1AC
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Hemp Advantage
Contention one is industrial hemp:
Commercial hemp is on hold—momentum for legal reform is in place, but new
federal action is key to industry development
Jeff Siegel 6/11, financial consultant, author, managing editor of Energy and Capital and
contributing analyst for the Energy Investor, an independent investment research service that
focuses primarily on stocks in the oil and gas, modern energy, and infrastructure markets
6/11/14, This is Better Than Drug Money!, Energy & Capital,
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/investing-in-hemp/4455
But while the ban obliterated hemp cultivation except for a few special cases requiring federal permits, Americans
were allowed to import hemp products, oil, and seeds. In 2011, the U.S. imported some $11.5 million worth of hemp products, oil,
and seeds, much of which was further processed into cooking oils, animal feeds, even granola bars.¶ A new farm bill enacted
earlier this year would open up the field once again. “This is big!” exclaimed Eric Steenstra, president of
advocacy group Vote Hemp. “We've been pushing for this a long time.”¶ Advocates estimate hemp could develop into
a $100 million a year industry, which could grow into a $10 billion a year market if the loosening of hemp cultivation laws is a
stepping-stone to the legalization of marijuana nationwide.¶ Steenstra anticipates precisely that. “This is part of an overall
look at cannabis policy, no doubt,” he affirms.¶ Still, the heavy hand of the federal government
will not move easily .¶ As the Associated Press reported last week, federal authorities ordered nearly 300
pounds of hemp seeds from Italy detained by U.S. customs officials in Louisville. In order to get the seeds
released, Kentucky State agriculture authorities had to take their case to court, suing the Justice Department, the Drug Enforcement
Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and even Attorney General Eric Holder.¶ Also worth noting is that while
fifteen states have availed themselves of the new farm bill by removing hemp production
barriers, in only two states — Colorado and Kentucky — have farmers taken to cultivating it.¶ The hemp
industry is in for a period of slow growth as it awaits other federal agencies to loosen
their restriction s on seed imports.¶ That being said, I'm...¶ Bullish on the Return of Hemp¶ As an industrial crop, it's
quite impressive.One acre of hemp can produce four times more paper than one acre of trees.Hemp
fiber is ten times stronger than cotton, can be used to make clothing, and doesn't require nearly
as much in the way of pesticides as cotton.Hemp can serve as a substitute for wood in building
materials. Not only is it stronger than wood, but it's cheaper to produce.Hemp produces more
biomass than any other plant that can be grown in the U.S.Hemp can be grown anywhere in the
United States, requires only moderate water, and is frost tolerant.When we think about the
legalization of marijuana, we often think about the massive profit potential. And rightly so. With
the legalization of marijuana will come an enormous opportunity for savvy investors and
entrepreneurs.Yet when you step back and look at the big picture, you'll find that when it comes
to cannabis, the real money's going to be in industrial hemp.¶ Unfortunately, with special interests
controlling the federal government, it's going to take some time before hemp comes back strong
enough to be a safe investment. That being said, the folks in Kentucky and Colorado who are actively moving
forward with the cultivation of hemp are embarking on a journey that could ultimately prove to
be insanely lucrative. And I wish them well.
Legalization is key to the regulatory framework—guides industry development and
resolves conflicting demands
Doug Fine 14, investigative journalist, bestselling author, reported from five continents for The
Washington Post, Wired, Salon, The New York Times, Outside, National Public Radio, and U.S.
News & World Report. His work from Burma was read into the Congressional Record and he
won more than a dozen Alaska Press Club awards for his radio reporting from the Last Frontier ,
LA Times, 2014, Teach Your Regulators Well, Hemp Bound: Dispatches from the Front Lines of
the Next Agricultural Revolution, pg 93-95
For hemp to once again take off in the United States, history tells us that two more elements have to
fall into place.¶ First, the industry pioneers must work with regulators to craft domestic
standards . l learned this from the saga of American biodeisel pioneers Kelly antl Bob King. They were in
biofuels so early, their Pacific Biodiesel website is biodeisel.com.¶ According to Business World Magazine, Pacific Biodeisel shared
its pro-launch study results with regulators and even competitors because the world frankly didn't know how
to make an industry of waste restaurant oil. Today their oil fuels a good deal of Hawaii, and they consult the world over.
You can fill up at gas pumps on two Aloha State islands, and municipalities use the fuel for backup generators.¶ Similarly, the
initial Canadian hemp players, several of whom are still in the industry, worked with regulators on
everything from field-testing hemp varieties to THC analysis, right from the beginning. As we've
discussed, this actually started several years before Canada's official 1993 reboot. ¶ As Hermann put it, "Even if President
Obama and Congress legalize hemp tomorrow, there's still a lot of work ahead for the U.S.
market and anyone who wants to be a player"¶ The initial U.S. state hemp legislation generally nods toward the¶
Canadian model; Colorado, in addition to unlimited commercial¶ cultivation for registered farmers who grow hemp with that inert
0.3¶ percent THC limit, is making a vocal statement of top-level support¶ by allowing those ten-acre development test plots wherein
THC levels won‘t be tested until a cultivar is ready for the commercial market. Similarly, Hawaii's step one looks to be a hundredacre state-sponsored research project. Pacific Biodeisel's Kelly and Bob King are big supporters of that project, because, in the end,
the french fries that today drive their business are finite. “Hawaii is close to legislation allowing for a test hemp plot that we hope will
remediate a few centuries of sugarcane monoculture soil and provide energy feedstock," Kelly King told me.¶ Now ,
patiently
developing a regulatory framework and official cultivars would seem to be
essential . But there is another fairly loud opinion out there, and I'd be remiss not to mention it. It goes like this; The original
American hemp farmers planted what they had on hand in their wagons after crossing wild rivers and unnamed mountain passes,
And they managed, before interstates, let alone NAFTA to build a world-lending industry.¶ In other words, some hemp
activists make the case for starting now with that ditch weed (or, if you prefer, the "heirloom cultivars") easily
found out by the railroad tracks in the heartland. This Let Darwin choose what we want plant philosophy is running up
against the We live in a lab coat-and-hairnet era because of uniformity and product safety demands line of
thinking. ¶ Hermann's view on this comes with too much in-the-field experience to ignore, and it's
basically this: Once she's expanded beyondselling carrots at the farmer's market, any farmer has to be savvy about her choice of
variety.¶ “Every Walmart already carries hemp oil, Nature's Path hemp cereal, and hemp twine,” she said. "A mature industry
has to be ready for the professionalism that level of reach demands.”¶ She’s talking about
standards, testing processes, and certification paperwork. Humanity's oldest plant is about to
grow up. “We have food and health inspectors certifying our industry in Canada." she reminded me. Burritos in Front of the
Phish show this is not. Still, this first to-do item is standard business stuff. It can be easily checked off.
And it solves perception-- ambiguous standards in the CSA result in investor
confusion that deters the hemp industry
Melinda Fulmer 2, award-winning financial writer and media strategist, Vice President of
Public Relations for City National Bank, former Times Staff Writer, 1/16/02, Hemp Imports Run
Afoul of DEA Rule, LA Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jan/16/business/fi-hemp16
Kenex contends the rule is discriminatory to Canadian producers, who provide the bulk of hemp products to the
U.S. because Americans are banned from growing the plant.¶ "Our company has invested a significant amount
of money in Canada and the U.S. to develop these markets for the past three years, and it has been one stumbling
block after another ," said Jean Laprise, Kenex president. "They're squashing an emerging industry."¶
The Kenex case adds more heat to a debate over the provision of NAFTA that allows private investors to sue governments for taking
actions that restrict trade. Since NAFTA was enacted, 15 such cases have been filed.¶ Critics argue the provision gives companies too
much power and undermines the ability of governments to protect their citizens.¶ But Laprise says it's necessary to protect
companies' rights when the law is discriminatory.¶ DEA officials refuse to comment on the issue because of the pending litigation.
But DEA Administrator Asa Hutchinson put forward the agency's position recently when he said that
"many
Americans do not know that hemp and marijuana are both parts of the same plant and
that hemp cannot be produced without producing marijuana."¶ The DEA says consumers have until Feb. 6 to
dispose of these items or be subject to penalty.¶ Although hemp and marijuana come from the plant species, cannabis, the variety
grown for industrial hemp contains much lower amounts of THC, a point the DEA acknowledges. The burning issue for the
DEA is: When can cannabis legally be sold as hemp, and when is it still a drug? Hemp oil and seeds
can't make people high, but they do contain minuscule amounts of THC, much as poppy seeds contain trace
amounts of opium.¶ "The leaves and flowers on industrial hemp, when you smoke them, it gives you a headache," said John Roulac,
president of Nutiva in Sebastopol, Calif., which makes snack bars and chips out of hemp. "If you smoke more, you just get a bigger
headache."¶
If there weren't a cloud hanging over the industry from this regulation,
manufacturers say, it would grow exponentially over the next several years
as demand
confusion over the new rule , and high-profile seizures of
hemp-containing products such as birdseed, should keep many companies from using the controversial
ingredient, Roulac said.¶ Many, however, say they plan to continue to sell their products.¶ Food companies that use
hemp ingredients hope that the industry and government can come up with guidelines that will
allow the industry to grow as it was expected to before the rule was published.¶ Without them, they say, the DEA's
ambiguous standards will make that difficult.
for functional foods grows.¶ However,
The US is looking to revolutionize the biofuels industry—only legalization solves
consideration of hemp to displaces corn—solves warming
Nicole M. Keller 13, J.D. Drake University, Associate Attorney at Goodman Law, 2013, THE
LEGALIZATION OF INDUSTRIAL HEMP AND WHAT IT COULD MEAN FOR INDIANA'S
BIOFUEL INDUSTRY, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, LexisNexis Academic
Among the products derivable from the industrial hemp plant, and the product most relevant to this Note, is
hemp as a biofuel. In a time of high gas prices, political instability, and increasing concerns over
the environmental effects of fossil fuel consumption, it is natural to seek an alternative. Globally,
the use of biofuels as an alternative to petroleum products is gaining momentum. n48 The United States alone
consumed approximately 11.7 million gallons of ethanol in 2011 n49 and over 549 [*560] million gallons of biodiesel in the first 9
months of 2011. n50 In Canada, hemp biofuel research is underway to produce cellulosic ethanol. n51
Cellulosic ethanol is ethanol produced from the non-food parts of feedstock and is a more efficient source of energy. n52
Currently, the majority of feedstock for biofuels comes from corn , soybeans, or
wheat. n53 However, in addition to being an inefficient source of fuel, the diversion of these
commodities for fuel production is at the expense of the world food supply. n54 The United States
has recognized the issue and has "announced a $ 510 million initiative meant to spur
development of a new US bio-fuel industry that utilizes non-food crops[.]" n55 The initiative is meant to
examine sources such as algae or wood chips; n56 however, there is a more efficient source: industrial hemp.
"When compared to other plant species of active interest in biofuel production, Hemp derives
100% more cellulose than species under active investigation." n57 Furthermore, "[ h]emp is Earth's number
one biomass resource ; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in four months." n58
Hemp biomass fuel products require a minimal amount of specialization and processing and "[t]he
hydrocarbons in hemp can be processed into a wide range of biomass energy sources, from fuel pellets to liquid fuels and gas." n59
These facts alone make industrial hemp the ideal source for both ethanol and biodiesel
production. Yet, industrial hemp, in addition to its fibrous plant matter, also produces seeds wherein lies
a rich source of hemp [*561] oil, and this oil can also be used for fuel. n60 Industrial hemp's fuel capabilities and
desirability is further enhanced by the fact that "[i]ndustrial hemp can be grown in most climates and on
marginal soils. It requires little or no herbicide and no pesticide[.]" n61 The hemp plant is also known
to improve soil conditions for rotational crops, n62 and it is a clean-burning fuel, contributing no greenhouse
gases. n63 Yet, industrial hemp is not seriously considered as a feedstock input, n64 largely because
industrial hemp is illegal to grow in the United States. ¶ III. Industrial Hemp History in the United States¶
Industrial hemp was not always illegal in the United States. n65 In fact, before 1937 it was grown and
manufactured into many products. n66 The public sentiment surrounding the plant was social acceptance of a staple in the
American household. n67 It was used most often for clothing, paper, rope, and lamp oil. n68 Respected presidents were proponents
of industrial hemp: "George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both grew hemp. Ben Franklin owned a mill that made hemp paper.
Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on hemp paper[,]" n69 and "Abraham Lincoln use[d] hemp-seed oil to fuel his
household lamps." n70 But in 1937, right when mechanical processes that would turn hemp into a truly industrialized commodity
were about to explode on the American scene, n71 Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. n72 The Act was aimed at
eliminating the use of marijuana as a drug but had the effect of making all industrial hemp varieties illegal as well. n73¶ [*562] ¶ The
Act placed a $ 1 tax on anyone who "imports, manufactures, produces, compounds, sells, deals in, dispenses, prescribes, administers,
or gives away marihuana." n74 Although legislative history shows that industrial hemp was not an intended target of the law, and
"Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) (the predecessor to the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA)), told the Senate Committee that those in the domestic industrial hemp industry 'are not only amply
protected under this act, but they can go ahead and raise hemp just as they have always done it[,]'" n75 the wording of the law
effectively prohibited industrial hemp cultivation. n76 Specifically, §1(b) of the Act says,¶ The term "marihuana" means all parts of
the plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not; the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every
compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds, or resin- but shall not include the mature
stalks of such plant, fiber produced from such stalks, oil or cake made from the seeds of such plant, any other compound,
manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such mature stalks (except the resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil, or cake,
or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination. n77¶ It is clear that Congress tried to exclude industrial hemp
from the legislation (i.e. "but shall not include the mature stalks of such plant" n78 ), but for practical purposes there is no way for a
farmer to produce the "mature stalks of such plant" without growing "the seeds thereof." n79 After the passage of the Act,
hemp farmers were confused about the impact the Act would have on their operations. n80
Letters were sent to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics asking what should be done about the hemp
that had been harvested but not yet sold. n81 People wanted to know if even having it was a
violation of the new law. n82 The letters also urged the Bureau to conduct [*563] research on
the benefits of the hemp plant. n83 Officials, unsure about the exact properties of hemp, gave conflicting answers and
enforced the new law inconsistently. n84 Moreover, there was never any formal research to determine if hemp was a viable crop for
big industry and if it could be produced without the psychoactive effect found in marijuana. n85 Thus, for some time, the
hemp industry mostly died in America. n86¶ Several years later in 1942, at the request of the Department of
Agriculture, US farmers were enlisted to grow hemp in an effort to support the war. n87¶ Despite the existence of the Marihuana Tax
Act of 1937, the result of the "Hemp for Victory" Campaign was that "thousands of farmers grew hundreds of thousands of acres of
hemp for wartime needs." However, by the end of WW II, the government's allowance of industrial hemp cultivation also ended and
by 1957, "prohibitionists had reasserted a total ban on hemp production." n88¶ Time passed, and American culture
changed and evolved throughout the 1960's when drug use escalated amidst the country's freedom movement. n89 As a
result of the increased use of recreational drugs, in 1970 Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act, which lays out definitions,
offenses, and charges related to narcotic drugs in the United States. n90 In it, Cannabis sativa is defined just as it was in the
Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, lumping industrial hemp into the category of Schedule I: Hallucinogenic Substances, n91 despite hemp
not having high enough THC levels to have any narcotic effect. n92¶ Over the past ten years, many states have
realized the economic and environmental potential of industrial hemp and have passed
legislation legalizing its cultivation. n93 However, because of its narcotic classification a [*564] DEA permit is also
required. n94 Unfortunately, the DEA has refused to grant any permits, n95 which makes production
still illegal at the federal level and effectively voids any efforts the states have taken to legalize industrial
hemp.¶ On February 14, 2013, "[Senator] Rand Paul and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, both of Kentucky,
joined Oregon Democratic [Senators] Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden in introducing legislation to allow American
farmers to cultivate and profit from industrial hemp." n96 The legislation, which is a companion bill to H.R. 525,
also known as the "Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2013" would explicitly exclude industrial hemp from the definition of marijuana
in the Controlled Substances Act, thus giving regulation of the crop to the States. n97 Currently the bill is in the first stage of the
legislative process. n98 The existence of this bill demonstrates the importance and potential of the industrial
hemp industry. It illustrates the people's desire to move away from the draconian enforcement of
outdated laws that fail to change and adapt with the demands of society.
Increasing production now is key—failure locks in new fuel standards that destroy
cellulosic biofuels
Nicholas Zeman 14, Energy and Transportation Correspondant for Engineering News Record,
former Associate Editor for BBI International—a biofuels magazine, May/June 2014 Issue, The
Final Push, Biofuels International Journal, http://dyadic.com/wpcontent/uploads/2014/05/The-Final-Push.pdf
If three cellulosic ethanol plants can start up and turn profits this year it will change not only the
entire ethanol market, but the future of world consumption. Several companies are closer than ever,
construction projects are booming and the time is now. But the US petroleum industry does not want to see
ethanol’s market share grow. ¶ With three global construction and engineering companies in the throes of the final stages
of construction for different cellulosic ethanol plants in the US Midwest, the situation suggests fierce angling to have the next
commercial facility up and running.¶ DuPont Chemical, Abengoa Bioenergy and Poet-DSM are all driving hard to bring the final
stages of their facilities home. Becoming the next 'first of its kind' plant on a new technological scene could mean gaining the lion's
share of government backing and investor confidence.¶ The cellulosic industry has not been able to achieve the
production targets that the Envirorvnental Protection Agency (EPA) has set for it, with Mississippi-
headquartered next
generation renewable fuels company Kior - a company once thought to be a
major player in cellulosic ethanol - recently announcing it may have to seek bankruptcy.¶ This
'lack of performance' gave the American Petroleum Institute (API), the largest trade
association for the oil and gas industry, a chance to attack the volume requirements for
cellulosic ethanol in the Renewable Fuel Standard. API filed suit against the EPA in a US Court of Appeals over
the agency’s 2013 RFS, saying the rules mandate significantly more cellulosic ethanol than currently
available in the marketplace. ¶ With the production tax credit for cellulosic biofuels expired since the end of 2013, the
Energy Information Administration predicts that production of cellulosic biofuels will remain below statuary targets through 2040.
EPA requirements for cellulosic renewables were originally set at 1.75 billion gallons. The agency has instead proposed to set only 17
million gallons. The RFS requires oil companies to include a specified volume of biofuels in its
reservoir - this drives the market.
¶ What bothers cellulosic ethanol companies about the proposed RFS reduction
is that it would likely cut into corn ethanol demand and reduce profits. This situation has had a dual effect on the ethanol market.
Ethanol prices are high due to supply concerns and rail congestion, but investment in clean energy companies has
been put in danger over the uncertainty of the regulatory environment. The ethanol industry
needs investment to continue to innovate, especially to open up its feedstock sources. This Is the
primary issue for the ethanol market in 2014.
Mitigation stabilizes CO2—no other energy policies solve the necessary fossil fuel
decreases and avoids catastrophic warming
John Valentine 11, Professor of Marine Science, University of South Alabama, 4/19/11, Food
vs. fuel: the use of land for lignocellulosic ‘next¶ generation’ energy crops that minimize
competition with¶ primary food production,
ftp://ftp.unccd.int/disk1/Library/Full%20Text%202011-2012%202013%20Full%20Text%20Publications/gcbb1111.pdf
Energy as a source of heating, lighting, cooking fuel and motive power is essential for modern civilizations. This review considers the
scope and merit in using land for growing crops that can be used as bioenergy. The need for bioenergy is fuelled by the
vision of four major gains for society.¶ A
reduction in C emissions from the substitution of fossil fuels with
appropriate energy crops-- The use of fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) for energy (including
transportation) represents an esti-mated 61% of world greenhouse gas emissions (Her-zog, 2009)
that are acknowledged to be responsible to climate change that is often referred to as the green-house effect or
global warming. The replacement of fossil by renewable biomass is one of several options that can contribute
to stabilizing atmospheric CO2 to a trajectory that avoids a doubling of the preindustrial
concentration (Pacala & Socobw, 2004). Other forms of renewable energy, such as wind, tidal, wave and
photovoltaic can also contribute but are intermittent and require energy storage or the use of other fuel technologies as backup. Only bioenergy can deliver energy in the form of heat, liquid transport fuels, biore-fining
leading to plant-based equivalents of important petrochemicals and the sequestration of soil
carbon that open up the possibilities of negative carbon balances. Harper et al. (2010) have highlighted
strategies for the capture and storage of carbon in soils, plants and products opening up the possibility of achieving a 'sub-zero
carbon Britain' that 'actively deans up the atmosphere'. In the EU, member states must meet binding, national targets for renewable
energy. Only those biofuels with high greenhouse gas savings demonstrated by rigorous life cycle assessment (LCA) count towards
national tar-gets. Biofuels must deliver current greenhouse gas savings of at least 35% compared thillith fossil fuels, rising to 50% in
2017 and to 60%, for biofuels from new plants, in 2018 (Europa, 2010). Similar legislation has been or is being enacted elsewhere.
The indirect effects of bioenergy production also need to be considered. These can arise from the conversion of important carbon
sinks, such as forests and grasslands. ¶ A significant contribution to energy gentrify by reductions in fossil
fuel dependence Biomass can be used to replace fossil fuels, particularly coal, through thermal
technologies, such as combustion to produce heat and/or power, gasification to produce syngas
or pyrolysis to produce gas, liquid (including a heavy oil) and solid products with a diverse range
of potential applications. Alternatively wet biomass, typi-cally from waste products, can be subjected to anaerobic digestion
to produce methane and possibly hydrogen. From the viewpoint of energy security, we wish to largely confine ourselves in this
section to a third main use of bioenergy, namely to produce biofuels for trans-portation in place of finite reserves of fossil liquid
fuels. Liquid transport fuels can be either first generation veg-etable oils, transesterified biodiesel or ethanol from fer molted starch
and sugar feedstocks, or second generation ligno-cellulose ethanol and biorefined oils or butanol from plant-based feedstocks.
Continued fossil fuel use causes catastrophic warming—biofuels are key to solve
Cecile Bessou 09, Cirad research center at the Agricultural Research for Development, has a
Ph.D. in Agronomy and Environmental Sciences and a MSc. in Sustainable Resource
Management, “Biofuels, greenhouse gases and climate change. A review”, September 23, 2009,
http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/93/05/59/PDF/hal-00930559.pdf)
Current global energy supplies are dominated by fossil fuels (81% in 2005), with much smaller
contributions from nuclear power (6.3%) and hydropower (2.2%). Bioenergy provides about 10% of the total
energy supplies, making it by far the most important renewable energy source used; solar, wind and
other renewable energy sources accounting for the last 0.5% (IEA, 2007a). On average, in the industrialised countries biomass
contributes less than 10% to the total energy supplies, but in developing countries the proportion is as high as 20–30%. In a number
of countries biomass supplies 50−90% of the total energy demand. A considerable part of this biomass use is, however, noncommercial, and relates to cooking and space heating, generally by the poorer part of the world’s population (IEA Bioenergy, 2007).
The contribution of bioenergy to the global supply mix has scarcely evolved since 1973 , whereas
other renewable energy sources have been consequently fostered and nuclear power widely developed (IEA, 2007a). Bioenergy
could play a bigger role, especially in the industrial countries, which consume a lot of fossil energy
and are therefore the main contributors to atmospheric pollution and global warming. According to
the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), greenhouse gas emissions have already made the world 0.6 ◦C warmer
during the last three decades. The EU-25 and the four other largest emitters, the United States, China, Russia and India, contribute
all together approximately 61% of global emissions. Energy-related emissions represent 60% of global emissions in CO2 equivalent
(Baumert et al., 2005).¶ Transport is a major energy consumer [27.6% of total final energy consumption worldwide
(IEA, 2007a), 31% in the EU-27 (EU DG-TREN, 2007); two-thirds
of the projected increase in oil demand will
come from transport (IEA World outlook 2005)] and a large greenhouse gas emitter. In 2004, the transport sector
produced 6.3 GtCO2, i.e. 23% of world energy-related CO2 emissions (Ribeiro et al., 2007) or roughly 13.5% of global greenhouse
gas emissions (Baumert et al., 2005). In the EU-27, this sector accounted for 22% of total greenhouse gas emissions in 2005 (EEA,
2008). Moreover, vehicle
emissions are the single most rapidly growing source of CO2
emissions. Achievement of a levelling off of vehicle emissions, given continuing growth in the number of
vehicles on the road, requires both: (1) a substantial reduction in vehicle emissions during the next
several years and (2) advances in technology in the longer term that fundamentally reduce CO2
emissions, because energy will always be at a premium (Hansen, 2006). The automotive market is logically evolving towards
electric motors, whose energy efficiency is roughly 7.5 times higher than that of internal combustion engines. The compacity and
lightness of liquid fuels still enable fifty-fold higher energy storage than the best current batteries (Roby, 2006). Fuel cells may in the
future replace these limited electro-chemical accumulators, but these are considered long-term technologies requiring significant
research and development efforts. Their deployment also hinges on changes in the market and consumption behaviours. Lastly,
electricity or H2 are secondary energy carriers that need to be produced from primary energy
sources, involving possibly high CO2 emissions. ¶ Biofuels can contribute to reducing the dependency
on fossil fuels and lower greenhouse gas emissions from transport, provided that the savings of greenhouse
gases through the use of bioenergy is not counteracted by an increase in the same emissions during the production and
transformation of the biomass. Agriculture and land-use change already account for some 15% and
13%
of global greenhouse gas emissions, respectively (Baumert et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2007; Houghton, 2008). Can
biofuels finally be considered as an advantageous clean energy source? Here, we address this question by first reviewing the various
biofuels, the state of the art of the technologies, and the current production and consumption rates. We then present the political
and economic frameworks that aim at promoting the development of biofuels but still fail at convincing all stakeholders about
biofuel sustainability. We finally address the issue of biofuel quality in terms of environmental impacts, with a special focus on
greenhouse gas emissions and the potential of biofuels to contribute to climate change mitigation.
Warming is real, anthropogenic, and causes extinction
Richard Schiffman 13, environmental writer @ The Atlantic citing the Fifth Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, “What Leading Scientists Want You to Know About Today's
Frightening Climate Report,” The Atlantic, 9/27,
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/leading-scientists-weigh-in-on-themother-of-all-climate-reports/280045/
The polar icecaps are melting faster than we thought they would; seas are rising faster than we
thought they would; extreme weather events are increasing. Have a nice day! That’s a less than scientifically rigorous
summary of the findings of the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released this morning in
Stockholm.¶ Appearing exhausted after a nearly two sleepless days fine-tuning the language of the report, co-chair Thomas Stocker called
climate change “the greatest challenge of our time," adding that “each of the last three decades
has been successively warmer than the past,” and that this trend is likely to continue into the
foreseeable future.¶ Pledging further action to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, "This isn’t a run of the mill report to
be dumped in a filing cabinet. This isn’t a political document produced by politicians... It’s science."¶ And that science
needs to be communicated to the public, loudly and clearly. I canvassed leading climate researchers for their take on the findings of the vastly influential IPCC report. What
Mann, the Director of
the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State (a former IPCC author himself) suggested: "Jury In:
headline would they put on the news? What do they hope people hear about this report?¶ When I asked him for his headline, Michael
Climate Change Real, Caused by Us, and a Threat We Must Deal With." ¶ Ted Scambos, a
glaciologist and head scientist of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) based in Boulder would lead with: "IPCC 2013, Similar Forecasts, Better Certainty." While
the report, which is issued every six to seven years, offers no radically new or alarming news, Scambos told me, it puts an exclamation point on
what we already know, and refines our evolving understanding of global warming.¶ The IPCC, the
indisputable rock star of UN documents, serves as the basis for global climate negotiations, like the ones that took place in Kyoto, Rio, and, more recently, Copenhagen. (The
next big international climate meeting is scheduled for 2015 in Paris.) It
is also arguably the most elaborately vetted and
exhaustively researched scientific paper in existence. Founded in 1988 by the United Nations and the World
Meteorological Organization, the IPCC represents the distilled wisdom of over 600 climate researchers in 32
countries on changes in the Earth’s atmosphere, ice and seas. It endeavors to answer the late New York mayor Ed Koch’s famous question “How am I doing?” for all of
us. The answer, which won’t surprise anyone who has been following the climate change story, is not very well at all. ¶ It is now 95 percent likely
that human spewed heat-trapping gases — rather than natural variability — are the main
cause of climate change, according to today’s report. In 2007 the IPCC’s confidence level was 90 percent, and in 2001 it was 66 percent, and just over 50
things are getting worse more quickly than almost anyone thought would
happen a few years back.¶ “If you look at the early IPCC predictions back from 1990 and what has taken place since, climate change is proceeding faster
percent in 1995. ¶ What’s more,
than we expected,” Mann told me by email. Mann helped develop the famous hockey-stick graph, which Al Gore used in his film “An Inconvenient Truth” to dramatize the sharp
Given the current trajectory, we're on track for
ice-free summer conditions in the Arctic in a matter of a decade or two... There is a similar story with the continental
rise in temperatures in recent times. ¶ Mann cites the decline of Arctic sea ice to explain : “
ice sheets, which are losing ice — and contributing to sea level rise — at a faster rate than the [earlier IPCC] models had predicted.”¶ But there is a lot that we still don’t
understand. Reuters noted in a sneak preview of IPCC draft which was leaked in August that, while the broad global trends are clear, climate scientists were “finding it harder
hotspots are not consistent, but move
erratically around the globe . The same has been true of heat waves, mega-storms and catastrophic floods, like the recent ones that ravaged the
Colorado Front Range. There is broad agreement that climate change is increasing the severity of extreme
weather events, but we’re not yet able to predict where and when these will show up. ¶ “It is like watching a pot boil,” Danish astrophysicist
and climate scientist Peter Thejll told me. “We understand why it boils but cannot predict where the next bubble will be.” ¶ There is also
uncertainty about an apparent slowdown over the last decade in the rate of air temperature increase. While some critics claim that global
warming has “stalled,” others point out that, when rising ocean temperatures are factored in, the Earth is
actually gaining heat faster than previously anticipated .¶ “Temperatures measured over the
short term are just one parameter,” said Dr Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in an interview. “ There are far more
critical things going on; the acidification of the ocean is happening a lot faster than anybody
thought that it would, it’s sucking up more CO2, plankton, the basic food chain of the
than expected to predict the impact in specific regions in coming decades.”¶ From year to year, the world’s
planet , are dying, it’s such a hugely important signal. Why aren’t people using that as a measure of what is going on?”¶ Barnett
thinks that recent increases in volcanic activity, which spews smog-forming aerosols into the air that deflect solar radiation and cool the atmosphere,
might help account for the temporary slowing of global temperature rise. But he says we shouldn’t let short term
fluctuations cause us to lose sight of the big picture.¶ The dispute over temperatures underscores just how formidable the IPCC’s task of modeling the complexity of climate
change is. Issued in three parts (the next two installments are due out in the spring), the full version of the IPCC will end up several times the length of Leo Tolstoy’s epic War
and Peace. Yet every last word of the U.N. document needs to be signed off on by all of the nations on earth. ¶ “
any complexity and importance at all
I do not know of any other area
of
where there is unanimous agreement ... and the statements so
strong ,” Mike MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, Climate Institute in Washington, D.C. told me in an email. “What IPCC has achieved is
remarkable (and why it merited the Nobel Peace Prize granted in 2007).”¶ Not surprisingly, the IPCC’s conclusions tend to be
“ conservative by design,” Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology told me: “The
IPCC is not supposed to represent the controversial forefront of climate science. It is supposed
to represents what nearly all scientists agree on, and it does that quite effectively.Ӧ Nevertheless, even these
understated findings are inevitably controversial. Roger Pielke Jr., the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder
suggested a headline that focuses on the cat fight that today’s report is sure to revive: "Fresh Red Meat Offered Up in the Climate Debate, Activists and Skeptics Continue
Fighting Over It." Pielke should know. A critic of Al Gore, who has called his own detractors "climate McCarthyists," Pielke has been a lightning rod for the political controversy
which continues to swirl around the question of global warming, and what, if anything, we should do about it. ¶ The public’s skepticism of climate change took a dive after
Hurricane Sandy. Fifty-four percent of Americans are now saying that the effects of global warming have already begun. But 41 percent surveyed in the same Gallup poll believe
For most
climate experts, however, the battle is long over — at least when it comes to the science. What remains in dispute
news about global warming is generally exaggerated, and there is a smaller but highly passionate minority that continues to believe the whole thing is a hoax. ¶
is not whether climate change is happening, but how fast things are going to get worse.¶ There are some possibilities that are deliberately left out of the IPCC projections,
because we simply don’t have enough data yet to model them. Jason Box, a visiting scholar at the Byrd Polar Research Center told me in an email interview that: “
scary elephant in the closet is terrestrial and oceanic methane release
The
triggered by warming.” The IPCC projections don’t
include the possibility — some scientists say likelihood — that huge quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas thirty times as potent as CO2) will eventually be released from
the threshhold “when humans lose control of potential
management of the problem, may be sooner than expected.Ӧ Box, whose work has been instrumental in documenting the
rapid deterioration of the Greenland ice sheet, also believes that the latest IPCC predictions (of a maximum just under three foot ocean rise by the end of
the century) may turn out to be wildly optimistic, if the Greenland ice sheet breaks up. “We are heading into uncharted
territory” he said. “ We are creating a different climate than the Earth has ever seen. ” ¶ The
head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, speaks for the scientific consensus when he says that time is fast running out to avoid the
catastrophic collapse of the natural systems on which human life depends. What he recently
thawing permafrost and undersea methane hydrate reserves. Box said that
told a group of climate scientist could be the most chilling headline of all for the U.N. report: ¶
midnight."
"We have five minutes before
Plan Text
The United States should legalize marihuana in the United States.
Framing
Contention two is framing:
We should use spaces like debate to communicate the risks of unmitigated
warming—rejection of our discourse sacrifices the political sphere to short-term
interest
Michael Mann 14, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University
and the author of “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines”,
“If You See Something, Say Something”, Jan 17, 2014, NYT,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/if-you-see-something-saysomething.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — THE overwhelming consensus among climate scientists is that human-caused
climate change is happening . Yet a fringe minority of our populace clings to an irrational rejection of wellestablished science. This virulent strain of anti-science infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading
newspapers and what we see on TV, leading to the appearance of a debate where none should
exist.¶ In fact, there is broad agreement among climate scientists not only that climate change is real (a survey and a review
of the scientific literature published say about 97 percent agree), but that we must respond to the dangers of a
warming planet. If one is looking for real differences among mainstream scientists, they can be found on two
fronts: the precise implications of those higher temperatures, and which technologies and policies offer the best solution to
reducing, on a global scale, the emission of greenhouse gases.¶ For example, should we go full-bore on nuclear power?
Invest in and deploy renewable energy — wind, solar and geothermal — on a huge scale? Price carbon emissions through cap-andtrade legislation or by imposing a carbon tax? Until the public fully understands the danger of our present
trajectory, those debates are likely to continue to founder .¶ This is where scientists come in. In my
view, it is no longer acceptable for scientists to remain on the sidelines. I should know. I had no choice but to
enter the fray. I was hounded by elected officials, threatened with violence and more — after a single study I co-wrote a decade and a
half ago found that the Northern Hemisphere’s average warmth had no precedent in at least the past 1,000 years. Our “hockey stick”
graph became a vivid centerpiece of the climate wars, and to this day, it continues to win me the enmity of those who have conflated
a problem of science and society with partisan politics.¶ So what should scientists do? At one end of the spectrum, you have the
distinguished former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, who has turned to civil disobedience
to underscore the dangers he sees. He was arrested in 2009 protesting mountaintop removal coal mining, then again in 2011 and
2013 in Washington protesting the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Texas Gulf. He has warned that the
pipeline, which awaits approval by the State Department, would open the floodgates to dirty tar sands oil from Canada, something
he says would be “game over for the climate.”¶ Dr. Hansen recently published an article in the journal PLoS One with the economist
Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, and other scientists, making a compelling case that emissions from
fossil fuel burning must be reduced rapidly if we are to avert catastrophic climate change. They
called for the immediate introduction of a price on carbon emissions, arguing that it is our moral obligation to not leave a degraded
planet behind for our children and grandchildren.¶ This activist approach has concerned some scientists, even those who have been
outspoken on climate change. One of them, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, who has argued that “the only
ethical path is to stop using the atmosphere as a waste dump for greenhouse gas pollution,” expressed concern about the
“presentation of such a prescriptive and value-laden work” in a paper not labeled opinion.¶ Are Dr. Hansen and his colleagues going
too far? Should we resist commenting on the implications of our science? There was a time when I would, without hesitation, have
answered “yes” to this question. In 2003, when asked in a Senate hearing to comment on a matter of policy, I readily responded that
“I am not a specialist in public policy” and it would not “be useful for me to testify on that.”¶ It is not an uncommon view among
scientists that we potentially compromise our objectivity if we choose to wade into policy matters or the societal implications of our
work. And it would be problematic if our views on policy somehow influenced the way we went about doing our science. But there is
nothing inappropriate at all about drawing on our scientific knowledge to speak out about the very real implications of our research.¶
My colleague Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, who died in 2010, used to say that being a scientist-advocate is
not an oxymoron. Just because we are scientists does not mean that we should check our citizenship at the door of a public
meeting, he would explain. The New Republic once called him a “scientific pugilist” for advocating a forceful approach to global
warming. But fighting for scientific truth and an informed debate is nothing to apologize for.¶ If
scientists choose not to engage in the public debate, we leave a vacuum that will be filled by
those whose agenda is one of short-term self-interest. There is a great cost to society if scientists fail
to participate in the larger conversation — if we do not do all we can to ensure that the policy debate is
informed by an honest assessment of the risks. In fact, it would be an abrogation of our responsibility to society if
we remained quiet in the face of such a grave threat.¶ This is hardly a radical position. Our Department of Homeland Security has
urged citizens to report anything dangerous they witness: “ If
you see something, say something .” We
scientists are citizens, too, and, in climate change, we see a clear and present danger. The public
is beginning to see the danger, too — Midwestern farmers struggling with drought, more
damaging wildfires out West, and withering record summer heat across the country — while
wondering about possible linkages between rapid Arctic warming and strange weather patterns, like the recent outbreak of Arctic air
across much of the United States.¶ The urgency for action was underscored this past week by a draft United Nations report warning
that another 15 years of failure to cut heat-trapping emissions would make the problem virtually
impossible to solve with known technologies and thus impose enormous costs on future generations. It confirmed
that the sooner we act, the less it will cost.¶ How will history judge us if we watch the threat unfold before
our eyes, but fail to communicate the urgency of acting to avert potential disaster? How would I
explain to the future children of my 8-year-old daughter that their grandfather saw the threat, but didn’t speak up in time?
Status quo debate is characterized by a misunderstanding of warming and the deemphasis of risk—only the 1AC incentivizes action
Joe Romm 12, Fellow at American Progress and is the Founding Editor of Climate Progress,
which New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called "the indispensable blog" and Time
magazine named one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010”, “Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media
And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate”, February 26, 2012,
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/26/432546/apocalypse-not-oscars-media-myth-ofrepetition-of-doomsday-messages-on-climate/#more-432546
*We don’t like ableist language*
The two greatest myths about global warming communications are 1) constant repetition of
doomsday messages has been a major, ongoing strategy and 2) that strategy doesn’t work and
indeed is actually counterproductive!¶ These myths are so deeply ingrained in the environmental and
progressive political community that when we finally had a serious shot at a climate bill, the powers that be decided not to focus on
the threat posed by climate change in any serious fashion in their $200 million communications effort (see my 6/10 post “Can you solve global
warming without talking about global warming?“). These myths are so deeply ingrained in the mainstream media that such messaging, when it is
tried, is
routinely attacked and denounced — and the flimsiest studies are interpreted exactly
backwards to drive the erroneous message home (see “Dire straits: Media blows the story of UC Berkeley study on climate
messaging“)¶ The only time anything approximating this kind of messaging — not “doomsday” but what I’d call
blunt, science-based messaging that also makes clear the problem is solvable — was in 2006 and 2007 with the release of An
Inconvenient Truth (and the 4 assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and media coverage like the April
2006 cover of Time). The data suggest that strategy measurably moved the public to become
more concerned about the threat posed by global warming (see recent study here).¶ You’d think it would be
pretty obvious that
the public is not going to be concerned about an issue unless one
explains why they should be concerned about an issue. And the social science literature,
not be clearer that only repeated messages have any
chance of sinking in and moving the needle.¶ Because I doubt any serious movement of public opinion
or mobilization of political action could possibly occur until these myths are shattered, I’ll do a
including the vast literature on advertising and marketing, could
multipart series on this subject, featuring public opinion analysis, quotes by leading experts, and the latest social science research.¶ Since this is Oscar
night, though, it seems appropriate to start by looking at what messages the public are exposed to in popular culture and the media. It ain’t doomsday.
Quite the reverse, climate change has been mostly an invisible issue for several years and the message of conspicuous consumption and business-asusual reigns supreme.¶ The motivation for this post actually came up because I received an e-mail from a journalist commenting that the “constant
repetition of doomsday messages” doesn’t work as a messaging strategy. I had to demur, for the reasons noted above.¶ But it did get me thinking about
what messages the public are exposed to, especially as I’ve been rushing to see the movies nominated for Best Picture this year. I am a huge movie buff,
but as parents of 5-year-olds know, it isn’t easy to stay up with the latest movies.¶ That said, good luck finding a popular movie in recent years that even
touches on climate change, let alone one a popular one that would pass for doomsday messaging. Best Picture nominee The Tree of Life has been billed
as an environmental movie — and even shown at environmental film festivals — but while it is certainly depressing, climate-related it ain’t. In fact, if
that is truly someone’s idea of environmental movie, count me out.¶ The closest to a genuine popular climate movie was the dreadfully unscientific The
Day After Tomorrow, which is from 2004 (and arguably set back the messaging effort by putting the absurd “global cooling” notion in people’s heads!
Even Avatar, the most successful movie of all time and “the most epic piece of environmental advocacy ever captured on celluloid,” as one producer put
it, omits the climate doomsday message. One of my favorite eco-movies, “Wall-E, is an eco-dystopian gem and an anti-consumption movie,” but it isn’t
a climate movie.¶ I will be interested to see The Hunger Games, but I’ve read all 3 of the bestselling post-apocalyptic young adult novels — hey, that’s
my job! — and they don’t qualify as climate change doomsday messaging (more on that later). So, no, the
movies certainly don’t
expose the public to constant doomsday messages on climate.¶ Here are the key points about what repeated
messages the American public is exposed to:¶ The broad American public is exposed to virtually no doomsday
messages, let alone constant ones, on climate change in popular culture (TV and the movies and even online).
There is not one single TV show on any network devoted to this subject, which is, arguably, more
consequential than any other preventable issue we face.¶ The same goes for the news media, whose coverage
of climate change has collapsed (see “Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011“). When the media do cover
climate change in recent years, the overwhelming majority of coverage is devoid of any doomsday messages
— and many outlets still feature hard-core deniers . Just imagine what the public’s view of
climate would be if it got the same coverage as, say, unemployment, the housing crisis or even
the deficit? When was the last time you saw an “employment denier” quoted on TV or in a
newspaper?¶ The public is exposed to constant messages promoting business as usual and indeed idolizing conspicuous consumption. See, for
instance, “Breaking: The earth is breaking … but how about that Royal Wedding? ¶ Our political elite and intelligentsia, including
MSM pundits and the supposedly “liberal media” like, say, MSNBC, hardly even talk about climate change and when they
do, it isn’t doomsday. Indeed, there isn’t even a single national columnist for a major media outlet
who writes primarily on climate. Most “liberal” columnists rarely mention it.¶ At least a quarter of
the public chooses media that devote a vast amount of time to the notion that global warming is
a hoax and that environmentalists are extremists and that clean energy is a joke. In the MSM,
conservative pundits routinely trash climate science and mock clean energy. Just listen to, say, Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe mock clean
energy sometime.¶ The major
energy companies bombard the airwaves with millions and millions of
dollars of repetitious pro-fossil-fuel ads. The environmentalists spend far, far less money. As noted
above, the one time they did run a major campaign to push a climate bill, they and their political
allies including the president explicitly did NOT talk much about climate change, particularly
doomsday messaging¶ Environmentalists when they do appear in popular culture, especially TV, are routinely mocked. ¶ There is
very little mass communication of doomsday messages online. Check out the most popular
websites. General silence on the subject, and again, what coverage there is ain’t doomsday
messaging. Go to the front page of the (moderately trafficked) environmental websites. Where is the doomsday? ¶ If you want to find anything
approximating even modest, blunt, science-based messaging built around the scientific literature, interviews with actual climate scientists and a clear
statement that we can solve this problem — well, you’ve all found it, of course, but the only people who see it are those who go looking for it.¶ Of course,
this blog is not even aimed at the general public.
Probably 99% of Americans haven’t even seen one of my
headlines and 99.7% haven’t read one of my climate science posts. And Climate Progress is probably the most
widely read, quoted, and reposted climate science blog in the world.¶ Anyone dropping into America from another country or another planet who
started following popular culture and the news the way the overwhelming majority of Americans do would get the distinct impression that nobody
who matters is terribly worried about climate change. And, of course, they’d be right — see “The failed presidency of
Barack Obama, Part 2.Ӧ It is total BS that somehow the American public has been scared and overwhelmed by repeated doomsday messaging into
some sort of climate fatigue. If
the public’s concern has dropped — and public opinion analysis suggests it
has dropped several percent (though is bouncing back a tad) — that is primarily due to the conservative
media’s disinformation campaign impact on Tea Party conservatives and to the treatment of this
as a nonissue by most of the rest of the media, intelligentsia and popular culture.
Our impact framing is good—affirming survival on the grounds that all life should
be greiveable powerfully is a precondition for all value and would radically
reframe climate change discourse
McKee (an artist and organizer with various projects including Strike Debt) 12
(Yates, Of Survival: Climate Change and Uncanny Landscape in the Photography of Subhankar Banerjee, Impasses of the PostGlobal, pg. 80-2)
In a now-famous passage from his final interview, Jacques Derrida grants survival a quasi-transcendental status. As if
stipulating a protocol of read- ing to his audience with regard to his own imminent end from beyond the grave, Derrida offers
a certain affirmation of life as an irreducible force at work in the apparent finality of death. Derrida’s affirmation
does not of course involve the simple sublation of death into a triumphant continuity of life,
but rather an unsettling of both poles that exposes their mutual dependency and
contamination. Derrida describes this undecidable im- passe in terms of survival, or “living-on”:¶ Life is survival.
To survive means to continue to live, but also to live after death All of the concepts that have helped my work, especially those
of the trace or the spectral, were linked to ‘survival’ as a structural dimension. Survival constitutes the very structure of what
we call existence. We are structurally survivors, marked by the structure of the trace, of the testa- ment. Everything I
have said about survival as the complica- tion of he life-death opposition proceeds in me
from an unconditional affirmation of life. Survival, this life after life, life more than life, the most intense life
4
possible. ¶ In a moving obituary published in a special issue of the arts journal Grey Room, Cadava marks this passage as an
exemplary deconstructive lesson concerning the memory of deconstruction itself. According to Ca- dava, if deconstruction is to
survive, or better, if deconstruction qua sur- vival is to survive beyond its academic entombment, if it is to have stakes, claims
or effects in the future, it would be necessary for us, Derrida’s sur- vivors, to move the “multiple legacies” of deconstruction in
new direc- tions, requiring that articulate them unforeseen histories, discourses, and problem-sets including “politics, religion,
economics, ideology, rights, nationalism, racism, colonialism, genocide, torture, the media, univer- sity institutions, capitalist
imperialisms of all kinds, rogue states, the war on terror ... ” (“Derrida’s Futures” 77). Collectively, these problem-sets
constitute what Cadava calls “the signature of ‘our time’,” the ethico-polit- ical urgency of which he signals by putting the
phrase “our time” in quo- tation marks in order to mark the non-self-identity of both the “we” and that “time” that such a
putative collective subject would share. Cadava’s litany of topoi closely echoes that put forth by Derrida himself in Spec- ters of
Marx, including what appears from our current vantage point to be a conspicuous absence: the question of ecological crisis in
general and planetary climate-change in particular.5 While it is beyond the scope of this paper to account for this strange
silence, survival can nevertheless be “set to work” in thinking climate change and the conflicts
surround it as precisely as an unhinging or disjoining of what Cadava calls “our time.”6¶ The setting-to-
work of survival entails, among other things, a consider- ation of the histories within which the word has been inscribed. In
par- ticular, it is relevant to note the ubiquity of survival as an ideologeme in Northern discourses of environmental crisis since
the late 1960’s, when books, conferences, and reports with titles such as The Crisis of Surviv- al, Science and Survival,
Blueprint for Survival, and Ecological Conscience: Values for Survival began to proliferate. Appealing to a general precariousness of the human species preceding any merely political interest or partition, survival has long functioned as a
transcendental imperative concerning the potentially suicidal disjuncture between the inhuman temporality of technological
evolution on the one hand and the redemp- tive cultural, moral, or spiritual self-awareness of humanity on the other.7 As Al
Gore put it recently in the first annual “Green” issue of Vanity Fair, “What is at stake is the survival of our civilization and the
habitability of the Earth. As one eminent scientist has put it, “the pending question is whether an opposable thumb and a
neocortex are a viable combination on this planet.”8¶ Left-wing thinkers such as Wolfgang Sachs have over the past
two de- cades made an important point of critically exposing the depoliticizing implications
of what he calls “survival as the new raison d’être of planetary management”—i.e. the positing of
the bare biophysical existence of hu- manity qua species as an unquestioned basis on which to make decisions concerning
economic development and environmental regulation on the part of global elites.9 While such critiques have
proven indispensable in establishing ecology as a site of antagonism rather than taken-forgranted consensus, survival can be productively re-mobilized as both a figure of
reading and an ethico-political imperative aligned with the concerns of
critical climate change
put forth in the current volume.¶ Rather
than a mere semantic frill to be
would need to be recognized in its aporetic
structure, which is to say, its suggestion of a fundamental depen- dence or indebtedness on the part
of life for its own endurance in time on a set of sustained and sustaining conditions that are
irreducible to the being-present of the life in question.10 Judith Butler has recently brought the quasisanctimoniously invoked or critically demystified, the survival
transcendental aporia of survival—“the very structure of existence” as Derrida calls it—into dialogue with an analysis of what
she calls the “uneven allocation of precarity” in an expanded global frame of biopolitics. For Butler, the “survivability”
of lives depends not only on the reliable allocation of material life-support networks, but
also, and perhaps more primordially, the conditions of the “representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible
in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this
way? This problem concerns the media, at the most general level, since a
life can be accorded a value only on
the condition that it is perceivable as a life ” (Frames of War 51). In other words, crucial
among the conditions of non-life on which life depends for its continua- tion—the “sustained and
sustaining conditions of life”—are those mediatic practices and aesthetic frames through which lives
are able to appear as livable, grievable, and thus worthy of protection. As Butler puts it, “in this way,
media and survival are linked” (Frames of War 181).
Academic spaces are uniquely key—the discourse that occurs in this space changes
cultural attitudes toward climate change and the environment
Eileen Crist 04, Professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology,
“Against the Social Construction of Nature and Wilderness”, Environmental Ethics vol 26,
Spring 2004, http://www.umweltethik.at/download.php?id=435
Yet, constructivist analyses of “nature” favor remaining in the comfort zone of zestless agnosticism and
noncommittal meta-discourse. As David Kidner suggests, this intellectual stance may function as a
mechanism against facing the devastation of the biosphere—an undertaking long underway but gathering
momentum with the imminent bottlenecking of a triumphant global consumerism and unprecedented population levels. Human-
driven extinction—in the ballpark of Wilson’s estimated 27,000 species per year—is so unthinkable a fact that
choosing to ignore it may well be the psychologically risk-free option. Nevertheless, this is the
opportune historical moment for intellectuals in the humanities and social sciences to join
forces with conservation scientists in order to help create the consciousness shift and
policy changes to stop this irreversible destruction. Given this outlook, how students in the human
sciences are trained to regard scientific knowledge, and what kind of messages percolate to the
public from the academy about the nature of scientific findings, matter immensely. The “agnostic
stance” of constructivism toward “scientific claims” about the environment—a stance supposedly mandatory for discerning how
scientific knowledge is “socially assembled”36—is, to borrow a legendary oneliner, striving to interpret the world at an hour that is
pressingly calling us to change it.
Scientific knowledge is an effective way to understand problems like global
warming—while not all scientific knowledge is perfect and science is not the only
valuable form of knowledge, the 1AC’s scholarship was robust enough to vote
affirmative
Pat Hutcheon 93, prof of sociology of education at U Regina and U British Columbia; former
research advisor to the Health Promotion Branch of the Canadian Department of Health and
Welfare and as a director of the Vanier Institute of the Family; Phd in sociology; began at Yale
and finished at U Queensland, “A Critique of "Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA"”,
http://www.humanists.net/pdhutcheon/humanist%20articles/lewontn.htm
The introductory lecture in this series articulated the increasingly popular "postmodernist" claim that all science is ideology.
Lewontin then proceeded to justify this by stating the obvious: that scientists are human like the rest of us and subject
to the same biases and socio-cultural imperatives. Although he did not actually say it, his comments seemed to imply that the
enterprise of scientific research and knowledge building could therefore be no different and no more reliable as a guide to action
than any other set of opinions. The trouble is that, in order to reach such an conclusion, one would have to ignore all those aspects
of the scientific endeavor that do in fact distinguish it from other types and sources of belief
formation.¶ Indeed, if the integrity of the scientific endeavor depended only on the wisdom and objectivity of the individuals
engaged in it we would be in trouble. North American agriculture would today be in the state of that in Russia today. In fact it would
be much worse, for the Soviets threw out Lysenko's ideology-masquerading-as-science decades ago. Precisely because an alternative
scientific model was available (thanks to the disparaged Darwinian theory) the former Eastern bloc countries have been partially
successful in overcoming the destructive chain of consequences which blind faith in ideology had set in motion. This is what
Lewontin's old Russian dissident professor meant when he said that the truth must be spoken, even at great
personal cost. How sad that Lewontin has apparently failed to understand the fact that while scientific knowledge -with the power it gives us -- can and does allow humanity to change the world, ideological beliefs have
consequences too. By rendering their proponents politically powerful but rationally and instrumentally impotent, they throw up
insurmountable barriers to reasoned and value-guided social change.¶ What are the crucial differences between ideology and science
that Lewonton has ignored? Both Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn have spelled these out with great care -- the former throughout a
long lifetime of scholarship devoted to that precise objective. Stephen Jay Gould has also done a sound job in this area. How strange
that someone with the status of Lewontin, in a series of lectures supposedly covering the same subject, would not at least have dealt
with their arguments!¶ Science has to do with the search for regularities in what humans experience of
their physical and social environments, beginning with the most simple units discernible, and
gradually moving towards the more complex. It has to do with expressing these regularities in the clearest and most
precise language possible, so that cause-and-effect relations among the parts of the system under study can be publicly and
rigorously tested. And it has to do with devising explanations of those empirical regularities which
have survived all attempts to falsify them. These explanations, once phrased in the form of testable
hypotheses, become predictors of future events. In other words, they lead to further conjectures of
additional relationships which, in their turn, must survive repeated public attempts to prove
them wanting -- if the set of related explanations (or theory) is to continue to operate as a
fruitful guide for subsequent research.¶ This means that science, unlike mythology and ideology, has a selfcorrecting mechanism at its very heart. A conjecture, to be classed as scientific, must be amenable
to empirical test. It must, above all, be open to refutation by experience. There is a rigorous set of
rules according to which hypotheses are formulated and research findings are arrived at,
reported and replicated. It is this process -- not the lack of prejudice of the particular scientist, or his negotiating
ability, or even his political power within the relevant university department -- that ensures the reliability of scientific
knowledge. The conditions established by the community of science is one of precisely defined
and regulated "intersubjectivity". Under these conditions the theory that wins out, and subsequently prevails, does so
not because of its agreement with conventional wisdom or because of the political power of its proponents, as is often the case with
ideology. The survival of a scientific theory such as Darwin's is due, instead, to its power to explain and
predict observable regularities in human experience, while withstanding worldwide attempts to refute it -- and
proving itself open to elaboration and expansion in the process. In this sense only is scientific knowledge objective and universal.
All this has little relationship to the claim of an absolute universality of objective "truth " apart from
human strivings that Lewontin has attributed to scientists.¶ Because ideologies, on the other hand, do
claim to represent
truth, they are incapable of generating a means by which they can be corrected as circumstances change. Legitimate science makes
no such claims. Scientific tests are not tests of verisimilitude. Science does not aim for "true" theories purporting
to reflect an accurate picture of the "essence" of reality. It leaves such claims of infallibility to ideology. The
tests of science, therefore, are in terms of workability and falsifiability, and its propositions are accordingly
tentative in nature. A successful scientific theory is one which, while guiding the research in a particular problem area, is
continuously elaborated, revised and refined, until it is eventually superseded by that very hypothesis-making and testing process
that it helped to define and sharpen. An ideology, on the other hand, would be considered to have failed under those conditions, for
the "truth" must be for all time. More than anything, it is this difference that confuses those ideological thinkers who are compelled
to attack Darwin's theory of evolution precisely because of its success as a scientific theory. For them, and the world of desired and
imagined certainty in which they live, that very success in contributing to a continuously evolving body of increasingly reliable -albeit inevitably tentative -- knowledge can only mean failure, in that the theory itself has altered in the process.
Robust social science supports the ability of apocalyptic framing to motivate action
Robin Veldman 12, doctoral candidate in the Religion and Nature program at the University of
Florida, whose research focuses on the interplay between environmental attitudes, religious
beliefs, and ethics, “Narrating the Environmental Apocalypse: How Imagining the End
Facilitates Moral Reasoning Among Environmental Activists”, Ethics & The Environment vol 17
no 1, Spring 2012, Project Muse
Some of the strongest evidence of a connection between environmental apocalypticism and
activism comes from a national survey that examined whether Americans perceived climate
change to be dangerous. As part of his analysis, Anthony Leiserowitz identified several “interpretive communities,” which
had consistent demographic characteristics but varied in their levels of risk perception. The group who perceived the risk to be the
greatest, which he labeled “alarmists,” described climate change [End Page 5] using apocalyptic language, such as
“Bad…bad…bad…like after nuclear war…no vegetation,” “Heat waves, it’s gonna kill the world,” and “Death of the planet” (2005,
1440). Given such language, this would seem to be a reasonable way to operationalize environmental apocalypticism. If such
apocalypticism encouraged fatalism, we would expect alarmists to be less likely to have engaged
in environmental behavior compared to groups with moderate or low levels of concern . To the
contrary, however, Leiserowitz found that alarmists “were significantly more likely to have
taken personal action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ” (ibid.) than respondents
who perceived climate change to pose less of a threat. Interestingly, while one might expect such radical views to
appeal only to a tiny minority, Leiserowitz found that a respectable eleven percent of Americans fell into this group (ibid).¶ Further
supporting Leiserowitz’s findings, in a separate national survey conducted in 2008, Maibach, Roser-Renouf, and
Leiserowitz found that a group they labeled “the
Alarmed” (again, due to their high levels of concern about climate change)
the segment most engaged in the issue of global warming. They are very convinced it is
happening, human-caused, and a serious and urgent threat. The Alarmed are already making
changes in their own lives and support an aggressive national response” (2009, 3, emphasis added). This
“are
group was far more likely than people with lower levels of concern over climate change to have engaged in consumer activism (by
rewarding companies that support action to reduce global warming with their business, for example) or to have contacted elected
officials to express their concern. Additionally, the authors found that “[w]hen asked which reason for action was
most important to them personally, the Alarmed were most likely to select preventing the
destruction of most life on the planet (31%)” (2009, 31)—a finding suggesting that for many in this group it is
specifically the desire to avert catastrophe, rather than some other motivation, that encourages
pro-environmental behavior. Taken together, these and other studies (cf. Semenza et al. 2008 and DerKarabetia,
Stephenson, and Poggi 1996) provide important evidence that many of those who think environmental
problems pose a severe threat practice some form of activism, rather than giving way to fatalistic
resignation.¶ National surveys give a good overview of the association between apocalypticism and activism among the general
public, but they do not [End Page 6] provide sufficient ethnographic detail. To complement this broader picture I now turn to case
studies, which provide greater insight into how adherents themselves understand what motivates their environmental behavior.¶
When seeking a subset of environmentalists with apocalyptic beliefs, the radical wing is an obvious place to look. For example, many
Earth First!ers believe that the collapse of industrial society is inevitable (Taylor 1994). At the same time, the majority are actively
committed to preventing ecological disaster. As Earth First! co-founder Howie Wolke acknowledged, the two are directly connected:
“As ecological calamity unravels the living fabric of the Earth, environmental radicalism has become both common and necessary”
(1989, 29).3 This logic underlies efforts to preserve wilderness areas, which many radical environmentalists believe will serve as
reservoirs of genetic diversity, helping to restore the planet after industrial society collapses (Taylor 1994). In addition to
encouraging activism to preserve wilderness, apocalyptic beliefs also motivate practices such as
“monkeywrenching,” or ecological sabotage, civil disobedience, and the more conventional
“paper monkeywrenching” (lobbying, engaging in public information campaigns to shift legislative priorities, or using
lawsuits when these tactics fail). Ultimately, while there are disagreements over what strategies will best achieve their desired goals,
for most radical environmentalists, apocalypticism and activism are bound closely together .¶ The
connection between belief in impending disaster and environmental activism holds true for Wiccans as well. During fieldwork in the
southeastern United States, for example, Shawn Arthur reported meeting “dozens of Wiccans who professed their apocalyptic
millenarian beliefs to anyone who expressed interest, yet many others only quietly agreed with them without any further
elaboration” (2008, 201). For this group, the coming disaster was understood as divine retribution, the result of an angry Earth
Goddess preparing to punish humans for squandering her ecological gifts (Arthur 2008, 203). In light of Gaia’s impending revenge,
Arthur found that Wiccans advocated both spiritual and material forms of activism. For example, practices such as Goddess worship,
the use of herbal remedies for healing, and awareness of the body and its energies were considered important for initiating a more
harmonious relationship with the earth (Arthur 2008, 207). As for material activism, Arthur notes [End Page 7] that the notion of
environmental apocalypse played a key role in encouraging pro-environmental behavior:¶ images of immanent [sic]
ecological crisis and apocalyptic change often were utilized as motivating factors for developing
an environmentally and ecologically conscious worldview; for stressing the importance of working for the
Earth through a variety of practices, including environmental activism, garbage collecting, recycling, composting, and religious
rituals; for learning sustainable living skills; and for developing a special relationship with the world as a divine entity. (2008, 212)¶
What these studies and my own experiences in the environmentalist milieu4 suggest is that people who make a serious
commitment to engaging in environmentally friendly behavior, people who move beyond
making superficial changes to making substantial and permanent ones , are quite likely to
subscribe to some form of the apocalyptic narrative.
Specifically, we should focus our energies on creating public, institutional
change—individual change is necessary but not sufficient
CAG 10, Climate Change Communication Advisory Group, “Communicating climate change to
mass public audiences”, September 2010,
http://psych.cf.ac.uk/understandingrisk/docs/cccag.pdf
This short advisory paper collates a set of recommendations about how best to shape mass public communications aimed at
increasing concern about climate change and motivating commensurate behavioural changes. ¶ Its focus is not upon
motivating small
private-sphere behavioural changes on a piece-meal basis. Rather, it marshals
evidence about how best to motivate the ambitious and systemic behavioural change that is
necessary – including, crucially, greater public engagement with the policy process
(through, for example, lobbying decision-makers and elected representatives, or participating in demonstrations), as well as major
lifestyle changes. ¶ Political leaders themselves have drawn attention to the imperative for more vocal
public pressure to create the ‘political space’ for them to enact more ambitious policy
interventions.1 While this paper does not dismiss the value of individuals making small private-sphere
behavioural changes (for example, adopting simple domestic energy efficiency measures) it is clear that such behaviours do
not, in themselves, represent a proportional response to the challenge of climate change. As David
MacKay, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate change writes: “Don’t be distracted by the
myth that ‘every little helps’. If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little” (MacKay, 2008). ¶ The
task of campaigners and communicators from government, business and non-governmental organisations must
therefore be to motivate both (i) widespread adoption of ambitious private-sphere behavioural
changes; and (ii) widespread acceptance of – and indeed active demand for – ambitious new policy
interventions. ¶ Current public communication campaigns, as orchestrated by government, business and nongovernmental organisations, are not achieving these changes. This paper asks: how should such communications be
designed if they are to have optimal impact in motivating these changes? The response to this question will require fundamental
changes in the ways that many climate change communication campaigns are currently devised and implemented. ¶ This advisory
paper offers a list of principles that could be used to enhance the quality of communication around climate change communications.
The authors are each engaged in continuously sifting the evidence from a range of sub-disciplines within psychology, and reflecting
on the implications of this for improving climate change communications. Some of the organisations that we represent have
themselves at times adopted approaches which we have both learnt from and critique in this paper – so some of us have first hand
experience of the need for on-going improvement in the strategies that we deploy. ¶ The
changes we advocate will be
challenging to enact – and will require vision and leadership on the part of the organisations adopting them. But without
such vision and leadership, we do not believe that public communication campaigns on climate
change will create the necessary behavioural changes – indeed, there is a profound risk that many of
today’s campaigns will actually prove counter-productive.
Personal consumption behavior is determined by habits and social organizations
that constraint individual changes—only the affirmative incentivizes a change on a
broad scale
Tim Jackson 05, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and
Director of RESOLVE, “Motivating Sustainable Consumption”, January 2005, Centre for
Environmental Strategy, http://hiveideas.com/attachments/044_motivatingscfinal_000.pdf
Consumption, in the words of one author (Miller 1995) represents the ‘vanguard of history’. The historical and contemporary
literature suggests a huge variety of different roles for consumption in modern society. These include its functional role in satisfying
needs for food, housing, transport, recreation, leisure, and so on. But consumption is also implicated in processes of
identity formation, social distinction and identification, meaning creation and hedonic
‘dreaming’. Some authors argue that these processes are driven by evolutionary imperatives of status and sexual selection. Two
key lessons flow from this literature. ¶ The first is that material goods are important to us, not just for their functional uses, but
because they play vital symbolic roles in our lives. This symbolic role of consumer goods facilitates
a range of complex, deeply engrained ‘social conversations’ about status, identity, social
cohesion, group norms and the pursuit of personal and cultural meaning. In the words of Mary Douglas
(1976) ‘An individual’s main objective in consumption is to help create the social world and to find a credible place in it.’ ¶ The
second key lesson is that, far from being able to exercise deliberative choice about what to consume and what not to consume, for
much of the time people find themselves ‘ locked in ’ to unsustainable consumption patterns.
Consumer 'lock-in' occurs in part through the architecture of incentive structures, institutional
barriers, inequalities in access, and restricted choice. But it also flows from habits, routines, social
norms and expectations and dominant cultural values. ¶ These lessons emphasise the difficulty
and complexity associated with negotiating pro-environmental behavioural change. They also
highlight the need for policy to come to grips with (and to influence) the social and institutional
context of consumer action, as well as attempting to affect individual behaviours (and behavioural
antecedents) directly. ¶ Part 2 Models of Consumer Behaviour ¶ 3. The Role of Models ¶ A key aim of this report is to provide an
overview of different models of consumer behaviour and of behavioural change. Conceptual models play two important roles in
understanding what motivates consumer behaviour and drives behavioural change. ¶ In the first place, they provide heuristic
frameworks for exploring and conceptualising consumer behaviour. In particular, they can help us understand the social and
psychological influences on both mainstream and pro-environmental (or pro-social) consumer behaviour. For example, some
models offer conceptual insights into the psychological antecedents of behaviour; others illustrate the way in which social norms are
contextualised; others again highlight the impact of different value orientations on behaviour, and so on. These heuristic
understandings also help us to identify points of policy intervention. ¶ Secondly, these models can be (and have been) used as
frameworks to test empirically the strength of different kinds of relationships (between values and behaviours for example) in
different circumstances. This is important for several reasons, not the least of which is that it enables us to develop an empirical
evidence base for particular assertions about consumer behaviour and consumer motivation. It also allows us to interrogate the
strength of these relationships under specific conditions, and to explore the possibilities for behavioural change. ¶ Models that are
good for heuristic understanding are not necessarily good for empirical testing, and vice versa. A good conceptual model requires a
balance between parsimony and explanatory completeness. ¶ 4. Rational Choice ¶ The starting point for the discussion of models of
consumer behaviour is the familiar ‘rational choice model’ that guides much of existing policy. This model contends that consumers
make decisions by calculating the individual costs and benefits of different courses of action and choosing the option that maximises
their expected net benefits. Several key assumptions underlie the model. These are that: ¶ · individual self-interest is the appropriate
framework for understanding human behaviour; ¶ · ‘rational’ behaviour is the result of processes of cognitive deliberation; and that ¶
· consumer preferences are exogenous to the model – that is to say they are taken as given without further elaboration as to their
origins or antecedents. ¶ The policy interventions that flow from this perspective are relatively straightforward. In the first place, it is
argued, policy should seek to ensure that consumers have access to sufficient information to make informed choices about the
available options. Secondly, it is recognised that private decisions do not always take account of social costs. Policy is therefore
required to ‘internalise’ these external costs and make them ‘visible’ to private choice. ¶ 5. Against Rational Choice ¶ Though familiar,
and clearly parsimonious, the rational choice model has been extensively criticised. One central criticism is that there are
cognitive limitations on our ability to take deliberative action. In fact, we use a variety of mental
‘short-cuts’ – habits, routines, cues, heuristics – which reduce the amount of cognitive
processing needed to act and often bypass cognitive deliberation entirely. A degree of
automaticity enters our behaviour, making it much more difficult to change, and undermining a
key assumption of the model. ¶ Another problem is that affective (emotional) responses confound cognitive
deliberation. It is well-known in marketing theory, for example, that consumers build affective relationships with products and
respond at an emotional level to decisions about what to buy and how to behave. Some evolutionary neuro-physiology even suggests
that emotion ‘precedes’ cognition in decision contexts. Our behaviours are based more on emotional response than on conscious
deliberation. ¶ The self-interest assumption of the rational choice model has also been attacked. In fact, human behaviour consists of
social, moral and altruistic behaviours as well as simply self-interested ones. To make matters worse, the assumption of individuality
is also suspect. Individual deliberations clearly do play some part on our behaviour. But behaviours are usually
embedded in social contexts. Social and interpersonal factors continually shape and constrain individual preference. ¶ 6.
Adjusted Expectancy Value Theories ¶ Some social psychological models attempt to conceptualise human behaviour in a more
nuanced way. Rational choice theory is a form of ‘expectancy value’ theory. In this kind of theory, choices are supposed to be made
on the basis of the expected outcomes from a choice and the value attached to those outcomes. A range of ‘adjusted’ social
psychological models of consumer behaviour seek to use this basic idea to go beyond assumptions of rational choice and unravel the
psychological antecedents of consumer preferences. ¶ Some theories also respond to critics by expanding on the expectancy value
structure of the rational choice model in various ways. In particular, they attempt to account for the influence of other people’s
attitudes on individual behaviour. The most famous example of this kind of theory is Ajzen and Fishbein’s ‘Theory of Reasoned
Action’. Ajzen’s ‘Theory of Planned Behaviour’ extends the same model to incorporate the influence of people’s perceptions about
their own control over the situation. ¶ These conceptual models are useful in understanding the structure of some intentional
behaviours. But they also leave out some key aspects of consumer behaviour. In particular, they do not offer clear insights into
normative (moral), affective (emotional) and cognitive (e.g. habitual) dimensions of people’s behaviour. ¶ Furthermore, the social
psychological evidence suggests that some behaviours are not mediated by either attitude or
intention at all. In fact the reverse correlation, in which attitudes are inferred from behaviours, is sometimes
observed. This has important implications for motivating sustainable consumption, because it suggests that behaviours can
be changed without necessarily changing attitudes first. ¶ Moreover, these behaviour changes
could be valuable in changing people’s environmental attitudes more generally. People may
recycle simply as a result of changes in municipal waste collection services, without ever having decided
that ‘recycling is a good thing’. But once they start recycling, some people will infer from this that they
are (to some extent) ‘green’. The possibility that this new attitude will ‘spill over’ into other behaviours is an
intriguing one. ¶ 7. Moral and Normative Conduct ¶ Moral and normative considerations are inherent in any discussion of
environmentally-significant consumer behaviour. Rational choice models eschew discussion of moral behaviour and assume that it
reflects an aspect of self-interest. But incorporating moral beliefs into adjusted expectancy value models appears to improve their
predictive power. ¶ Moreover, some authors have made explicit attempts to understand the dimensions and the antecedents of moral
or pro-social behaviours. For example, Schwartz’s ‘Norm-Activation Theory’ suggests that moral behaviours are the result of a
personal norm to act in a particular way. These norms arise, according to Schwartz, from an awareness of the consequences of one’s
actions and the ability and willingness to assume responsibility for those consequences.¶ The most well-known work on the moral
dimensions of pro-environmental behaviours is that of Paul Stern and his colleagues. Their Value-Belief-Norm theory attempts to
elucidate a chain of influence from people’s value sets and beliefs to the emergence of a personal norm to act in a given way. The
importance of this work is its insight into the value basis of different behaviours and behavioural intentions. ¶ Cialdini’s Focus
Theory of Normative Behaviour also has important ramifications for understanding consumer behaviour. Cialdini suggests that
people are continually influenced in their behaviours by social norms which prescribe or proscribe certain behavioural options. The
existence of such social norms can be a powerful force both in inhibiting and in encouraging pro-environmental behaviour. At one
level, pro-environmental behavioural change can be thought of as a transition in social norms. ¶ 8. The Matter of Habit ¶ Expectancy
value models still assume that behaviour is the result of deliberative, cognitive processes. But in practice, many of our
ordinary, everyday behaviours are carried out with very little conscious deliberation at all.
Cognitive psychology suggests that habits, routines and automaticity play a vital role in the cognitive
effort required to function effectively. This ability for efficient cognitive processing becomes increasingly important in
a message-dense environment, such as the modern society in which we live. ¶ At the same time, the process of ‘routinization’ of
everyday behaviours makes them less visible to rational deliberation, less obvious to understand, and less accessible to policy
intervention. Habitual behaviours often undermine our best intentions to change and are an
important structural feature of behavioural ‘lock-in’. Habit is one of the key challenges for behavioural change
policy since many environmentally-significant behaviours have this routine character.¶ 9. Sociality and
Self ¶ Many social-psychological models assume an individual approach to human behaviour. But experience tells us
that we are often constrained by what others think, say and do. Some social theories go even further than this
and suggest that our behaviours, our attitudes, and even our concepts of self are (at best) socially constructed and (at
worst) helplessly mired in a complex ‘social logic’. Social identity theory, for example, regards key aspects of our
behaviour as being motivated by a tendency towards intra-group solidarity and inter-group competition. ¶ These kinds of
theories provide a rich evidence base for the social embeddedness of environmentally significant behaviour. They also suggest
that behavioural change must occur at the collective, social level. Individual change is neither
feasible nor sufficient .
Life has intrinsic and objective value achieved through subjective pleasures---its
preservation should be an a priori goal
Amien Kacou 8 WHY EVEN MIND? On The A Priori Value Of “Life”, Cosmos and History: The
Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 4, No 1-2 (2008)
cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/92/184
Furthermore, that manner of finding things good that is in pleasure can certainly not exist in any
world without consciousness (i.e., without “life,” as we now understand the word)—slight
analogies put aside. In fact, we can begin to develop a more sophisticated definition of the concept of “pleasure,” in the
broadest possible sense of the word, as follows: it is the common psychological element in all psychological
experience of goodness (be it in joy, admiration, or whatever else). In this sense, pleasure can always be pictured to
“mediate” all awareness or perception or judgment of goodness: there is pleasure in all consciousness of things
good; pleasure is the common element of all conscious satisfaction. In short, it is simply the very
experience of liking things, or the liking of experience, in general. In this sense, pleasure is, not only uniquely
characteristic of life but also, the core expression of goodness in life—the most general sign or
phenomenon for favorable conscious valuation, in other words. This does not mean that
“good” is absolutely synonymous with “pleasant”—what we value may well go beyond
pleasure. (The fact that we value things needs not be reduced to the experience of liking things.) However, what we
value beyond pleasure remains a matter of speculation or theory. Moreover, we note that a variety of
things that may seem otherwise unrelated are correlated with pleasure—some more strongly than others. In other words, there
are many things the experience of which we like. For example: the admiration of others; sex; or
rock-paper-scissors. But, again, what they are is irrelevant in an inquiry on a priori
value —what gives us pleasure is a matter for empirical investigation.¶ Thus, we can see now that, in general,
something primitively valuable is attainable in living—that is, pleasure itself. And it seems
equally clear that we have a priori logical reason to pay attention to the world in any world
where pleasure exists. Moreover, we can now also articulate a foundation for a security
interest in our life: since the good of pleasure can be found in living (to the extent pleasure remains
attainable),[17] and only in living , therefore, a priori , life ought to be continuously (and
indefinitely) pursued at least for the sake of preserving the possibility of finding that
good.¶ However, this platitude about the value that can be found in life turns out to be, at this point, insufficient for our
purposes. It seems to amount to very little more than recognizing that our subjective desire for life in and of itself shows that
life has some objective value . For what difference is there between saying, “living is
unique in benefiting something I value (namely, my pleasure); therefore, I should desire to go
on living,” and saying, “I have a unique desire to go on living; therefore I should have a desire
to go on living,” whereas the latter proposition immediately seems senseless? In other words, “life gives me pleasure,” says
little more than, “I like life.” Thus, we seem to have arrived at the conclusion that the fact that we
already have some ( subjective) desire for life shows life to have some ( objective)
value . But, if that is the most we can say, then it seems our enterprise of justification was quite superficial, and the
subjective/objective distinction was useless—for all we have really done is highlight the correspondence between value and
desire. Perhaps, our inquiry should be a bit more complex.
2AC
Case
Hemp
Only legalization solves—creates a market incentive for the technology that makes
hemp profitable
IGA 2k, Illinois General Assembly Industrial Hemp Investigate and Advisory Task Force,
1/26/00, Industrial Hemp Investigative and Advisory Task Force Report,
http://www.votehemp.com/PDF/Illinois_Industrial_Hemp_Report.pdf
United States¶ Because the Controlled Substances Act classifies all cannabis, including industrial
hemp as marijuana, industrial hemp is a Schedule I controlled substance. Nonetheless the DEA does not
prohibit the¶ cultivation of marijuana for industrial hemp. However under the federal Controlled Substances Act, ¶ marijuana is a
Schedule I controlled substance. Any person who seeks to cultivate it for industrial hemp must first
register with the DEA as a Schedule I manufacturer. In determining whether to issue a¶ registration, the DEA
must consider a variety of factors, including whether the applicant has been¶ granted the appropriate state authority to cultivate and
what security procedures the applicant will use to¶ prevent the diversion of controlled substance material.
The security
precautions are extensive and expensive . This process requires that the state has regulations or statute
governing the growth of¶ cannabis before granting registration.¶ Colorado introduced legislation in 1995 to allow farmers to grow
industrial hemp, but did not pass. In¶ 1999 sixteen states introduced legislation for study, research or production of industrial hemp.
The¶ legislation passed Arkansas, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, North¶ Dakota and Virginia.
Legislation did not pass in Iowa, Maryland, New Hampshire, Oregon, Tennessee,¶ Vermont and Wisconsin. Sizable
constituencies in Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and¶ Pennsylvania have organized to study and
promote the hemp industry.¶ Economic Viability¶ Industrial hemp produces three main raw materials: bast fibers, hurds,
and seeds. The potential for using¶ these three ingredients in different manners makes industrial hemp a versatile product. Whether
the¶ cultivation of industrial hemp could lead to a thriving industry, create employment and profits has not¶ been adequately tested.
With only two years of commercial production in Canada, growing industrial¶ hemp has benefited a limited number of growers
there. The economic advantage for Illinois may lie in¶ its being among the first states to develop and capture the hemp market, but
the size of the risk is¶ difficult to judge.¶ At the annual Illinois Farm Bureau meeting in December of 1999, the Farm Bureau adopted
policy #66,¶ which states; Presently, the US imports all of its industrial hemp from Canada and thirty-two other¶
foreign nations. This
is a product that can be efficiently produced in country, providing not only an¶
alternative crop, but jobs for America workers . Therefore, we will aggressively pursue actions necessary¶ to
require the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to issue permits to US producers allowing the¶ production of industrial hemp.¶ To
date, legal constraints have prevented industrial hemp from being grown on a large scale in most¶
developed nations, so there has been incentive to develop new technology that would maximize
hemp's profitability. The bottom line of growing hemp is the cost of transportation to a processing center. Since¶ hemp is a
bulky crop, it is not cost-effective to ship hemp far from a processing plant. Jean Ma LaPrise¶ stated that a processing plant for seed
could be 150 miles away, but for processing hemp stalks it would¶ be feasible to have the plant 50 miles away. ln terms of community
economic development, hemp cultivation could lead to jobs in processing centers, as well as in small weaving factories,
seed crushing¶ facilities, and pulp mills.
Until legislative restrictions are removed from hemp, it is unlikely
that investments in improved technology will be made or that the required industrial
infrastructure will be developed.
Miliarization
No war impacts – warming discourse changes security discourse, not the other
way around
de Brito (PhD Student, Department of Politics & International Relations; University of Southampton, United Kingdom) 11
(Rafaela Rodrigues, A Climate for Conflict or Cooperation? Addressing the Securitisation of Climate Change, Paper prepared for the Third Global
International Studies Conference, 17-20 August 2011, University of Porto, Portugal)
Trombetta, however, argues that the logic of security itself can change as new principles, actors, capabilities and threats gain relevance and
different security discourses emerge (2011: 142). In line with this reasoning, Detraz and Betsill identify two different discourses of climate
change and security and argue that each produces distinct understandings and yields unique policy recommendations (2009: 305). According
to the authors, while the environmental conflict discourse is directly linked to traditional understandings of military and state security, the
environmental security discourse is more closely linked to notions of human security in
which the protection of human welfare is central (Detraz and Betsill, 2009: 306). According to this line of thought,
linking climate change and security does not inevitably imply linking it to military security.
In the EU, although climate change is increasingly being framed as a security issue by key actors,
both causes and effects are being dealt within the realm of normal environmental politics:
adaptation and mitigation measures, with a commitment to climate research and
international cooperation. What securitisation created was an increase sense of urgency attributed to climate change that is
speeding the response to the issue (Brito, 2010: 48). Furthermore, there are no predictable signs that military
responses to climate change will be formulated in a near future. This is not to say, however, that there is no
role envisaged for the military in climate-security. In fact they are seen as key players in climate related crisis management and disaster
response (High Representative for CFSP and the European Commission, 2008: 10). However, crisis response is but one component of EU
action on climate change which attempts to combine prevention, mitigation, adaptation, and response to crisis (Council of the European Union,
2009: 3). The analysis of climate change politics in the EU suggests that Maria Julia Trombetta is correct when she argues that the
securitisation of the environment is transforming existing security practices and
provisions
(Trombetta, 2008: 585). As Javier Solana argues, in the case of climate change, mitigation and adaptation should be seen
as preventive security policies (Solana, 2008).
Our rhetoric solves their generic security impact—it changes value structures that
are a prerequisite to the alt
Dyer 8 [Dr. H.C. Dyer, School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) @ University of Leeds, “The Moral Significance of
'Energy Security' and 'Climate Security” Paper presented at WISC 2nd Global International Studies Conference, ‘What keeps us
apart, what keeps us together? International Order, Justice,
Values’ http://www.wiscnetwork.org/ljubljana2008/getpaper.php?id=60]
There is already considerable concern and cooperative activity, but it must also cope with
predominately structural obstacles. Beyond the practical problem of coping with existing structures, or changing them, is the deeper problem of
assuming foundational points of reference for any given structural reality such that challenging or changing it is difficult or impossible. So there is an
intellectual, or attitudinal, hurdle to leap at the outset – we’d have to accept that some deeply held assumptions are simply not
viable (sustainable), and learn to let them go. I have suggested elsewhere that while ‘perspectives on politics in the absence of immutable external foundations may be quite
there is a great temptation in public discourses to deal with uncertainty by positing certainties,
and to play fundamentalist trump cards of different kinds’ (Dyer, 2008). Switching from one foundational reference to another
is not likely to work, and the anti-foundational perspective taken here suggests a pragmatic approach to
developing the most effective social practices as we learn them, and adjusting structures to
support them. An institutional context illustrates the discourse, in so far as ‘some controversial principles, such as whether to approach from an anthropocentric
widely accepted…
perspective or from a biocentric approach, or whether the viewpoint was from the individual or community, were the focus of considerable debate’. Not surprisingly, there is an
air of realism about the application of ethical principles on renewable energy: ‘although a normative declaration would be nice, it was not feasible in the current political
environment’ (UNESCO 2007; 7). The pragmatism is, nevertheless, appropriate since there is no progress to be made by assuming that an appreciation of the moral significance
of energy and climate security only bears on abstractions – the point is that the underlying values reflected in political agendas should be flushed out, and the most appropriate
values promoted and acted upon in a pragmatic fashion as interests. For example, it was noted that ‘barriers to renewable energy systems were institutional, political, technical
and financial’ and also that there is ‘potential conflict between bioregional, potentially unstable energy systems and countries’ desires for energy independence and self-reliance’;
this suggests the need for a ‘global eco-ethics’ (UNESCO 2007; 8). Pragmatism is inherent in thinking through the moral significance of such challenges: ‘From the ethical point
of view, nuclear power presented many problems at each point of the complex supply chain, including uranium mining, enrichment, and risk management in a functioning
plant. It was a highly centralized and state-controlled source of energy that did not promote participatory democracy’. It can also be seen that ‘nuclear and fossil-fuel based
power also triggered international conflicts’. By contrast, ‘renewable energies such as solar, wind, small hydro, biomass, geothermal and tidal energy are often decentralized and
The moral significance of energy security and
climate security dilemmas is that they cause us to see change as a challenge, rather than
impossible; a challenge to be met by reconsidering our value-orientations – which
changes everything. Elsewhere I’ve noted that goals which the state purports to serve (health, wealth, security) are seen differently in an environmental light, and
this could lead to substantial change in political practices (Dyer, 2007). Another pragmatist, John Dewey, ‘argued that the public
interest was to be continuously constructed through the process of free, cooperative inquiry into
can be used in remote areas without a solid energy supply system’ (UNESCO 2007; 8-9).
the shared good of the democratic community’ and Minteer suggests that this is a necessary approach ‘in
making connections between normative arguments and environmental policy discourse’ (Minteer,
2005). This reflects Hayward’s argument that environmental values are supported by enlightened human interests, and furthermore this link must exist to promote ecological
goods, and that consequently there are serious implications in fully integrating environmental issues into our disciplinary concerns (Hayward, 1998). I’ve argued before that
environmental politics dislodges conventional understandings of moral and political agency, and in ‘this wider socio-political-economic context, ecological significance may be
the determining factor in the end’ (Dyer, 2007). Hargrove (1989) makes an argument for anthropocentric, aesthetic sources of modern environmental concern by identifying
attitudes that constrained (‘idealism’, ‘property rights’) and supported (scientific and aesthetic ideals) our environmental perspectives. If this argument doesn’t stretch us much
beyond ourselves, there is no reason these anthropocentric orientations couldn’t be built upon as a foundation for more specifically ecocentric perspectives. The key here is to
identify the underlying ‘security’ assumptions which thwart efforts to cope with energy and climate issues coherently and effectively, and to advocate those assumptions that
serve genuine long-term human security interests (inevitably, in an ecological context). In this way can we take stock of the existing structures that constrain and diminish
human agency – while conceiving of those that would liberate and secure it in sustainable ways. As the reality of the situation slowly dawns on us, various moral, political,
economic and social actors are beginning to consider and test new strategies for coping – the real question is whether they are just playing to beat the clock, or if they’ve stopped
long enough to reconsider the rules and purposes of the strategic context in which they act. 'Security' as cause and effect of a moral turn Security is central to understandings of
the responsibilities of states, even definitional in their self-conception as defenders of the nation, with moral obligations to their own population which include defending them
from external threats of all kinds (even if threats to nationals commonly emanate from their own state, per Booth’s ‘protection racket’, 1995). Security is usually the first concern
of individuals as well, even extending to protective self-sacrifice (if sometimes greed or pleasure usurps this priority). The boundaries of concern and felt responsibility for
security are nevertheless potentially flexible, and moral obligations may vary over time and space (who’s included, who’s not; when, where). The rationale for those obligations
may now be extending over wider ranges of time and space, especially within an ecological perspective on how ‘security’ might be obtained. In this way, alertness to the security
implications of climate and energy drives moral development, while at the same time a developed sense of moral obligation prompts a recasting of these issues in more urgent
security terms. The insecurity of the status quo with respect to both energy and climate is enough to warrant serious consideration of how relative security might be obtained,
and yet the most obvious dimension of insecurity is the collective failure to plan and act for the inevitable change that will be forced upon us, sooner or later. At every periodic
assessment it seems sooner, rather than later, as IPCC and other government reports confirm our worst fears and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sets the doomsday clock
ever nearer to midnight. On the assumption that justice and equity will underwrite the feasibility of any international climate strategies, Grasso (2007) attempts to ‘identify a
pluralistic normative ethical framework for climate mitigation and adaptation’ which includes ‘the criterion of lack of human security’ as regards the allocation of adaptation
The pursuit of any meaningful energy and climate security policy will require anticipation of future
scenarios. In offering a convincing perspective on ‘the age of petroleum’ as merely a recent blip
in the long run of human energy supply (until the late 19 century provided by biomass and animate labour, and from the 21 century by
renewables) the Nuclear Energy Agency argues that the ‘critical path structure’ should include ‘concurrent
risk, economic, and environmental impact analyses… for all technologies and proposed actions for the transition to a post-petroleum
resources.
post-carbon
th
st
economy’ (Nuclear Energy Agency, 2004; 37). While nuclear power remains under consideration, and hydrogen technology emerges as a potential portable fuel (though
alternatives to fossil fuels clearly exist
electricity intensive in production), there are many more positive solutions to the challenge. The
, though it
‘will take a new industrial revolution’ (Scheer, 2002) or an ‘energy revolution’ (Geller, 2002). A wide range of innovations include ‘a fuel cell battery that runs on virtually any
sugar source’ (African Technology Development Forum 27 March 2007). The Renewables 2007 Global Status Report (REN21) offers evidence of ‘the undeterred growth of
electricity, heat, and fuel production capacities from renewable energy sources, including solar PV, wind power, solar hot water/heating, biofuels, hydropower, and geothermal’.
Heinberg notes that the 21st century ushered in an era of declines, in a number of crucial parameters: Global oil, natural gas and coal extraction; Yearly grain harvests; Climate
we must begin
now to make radical changes to our attitudes, behaviors and expectations’ – h e seeks to address ‘the cultural,
psychological and practical changes we will have to make as nature rapidly dictates our new limits’ (Heinberg, 2007). Thus moral issues arise as the idea of a post-petroleum
stability; Population; Economic growth; Fresh water; Minerals and ores, such as copper and platinum. ‘To adapt to this profoundly different world,
economy gains new currency as a security issue. Decades ago, conventional intergovernmental bureaucracies (e.g. FAO, 1982, ‘Planning for the post-petroleum economy’) were
addressing what now seems a novel and urgent issue, perhaps because the sense of urgency or emergency has re-emerged in the confluence of energy and climate concerns. Both
producers and consumers of energy have already taken some steps to reflect concern with energy and climate insecurity, by experimenting with different practices (recycling,
improving efficiency, slowly introducing new technologies, attempting to manage the energy situation collectively, etc), and yet a remaining element of denial is reflected in a
slow pace of change limited to the margins rather than the centre of planning. It seems fairly clear that maintaining current assumptions about economic growth while
addressing climate change will at the very least require prompt application of new technologies and a regulatory
and fiscal environment to support them (Sachs, J., 2008). This implies a radical shift of practices, and it remains to be seen
whether currently familiar assumptions about economic growth will survive. Dabelko notes the considerable
history of environmental security thinking, which figured in the landmark Brundtland Report (‘Our Common Future’, 1987) twenty years ago, including extensive discussions of
energy, food security, and sustainable development in general (Dabelko, 2008). However, the Brundtland account of environmental security (and sustainable development) may
The present
challenges require a more holistic 'ecological security' perspective for achieving climate security and
be too conventional and insufficiently radical for current purposes, as the contemporaneous critiques and events of the intervening decades suggest.
energy security in a coordinated manner, reflecting an evolving morality-security relationship. Pirages and De Geest offer an ‘eco-evolutionary’ approach to environmental
security, ‘to anticipate and analyze emerging demographic, ecological and technological discontinuities and dilemmas associated with rapid globalization’ (Pirages and De Geest,
ecological security addresses
local environment/society relations rather than state-centric concerns with environmental
threats – though she does argue that ecological security is still focussed on the issue of violence and conflict as security references, rather than inequality per se; an issue
2003), while Kütting highlights the distinctions between environmental security and ecological security, suggesting that
that development of the concept is addressing. She also notes Peluso and Watt’s (2001) political ecology critique of the concept of environmental security: ‘[their] ecological
security approach combines structural political economy approaches with cultural and ecological studies’ (Kütting, 2007; 52-53). Among the conclusions Kütting arrives at is
inclusiveness of ‘ecological security’ which gives it great qualitative and normative analytical power can also diffuse
the meaning and reference of the concept. A broad concept, to be sure, and yet the breadth of ‘ecological security’ may
provide the framework for research into narrower policy topics which is otherwise thrown into a
competitive relationship. For each society, economy, or country, or collective actor (such as the EU), competing political and
economic demands may undermine the attempt to address climate and energy security priorities
in a coordinated, consistent, and complementary manner. It is already clear that energy and climate create a nexus that invokes
that the breadth and
long-term security concerns for major actors (Hart, 2007), but not so clear that they have been understood as interconnected strategic goals in a moral context.
Achieving such strategic goals rests heavily on global cooperation and the success of any such
endeavours would seem to rest in having a commonly accepted framework – such as ecological
security – to underwrite agreement in principle and policy. Sayre identifies as the critical factor our choice of values: ‘we have a clear and urgent
need to set aside the values of consumerism and to replace them with other values …’ (Sayre, 2007; Chapter 18). It is this underlying set of values that has not yet been seriously
addressed in energy and climate security discussions, not least because it presents profound challenges to almost everything we currently do, and the way we do it. To meet such
challenges
it will be necessary to internalize an ecological understanding of human security in our
moral, political, economic, and social systems and structures. Such an ecological understanding would encompass the widest
scope of moral community. The emergence of ‘energy security’ and ‘climate security’ reflects an increased sense of urgency
around these issues at the heart of state interests and the global political economy, and may yet represent the tipping point at which the
remnants of denial and resistance are abandoned in favour of structural adjustments of the ecological kind. While practical issues (such
as developing alternative portable fuels) may carry moral implications, the real normative weight of pursuing energy and climate
security arises from the wider structural implications of securing a sustainable future. Viewing such
developments as a moral turn allows us to appreciate that a sense of insecurity can cause us to question our
assumptions and adjust our values, and that changing values can underwrite our efforts to
change everything else – including the socio-political-economic structures that influence our
practices. Conclusions: more than instrumental adjustment These recent climate and energy security terms reflect more than
mere instrumental adjustment to practical challenges, within the framework of existing moral conceptions and commitments; that is,
within the framework of the existing international system. Our attention should be turned to the
systemic and structural implications of this shifting discourse, as it may reflect substantial underlying change. Furthermore, any
opportunity to build on momentum or dynamics that would address the fundamental issues of energy
and climate should be identified and capitalised on – while mere instrumental short-term adjustments may advantage some actors, it
is of course necessary to go far beyond such superficial instrumentality and to appreciate the deeper significance of the energy-climate scenario. In viewing shifts
in the security discourse as morally significant, we are better able to appreciate the structural
consequences. In light of these evolving security concepts we should attempt the further development of an 'ecological security' concept as a holistic perspective of
some practical and normative significance. This should be informed by an anti-foundational interpretation of the discourses in which these security terms are deployed, with no
this is new territory, which demands openmindedness. As Cerny (1990) concluded in respect of structure and agency, our inherited ideas are imperfect guides to the
future, and a critical report on biofuels (Santa Barbara, 2007) concludes that energy security and climate change demand a new paradigm and cites Einstein: ‘We can’t
fixed assumptions about moral, political, economic or social points of reference –
solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’. Oversimplification of the issues under convenient ‘security’ labels is risky – in doing this
a moral perspective on security could lead
to even more extraordinary measures: global cooperation in the long-term pursuit of human
interest, bringing urgency to what is obviously important. Thus some conformity around
ecological values may yet help us cope with the challenges of energy and climate security.
states signal high priority ‘national interests’ and the threat of extraordinary measures. However,
Apoc good
Our rhetoric is necessary to get political attention
POIRIER 2 Professor of Law - Seton Hall 2002 Case Western University Law Review 53 409
In identifying the Litany and giving it such a prominent place in his argument, Lomborg basically accuses environmentalists of
using the rhetoric of catastrophe illicitly. One obvious response is that the rhetoric of
catastrophe is shared by all parties to the debate. In an arena crowded with issues, claims of
impending disaster may be an effective way of getting political attention. n80 More novel is an
argument, which I develop primarily from the writings of German sociologist Ulrich Beck, that political debate about risk necessarily
takes the shape that Lomborg accuses environmentalists of foisting on the public. If Beck is right
about the politics of fear and the inevitability of expert and media intermediaries who interpret risk to the
masses, then Lomborg's accusations lose much of their force. The muddle of environmental and antienvironmental rhetoric is just another inevitable part of the complexity of environmental policy.
Lomborg's expectation that it would be otherwise is at best a naive outlook fueled by his simplistic and
idealized view of the role of science in environmental policymaking. I argued in Part II.A.1. above that debates
over science policy will tend to become polarized because of the large interests at stake. It might seem
that exaggerated reliance on potential catastrophic outcomes is the province of environmentalists. Those opposed to the environmentalists' dire predictions, it might seem, can
hardly be put in the catastrophe camp. But there are other kinds of arguments from catastrophe. I will name two. One is the "overregulation is underregulation" argument.
Lomborg himself provides a fine example. He stresses the plight of two billion people without clean water or sanitation, who will not be rescued if we listen to the foolish fears of
the Litany. This is not an argument from ecological collapse, but it is surely an argument from catastrophe, social catastrophe through misallocation [*4281 of resources. n81 The
Regulate what property owners can do with their
own property, and we face the destruction of civil society, the end of investment, the loss of personal freedom, and so
on. In discussing environmental rhetoric, I recently constructed an opposition of the environmental jeremiad and the property rights encomium. n82 But one must recognize
that there is also a standard property rights jeremiad_ »
other typical argument from catastrophe for the right is the property rights argument.
K
2AC K
Death is not a social phenomenon – it is strictly a biological one that represents
the end of all biological functions
Bernat 9 (James – Neurology Department, M.D., Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center,
“Contemporary controversies in the definition of death”, 2009, Progress in Brain Research
Volume 177, 2009, Pages 21–31, ScienceDirect)
The definition and criterion of death To better understand the need to analyze the definition and criterion of death
before physicians can design tests to determine death, let us consider the findings in a typical case of a brain-dead patient. A 44-year-old man suffered a
spontaneous massive subarachnoid hemorrhage from a ruptured cerebral aneurysm. His intracranial pressure exceeded systolic blood pressure for over
12 h. Neurological examination showed a complete absence of all clinical brain functions. He had apnea, absence of all brain stem reflexes, and
complete unresponsiveness to any stimuli. He had diabetes insipidus and profound systemic hypotension requiring vasopressor drugs to maintain his
blood pressure. Brain MRI showed marked cerebral edema with bilateral uncal herniation. Intracranial blood flow was entirely absent by intravenous
radionuclide angiography. While on the ventilator, his heart continued to beat, blood continued to perfuse visceral organs (but not his brain), his
kidneys made urine, and his gastrointestinal tract absorbed nutrients provided medically through a nasogastric tube. Was he alive or dead? He had
some findings traditionally present in dead patients: he was apneic, motionless, utterly unresponsive, had no pupillary reflexes to light, and had no
neuroendocrine homeostatic control mechanisms. But he also had some findings seen in living patients: he had heartbeat and visceral organ circulation
and functioning. But a physician's determination of whether he should be considered as alive or dead cannot be made until there is conceptual
agreement on what it means to be dead when technology successfully supports some of his vital subsystems. In the pretechnological era, when one
system vital to life stopped (heartbeat/circulation, respiration, or brain functions) the others stopped within minutes, so we did not have to address the
question of whether a person was dead when only brain functions stopped. Now, technology has created cases in which brain functions can cease
irreversibly but circulation and respiration can be mechanically supported. Now, we
must analyze the nature of death to
resolve the ambiguity of whether the “brain dead” person described in this case is truly dead. In the earliest description of brain-dead
patients, Mollaret and Goulon (1959) intuited that they were actually dead, claiming that they were in a state beyond coma (le coma dépassé). In the
classic Harvard Medical School Ad Hoc Committee report that publicized the concept and established the term “brain death” (1968), the authors
asserted that the patients were dead and therefore represented suitable organ donors. The first rigorous conceptual arguments showing why brain-dead
patients should be considered dead were not offered until a decade later (Korein, 1978; Capron and Kass, 1978) and were refined and expanded further
over the next several years ( Bernat, Culver, & Gert (1981) and Bernat, Culver, & Gert (1982); President's Commission, 1981). Jurisdictions within the
United States began to incorporate brain death determination into death statutes in 1970 (Curran, 1971), even before a firm philosophical foundation
justified doing so. The analyses of death that have gained the greatest acceptance by other scholars begin conceptually with the meaning of death and
progress to tangible and measurable criteria. Korein (1978) and Capron and Kass (1978) pointed out that agreement on a concept of death must precede
the development of tests to determine it. My colleagues, Charles Culver and Bernard Gert, and I further developed their idea of hierarchies of analysis
by fashioning a rigorous sequential analysis that incorporated the paradigm, definition, criterion, and tests of death (Bernat, Culver, & Gert (1981) and
Bernat, Culver, & Gert (1982)). I refined this analysis in subsequent articles that I summarize here (Bernat (1998), Bernat (2002) and Bernat (2006a)).
This analysis is frequently regarded as the standard defense that brain death represents human death, even among those who disagree with it
(Shewmon, 2009). The
first stage of analysis is to state and defend the preconditions of the argument
or “paradigm” of death: that set of assumptions that frame the analysis by clarifying the goal and
boundaries of the analysis. Agreement on these conditions is a prerequisite for further
discussion. Much of the disagreement by other scholars with this account results from failure to accept one or more of the seven conditions of the
paradigm. 1. The word “death” is a nontechnical word that we use correctly in ordinary
conversation to refer to the cessation of life of a human being. The goal in an analysis should not be
to redefine “death” by contriving a new or different meaning but to make explicit the
implicit meaning of death that we all accept in our usage of “death” that has been made ambiguous by advances in life-support
technology. 2. Death is a biological phenomenon. We all agree that life is a biological
phenomenon; thus its cessation also is fundamentally biological. Death is an immutable and
objective biological fact and is not a social contrivance. The focus of analyzing the definition and criterion of death is the
ontology of death and not its normative aspects. 3. We restrict the analysis to the death of higher vertebrate species for whom death is univocal. We
refer to the same phenomenon of “death” when we say our cousin died as we do when we say our dog died. 4. “Death”
should be applied
directly and categorically only to organisms. All living organisms must die and only living
organisms can die. When we say “a person died,” we refer to the death of the living organism that embodied the person, not that their
organism continues to live but has ceased to have the attributes of personhood. 5 . A higher organism can reside in only one of
two states, alive or dead: no organism can be in both states simultaneously or in neither. 6. Death
is most accurately represented as an event and not a process. If there are only two mutually exclusive underlying
states of an organism (alive and dead), the transition from one state to the other, at least in theory, must be sudden and discontinuous, because there is
no intervening state. However, because of technical limitations, the event of death may be determinable only in retrospect. Death is conceptualized
Death is irreversible . If
the event of death were reversible it would not be death but rather incipient dying that was
interrupted and reversed. A definition of death must reflect the concept that something fundamental and essential about the organism
most accurately as the event separating the true biological processes of dying and bodily disintegration. 7.
has changed irreversibly. We do not require the cessation of function of every cell, tissue, or organ to intuit death. The life and growth of some of a
formerly living person's cells in a cell culture dish does not imply that she remains alive although part of her undoubtedly does. Similarly, the
functioning of a single organ outside the body, such as a donated kidney that is being mechanically perfused and oxygenated awaiting transplantation,
is not indicative of life of the organism. Respiration and circulation that are supported technologically after the brain has been destroyed allow many
organs to continue functioning despite the loss of the life force driving them as well as the cessation of the overall interrelatedness and unity of the
body. Such a preparation of mechanically functioning but nonintegrated bodily subsystems constitutes life of part of the organism but does not
represent life of the overall organism any more than does the isolated functioning of its individual cells, tissue, or organs. An
adequate
definition of death is the cessation of the critical functions of the organism as a
whole . The biologist Jacques Loeb (1916) explained the concept of the organism as a whole. This concept does not refer to the whole organism
(the sum of its parts) but to the integrated functioning and interrelatedness of its parts that create the unity of the organism. Contemporary
biophilosophers use the mechanism of emergent functions to explain this concept more precisely (Mahner and Bunge, 1997). An emergent function is a
property of a whole that is not possessed by any of its component parts, and that cannot be reduced to one or more of its component parts. A function is
called an emergent function because it emerges spontaneously from the sum of its parts given the condition that the necessary parts (subsystems) are in
place and functioning normally. The ineffable phenomenon of human consciousness is the most exquisite example of an emergent function. The
organism as a whole is the set of critical emergent functions of the organism. The irreversible loss of the organism's critical emergent functions
produces loss of the functioning of the organism as a whole and represents the death of the organism. The organism's individual subsystems that
remain functioning as a result of mechanical support do not represent life of the organism because their interrelatedness, wholeness, and unity have
ceased forever.
The cessation of the organism as a whole is the most precise conceptualization of
death in our technological era in which physicians are capable of providing visceral organ support, transplantation, and advanced critical care. The
criterion of death best satisfying this definition is the irreversible cessation of all clinical brain functions. This criterion is known as the “whole-brain”
criterion of death because it requires cessation of all clinically measurable brain functions including those executed by the brain stem, diencephalon,
thalamus, and cerebral hemispheres. The functions generated and organized within these structures are necessary and sufficient for the critical
emergent functions of the organism and thus are necessary and sufficient for the organism as a whole. Death
of the organism requires
their irreversible cessation. In past analyses of the unity and interrelatedness of the subsystems of the organism, my colleagues and I
stressed that functions of the whole brain provided the integration of the parts that created the whole. Subsequently, critics pointed out that the brain
was not the only organ responsible for integration, and that structures such as the spinal cord contributed significantly to the organism's integration of
its parts into a whole (Shewmon, 2004). In their recent report, the President's Council on Bioethics (2009) accepted the coherence of the formulation of
whole brain death but concluded that Shewmon's integration criticism was justified. As a result, they proposed an alternative explanation of why brain
death satisfies the definition of death as the loss of the organism as a whole. They concluded that the cessation of clinical brain functions caused “the
inability of the organism to conduct its self-preserving work.” This conceptualization emphasized the cessation of the organism's principal functions
that made it an organism. Shewmon recently analyzed the President's Council's alternative justification and found it wanting (Shewmon, 2009).
Physicians have devised tests to show that the criterion of death has been fulfilled. Two sets of tests for death reflect the two basic clinical
circumstances: resuscitation or no resuscitation. If positive-pressure ventilation is not used or planned, physicians can use the permanent cessation of
circulation and respiration to declare death because the brain will be destroyed by ischemic infarction within a sort time once its circulation has ceased.
If positive-pressure ventilation is being used, physicians must directly measure brain functions to assess death (“brain death”). Bedside clinical and
laboratory tests to determine brain death have been standardized and subjected to evidence-based analysis. Their description is clinically crucial but is
beyond the scope of this article. These tests and procedures have been critically reviewed (Wijdicks, 2001; Bernat, 2009). Alternative formulations of
death Critics of either the whole-brain criterion of death or of all brain-based concepts of death have offered alternative analyses.
The earliest criticism accepted the theory of brain death but argued that criterion of death should not be cessation of all clinical functions of the entire
brain but only those of the cerebral hemispheres. This argument holds that the cerebrum imparts the characteristics that distinguish humans from
other species and the more primitive brain structures that are shared with other species are not relevant. Robert Veatch claimed that death should be
defined uniquely for human beings as “the irreversible loss of that which is considered to be essentially significant to the nature of man.” He rejected
the idea that death should be related to an organism's loss of the capacity to integrate bodily function” because “man is, after all, something more than a
sophisticated computer” (Veatch (1975) and Veatch (1993)). A reasonable application of the higher brain formulation would define as dead patients
who had irreversibly lost consciousness such as those in a vegetative state. Several other scholars concurred with this concept that became known as the
higher brain formulation of death (Gervais, 1986). The higher brain formulation is an inadequate construct of death because it violates the first
principle of the paradigm by not attempting to make explicit the ordinary concept of death. Instead, it redefines death by declaring as dead braindamaged patients who are universally regarded as alive. A clear example of a patient satisfying the higher brain formulation would be a patient in an
irreversible vegetative state. Despite loss of awareness and many features of personhood, these patients are regarded as alive throughout the world
(Bernat, 2006b). Because many people would prefer to die if they were ever in such a state, the proper place of the higher brain formulation is in
determining grounds to permit cessation of life-sustaining therapy. Another critique of the criterion of whole-brain death is the British formulation of
brain stem death. Under the intellectual leadership of Christopher Pallis, the practice of brain stem death in the United Kingdom requires the cessation
of only brain stem functions (Pallis, 1995). In these cases, examiners cannot test cerebral hemispheric function and cannot use confirmatory tests
showing cessation of intracranial blood flow (Kosteljanetz et al., 1988). This circumstance creates the possibility of retained awareness despite other
evidence of brain stem failure (Ferbert et al., 1988). This serious flaw is uncompensated for by any unique benefit of the brain stem formulation. Yet,
because most whole-brain functions can be shown to be absent when all brain stem functions are absent, the whole-brain and brain stem formulations
usually yield the same results. The sole exception is the case of a primary brain stem catastrophe in which the patient could be declared dead in the
brain stem formulation but not in the higher brain formulation. Several
scholars have argued that no single criterion of
death can be determined because death is not a discrete event but rather is an ineluctable
process within which it is arbitrary to stipulate the moment that death has occurred. Linda Emanuel (1995) made this argument and offered a
scenario of a patient gradually dying over many months from progressive multi-organ failure. Although this claim appears
plausible in some cases of gradual dying, it errs by confusing the state of an underlying organism
with our technical ability to determine that state. Simply because we may not always be able to
detect the moment the organism changes from alive to dead, or we may be able to detect the transition only in
retrospect — as in a brain death determination — does not necessarily mean that the point of death does not exist
or is arbitrary. Death is not a process but is the event separating the process of dying from the process of bodily disintegration.
Other scholars argue that alive and dead are not always distinctly separable states and that some organisms (such as brain-dead patients) can reside in
an in-between state that is neither alive nor dead but has elements of both. Halevy and Brody (1993) made this argument employing the mathematical
theory of fuzzy sets. They claimed that physical or biological phenomena do not always divide themselves neatly into sets and their complements. They
asserted that the event of death is such an example and therefore it is impossible to identify a unitary criterion of death. However, this claim confuses
our ability to identify an organism's biological state and the nature of that underlying state. The paradigm made clear that life and death are the only
two underlying states of an organism and there can be no in-between state because the transition from one state to the other must be sudden and
discontinuous. Using the terminology of fuzzy set theory, it is most accurate biologically to view alive and dead as mutually exclusive (nonoverlapping)
and jointly exhaustive (no other) sets thereby permitting a unitary criterion of death. Some scholars claim that death is not an immutable biological
event but is a social contrivance that varies among societies and cultures (Miles, 1999). The
most libertarian among them go so
far as to claim that because death is a socially determined event, individuals in a free society should be permitted to
stipulate their own criterion of death based on their personal values (Veatch, 1999). These claims err in rejecting the
paradigm requirement that death
(like life)
is fundamentally a biological, not a
social, phenomenon . We all agree that customs surrounding death and dying have
important and cherished social, legal, religious, and cultural aspects, which vary among societies. But Veatch and
Miles err by failing to restrict their philosophical consideration to the ontogeny of death rather than to its normative issues. A few
philosophers argue that there are two kinds of death: death of the human organism and death of
the person (McMahan, 1995; Lizza, 2005). These scholars claim that they are not using “person”
metaphorically and assert that the death of a person is separate from that of the death of the
human organism embodying the person. This nonbiological dichotomy and dualism violates
the paradigm requirement that death is fundamentally a biological phenomenon
that refers to the demise of the human organism that embodied a person.
Life is a pre-requisite to death’s symbolic value---fearing death doesn’t preclude
recognizing life’s finitude and its inevitability and “running away from death” is
good!
Cara Kalnow 9, A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of MPhil at the University of St. Andrews
“WHY DEATH CAN BE BAD AND IMMORTALITY IS WORSE”, https://research-repository.standrews.ac.uk/bitstream/10023/724/3/Cara%20Kalnow%20MPhil%20thesis.PDF
(PA) also provided us with good reason to reject the Epicurean claim that the finitude of life cannot be bad for us. With (PA), we saw that our lives could
accumulate value through the satisfaction of our desires beyond the boundaries of the natural
termination of life. But Chapter Four determined that the finitude of life is a necessary condition for the value of
life as such and that many of our human values rely on the finite temporal structure of life. I therefore
argued that an indefinite life cannot present a desirable alternative to our finite life, because life as such would not be recognized as valuable. In this chapter, I have argued
that
the finitude of life is instrumentally good as it provides the recognition that life itself is
valuable . Although I ultimately agree with the Epicureans that the finitude of life cannot be an evil, this
conclusion was not reached from the Epicurean arguments against the badness of death, and I
maintain that (HA) and (EA) are insufficient to justify changing our attitudes towards our future deaths and the finitude of life. Nonetheless, the instrumental good of the
finitude of life that we arrived at through the consideration of immortality should make us realize that the finitude of life cannot be an evil; it is a necessary condition for
the recognition that life as such is valuable.¶ Although my arguments pertaining to the nature of death and its moral implications have yielded several of the Epicurean
my position still negotiates a middle ground between the Epicureans and Williams, as
(PA) accounts for the intuition that it is rational to fear death and regard it as an evil to be avoided .
conclusions,
I have therefore reached three of the Epicurean conclusions pertaining to the moral worth of the nature of death: (1) that the state of being dead is nothing to us, (2) death
we can rationally fear
our future deaths, as categorical desires provide a disutility by which the prospect of death is
rationally held as an evil to be avoided. Finally, I also claimed against the Epicureans, that the prospect of death can rationally be regarded
as morally good for one if one no longer desires to continue living.¶ 5.3 Conclusion¶ I began this thesis with the suggestion that in part, the Epicureans were
right: death—when it occurs—is nothing to us. I went on to defend the Epicurean position against the objections raised by the
simpliciter is nothing to us, and (3) the finitude of life is a matter for contentment. But against the Epicureans, I have argued that
deprivation theorists and Williams. I argued that the state of being dead, and death simpliciter, cannot be an evil of deprivation or prevention for the person who dies
it is rational to
fear death and to regard death as an evil to be avoided, not because death simpliciter is bad, but rather because the
prospect of our deaths may be presented to us as bad for us if our deaths would prevent the
satisfaction of our categorical desires. Though we have good reasons to rationally regard the
prospect of our own death as an evil for us, the fact that life is finite cannot be an evil and is
in fact instrumentally good, because it takes the threat of losing life to recognize that life
because (once dead), the person—and the grounds for any misfortune—cease to exist. I accounted for the anti-Epicurean intuition 115 that
as such is valuable . In this chapter, I concluded that even though death cannot be of any moral worth for
us once it occurs, we can attach two distinct values to death while we are alive : we can
attach a value of disutility (or utility) to the prospect of our own individual deaths, and we must
attach an instrumentally good value to the fact of death as such. How to decide on the
balance of those values is a matter for psychological judgment.
Their refusal to address possible catastrophes in the world is more of an attempt
of escaping from realities --- it’s more productive to work to remove the causes of
fear and suffering
Geshe Kelsang Gyatso 3, Internationally renowned teacher and author of 19 books on
spirituality, Tharpa Publications, http://www.tharpa.com/uk/background/dealing-withfear.htm
According to Buddhism, there is unhealthy fear and healthy fear. For example, when we are afraid of
something that cannot actually harm us - such as spiders - or something we can do nothing to avoid such as old age or being struck down with smallpox or being run over by a truck - then our fear is unhealthy, for it serves only to
make us unhappy and paralyze our will. On the other hand, when someone gives up smoking because they
are afraid of developing lung cancer, this is a healthy fear because the danger is real and there
are constructive steps they can take to avoid it. IT CONTINUES However, right now we need the healthy
fear that arises from taking stock of our present situation so that we can resolve to do
something about it. For example, there is no point in a smoker being scared of dying of lung cancer unless there is something that he or
she can or will do about it, i.e. stop smoking. If a smoker has a sufficient fear of dying of lung cancer, he or
she will take steps to kick the habit. If he [or she] prefers to ignore the danger of lung cancer, he [or she] will continue to create
the causes of future suffering, living in denial and effectively giving up control. Just as a smoker is vulnerable to lung cancer due to cigarettes, it is
true that at
the moment we are vulnerable to danger and harm, we are vulnerable to ageing, sickness, and eventually
We are
vulnerable to all the mental and physical pain that arises from an uncontrolled mind-such as the pains that come from the delusions of
attachment, anger, and ignorance. We can choose to live in denial of this and thereby give up what
death, all due to our being trapped in samsara — the state of uncontrolled existence that is a reflection of our own uncontrolled minds.
control we have , or we can choose to recognize this vulnerability, recognize that we are in
danger, and then find a way to avert the danger by removing the actual causes of all fear (the
equivalent of the cigarettes) - the delusions and negative, unskillful actions motivated by those delusions. In this way we gain
control, and if we are in control we have no cause for fear. A balanced fear of our delusions
and the suffering to which they inevitably give rise is therefore healthy because it serves to
motivate constructive action to avoid a real danger. We only need fear as an impetus until we have removed the causes
of our vulnerability through finding spiritual, inner refuge and gradually training the mind.
Death ends our ability to actively seek out joy and suffering---symbolic encounters
via the communicative realm of debate solve
Brandon Turner 6, U Wisconsin-Madison Dept of Pol Sci, The Thrill of Victory, the Agony of
Defeat: The Nietzschean Vision of Contest,
www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2006%20Papers/Brandon%20Turner.pdf
The third benefit derived from competing is the experience of an illusory and aesthetic form of pain—or, more plainly, the agon provides the
opportunity to lose. Nietzsche understood suffering and destruction as constitutive of life and thus experiences to be
valued, in contrast to those values he believed to be symptomatic of the modern age, the desire for material and spiritual comfort and an aversion to
pain of any kind. “Today,” he writes in describing the ancient festivals of punishment in The Genealogy of Morals, “when suffering is always brought
forward as the principal argument against existence, as the worst question mark, one does well to recall the ages in which the opposite opinion
prevailed because men were unwell to refrain from making suffer and saw in it an enchantment of the first order, a genuine seduction to life.”49
Suffering is, above all, common; it is only made unbearable when it exists unjustified. Thus “what really arouses indignation against suffering is not
suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering,” and humanity is forced to invent justifications for the pain felt by all (e.g. God, sin).50 The
agon was invented, on the one hand, to reduce suffering by channeling the will to power
into the arena; but on the other hand, the agon enables the aestheticization of suffering. In
competing, the combatant makes a spectacle of striving , and it is a spectacle whether he wins or loses. One loses
in the agon on one’s own terms and in a way that befits the artist. One dies the tragic death in the arena, losing and
suffering in front of others and in front of one’s opponent. In defeat, the combatant feels the
suffering of submission and becomes a slave to the victor – but only in the arena! The agon makes possible the illusory
defeat. ¶ The
defeat is illusory because no one has to die . Aesthetic defeat orients the
contestant towards death
in the sense that the vanquished experiences a real defeat unique to her.51 It should be clear by this point
that to
construct a contest that results in the death of a contestant is to miss the point of the
agon almost entirely. Recall that the Greek answer to the Silenusian challenge—why life?—was, essentially, more life. The agon, like the
aesthetic, is a celebration of life understood comprehensively. To actively seek out both joy and suffering is to
immerse oneself willingly and completely in the very fabric of existence.52 Death , like the
ostracized genius,
ends the agon and the benefits derived therein.
Nietzsche’s treatment of the institution of
dueling is instructive, for in it he seeks “a code of honour which admits blood in place of death, so that the heart is lightened after a duel fought
according to rules, [and this would be] a great blessing, since otherwise, a great many human lives would be placed in danger.”53 Like doctors
practicing the art of bloodletting, contestants inflict wounds and spill blood—whether it be real or metaphorical. Just as killing one’s patient due to
bloodletting constitutes an entirely unsuccessful practice, so the
contestant does not wound to kill. What is desired is
the regenerative effect of wounding. Thus Nietzsche praises war, like tragedy, for “its curative power lies even in the wounds one
receives…increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus (The spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding).”54
1AR
AT: Edelman
Edelman has it entirely backwards. Queerness requires futurity. Their framework
closes off the possibility of altering the present, thereby crushing social change
and naturalizing hetero-normativity
Muñoz 6
José Esteban, Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU, PMLA, v121, n3, May, p. 825-826
I have chosen to counter polemics that argue for antirelationality by insisting on the essential
need for an understanding of queerness as collectivity. At the 2005 MLA panel, in recent
essays, and in my forthcoming book Cruising Utopia, I respond to the assertion that there is
no future for the queer by arguing that queerness is primarily about futurity.
Queerness is always on the horizon. Indeed, for queerness to have any value whatsoever, it
must be considered visible only on the horizon. My argument is therefore interested in
critiquing the ontological certitude that I understand to accompany the politics of presentist
and pragmatic contemporary gay identity. This certitude is often represented through a
narration of disappearance and negativity that boils down to another game of fort-da. My
conference paper and the forthcoming book it is culled from have found much propulsion in
the work of Ernst Bloch and other Marxist thinkers who did not dismiss utopia. Bloch found
strident grounds for a critique of a totalizing and naturalizing idea of the present in his
concept of the no-longer-conscious. A turn to the no-longer-conscious enabled a critical
hermeneutics attuned to comprehending the not yet here. This temporal calculus deployed
the past and the future as armaments to combat the devastating logic of the here and now, in
which nothing exists outside the current moment and which naturalizes cultural logics
like capitalism and heteronormativity. Concomitantly, Bloch has also sharpened our
critical imagination’s emphasis on what he famously called “a principle of hope.” Hope is an
easy target for antiutopians. But while antiutopians might understand themselves as critical
in the rejection of hope, they would, in the rush to denounce it, miss the point that hope is
spawned of a critical investment in utopia that is nothing like naive but, instead, profoundly
resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a broken-down present. My turn to Bloch, hope, and utopia challenges theoretical insights that have been stunted by the lull of presentness and by various romances of
negativity and that have thus become routine and resoundingly anticritical.
AT: Berlant
Their berlant K is totally wrong---stories of pain combined with political action
avoid vampiristic consumption and motivate effective harm-reduction
Rebecca Wanzo 9, Associate Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program,
Washington U in St. Louis. The Suffering Will Not Be Televised, 228-232
Despite my disappointment in these fi lms and frequent annoyance with the narrative trajectory of many of their productions, I admit that I have a bit
of a soft spot for the Lifetime network. I,
too, used to automatically criticize made-for-television movies “inspired by a
true story” about women at risk. I found them exploitative, as any film can be that makes entertainment
out of a personal tragedy. Lifetime Television has been called “television for victims,” in a criticism of its seemingly endless capacity to
show fi lms about the victimization of women.5 One of the questions that this moniker raises is what kind of storylines about people have the most
dramatic impact. Popular fi lms with high dramatic impact depict violence, stories of surviv- ing some atypical traumatic event, or struggling with some
more powerful person or entity. One aspect of the criticisms of Lifetime is the objection to formulaic melodrama in itself, framed within the gendered
derision of women’s victimization narratives or, on the other side of the political spectrum, discomfort with such narratives as demeaning, reductive,
and trite. The fi lms shown on the network, some produced by Lifetime but most produced elsewhere, vary in quality, but the criticisms of Lifetime raise
a question that I have explored throughout this book: What is the best way to represent a story of suffering? ¶ 229¶ Simply
crying at a
Lifetime film clearly cannot sustain any sub- stantive political work—but what if the crying
citizen is directed to, at the very least, awareness, and in the best case scenario, action, after
their emotional catharsis? Sorrow produced at the sight of a dead or wounded woman may not
accomplish anything unless the representation is framed in relationship to some
political action , but tears in relation to abolition and child abduction did produce action.
However, a major ethical problem with using sympathy and compassion as the primary mechanism for political change is that sentimental politics
depends on the cultural feelings of those in power, and the disempowered must depend on patronage. Hannah Arendt argues that compassion cannot
embrace a larger population, but pity can, and pity is a dangerous affect because it cannot exist without misfortune, thus “it has just as much vested
interest in the existence of the unhappy as thirst for power has a vested interest in the existence of the weak . . . by being a virtue of sentiment, pity can
be enjoyed for its own sake, and this will almost automatically lead to a glorifi cation of its cause, which is the suffering of others.”6 ¶ Following Arendt,
the charge against Lifetime could be that it thus encourages sadism because watchers could take
pleasure in pity. Or, as literary critic Marianne Noble has suggested in her study of sentimentality, the network might embrace masochism
because watchers would identify with the sufferer and might begin to take pleasure in these fantasies of subjection.7 However, these
readings of the pleasures of consuming stories of subjection are too narrow . In the case
of Lifetime, casting these films as only narratives of victimization is too limited a reading. After watching several
fi lms, I began to be compelled by stories I had not heard before about women interven- ing when the state fails to protect them. The stories
were clearly not only about victimization, but also about survival. The movies negotiate a
balance between structural critique and stories of individual heroism, and I am often disappointed, as with the fi
lms discussed above, with how much weight is placed on the side of individual transformation. Nonetheless I later began defending the network out of
political principle, as part of a broader effort to challenge the ¶ 230¶ facile denunciation of the word “victim.” Lifetime’s fi lms are often poor in terms of
artistic merit, but the network is contributing to a national conversation about what agency can look like. ¶ My
argument may seem as
if I am looking for politics in all the wrong places, relying on sentimentality when I should focus on politically rational
arguments that eschew the appeals of emotional response. I am not asking for radical progressivism from popular
culture. Instead, I am arguing that politics is often accomplished through the popular and
conventional work of emotional appeals, as many activists throughout history have
demonstrated. The question facing activists for African American women—or, for that matter, advocates for
any identity group outside the national imaginary of ideal citizenship—is not only how to expose discrimination, but also
how to make use of existing rhetoric so that attacks on their bodies can be read as pressing
concerns for all U.S. citizens. Affect and popular culture can be easily criticized as tools of anti-intellectual
conservative machines. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno rightly argue, popular culture focuses on producing narratives of
comfort or affects that can ultimately serve the state’s purposes.8 Totally escaping the political storytelling of the status
quo elicited by mass-produced texts is indeed impossible. However, the impossibility of total
escape does not preclude the possibility of making use of tools
Marked
produced by ideology. Mobilizing affect demands use of proven rhetorical tools, but this use need
not forestall a criticism of the need to employ the structures in the first place. Negotiating the
relationship between challenging the “master’s tools” and making use of them to garner financial
support and political power is not an easy project, but it is a necessary one. ¶ The book’s title is inspired by
this very tension between see- ing popular cultural productions as inevitably politically ineffi cacious and recognizing the possibilities offered by making
use of widely circulated genres and media. When Gil Scott-Heron produced his famous choreo-poem, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in 1974,
he called attention to the disconnect between radical action and violent struggles taking place in the streets and the pleasures of oblivion offered by
scripted television and commercials.9 Television stood in for mass-produced media that would not show what was really occurring in the streets, like
“pigs shooting down brothers in instant replay.” Scott-Heron pointed to the need for his audience to take to the streets and participate, live, in the
revolution. Indeed, a ¶ 231¶ rue revolution requires “live” political action and organizing, and television and many cultural productions neglect a
multitude of issues that are politically urgent. However, it is clearly no longer the case that “pigs shooting down brothers in the street is left off of
instant replay.” Important events are depicted on the news, in scripted tele- vision shows, in genre fi ction, in magazines, in movies, and on the
Internet. You can even catch the occasional social message in a television commercial. Rather than reject various media wholesale, we are left with a set
of questions about what to do with contemporary media realities. How and why are certain kinds of traditionally neglected issues represented? Once
represented, how are they interpreted, and can activists play a role in that interpretation? What do activists do about the complexities lost when they
make use of certain kinds of mass-marketed discourses? ¶ Octavia Butler perhaps best articulated this problem in her science-fi ction novel Parable of
the Talents. The novel exemplifi es what Lauren Berlant calls the postsentimental text—one that exhibits longing for the unconfl icted intimacy and
political promise senti- mentality offers but is skeptical of the ultimate political effi cacy of making feeling central to political change. Her heroine,
Olamina, suffers from “hyperempathy” syndrome, which allows her to feel the emotions of others, but Butler is careful to argue that being able to feel
the pain of others is not the means for liberation—it is a “delusional disorder.” Thus Olamina focuses on other modes of political change, and struggles
to gain followers for her politi- cal and spiritual project for survival, Earthseed, in a United States devastated by environmental destruction and the
domination of a repressive fusion of government and a religious right organiza- tion called Christian America. Through Olamina’s struggle, Butler
addresses the intellectual discomfort with consumption by having a character explicitly argue that only strategic commodifi cation will result in
successful dissemination of radical ideas. Olamina struggles with the means by which she can circulate Earthseed, until someone suggests to her that
she must use the marketing tools she slightly disparages to compel people to her project. Her companion, Len, argues that Olamina must “focus on
what people want and tell them how your system will help them get it.” She resists the call to “preach” the way her Christian American enemy Jarret
does, rejecting “preaching,” “telling folksy stories,” emphasizing a profi t motive, and self-consciously using her charismatic persona to sell Earthseed. ¶
232¶ Len argues that her resistance to using the tools of commodifi cation “leaves the fi eld to people who are demagogues—to the Jarrets of the
world.”10 Butler ultimately presents the moral that the project of producing populist texts for mass consumption cannot be left to those with
unproductive or dangerous dreams, abandoned by a Left that desires not only revolution but also political change resulting in real material gains. ¶
Clearly, the productions
of mass-culture are not the only way to move people to action, but they are no
doubt a tool. The dismissiveness accompanying the label of the sentimental in contemporary culture is because
academic critics claim that it does not do anything, it is the antithesis of action. However, this book is
about how sentimentality is doing things all the time . For better or worse, it teaches people to
identify “proper” objects of sympathy. It teaches people how to relate to each other. It teaches
people how to make compelling arguments about their pain. The circulation of sentimental political storytelling often
depends on media to which many progressives have a schizophrenic relationship. News media and television are often tools of the state, but citizens
depend on the news for the free circulation of information and often look for progressive politics in television shows. Others disavow the “idiot box”
altogether and have faith only in alternative news sources. However, the dichotomy between the popular and other spaces in which people tell stories
about suffering is a false one. Sentimental political storytelling is omnipresent in U.S. culture. While
the discourse has many shortcomings, people interested in political change are taking a perilous road if they
ignore the possibilities of imperfect stories told about citizens in pain .