward off the greatest traditional international danger, war between the world’s major powers. And it will give Washington options for dealing with nonstate threats such as terrorism and transnational challenges such as climate change. But it will also impose burdens of leadership and force choices among competing priorities, particularly as finances grow more straitened. With great power comes great responsibility, as the saying goes, and playing its leading role successfully will require Washington to display a maturity that U.S. foreign policy has all too often lacked. THE WEALTH

OF NATIONS In forecasts of China’s future power position, much has been made of the country’s pressing domestic challenges: its

slowing economy, polluted environment, widespread corruption, perilous financial markets, nonexistent social safety net, rapidly aging population, and restive middle class. But as harmful as these

problems are, China’s true Achilles’ heel on the world stage is something else: its low level of technological expertise compared with the United States’. Relative to past rising powers, China has a much wider technological gap to close with the leading power. China may export container after container of high-tech goods, but in a

world of globalized production, that doesn’t reveal much. Half of all Chinese exports consist of what economists call “processing trade,” meaning that parts are imported into China for assembly and then exported afterward. And the vast majority of these Chinese exports are directed not by Chinese firms but by corporations from more developed

countries. When looking at measures of technological prowess that better reflect the national origin of the expertise, China’s true position becomes clear. World Bank data on payments for the use of intellectual property, for example, indicate that the United

States is far and away the leading source of innovative technologies, boasting $128 billion in receipts in 2013—more than four times as much as the country in second place, Japan. China, by contrast, imports

technologies on a massive scale yet received less than $1 billion in receipts in 2013 for the use of its intellectual property.

Another good indicator of the technological gap is the number of so-called triadic patents, those registered in the United States,

Europe, and Japan. In 2012, nearly 14,000 such patents originated in the United States, compared with just under 2,000 in China. The distribution of highly influential articles in science and engineering—those in the top

one percent of citations, as measured by the National Science Foundation—tells the same story, with the United States accounting for almost half of these articles, more than eight times China’s share. So does the breakdown of Nobel Prizes in

Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine. Since 1990, 114 have gone to U.S.-based researchers. China-based researchers have received

two. Precisely because the Chinese economy is so unlike the U.S. economy, the measure fueling expectations of a power shift, GDP, greatly underestimates the true economic gap between the two countries. For one thing, the immense destruction that China is now wreaking on its environment counts favorably toward its GDP, even though it will reduce economic capacity over time by shortening life spans and raising cleanup and health-care costs. For another thing, GDP was originally designed to measure mid-twentieth-century manufacturing economies, and so the more knowledge-based and globalized a country’s production is, the more its GDP underestimates its economy’s true size. A giant economy alone won’t make China the world’s second superpower. A new statistic developed by the UN suggests the degree to which GDP inflates China’s relative power. Called “inclusive wealth,” this measure represents economists’ most systematic effort to date to calculate a state’s wealth. As a UN report explained, it counts a country’s stock of assets in three areas: “(i) manufactured capital (roads, buildings, machines, and equipment), (ii) human capital (skills, education, health), and (iii) natural capital (sub-soil

resources, ecosystems, the atmosphere).” Added up, the United States’ inclusive wealth comes to almost $144 trillion—4.5 times China’s $32 trillion. The true size of China’s economy relative to the United States’ may lie somewhere in between the numbers provided by GDP and inclusive wealth, and admittedly, the latter measure has yet to receive the same level of scrutiny as GDP. The problem with GDP, however, is that it measures a flow (typically, the value of goods and services produced in a year), whereas inclusive wealth measures a stock. As The Economist put it, “Gauging an economy by its GDP is like judging a company by its quarterly profits, without ever peeking at its balance-sheet.” Because inclusive wealth measures the pool of resources a government can conceivably draw on to achieve its strategic objectives, it is the more useful metric when thinking about geopolitical competition. But no matter how one compares the size of the

U.S. and Chinese economies, it is clear that the United States is far more capable of converting its resources into military might. In the past, rising states had levels of technological prowess similar to those of leading ones. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the United States didn’t lag far behind the United Kingdom in terms of technology, nor did Germany lag far behind the erstwhile Allies during the interwar years, nor was the Soviet Union backward technologically compared with the United States during the early Cold War. This meant that when these challengers rose economically, they could soon mount a serious military challenge to the dominant power. China’s relative technological backwardness today, however, means that even if its economy continues to gain ground, it will not be easy for it to catch up militarily and become a true global strategic peer, as opposed to a merely a major player in its own neighborhood.

The Cold War pushed the US decades ahead China is chasing a moving target with an already massive military gap Brooks and Wohlforth in 2016 (STEPHEN G. BROOKS is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. WILLIAM C. WOHLFORTH is Daniel Webster Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. This article is adapted from their forthcoming book America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century Oxford University Press, 2016; May/June 2016 Issue; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-04-13/once-and-future-superpower)

The technological and economic differences between China and the United States wouldn’t matter much if all it took to gain superpower status were the ability to use force locally . But what makes the United States a superpower is its ability to operate globally, and the bar for that capability is high. It means having what the

political scientist Barry Posen has called “command of the commons”—that is, control over the air, space, and the open sea, along with the necessary infrastructure for managing these domains . When one measures the 14 categories of systems that create this capability (everything from nuclear attack submarines to satellites to transport aircraft), what emerges is an overwhelming U.S. advantage in each area, the result of decades of advances on multiple fronts. It would take a very long time for China to approach U.S. power on any of these fronts, let alone all of them. For one thing, the United States has built up a massive scientific and industrial base. China is rapidly enhancing its technological inputs, increasing its R & D spending

and its numbers of graduates with degrees in science and engineering. But there are limits to how fast any country can leap forward in such matters, and there are various obstacles in China’s way—such as a lack of effective intellectual property protections and inefficient methods of allocating capital—that will be extremely hard to change given its rigid political system. Adding to the difficulty, China is chasing a moving target. In 2012, the United States spent $79 billion on military R & D, more than 13 times as much as China’s estimated amount, so even rapid Chinese advances might be insufficient to close the gap. Then there are the decades the United States has spent procuring advanced weapons systems, which have grown only more complex over time. In the 1960s, aircraft took about five years to develop, but by the 1990s, as the number of parts and lines of code ballooned, the figure reached ten years. Today, it takes 15 to 20

years to design and build the most advanced fighter aircraft, and military satellites can take even longer. So even if another country managed to build the scientific and industrial base to develop the many types of weapons that give the United States command of the commons, there would be a lengthy lag before it could

actually possess them. Even Chinese defense planners recognize the scale of the challenge. Command of the commons also requires the ability to supervise a wide range of giant defense projects. For all the hullabaloo over the evils of the military-industrial complex and the “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the Pentagon, in the United States, research labs, contractors, and bureaucrats have painstakingly acquired this expertise over

many decades, and their Chinese counterparts do not yet have it. This kind of “learning by doing” experience resides in organizations, not in individuals . It can be transferred only through demonstration and instruction, so cybertheft or other forms of espionage are not an effective shortcut for acquiring it. China’s defense industry is still in its infancy, and as the scholar Richard Bitzinger and his colleagues have concluded, “Aside from a few pockets of excellence such as ballistic missiles, the Chinese military-industrial complex has appeared to demonstrate few capacities for designing and producing relatively advanced conventional

weapon systems.” For example, China still cannot mass-produce high-performance aircraft engines, despite the immense

resources it has thrown at the effort, and relies instead on second-rate Russian models. In other areas, Beijing has not even bothered competing. Take undersea warfare. China is poorly equipped for antisubmarine warfare and is doing very little to improve. And only now is the country capable of producing nuclear-powered attack submarines that are comparable in quietness

to the kinds that the U.S. Navy commissioned in the 1950s. Since then, however, the U.S. government has invested hundreds of billions of dollars and six decades of effort in its current generation of Virginia-class submarines, which have achieved absolute levels of silencing. Finally, it takes a very particular set of skills and infrastructure to actually use all these weapons. Employing them is difficult not just because the weapons themselves tend to be so complex but also because they typically need to be used in a coordinated manner. It is an incredibly complicated endeavor, for example, to deploy a carrier battle group; the many associated ships and aircraft must work together in real time. Even systems that may seem simple require a complex surrounding architecture in order to be truly effective. Drones, for example, work best when a military has the highly trained personnel to

operate them and the technological and organizational capacity to rapidly gather, process, and act on information collected from them. Developing the necessary infrastructure to seek command of the commons would take any military a very long time. And since the task places a high premium on flexibility and delegation, China’s centralized and hierarchical forces are particularly ill suited for it. THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT In the 1930s alone, Japan escaped the depths of depression and morphed into a rampaging military machine, Germany transformed from the disarmed loser of World War I into a juggernaut capable of conquering Europe, and the Soviet Union recovered from war and revolution to become a formidable land power. The next decade saw the United States’ own sprint from military also-ran to global superpower, with a nuclear Soviet Union close on its heels. Today, few seriously anticipate another world war, or even another cold war, but many observers argue that these past experiences reveal just how quickly countries can become

dangerous once they try to extract military capabilities from their economies. But what is taking place now is not your grandfather’s power transition. One can debate whether China will soon reach the first major milestone on the journey from great power to superpower: having the

requisite economic resources. But a giant economy alone won’t make China the world’s second superpower, nor would overcoming the next big hurdle , attaining the requisite technological capacity. After that lies the challenge of transforming all this latent power into the full range of systems needed for global power projection and learning how to use them. Each of these steps is time consuming and fraught with difficulty. As a

result, China will, for a long time, continue to hover somewhere between a great power and a superpower. You might call it “an emerging potential superpower”: thanks to its economic growth, China has broken free from the great-power pack, but it still has a long way to go before it might gain the economic and technological capacity to become a superpower. China’s quest for superpower status is undermined by something else, too: weak incentives to make the sacrifices required. The United States owes its far-reaching military capabilities to the existential imperatives of the Cold War. The country would never have borne the burden it did had policymakers not faced the challenge of balancing the Soviet Union, a superpower with the potential to dominate Eurasia. (Indeed, it is no surprise that two and a half decades after the Soviet Union collapsed, it is Russia that possesses the second-greatest

military capability in the world.) Today, China faces nothing like the Cold War pressures that led the United States to invest so much in its military. The United States is a far less threatening superpower than the Soviet Union was: however aggravating Chinese policymakers find U.S. foreign policy, it is unlikely to engender the level of fear that motivated Washington during the Cold War. Stacking the odds against China even more, the United States has few incentives to give up power, thanks to the web of alliances it has long boasted. A list of U.S. allies reads as a who’s who of the world’s most advanced economies, and these partners have lowered the price of maintaining the United States’ superpower status. U.S. defense spending stood at around three percent of GDP at the end of the 1990s, rose to around five percent in the next decade on account of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and has now fallen back to close to three percent. Washington has been able to sustain a global military capacity with relatively little effort thanks in part to the bases its allies host and the top-end weapons they help develop. China’s only steadfast ally is North Korea, which is often more trouble than it is worth. Given the barriers thwarting China’s path to superpower status, as well as the low incentives for trying to overcome them, the future of the international system hinges most on whether the United States continues to bear the much lower burden of sustaining what we and others have called “deep engagement,” the globe-girdling grand strategy it has followed for some 70 years. And barring some odd change of heart that results in a true abnegation of its global role (as opposed to overwrought, politicized charges sometimes made about its already having done so), Washington will be well positioned for decades to maintain the core military capabilities, alliances, and commitments that secure key regions, backstop the global economy, and foster cooperation on transnational problem

Investment Bubble Turn

Gov Investment = BubbleIncreased government subsidies of green energy will create a bubble AKHTAR, 2016

Akhtar, Tanzeel. "Renewable Energy Is A ‘Bubble,’ Says Financier". WSJ. N. p., 2016. Web. 4 July 2016.

Sustainable investing and clean energy are hot topics, but one Danish financier is warning that people might be getting carried away. Per Wimmer, a former Goldman Sachs banker and the founder of Wimmer Financial LLP,

a London-based corporate-advisory firm specializing in natural resources, foresees a “green bubble” that could have similar consequences to the dot-com and housing bubbles. Eight Questions to Ask Before Picking a College Knowing the answers to these questions should give you a financial head start VIEW INTERACTIVE ISTOCK JOURNAL REPORT Insights from The Experts Read more at WSJ.com/WealthReport MORE IN INVESTING IN FUNDS & ETFS Emerging Markets: 5 Things to Know ‘Super Bowl’ Indicator Works Again ‘Do Good’ Strategies Turn Corner U.S.-Stock Funds Fell 2.1% for Year Do Investors Need Any Junk? The Wall Street Journal asked the 47-year-old Mr. Wimmer, who is also a philanthropist and would-be private astronaut, about the distortions he sees in the clean-energy market and where he thinks the opportunities are. Here are edited excerpts: WSJ: What are the main issues behind the so-called bubble you see forming in green

energy? MR. WIMMER: Very simply put, for green energy to be truly sustainable, it must be commercially sustainable. The reality today is that when it comes to politicians allocating subsidies, it seems like they are being allocated almost religiously across the board. As long as there is a green element, then [politicians believe] it is fine and deserves funding from tax dollars. I argue that is a little unsophisticated. We have got to look at supporting and subsidizing the technologies that stand a chance at becoming commercially independent from subsidies within a reasonable time period—about seven to 10 years. I think that gives us a better bang for the buck than just spraying it across the whole spectrum. Now one of the arguments that people say against that is, “What about innovation? Shouldn’t we try something new from time to time?” I say yes, but I would say those research-and-development dollars are better put into universities, as opposed to a company that gives it a go and then goes bust, the technology lost in the process. It is better to get an education out of it. WSJ: In your book “The Green Bubble,” you highlight

infrastructure problems involved in large-scale green-energy projects in the U.S. Tell us about those. MR. WIMMER: There are a number of challenges that green energy faces, and one [involves] infrastructure, meaning that if you were to target, say, 20% green energy including wind farms in the U.S., you would have to build an awful lot of transmission grid, which is quite expensive. Somebody is going to have to pay for it—the taxpayer, perhaps? I identify a massive infrastructure challenge, and somebody has to fund that. This is just one of the many challenges that renewables face. WSJ: What green-investment opportunities might be particularly promising? MR. WIMMER: One [area of promise] is efficiency technology such as LED lighting that could save you 99% off your consumption compared with a normal lightbulb. That is a huge saving. Also, smarthouse grids and big hydro dams, which we love because they operate 24/7, so it is dollars per megawatts, which is actually quite competitive. The last big area is nuclear, which is controversial, but if the world is keen to move to a CO2-free arena, nuclear is part of the solution, and you would have to install more nuclear power plants around the world.

Solar energy is a bubble- only sustainable with government subsidy Martin 16

"Suddenly, The Solar Boom Is Starting To Look Like A Bubble". MIT Technology Review. N. p., 2016. Web. 4 July 2016.

By all accounts, 2016 should be a great year for solar power providers. In December, Congress extended the federal investment tax credit for solar installations through 2022, convincing analysts to project strong growth for the solar industry in coming years. Prices for solar panels continue to decline, even as emissions reduction targets reached under the Paris climate accord drive governments to seek more power from renewable energy sources. Several recent reports have shown that the cost of solar is often comparable or nearly comparable to the average price of power on the utility grid, a threshold known

as grid parity. But investors are not feeling the love. This week shares of U.S. solar leader SolarCity tumbled to a new low, while several other solar companies also took a pounding. Last month Nevada introduced

sharp cutbacks in its program for net metering—the fees paid to homeowners with rooftop solar installations for excess

power they send back to the grid. California and Hawaii, two of the biggest solar markets, have introduced changes to their net metering schemes as well. Across the country, as many as 20 other states are considering such changes, which would dramatically alter the economics of rooftop solar. The uncertainty has cast the solar providers’ business models into doubt. Without net metering payments, residential solar “makes no financial sense for a consumer,” SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive recently admitted to the New York Times. A SolarCity employee building a rooftop solar installation in Lakewood, California. The rosier projections for grid parity usually assume that both net metering fees from utilities and government subsidies

will continue. GTM Research this week released a report saying that rooftop solar is now at parity with grid power in 20 states, and will be in 22 more by 2020—if subsidies are included. Without subsidies, the picture looks a lot bleaker. If each state added a $50 per month fixed charge to solar owners’ bills—a change that many big utilities are fighting for—solar would be at grid parity in only two states. Critics of government subsidies for renewable energy have called the solar boom “an artifical market” that will evaporate the minute government handouts dry up. All the recent turbulence aside, it’s likely that solar’s longer-term future in the U.S. remains bright. Renewable portfolio standards, the state-level mandates that establish minimum renewable-energy requirements, will drive the addition of 89 gigawatts of new solar capacity over the next 10 years, according to analysts at Credit Suisse. Solar prices will continue to fall; a study by Oxford University researchers, published last month in Research Policy, found that annual price declines of 10 percent will continue well into the next decade, enabling solar to supply 20 percent of global energy needs by 2027. And falling costs and wider availability of solar systems coupled with energy storage will enable solar households to store energy for later use, making rooftop solar more economical on its own—regardless of whether it ever reaches true grid parity.

Solar energy creates a bubble Johnson 16

http://www.washingtontimes.com, The. "DREW JOHNSON: A Solar Energy Bubble In The Making". The Washingtion Times. N. p., 2016. Web. 4 July 2016.

The 2007-08 financial crisis left many in America with bitter feelings toward Wall Street. Policymakers and pundits chastised financial investors for being greedy and preying on hardworking Americans. Those criticisms, however, were misplaced. The real culprit of the financial bubble and fallout from its collapse wasn’t Wall Street. It was Washington. Government policies – specifically, reckless programs that gave out tax dollars and taxpayer-backed loans to encourage home ownership – fueled the bubble. America appears to be heading down a similar path with its current promotion of solar power. Just as the government created a housing bubble when policymakers attempted to lure Americans into buying homes, lawmakers are now creating a solar bubble by arbitrarily and unnecessarily encouraging increased renewable energy production. And much like the housing bubble and the subsequent financial crisis, taxpayers and investors will be forced to pay for the government’s bad decisions when the industry comes crashing down. Nothing provides less bang for American taxpayers’ buck than solar energy. The federal government spent an astounding $39 billion subsidizing solar energy schemes last year, according to the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. Despite the massive amount squandered on taxpayer-funded handouts, solar provides a paltry 0.6 percent of America’s electricity supply.

Renewable energy is hitting the bubble Helman, 2016

Helman Christopher SunEdison Is Just The Latest Casualty Of The Popping Of The Easy-Money Energy Bubble "Forbes Welcome". Forbes.com. N. p., 2016. Web. 4 July 2016.

SunEdison declared bankruptcy yesterday. Its Chapter 11 filing disclosed total assets of $20.7 billion and total debts of $16.1 billion. The collapse of the world’s biggest developer of renewable energy projects comes at something of an ironic time. With oil prices at $43 per barrel we expect oil and gas companies to go bankrupt. Energy XXI and Goodrich GR +% Petroleum filed recently; Linn Energy is soon to follow. And most of America’s coal producers have failed too, including the world’s biggest miner, Peabody Energy BTU +%. We’re talking tens of billions of enterprise value, wiped

out. So why would SunEdison go under at the same time the fossil fuel producers? What’s the connection? Clean energy apologists want you to believe that SunEdison’s failure has nothing to do with their revolution. But that’s not the case. SunEdison, Peabody and all the rest are victims of the popping of

the Energy Debt Bubble. Endless borrowings of easy money acted like methamphetamine on America’s

solar power developers just as it did the oil frackers and coal miners. Rosy projections fueled rampant buildouts. Cash

flows from those projects have been insufficient to cover debt payments. SunEdison started as a silicon chip division of Monsanto MON -2.02%, which spun it out. The company became a big solar project developer, and then a residential installer. CEO

Ahmad Chatila boasted that by 2020 SunEdison would grow as big as Exxon Mobil. But it grew too fast, relying on cheap financing to make acquisitions it couldn’t afford (like the 2014 acquisition of First Wind from D.E. Shaw for $2.4 billion). Chatila tried hard; he created two new publicly traded, tax-advantaged “yieldcos” to help spur growth: TerraForm Power owns projects in developed countries; TerraForm Global would invest in emerging markets. These yieldcos are similar to master limited partnerships in the oil pipeline business. Like MLPs, they pass along all pre-tax profits to unitholders and so enjoy lower costs of capital. By raising capital to acquire “drop-down” assets from SunEdison at (perhaps artificially) inflated prices, the yieldcos enabled SunEdison to keep building. The plan was for reliable cash flows from green energy sold to utilities to both cover debt payments and generate dividends for yieldco unit holders.

Unfortunately, many projects have overpromised and underdelivered. SunEdison has faced financial challenges with some of its own projects. In Hawaii the local utility company pulled out of an agreement to buy power from three of SunEdison’s solar installations, citing the company’s failure to meet project milestones. (D.E. Shaw is now seeking to acquire the Hawaii projects.) Another troubled project is a wind farm in Andhra Pradesh, India. The company won a government tender to build the wind farm, by agreeing to do it for a rock-bottom tariff of just 7 cents per kwh. Solar

analyst Jenny Chase at Bloomberg New Energy Finance notes that some pending projects like that might not be worth completing. What contributed to SunEdison’s downfall was that it had too many marginally profitable projects in various stages of completion and couldn’t monetize those projects quickly enough to pay back creditors. Recommended by Forbes Is The Cleantech Bubble Over? The Reality Of Solar Economics SunEdison's Big Slide: When Financial Engineering Goes Wrong Billionaire David Einhorn's Hedge Fund Is Down By 20% In 2015 Sunrun's $250 Million In Financing A Positive Sign For Distributed Solar MOST POPULAR Photos: The 20 College Majors With The Highest Starting Salaries In 2016 +71,630 VIEWS U.S. Dept. Of Justice Deals Crushing Blow To Songwriters MOST POPULAR Photos: The Cities With The Most Billionaires MOST POPULAR Five Predictions For The Season Six Finale Of 'Game Of Thrones' The solar industry’s highest-profile embarrassment has been the $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar project in the Mojave Desert, owned by NRG Energy NRG +0.20% and Google GOOGL +1.11%. More than a year after start up, it’s only generating 40% of expected electricity and may have to be shut down. The 170,000 mirrors at Ivanpah are also infamous for concentrating sunlight into death rays that have burned more than 3,500 birds alive, turning them into flaming “streamers.” It’s a similar story at a plant in Arizona built by Spanish renewables giant Abengoa . Though neither are SunEdison projects, they illustrate a lackluster trend. Abengoa’s U.S. operations filed for bankruptcy in February with $10 billion in debt. Meanwhile, Ivanpah’s troubles indirectly claimed the head of David Crane, who had bet his tenure as CEO of NRG Energy on pivoting the coal-focused power generator towards green energy. (See my 2014 Forbes Magazine profile of Crane.) Crane spearheaded NRG’s own yieldco, NRG Yield, as a way to finance renewable projects. But investors freaked out over high costs and low returns. He resigned this year, declaring that he couldn’t make the green energy transition work.

NRG will refocus on traditional generation. To be sure, there is money to be made in renewable energy, especially when developers score sweetheart deals from ratepayers. That’s what D.E. Shaw has done in Rhode Island with America’s first ever offshore wind farm. SunEdison acquired a piece of that one through the First Wind deal, and still owns a less than 5% stake. It will be profitable because the developers joined with Rhode Island politicians to pull a fast one over on the state’s ratepayers. With or without government subsidies, solar power remains economically untenable. It is simply not a competitive, scalable source of power generation. It costs twice as much on average as wind power, and even more

for small-scale residential installations. According to the EIA, solar PV systems generate power for about 12.5 cents per kwh. That includes 1.1 cents per kwh in subsidies. If you really want renewable energy, wind is a better option at 7.4 cents. Natural gas costs 7.2 cents per

kwh, compared to which coal is a nonstarter at 9.5 cents. Coal supplied from U.S. mines is down 20% in the past two years. The economics of solar are set to get even worse. Even though residential solar continues to grow, it might soon hit stall speed as politicians and consumers wake up to its regressive social impact and do away with “net metering” laws. Hawaii and Nevada have already decreased the amount of money that owners of home solar systems can make by sending their excess electricity to the grid. In time, analyst Huge Wynne at Bernstein Research thinks such net metering provisions will be done away with altogether as politicians rightly understand their regressive impact on other ratepayers forced to carry a bigger share of the costs to maintain and depreciate the power grid. California will reconsider net metering in 2019. Ending net metering would eliminate a big driver for adoption of residential solar. According to Bernstein, although California and Texas have similar sun exposure, architecture and patterns of settlement, California (with net metering) gets 2.2% of its power from rooftop solar, while Texas (with no net metering) does only .03%. That helps explain why shares of SolarCity are down 40% in the past year. Another financial giant who has already lost big on SunEdison is David Einhorn. His Greenlight Capital had a stake of almost 7% in SunEdison stock, before selling about half the position in the days before the Chapter 11 filing. SunEdison was one of Greenlight’s biggest losses last year, along with coal miner Consol Energy and chipmaker Micron Technology MU -9.09%. It’s funny. A year ago, in May 2015 at the Sohn Investment Conference, Einhorn presented his now famous bear case against all the shale oil frackers, most notably “Mother Fracker” Pioneer Natural Resources PXD -0.07%. His argument in a nutshell: “The problem is that oil fracking is high cost.” He could have made nearly the same argument against SunEdison. Pioneer has recovered 50% off its lows and is down just 13% over the past 12 months. Investors have come to appreciate the potential of the company’s extensive position in the Permian Basin, which is proving to hold the most economic tight oil

formations in the United States. In the aftermath of the easy-money energy bubble high-cost oil may prove to be a better investment than SunEdison’s high-cost renewables.

Bubble Collapse Turns InvestmentBubbles are devastating to an economy- Japan Housing Bubbles proveMARTIN FACKLER, Tokyo bureau chief, DEC. 25, 2005, “Take It From Japan: Bubbles Hurt”, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/business/yourmoney/take-it-from-japan-bubbles-hurt.html

So Mr. Nakashima, a Tokyo city government employee who was then 36, took out a loan for almost the entire $400,000 price of a cramped four-bedroom apartment. With property values rising at double-digit rates, he would easily earn back the loan and then some when he decided to sell. Or so he thought. Not long after he bought the apartment, Japan's property market collapsed. Today, the apartment is worth half what

he paid. He said he would like to move closer to the city but cannot: the sale price would not cover the $300,000 he still owes the bank. With housing prices in the United States looking wobbly after years of spectacular gains, it may be helpful to look at the

last major economy to have a real estate bubble pop: Japan. What Americans see may scare them, but they may also learn ways to ease the

pain. To be sure, there are several major differences between Japan in the 1980's and the United States today. One is the fact that property prices rose much faster and more steeply in Japan, partly because speculators used paper profits from a booming stock market to invest in property, insupportably leveraging the prices of both higher and higher. Another difference is that the biggest speculators in Japan's frenzy were deep-pocketed corporations, and they pumped up the

commercial property market at the same time that home prices were inflating. Still, for anyone wondering why even the possibility of a housing bubble in the United States preoccupies so many economists, it is worth looking at how the property crash in Japan helped to flatten that economy, which is second only to that of the United States, and to keep it on the canvas for more than a decade. And as American homeowners contemplate what might happen if their property values

fell --particularly if they fell hard -- there are lessons in the bitter experiences of their Japanese counterparts like Mr. Nakashima. JAPAN suffered one of the biggest property market collapses in modern history. At the market's peak in 1991, all the land in Japan, a country the size of California, was worth about $18 trillion, or almost four times the value of all property in the United States at the time. Then came the crashes in both stocks and property, after the Japanese central bank moved too aggressively to raise interest rates. Both markets spiraled downward as investors sold stocks to cover losses

in the land market, and vice versa, plunging prices into a 14-year trough, from which they are only now starting to recover. Now the land in Japan is worth less than half its 1991 peak, while property in the United States has more than tripled in value, to about $17 trillion. Homeowners were among the biggest victims of the Japanese real estate bubble. In Japan's six largest cities, residential prices dropped 64 percent from 1991 to last year. By most estimates, millions of homebuyers took substantial losses on the largest purchase of their lives. Their experiences contain many warnings. One is to shun the sort of temptations that appear in red-hot real estate markets, particularly the use of risky or exotic loans to borrow beyond one's means. Another is to avoid

property that may be hard to unload when the market cools. Economists say Japan also contains lessons for United States policy makers, like Ben S. Bernanke, who is expected to become chairman of the Federal Reserve at the end of January. At the top of the list is to learn from the failure of Japan's central bank to slow the rise of the country's real estate and stock bubbles, and then its failure to soften their collapse. Only recently did Japan finally find ways to revive the real estate market, by using

deregulation to spur new development. Most of all, economists say, Japan's experience teaches the need to be skeptical of that fundamental myth behind all asset bubbles: that prices will keep rising forever . Like their

United States counterparts today, too many Japanese homebuyers overextended their debt, buying property that cost more than they could rationally afford because they assumed that values would only rise. When prices dropped, many buyers were financially battered or even wiped out. "The biggest lesson from Japan is not to fall into the same state of denial that existed here," said Yukio Noguchi, a finance professor at Waseda University in

Tokyo who is perhaps the leading authority on the Japanese bubble. "During a bubble, people don't believe that prices will fall," he said. "This has been proven wrong so many times in the past. But there's something in human nature that makes us unable to learn from history."

When Bubbles burst they devastate the economy- current policies failNarayana Kocherlakota, (Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis), Friday, April 3, 2009, “Bursting Bubbles: Consequences and Cures“, https://www.imf.org/external/np/seminars/eng/2009/macro/pdf/nk.pdf

Immediately after the bubble bursts, the entrepreneurs with good projects have little capital available for investment. Macroeconomic aggregates fall dramatically. Entrepreneurs have to self-finance their projects, and begin to accumulate physical capital for this purpose . In any given date, much of the accumulated capital

in society is used inefficiently because the owners do not have useful projects. The economy transits to a new lower level of economic activity. Entrepreneurs and workers alike mourn the collapse of the bubble . Nonetheless, from an ex-ante perspective, a positive stochastic bubble expands the social pie. I discuss a range of possible interventions in the wake of the bubble

collapse. The bubble’s collapse creates two related but distinct problems. First, entrepreneurs have lost wealth. Second, entrepreneurs without good projects are accumulating wealth via a lowreturn savings vehicle. Successful interventions must cure both problems. I argue that several of the current policy moves (including bailing out

financial intermediaries) are poorly designed to meet these objectives.

At: Manufacturing

Manufacturing not key to EconManufacturing is not k2 the econ – 40% factories shut down since 2000 & accounts for no more than 12.4% of US GDPBurke 16 (John Burke; His involvement with the markets began in 1975, when he worked in the A.G Edwards booth on the Chicago

Board Options Exchange. After starting his own blog in 2008, he has written for a number of financial websites, Investopedia, “Why a Strong U.S. Manufacturing Industry Matters (UTX)”, http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/061516/why-strong-us-manufacturing-industry-matters-utx.asp)

Investors see the manufacturing industry as a category of businesses, many of which are involved in the creation of consumer goods, both durables, such as automobiles and refrigerators, as well as non-durable goods, such as food and cosmetics. Politicians usually focus on the manufacturing industry as a source of jobs. For example, politicians from across the spectrum have criticized the decision by United

Technologies Corp. (NYSE: UTX) to move its Carrier air-conditioning plant from Indiana to Mexico. During the first decade of the 21st century, 40% of America’s largest factories closed their doors . As of July 2015, manufacturing had been growing faster than the overall economy for the first time since the 1990s, with 900,000 new jobs added since February 2010. In April 2016, manufacturing increased 0.30% from the previous month. Between April 2015 and April 2016, manufacturing increased 0.40%. Importance of

Manufacturing to Overall Economy During the first and second quarters of 2009, manufacturing’s contribution to America’s gross domestic product (GDP) reached a post-financial crisis low of 11.9%. After reaching 12.4% in fourth quarter 2011 and second quarter 2012, manufacturing’s contribution to America’s GDP faded to 12.0% by fourth quarter 2015. In 2014, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported that while overly optimistic claims of a U.S. manufacturing renaissance appeared unwarranted , some manufacturing sectors had made impressive rebounds following the Great Recession. Sectors within the durable goods category withstood the

recession well or strongly rebounded. While manufacturing decreased as a share of America’s GDP, the GDP share of manufacturing exports has remained roughly constant.

Wages Turn

Competitiveness = Low WagesBad wages due to increased manufacturing sectorUN 12(United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2012, “TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT, 2012,” http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2012_en.pdf, Pg VIII) Accessed 7/7/16

In many East and South-East Asian economies, macroeconomic and industrial policies supportive of productive investment spurred rapid industrialization and buoyed economic growth in the context of increasing globalization. In these subregions, the shifts in income distribution over the past few decades have been strongly influenced by the creation of numerous employment opportunities in high-productivity activities, mainly in manufacturing. Thus labour was able to move from low-productivity jobs, often rural, towards higher productivity jobs. Wages in these occupations rose faster than average wages as the supply of better skilled workers fell short of demand. In addition, financial liberalization caused incomes from financial activities to rise faster than those from other activities. To the extent that income inequality hinders the development of domestic markets, a move to more equal income distribution would facilitate a productive

upgrading away from low-wage and low-skill specialization within international and/or regional production networks. In China, rising inequality has also taken the form of growing regional income disparities and a widening urban–rural income gap. This appears to be due to fiscal decentralization and trade and industrial policies, including investment in infrastructure, that have favoured coastal areas closer to international trade routes and large-scale capital-intensive production over small-scale production. At the same time, disparities among wage earners contributed to overall inequality, as the distribution of wages shifted in favour of skilled workers in the high-tech, financial and services sectors, and migrants from rural areas receive lower wages and social benefits than urban workers with formal residence.

Market competitiveness only leads to low wagesUN 12(United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2012, “TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT, 2012,” http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2012_en.pdf, Pg XI) Accessed 7/7/16

Insufficient growth of average real wages, coupled with inappropriate tax reforms, constitute the root causes of rising inequality in most countries, but they have not led to the promised outcomes of faster growth and lower unemployment.

This is because any policy approach that dismisses the important contribution of income distribution to demand growth and employment creation is destined to fail. A shift in income distribution to high income groups with a higher savings rate implies falling demand for the goods produced by companies. When productivity grows without a commensurate increase in wages, demand will eventually fall short of the production potential, thereby reducing capacity utilization and profits. This in turn will typically lead to cuts – and not to an increase – in investments. Real wage increases below productivity growth and greater job uncertainty

systematically destabilize domestic demand and serve to increase unemployment rather than reducing it. This suggests that relying on the simple market mechanism cannot prevent disequilibrium on the labour markets. Indeed, just ahead of the new jump in unemployment in developed countries − from an average of less than 6 per cent in 2007 to close to 9 per cent in 2011 − the share of wages in GDP had fallen to the lowest level in the post-war era. Due to their negative effect on consumer demand, neither lower average wages nor greater wage differentiation at the sector or firm level can be expected to lead to a substitution of labour for capital and reduce unemployment in the economy as a whole. In addition, greater wage differentiation among firms to overcome the current crisis in developed

countries is not a solution either, because it reduces the differentiation of profits among firms. Yet it is precisely the profit differentials which drive the investment and innovation dynamics of a market economy. If less efficient firms

cannot compensate for their lower profits by cutting wages, they must increase their productivity and innovate to survive. Equally, a possible initial improvement of international competitiveness that may result from translating productivity gains into lower export prices is not sustainable, because it adversely affects growth and employment generation in other countries. Moreover, when such a strategy is pursued simultaneously in many countries

whose producers compete internationally, it will tend to trigger a downward spiral in wages. Such practices may deprive a large proportion of their populations of a share in the productivity gains. The same holds for international tax competition, especially with regard to corporate taxation.

The drive for manufacturing competitiveness is unsustainable – it leads to wage depression

UNCTAD in 2012(United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, “Trade and Development Report: Policies for Inclusive and Balanced Growth,” http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2012_en.pdf)

The third area where more international cooperation is necessary relates to competition among countries. There is a widespread perception that accelerated globalization is compelling countries to compete in similar ways as

companies. In this view, countries’ wealth is considered to be dependent on each country’s ability to effectively adjust to the challenges that are created by open markets for goods and capital. Countries with superior capital and technology endowments would come under competitive pressure from trading partners with a relatively large supply of labour and weak labour market institutions, and vice versa. In particular, the emergence of a huge pool of idle labour in developing countries like China and India would fundamentally change the capital-labour ratio for the entire world, and would bring about equilibrium of low and high wages

somewhere in the middle. As discussed earlier, declining wage shares are not a “natural” by-product of globalization, and the model describing competition among companies does not apply to countries, particularly not to countries with independent currencies. In a dynamic market economy,

companies compete through differentiation of productivity and profits. They have to accept the price of labour, which is determined on the markets for different qualities of labour in the same way as the price of capital. Consequently, the success or failure of a company is determined by the specific value it adds to the goods and services traded on international markets. Companies that are able to generate higher productivity through innovation and new products produced at lower unit labour costs than their competitors can offer their goods at lower prices or make higher profits

at given prices. However, this mechanism does not apply at the country level. Regardless of whether wages are centrally negotiated for the economy as a whole or whether they are the outcome of a flexible labour market with a high degree of labour mobility, they will tend to be more or less equal for similar occupations. Thus countries, unlike companies, have to be considered as wage setters, not wage takers. Consequently, when productivity advantages are reflected in higher nominal and real wages, stronger growth of the average productivity of the entire economy does not increase the competitiveness of all companies against the rest of the world. However, even if productivity gains, instead of being translated into higher real wages, were used to reduce prices, this would not necessarily improve the country’s competitiveness or

the competitiveness of all its enterprises. The prices in a country that consistently uses wage-dumping policies to improve its competitiveness would not necessarily be lower than in the rest of the world when expressed in the currencies of its trading partners. In a world of national currencies and national monetary policies,

a country supplying its goods at much lower prices would gain market shares and accumulate huge trade and current-account surpluses. However, political pressure to adjust wages and prices measured in international currency would mount, and sooner or later the country would be obliged to undertake such an adjustment through a revaluation of its currency. The principle to be applied

is straightforward: given the increasingly open borders for trade and capital flows, the international trade and financial systems must be designed in such a way that in the global division of labour companies in different countries are not in danger of permanently losing out against those in the rest of the world. If nominal wage increases in one country consistently exceed the overall gain in

productivity by a wider margin than in its trading partners, that country risks getting into an unsustainable position. This is because most of its companies either have to ask for higher prices and accept a permanent loss of market shares, or accept lower profits to avoid the loss of market shares. However, with open markets, the gap in price competitiveness compared with the rest of the world has to be closed one way or another.

Low Wages = Inequality

Economic globalization and marketization leads to an unbalanced work field and inequality, this leads to conflictUN 12(United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 2012, “TRADE AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT, 2012,” http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/tdr2012_en.pdf, Pg 32) Accessed 7/7/16 BE

One area in which the gap between formal and real equality seems particularly strong is in market operations. On the one hand, buyers and sellers in different markets are formally equal: they are free to accept or refuse a transaction at a given price. Consequently, a market transaction theoretically takes place only if it is beneficial to both parties. In addition, market institutions

assure justice through the equivalence of exchanges (Habermas, 1973). On the other hand, inequality of resources is more clearly manifested in market transactions than anywhere else, owing to asymmetries in the purchasing power of different participants. From a formal point of view, markets are the sphere of personal and legal equality whereby all participants are equally free to buy and sell to their mutual benefit. But in reality, owing to disparities in wealth and incomes, market operations reflect the lack of real (or effective) equality in starting positions. There is nothing in the pure market mechanism that tends to rebalance an initially unequal distribution of assets and resources. Agents with more resources or greater access to credit (the

two being frequently related) can invest, innovate and expand production on a larger scale than others. Thus the process of economic development is normally unbalanced, with some firms and sectors gaining market shares at the expense of others, and new products and production processes replacing older ones in a process of “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 1942/2003). In this process, the accumulation of capital and knowledge (including that acquired through learning by doing) tends to concentrate wealth and economic power even further. Although the principle of formal equality is the basis for social and economic interaction in most modern societies, the social consensus on how much inequality of market outcomes is acceptable, differs considerably among societies. But irrespective of cross-country differences in the level of effective inequality, the increase in inequality over time has given rise to growing

concerns in many countries about its social and economic repercussions. Accelerated economic globalization and technological progress over the past 30 years is often seen as a major factor responsible for a widening of the income gap between wage earners and earners of capital incomes, as well as between different groups within these aggregates. It is important to bear in mind, however, that trade, financial and technological factors always operate within a framework of social and economic institutions, regulations and policies. In this Trade and Development Report (TDR), it is argued that although inequality has risen in most regions since the 1980s, when globalization began to accelerate and became increasingly

“finance-led”, there is nothing “natural” about this development that requires society to allow or accept it. Nor does an increase in inequality improve the efficiency of market outcomes in a rapidly changing world. Even worse, a significant rise in inequality can generate economic conflicts that lead to social tensions and, in the extreme, political violence , especially when overall income growth is slow or absent. This is why economists such as Tinbergen (1956/1964) included among the objectives of economic policy the need for a better distribution of real income and expenditure among social groups and countries.

Statistics show that weaker economies tend to have lower wagesQuak, November 26, 2014[Evert-jan Quak, freelance knowledge broker for The Broker on the themes ‘Inclusive Economy’ and ‘Food Security’. Over his career, he has specialized in international economics, corporate social responsibility and trade issues, Low wages and job insecurity as a destructive global

standard, The Broker, http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/Articles/Low-wages-and-job-insecurity-as-a-destructive-global-standard]

Low wages can also be an element of precarious work. In 2009, almost a quarter of employees in the United States were in low-wage work, earning less than two-thirds of the median income. 19 As figure 4 shows, some other Western countries have similarly high percentages. A quarter of all workers worldwide earn US$2 a day or less. According to the ILO, the number of working poor – those who have paying jobs but who still cannot make ends meet – in developing countries is decreasing, 20 but more than 30% of the workforce still live in poor households and another 25% live in households just above the international

poverty line of US$1.25 a day. 20 Another trend can be seen in Europe and the United States, where working poverty is increasing, although the figures in industrialized countries remain well below the global average. According to Eurostat figures for 2010, 8.2% of workers in the Eurozone earned less than the region’s average poverty rate of €10,240 euros a year for a single adult worker, up from 7.3% in 2006. These figures are nearly double in Spain and Greece. In addition, according to Alderman, the US Labour Department estimated that 7% of single adult workers in the United States were living below the poverty threshold of $10,830 (or approximately €7,873) in 2009, up from 5.1% in 2006. 22 Research also shows that ‘non-standard’ (e.g. temporary and part-time) jobs pay less than permanent jobs, even when controlled for

different sectors, the seniority of the wage earner or skill intensity. Both temporary and part-time workers in the service and industrial sectors are paid less than workers with a permanent contract in the same sectors, showing that working without a permanent contract reduces wages and widens the wage gap, at least in advanced and transition economies. 23 The only exception was Ireland where until the start of the economic crisis in 2008, the

two types of work paid equally in both sectors. The extreme cases, however, are Spain, Portugal, Greece and Germany, where wages for flexible and part-time work are about 25% per cent lower than standard work in the industrial sector. In the service sector, the wage gap is even higher, with flexible and part-time workers receiving 40% less than full-time workers in the years prior to 2008. And although it is certainly true that having an insecure, temporary contract can help workers to obtain a permanent contract, there is also evidence that such upward mobility is far from common. It depends on the nature of the contract: well-defined fixed-term contracts offer more opportunities for job mobility and an increase in wages than indefinite contracts. 24 Subcontracting also forces many into insecure and low-paid jobs, through a shift in power relations. This varies, however, between skill levels and sectors.

Weak wages bad for economic growth- encourages a wage gap Ruetschlin, April 22, 2014[Catherine Ruetschlin, Catherine Ruetschlin brings an original, astute voice to economic issues, labor policy, and upward mobility, FAST FOOD FAILURE: HOW CEO-TO-WORKER PAY DISPARITY UNDERMINES THE INDUSTRY AND THE OVERALL ECONOMY, Demos, http://www.demos.org/publication/fast-food-failure-how-ceo-worker-pay-disparity-undermines-industry-and-overall-economy]

The link between income inequality and economic instability has drawn renewed attention from economists, policy makers, global financial institutions, media, and investors. From Davos to Wall Street to Main Street, there is a growing consensus that inequality slows economic recovery and dampens consumer demand. Yet the gap between the highest and lowest earners in the US economy continues to grow, with consequences for the economy and firm performance. New analysis of the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio across industries shows that Accommodation and Food Services is the most unequal sector in the economy, and that this extreme pay disparity is primarily driven by one of the sector’s component industries: fast food. The fast food industry is also one of the highest growth employers in the nation. Over the past year, frustrated front-line fast food workers, striking for higher pay and union representation, have increased public scrutiny of low wages and poor conditions. Workers’ nationwide protests, among other factors, spurred industry-leader McDonald’s to identify several consequences of

inequality as a threat to its long-term performance. Fast food income inequality has serious repercussions for the entire

industry—not just McDonald’s—and across the economy as a whole. Fast food companies and other firms will need to address their imbalanced pay practices in order to mitigate the damaging effects of income inequality.

Less wages prevent economic growthNational Employment Law Project, April 2012[Slower Wage Growth, Declining Real Wages Undermine Recovery, National Employment Law Project, http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/NELP.DecliningWageGrowth.pdf]

Workers’ wages suffered during the Great Recession, and while nominal average hourly wages are increasing slowly, their growth rate is far

behind the pace of pre-recession growth. At the same time, when adjusted for inflation, the real value of wages has fallen, even

over the course of the last year – well into the third year of the official recovery from the Great Recession. 1 These sobering trends underscore what many working families already know: employment growth has been – and is expected to continue to be – skewed towards lower-income jobs, and wages for people trying to enter the workforce or become reemployed after job loss are declining. Moreover, increasing shares of employed workers are experiencing no wage growth, and those working in minimum wage jobs are stuck with historically low spending power. Together, these factors amplify diverging income trends, characterized by the

accumulation of income gains for top earners and corporations flush with cash, while the overwhelming majority of workers are falling further

behind, undermining a sustained robust economic recovery.

Overinvestment in bond markets risks a bubble collapse that undermines the economyVivianne Rodrigues and Stephen Foley, Financial Times in 2013, Concerns over high demand for EM bonds, https://next.ft.com/content/eae8e82a-9617-11e2-b8dd-00144feabdc0

The enthusiasm with which global managers are pushing emerging market debt as an alternative to lower-yielding

fixed income investments in the developed world is raising eyebrows among some specialists. There are fears that some developing countries may not be able to absorb a huge influx of money without suffering an investment bubble with potentially dire consequences. But these concerns are not stopping fund managers and others working hard to open a new frontier in the developing world. At a recent strategy roundtable, BlackRock said US institutional investors, such as pension funds, are routinely being told they should double their exposure to emerging market debt to 8 per cent from a current average of 4 per cent of their portfolios. BlackRock goes even further, recommending a 10 per cent allocation. “For investors looking to get incremental yield, it’s more important than ever to cast a wider net,” Russ Koesterich, BlackRock’s chief investment strategist, said at a presentation in New

York last week. Rock-bottom interest rates in the US and Europe have lured many investors to higher-yielding emerging market bonds in the past couple of years. Strong economic growth in the region, in contrast to the struggling developed economies, has helped persuade pension funds that the risks historically associated with emerging markets have diminished. But if they all follow BlackRock’s advice to put more money to work, an extra $3tn may be funnelled into emerging market bonds in coming years, or $485bn for each percentage point increase in portfolio exposure, according to BlackRock’s own calculations. That is about three times the total amount of bonds sold by emerging markets corporations and sovereigns in 2012, or $1.1tn, according to Dealogic figures. And that was a record year for the region. It is worth noting that the current total of outstanding sovereign and corporate debt from emerging market countries is only $4.9tn, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “I’m frequently getting calls from our hedge fund clients asking me to help them find more and more assets to buy in emerging markets. But it’s not getting easier to find good options. Actually, it’s getting tougher,” says Alberto Bernal, head of research and strategy at Bulltick Capital Markets, which specialises in Latin American investments.

Domestic bond markets have deepened considerably in places such as Mexico, Brazil, Turkey and South Africa, but their size

relative to more mature markets is still small. As a result, many traders and bond managers are reluctant to part with the securities when they do get their hands on them. Prices have been squeezed higher . The demand is even higher for bonds traded internationally. Since 2010, the governments of Mongolia, Belarus, Zambia, Georgia, Bolivia, Tanzania, Paraguay, Angola, Nigeria, Albania, Montenegro, Jordan and most recently Honduras have all been able to tap global investors for bond issues for the first

time. Even Papua New Guinea and Rwanda are planning to sell inaugural international bonds soon. “You know there’s something wrong when you see a very large pool of investors aggressively trying to buy bonds by companies with very weak balance sheets, or being sold by a country such as Bolivia, with yields below 5 per cent,” Mr Bernal says. Analysts also caution that emerging market debt is not likely to be a one-way bet, since idiosyncratic local economic conditions,

government actions and other risks can all make rates and prices volatile. For example, while on a 12-month basis returns on emerging markets bonds still stand above 10 per cent, year to-date performance is lagging behind, in part because of a recent rise in US Treasury yields, according to the JPMorgan EMBI Global Diversified Index. “Mismatched expectations for supply and demand in emerging markets is not the only challenge investors may face this year. There may also be a mismatch in people’s expectations for returns on these bonds,” says Marcelo Assalin, head of emerging market sovereign debt at ING US Investment Management. The other question is whether emerging market governments and companies really need all the extra money that could come their way. One person who believes so is Doug Peterson, chief executive of rating agency Standard & Poor’s, who has been travelling in the developing world to advise on the expansion of local debt markets. “Emerging market countries are developing credit cultures in order to finance schools, roads, energy and hospitals where our ratings facilitate access to more investors,” he said on a recent conference call with investors in S&P’s parent company, McGraw-Hill. But

Alan Ruskin, a macro strategist at Deutsche Bank, says warning signs are flashing already in Hong Kong, South Korea, Brazil, China, Thailand, Malaysia and Hungary. In Hong Kong and Brazil credit growth does not seem to have translated into strong GDP growth,

suggesting the money is being put to unproductive uses. “You have got to be alert. A credit boom can be one side of asset inflation and, in its worst form, an asset bubble,” Mr Ruskin says. “Credit booms are prone to end in a credit bust.”