Resource Wars
Resource wars don’t happen
Victor 7 – professor of law at Stanford Law School (David G., director of the Program on Energy and
Sustainable Development, 11/12/07, “What Resource Wars?”
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=16020)
Rising energy prices and mounting concerns about environmental depletion have animated fears that
the world may be headed for a spate of “resource wars”—hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab
valuable resources. Such fears come in many stripes, but the threat industry has sounded the alarm bells
especially loudly in three areas. First is the rise of China, which is poorly endowed with many of the
resources it needs—such as oil, gas, timber and most minerals—and has already “gone out” to the world with the goal of securing what
it wants. Violent conflicts may follow as the country shunts others aside. A second potential path down the road to
resource wars starts with all the money now flowing into poorly governed but resource-rich countries.
Money can fund civil wars and other hostilities, even leaking into the hands of terrorists. And third is global climate change, which
could multiply stresses on natural resources and trigger water wars, catalyze the spread of disease or bring about mass migrations. Most of
this is bunk, and nearly all of it has focused on the wrong lessons for policy. Classic resource wars are good material for
Hollywood screenwriters. They rarely occur in the real world. To be sure, resource money can magnify and prolong
some conflicts, but the root causes of those hostilities usually lie elsewhere. Fixing them requires focusing on the
underlying institutions that govern how resources are used and largely determine whether stress explodes into violence. When conflicts
do arise, the weak link isn’t a dearth in resources but a dearth in governance.
Disease
No impact to disease – they either burn out or don’t spread
Posner 05 (Richard A, judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, and senior lecturer at the
University of Chicago Law School, Winter. “Catastrophe: the dozen most significant catastrophic risks
and what we can do about them.”
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmske/is_3_11/ai_n29167514/pg_2?tag=content;col1)
Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of
its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been enormously destructive
plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human
race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an
evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too
quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its
spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race. The likelihood of a natural pandemic that would
cause the extinction of the human race is probably even less today than in the past (except in prehistoric times, when people
lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to
localize an infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can
still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time.