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China Solar AFF – NCC Packet Wave One1AC DraftPlan TextThe United States Federal Government should establish a national space policy substantially increasing international space cooperation with the People’s Republic of China in the area of space based solar power. Warming AdvantageSBSP ensures unlimited energy production but requires massive technological investment – only US-China collaboration gets the project off the groundMcKirdy and Fang 19 (Euan McKirdy is a Digital Producer based in Hong Kong. He joined CNN in early 2014 and covers everything from tech and the environment to sport and culture. Nanlin Fang is a News Researcher based in Beijing who produces multimedia content., “Space power plant and a mission to Mars: China's new plans to conquer the final frontier”, 2019. DOA: 8/13/2019, AAS) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****China says it is working to develop a solar energy plant in space that could one day beam enough power back to Earth to light up an entire city. If scientists can overcome the formidable technical challenges, the project would represent a monumental leap in combating the Earth's addiction to dirty power sources which worsen air pollution and global warming. A space-based solar power station could also provide an alternative to the current generation of earthbound and relatively ineffective renewable energy sources. Scientists had previously thought space solar plants (SSPs) would be prohibitively expensive. But with Beijing pledging to invest 2.5 trillion yuan ($367 billion) in renewable power generation -- solar, wind, hydro and nuclear -- by 2020, China might just have the financial firepower. The state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation hopes to be operating a commercially viable solar space station by 2050, according to a recent report in the country's official newspaper Science and Technology Daily. Energy could be beamed to Earth via microwaves or lasers. But Pang Zhihao, a researcher at the China Academy of Space Technology, warned that the hazards potentially posed to humans, plants and animals by that process must be examined. While an endless source of renewable energy is the holy grail in tackling climate change, some fear that lasers produced at an SSP could potentially be weaponized to give Beijing a lethal military instrument. Ambitious program China was late to the space race -- it didn't send its first satellite into orbit until 1970 -- but its program has seriously matured in the past few years, hitting milestones including a manned spaceflight and the landing of a rover on the far side of the moon, a historic first. But under President Xi Jinping, it has invested billions in building up its space program, while aggressively asserting its influence back on Earth, pursuing the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." The plans are getting more ambitious by the day. At the 2019 opening of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference on Sunday, the chief designer of China's lunar exploration told of plans to send a rover to Mars. "Over the past 60 years, we've made a lot of achievements, but there is still a large distance from the world space powers. We must speed up our pace," Wu Weiren said, claiming a probe would be sent to the red planet in 2020. Space solar energy is the biggest potential energy source available to humans and could supply nearly all the electrical needs of every person on our planet, according to the United States National Space Society (NSS). The technology for harnessing solar power in space has been around since the 1960s, says Peter Schubert, director of the Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. But there are several technical hurdles, he says. These include finding a low-cost, environmentally friendly launch vehicle to take the solar plant into space, combating the huge in-orbit operation and construction costs, and working out how best to transmit the power back to Earth. One solution to the first issue could be 3D printing. "Additive manufacturing is now widely available for the aeronautics industry," says Nobuyoshi Fujimoto, a spokesman for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the country's equivalent of NASA. "Therefore, this new manufacturing technology will be used for SSPs as well." The NSS believes the necessary technologies are "reasonably near-term" and the costs involved are smaller than paying the price of global warming -- particularly when the long-term environmental benefits are considered. A solar power plant floating 36,000 kilometers above our heads, for example, wouldn't be subject to the vagaries of generating solar power back on Earth. Instead, it could be receiving the sun's energy and generating power 99% of the time, only going offline when the Earth eclipses the sun. Furthermore, the sun's rays wouldn't be weakened by their journey through the Earth's atmosphere. Such a plant would be up to six times more efficient than comparable technologies on Earth, the Science and Technology Daily report says. How it works Components, including solar panels and technology for converting electricity for transmission, would be blasted into space where they would be assembled. The completed solar farm would be placed in a geostationary orbit over a receiving station on Earth. It would transmit the energy -- either in the form of a laser or as microwaves -- to the Earth base, where it could be reconverted to electricity and distributed via the grid. Experts estimate that a fully operational solar array would have to be huge -- at least 2 square kilometers (0.8 square miles) -- to produce 1 gigawatt of power, JAXA's Fujimoto says. Its construction would also present huge logistical issues. "(An) SSP would be assembled piece-by-piece over repeated launches and dockings," according to the JAXA. "The construction of the structure by crew members would be prohibitively expensive and unsafe. A key phase of the program will be to develop robotic systems capable of assembling all of the components of the large orbital structure autonomously." China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation plans to launch small solar satellites that can harness energy in space as soon as 2021. Then it will test larger plants capable of advanced functions, such as beaming energy back to Earth via lasers. A receiving station will be built in Xian, around 500 miles northeast of the Chinese city of Chongqing. The city is a regional space hub where a facility to develop the solar power farms has been founded. By 2050, the company plans that a full-sized space-based solar plant would be ready for commercial use, the Chinese media report said. "The approach that the Chinese have announced looks very reasonable to me," says Schubert. "Because the ultimate goal of this is to get very large power stations, doing that all in one go is not practical -- there are a lot of things you learn along the way." Li Ming, director of the Technology Committee of the Fifth Institute of China Aerospace Science and Technology Group, told Chinese media that if Beijing continues to invest and develop in the emerging technologies, it "could be the first country that has a utility value solar power space station," according to the Science and Technology Daily. The US hasn't looked into developing SSP technology since 2003, Schubert says. "A challenge in the US is the influence of energy companies for which SSP would be a disruptive technology," he says. But he adds that if the technology proves viable, the US would "likely be a fast follower-then-leader," similar to how it played catchup to the Soviet Sputnik project before overtaking it to land a man on the moon. "In my opinion the scale is such that Chinese-American collaboration would be the best path to success," he adds. However, current laws prohibit NASA from cooperating with China on aerospace technology." While experts believe the microwaves beamed from the solar farms would be about as intense as the sun's rays on a summer's day, Pang says more research is needed into the potential long-term effects on the ecology, atmosphere, and organisms. In addition to providing constant renewable energy to the planet, a space solar power plant could, in theory, focus its beam outward and power spacecraft, obviating the need for solar cell wings and greatly increasing power levels and control accuracy. The energy beams could also direct power to remote areas or even dissipate destructive weather systems like typhoons. But there is a potentially more worrying application. "Coherent radiation from a laser is so far different from the microwave or radio wave approach -- (if weaponized) a laser could burn a city to the ground in a matter of minutes or hours," says Schubert. Schubert says that a satellite in geostationary orbit has a view of about one third of the Earth's surface, which would present a huge tactical advantage -- the ultimate "high ground," he says. "It is my opinion that no large nation would allow another nation to put a 5 GW laser in (goestationary orbit). As everyone knows, there is no such thing as an unhackable system. Huge power lasers are just too much of a risk to put in space." Climate change Still, with governments around the world battling to hold back climate change, some feel space solar technology can't come soon enough. "When we look at ... carbon emissions globally, they're on the increase -- as developing nations improve their standard of living they're burning coal even though we know about climate change," says Schubert. "If we could get spaceborne power to get going quickly, that would address the root cause of the problem and provide us a carbon-free energy source that's reliable around the clock. In my mind, it's the most important technology for the future of mankind."U.S. Chinese cooperation sets international norms for economic development – key to trust and product dissemination Loftus 19 (Peter Loftus – 1st Lieutenant of the United States Air Force. “Counter and Cooperate: How Space Can Be Used to Advance US–China Cooperation While Curbing Beijing’s Terrestrial Excesses” AIR & SPACE POWER JOURNAL (Spring 2019) , DOA: 8/13/19) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****As China’s interests continue to expand outward from its shores, it seeks to build a military capable of protecting its economic interests overseas. For example, China has participated in counterpiracy operations in the Gulf of Aden since 2008 and recently established a permanent base in Djibouti to aid in this effort and serve as a PLA logistics hub for the region. This base will assist the PLA Navy in extending its reach while also securing sea lines of communication, through which much of China’s imports and exports transit. Beijing also has grand ambitions in space, many of which are economical and also require protection. These ambitions include projects to start lunar and asteroid mining, bring the BeiDou-2 Navigation Satellite System network into global service by 2020 and establish a Chinese space station by 2022. Beijing even has preliminary plans for an ambitious space-based solar energy network that will use microwaves to transmit power back to Earth by 2050.10 In the Strategic Studies Quarterly 12, no. 1 edition, Dr. Namrata Goswami argues that Chinese space exploration must be viewed through the broader framework of the Chinese economy’s expanding need for resources.11 She explains that President Xi sees space as an environment for scientific innovation as well as an opportunity to revitalize stagnant state-owned enterprises. She goes on to state that “. . . these goals are unique as they indicate a completely different view of space. Rather than just an arena for conquest and showing off, China views space as an environment in which to live, work, and create wealth through habitation and resource extraction.”12 This begs the question: how will China protect its interests in space? Leadership in Beijing will increasingly have to consider how it will secure these important economic assets in a realm where there are few laws or agreed upon codes of conduct. Although this analysis is not exhaustive, it provides a basis for understanding China’s current space initiatives and ambitions. So what kind of policy should Washington adopt to accommodate China’s interests, advance our own, and dissuade Beijing from extending a potential conflict into space? An intelligent approach will be two-fold. On one hand, we should foster cooperation where our interests with the Chinese overlap. On the other, we should develop a comprehensive approach for defending our interests, especially in the SCS. The latter issue is of great importance because we must first confront Beijing’s transgressions here on Earth to deter China’s militaristic expansionism in space. China’s economic and military rise during the last several decades was made possible by the post-World War II economic order established by the US. However, as a great power, China is unsatisfied with the current US-led order that it did little to help shape. Beijing and Washington are increasingly at odds internationally as their competing interests and visions for the future begin to collide. New avenues for cooperation are desperately needed to foster mutual trust and create an environment where the US and China can coexist with minimal friction. Space presents an excellent opportunity for cooperation between Washington and Beijing. Our two nations will compete in this realm—there is no avoiding that. However, both parties will benefit greatly from having a standardized set of rules governing military and economic activities in space. Hopefully, if these two great powers establish a framework of behaviors and norms for space, the rest of the world will follow suit. To start, the US should extend an olive branch. As Brian Weeden and Xiao He point out in their article for War on the Rocks, “Washington still hopes that Beijing can be a constructive partner for greater international space security. While China still chafes at the largely American constructed rules-based order, it likewise has a clear interest in using its development of space capabilities to promote bilateral cooperation and to play a role the formation of new international regimes.”13 While Russia seeks to undermine international space initiatives, Beijing and Washington should look toward the future and create a bold plan for space governance. This does not mean intimate cooperation, but there should be norms and codes for how government entities and private corporations should act in space. Weeden and He go on to say that both sides should seek to establish confidence-building mechanisms to help build trust as well as processes for cooperation and deconfliction. On the economic front, private companies crave stability and clear rules. If the world’s two preeminent military and economic powers establish clear guidelines early on, potential financiers will have greater confidence to invest the large up-front costs for expensive space-based projects. This leads to the next point that both sides should promote: private sector cooperation in the space domain. It would be advantageous for both sides if private corporations in the US and China pursue space exploration together. Space-lift capabilities, space stations, asteroid mining, lunar stations, and other endeavors all require significant initial costs. By partnering, American and Chinese corporations could call upon the support of both the Chinese and US governments in seeking out new resources such as solar power, rare elements, and numerous other fields for scientific discovery that would be of great benefit to people everywhere. A private-sector partnership should be plausible as long as intellectual property rights are respected and the governments involved don’t micromanage the projects. Deep US–Chinese economic integration is often cited as one reason war between our two nations is unthinkable. Why would the same logic not extend to space?Regulatory frameworks necessary to SBSP international follow-onErnst 13 [Ernst, Deliana, specializes in energy and climate policy, and energy market regulation, 11/20/2013. "Beam It Down, Scotty: The Regulatory Framework for Space‐Based Solar Power." Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law, Accessed: 8/13/2019. BBB] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****This article shows that the current international and national liability regimes, either specifically for space environment or in general, provide insufficient recourse for an injured party affected by an SSP system. In order to provide regulatory certainty to both operators as well as potential injured parties of an SSP system, the States involved with SSP and at least their neighbouring States would benefit from a comprehensive international liability regime similar to the 2006 Principles on Allocation of Loss and the existing civil liability and compensation schemes.123 Following these schemes and frameworks, a civil liability scheme benefiting SSP should include three essential characteristics. First, the operator has strict liability, and the injured party will only need to demonstrate harm suffered as well as causation with its origin.124 Second, the liability is channelled to a sole operator, which will have to respond to the damage. The operator should be primarily liable and take out insurance with, in most cases, subsidiary State liability, or the recognition that additional funding has to be ensured by the State if the operator cannot fully compensate the victims.125 Third, the responsibility for the harm is privatized and moved from primary State liability to civil liability of the private operator.126 Inspiration for such a comprehensive regime can be found either in the American system where all claims are channelled to the launch operator, as discussed above, or in the framework adopted for nuclear law. Under the nuclear regulatory framework, the nuclear operator has absolute, but limited, operator liability with obligatory insurance.127 This operator liability is backed up by supplementary State liability and, ultimately, by an international joint State fund. In case such a fund is used in an SSP liability scheme, it could be funded by contributions based on economic factors and SSP activities.128 Conclusion Though operating SSP systems are not yet a reality, the promise of their abundant, efficient, largely carbon‐neutral energy has catalyzed interest by various private actors as well as national space agencies. Even though an SSP system would need to be pursued in the context of a tremendous range of existing national and international policy and regulatory considerations, this article has shown that the existing legal frameworks are not yet able to accommodate SSP. The international space treaties together with general international law on liability and the environment form the existing international regulatory framework applicable to SSP. The biggest void to fill in this framework concerns liability for potential damages from wireless energy beam to persons, property and the environment. At the national level, the United States has the most comprehensive legislative framework for space activities, suggesting that this regime is at present the best suited for coping with the many divergent factors of launching a SSP system. However, once in orbit, the legal consequences of maintaining a SSP system, including potential damage from its wireless energy transmission, are not covered and left to tort law. China is still preparing its legislation on space activities, and therefore has an opportunity to introduce a legal framework to support the operation of SSP. Existing Chinese legislation, including tort law and environmental law, offers some legal certainty to parties affected by SSP, although there is no practical experience with these laws as of yet. Considering its ambitious space aspirations, it is puzzling that the EU has not yet enacted detailed legislation on space activities. Thus far, it has relied on the international space treaties and on national legislation. A European SSP project would benefit from an overarching EU regulatory framework, especially with respect to the gaps on liability that currently exist in international and national frameworks. The current international and national liability regimes provide insufficient recourse for an injured party affected by an SSP system. Given the potential for disaster in case a wireless beam would stray from its intended target, and other possible damage to Earth, any future SSP system would benefit from a comprehensive regulatory framework in which the liability between the operator, the public and States is strictly defined. Therefore, interested States should initiate negotiations on an international liability regime for SSP. In doing so, they could draw on existing civil liability regimes for nuclear and oil pollution. The American space liability regime, which channels liability to the launch operator, offers a good foundation due to its legal predictability and sole liability of the SSP operator. This liability regime could be extended with claims for damages from the in‐orbit operation. In sum, although there remains substantial legal and technological work to be done, it indeed appears as though we are within grasp of obtaining the associated benefits of SSP – Scotty won't have to wait too much longer.Global consensus key to space solar energy gridKomerath 10 – Professor of Aerospace EngineeringNarayanan, 1-4-2010, “The Space Power Grid: Synergy Between Space, Energy and Security Policies,” ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****SPECIAL POLICY FEATURES OF THE SPACE POWER GRID 1. Global Collaboration Model Such a system involving global power exchange obviously requires global collaboration. It spans many of the issues in building Space infrastructure, and international collaboration for ground infrastructure and energy trading. ROI large enough to attract private capital is not realistic because of the large risk. Public financing is also needed to ensure serious intent on the part of governments to complete the project. The SPG involves placing a substantial number of satellites into low/mid earth orbit, and several large ultralight collectors into high orbits. There will be powerful beams of energy crisscrossing between these. Cooperative regulation could be modeled after the various UN agreements that allot orbit sectors and frequency bandwidth to nations to enable the communication satellites, the GPS, Galileo and Glonass global positioning systems. A global solar power grid in Space should meet with support from all the spacefaring nations, and from most non-spacefaring nations. Already, apart from the US and Europe, Japan, which has few fossil power resources, has a very strong program[24,25] for space solar power. China has been tapped by the European Union for participation in a power grid. Russia, China, Africa and Australia have vast undeveloped areas that are suitable for renewable power generation but lack terrestrial power grids, while the many island nations of the world would benefit from beamed power as a replacement for fossil power. India, with a growing space program, has already invested heavily in microwave infrastructure for communications, and should be amenable to converting some of that to power beaming purposes. With the next round of the Climate Control global agreement due in 2013, consensus appears to have emerged on the issues confronting nations, as well as the possibility of concerted global action. This generates a climate ripe for undertaking the massive collaborative effort that can lead to true energy independence. Climate change is a global problem that requires an international solution – unilateral approaches failSullivan 19 [Jake Sullivan is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was the national-security adviser for Vice President Joe Biden, the director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State, and the deputy chief of staff for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “What Donald Trump and Dick Cheney Got Wrong About America”, Sections 1-3, , Accessed 08-19-2019 ECT] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****I. A Dangerous Idea Can america still lead the world? Should it? If so, how? These fundamental questions have lurked in the background for years. Donald Trump brought them front and center. The knee-jerk response of national-security professionals to such questions is to offer a history lesson on the benefits of the “liberal international order” that America built after 1945. I once used that phrase at a campaign event in Ohio in 2016—I had advised both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden, and then worked for Clinton when she ran for president—and someone came up to me afterward and said, “I’m not sure what exactly you’re referring to, but I don’t like any of those three words!” To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. Right now, everything is up for debate when it comes to the basic purpose of U.S. foreign policy. For me, that’s unsettling. I was raised in Minnesota in the 1980s, a child of the late Cold War—of Rocky IV, the Miracle on Ice, and “Tear down this wall!” The ’90s were my high-school and college years. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Iron Curtain disappeared. Germany was reunified. An American-led alliance ended a genocide in Bosnia and prevented one in Kosovo. I went to graduate school in England and gave fiery speeches on the floor of the Oxford Union about how the United States was a force for good in the world. Young people have been exposed to a particularly arrogant brand of exceptionalism. Times have changed. These days, I’m back on a university campus, now as a teacher. My students have had a profoundly different upbringing. They were in elementary and middle school in the 2000s, children of the global War on Terror—of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, drones and Edward Snowden, and, most of all, the Iraq War. Many of them aren’t naturally inclined to see American foreign policy through a lens of optimism or aspiration. I hear this in my classes, and I see it in surveys that reveal a strong generational divide over the idea of “American exceptionalism.” Large numbers of young people question the merits of a unique American leadership role in world affairs. This is partly because they have seen the country’s foreign policy so frequently fall short. But I suspect it is also because they have been exposed to a particularly arrogant brand of exceptionalism. For example, Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz published a book a few years ago called Exceptional, in which they boast of America’s unmatched “goodness” and “greatness”—conceding nothing, admitting no error. In their telling, the Vietnam and Iraq Wars were sound strategic decisions. George W. Bush’s administration’s use of torture was right; its critics were wrong. And on and on. Young people hear these kinds of arguments and say, Count us out. Meanwhile, older generations are tilting toward a different outlook: the United States as the world’s No. 1 sucker. It’s time, many believe, to stop shouldering the burdens and letting others enjoy the benefits. This is Trump’s vision of “America first.” He is hostile toward America’s allies and contemptuous of cooperation. He loves to goad and bully (and even bomb) other countries and says alarming and irresponsible things about nuclear war. He has pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and more. He is not preaching isolationism; he is preaching predatory unilateralism. The Iran deal and the dark side of American exceptionalism Trump’s approach is dangerous, but he has surfaced questions that need clear answers. Those of us who believe that the United States can and should continue to occupy a global leadership role, even if a different role than in the past, have to explain why Trump is wrong—and provide a better strategy for the future. In doing so, we should not play by his rules. An energized, inspiring, and ultimately successful foreign policy must cut through Trump’s false, dog-whistling choice between globalism and nationalism. It must combine the best kind of patriotism (a shared civic spirit and a clear sense of the national interest) and the best kind of internationalism (a recognition that when your neighbor’s house is on fire, you need to grab a bucket). And it should reject the worst kind of nationalism (damn-the-consequences aggression and identity-based hate-mongering) and the worst kind of internationalism (the self-congratulatory insulation of the Davos elite). This calls for rescuing the idea of American exceptionalism from both its chest-thumping proponents and its cynical critics, and renewing it for the present time. The idea is not that the United States is intrinsically better than other countries, but rather this: Despite its flaws, America possesses distinctive attributes that can be put to work to advance both the national interest and the larger common interest. In the wrong hands, American exceptionalism can be a dangerous idea. It can justify too much. It can admit too little. It can offend and alienate. But for proponents of an engaged and effective foreign policy, failure to own and define the idea—especially when malevolent forces are seeking to own and define so many national ideas—is even more dangerous. Without a sense of greater purpose about the nation’s work in the world, the U.S. will lose direction and ambition at a time when it badly needs both. And if that sense of purpose is not grounded in humility, the U.S. will fall victim to hubris and excess. What follows is a case for a new American exceptionalism as the answer to Donald Trump’s “America first”—and as the basis for American leadership in the 21st century. II. Self-Correction, Self-Renewal American exceptionalism has meant different things to different people at different times: the unique geographic advantages of the continent, the story of the Revolution and the writing of the Constitution, the legacy of the frontier, the impulse to universalize the American experience. Some have taken this to an extreme, asserting that America is blessed by divine providence. There is a common thread: the idea that the United States has a set of characteristics that gives it a unique capacity and responsibility to help make the world a better place. The left and the right have abandoned American exceptionalism FROM OUR JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 ISSUE Subscribe to The Atlantic and support 160 years of independent journalism SUBSCRIBE Most people are familiar with the standard story of how those characteristics have guided American foreign policy in the modern era. The United States stopped Hitler’s Germany, saved Western Europe from economic ruin, stood firm against the Soviet Union, and supported the spread of democracy worldwide. This story has always been compelling. It is also incomplete. Americans are no longer buying it at face value. What about the mistakes, the complexities, the imperfections—things like covert regime change across Latin America, support for brutal dictators, the invasion of Iraq, and the tragedies (despite the best of intentions) of Somalia and Libya? The Cheney version either ignores this dark underbelly or insists that the United States is “saved,” as it were, and therefore cannot sin. It is a self-serving lie that has generated skepticism about America’s strengths and virtues. Still, the exceptionalist idea has proved resilient, no matter how many experts declare it useless or wrong. The expectation that the United States can do, and be, better runs deep—even among America’s fiercest critics. One such critic, the journalist Suzy Hansen, used the phrase broken heart in her book, Notes on a Foreign Country, to describe the way many people feel about the reality of American power. The phrase reflects a perhaps unwitting expectation, a hope, that the U.S. will act differently from other powerful countries. The idea of American exceptionalism speaks to not just who we have been but who we can be. A distinctive part of America’s postwar history has been the ability to adjust after failures and follies, which are an inevitable part of global leadership. The Marshall Plan and nato came into being only after a period in which Harry Truman’s administration reduced the American footprint in Western Europe and imposed self-defeating conditions on economic assistance. The Bush-era HIV/aids program that saved millions of lives arrived many years after the woeful response to the epidemic by Ronald Reagan’s administration. In Latin America, from the end of the Cold War through the Barack Obama years, heavy-handed intervention and support for dictators gave way to mutual respect, engagement as equals, and the normalization of relations with Cuba. This capacity for self-appraisal, self-correction, and self-renewal separates the United States from past superpowers. It is what President Obama—elected in part because of popular opposition to the Iraq War—meant when he said, on the 50th anniversary of the march to Montgomery, Alabama: “Each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals.” After Trump, the United States will face its next great readjustment. Part of the challenge will be to repair the damage he has done—to alliances, to treaties, to the perception of American motives, to trust in America’s word, and, most of all, to the very idea of America. But the United States must also update its purpose in a changing world. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, U.S. foreign policy was rooted in a single, simple idea: Americans were not willing to endure global war and global depression ever again. The Cold War followed quickly, and provided a clarity of purpose to efforts both at home and overseas. When the Soviet Union collapsed, so did the guiding objectives of U.S. foreign policy. Exceptionalism began to mean, in the words of the political scientist Stanley Hoffmann, nothing more than “being, remaining, and acting as the only superpower.” Then came 9/11. America stumbled into the War on Terror, which started with the justified invasion of Afghanistan but continued with the invasion of Iraq, one of the most catastrophic decisions in American history. The result, a decade and a half later, is an open-ended military commitment that spans multiple countries. Today, three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. still hasn’t found a durable answer to the most basic of questions: What is American foreign policy for? Justin Fantl III. The Purpose The foreign-policy community’s traditional response to that question has been to describe America as the world’s “indispensable nation.” That is no longer sufficient. By itself, indispensability is more wearying than energizing—it’s the boy in the Hans Brinker story, holding back the flood by putting his finger in the dike. It speaks to fulfilling others’ needs, not one’s own. And it comes with no limits. The core purpose of American foreign policy must be to protect and defend the American way of life. This raises the obvious challenge that the very definition of the American way of life is currently up for grabs. No vision of American exceptionalism can succeed if the United States does not defeat the emerging vision that emphasizes ethnic and cultural identity and restore a more hopeful and inclusive definition: a healthy democracy, shared economic prosperity, and security and freedom for all citizens to follow the paths they choose. This requires domestic renewal above all, with energetic responses at home to the rise of tribalism and the hollowing-out of the middle class. Foreign policy can support that renewal, while dealing effectively with external threats. These fall into two categories. The first emanate from other countries, specifically the major powers: There is China’s long-term strategy to dominate the fastest-growing part of the world, to make the global economy adjust to its brand of authoritarian capitalism, and above all to put pressure on free and open economic and political models. And there is Russia’s pursuit of a related strategy to spread neofascist ideology and destabilize Western democracies. The threats in the second category are those that transcend national borders: the spread of weapons of mass destruction; deadly epidemics like Ebola; irreversible planetary harm caused by climate change; another global economic meltdown; and massive cyberattacks. All of these have the potential to cripple America as we know it. Here’s the kicker: None of them can be effectively confronted by the United States alone, and none can be effectively confronted if the United States sits on the sidelines. The fact that the major powers have not returned to war with one another since 1945 is a remarkable achievement of American statecraft. The U.S. must mobilize a common response to these threats. In some cases, the response needs to be global, bringing the U.S. together with its rivals—including China—to face shared challenges such as nuclear proliferation and climate change. In others, the U.S. should work exclusively with its friends and allies to resist the spread of aggression, authoritarianism, and malignant corruption. Cooperation of this kind does not happen spontaneously; it requires some actor to step up and lead. The U.S. has historically served this function, a reality I experienced firsthand during my time in government. If the U.S. had not led the charge, the Paris Agreement—which rallied 195 nations to pledge to reduce carbon emissions—would not have come into being. If, after a sluggish start, the U.S. had not led the response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014, an epidemic could have swept across Africa and proved difficult to contain. And even when the U.S. makes mistakes at home, its leadership abroad can come to the rescue: If the U.S. had not coordinated a global response, the 2008 financial crisis could easily have spiraled into a second Great Depression. Consider what would happen if America gave up its leadership role. Might China fill the gap? I have not seen anyone make a persuasive case that China would or could, and in any event China sometimes is the threat. The Europeans cannot replace America either, given how preoccupied they are with holding their own union together. How does exceptionalism fit into this analysis? The United States cannot keep leading if it starts being seen by others as a “normal” power, interested exclusively in its narrow self-interest. America has to keep demonstrating that it is an unusual power, in terms of its attitudes, habits, methods, and ideas. Being exceptional means putting these core attributes to work for America’s own interests, yes—but also for the common good. Similarly, at home, the public will accept major investment in foreign policy only if it believes the United States is not just a normal country, with normal responsibilities. Exceptionalism is how you reconcile patriotism with internationalism.Solar Powered Satellites are key to avoid warming’s “tipping point” of the worst impacts Dr. Feng Hsu, 10, Sr. Vice President?Systems Engineering & Risk Management Space Energy Group, Winter 2010, (Online Journal of Space Communication, Harnessing the Sun: Embarking on Humanity's Next Giant Leap, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****It has become increasingly evident that facing and solving the multiple issues concerning energy is the single most pressing problem that we face as a species. In recent years, there has been extensive debate and media coverage about alternative energy, sustainable development and global climate change, but what has been missing (at least in the mainstream media) is the knowledge and point of view of scientists and engineers. From the scientists or engineers perspective, this paper discusses the prospects for mankind's technological capability and societal will in harnessing solar energy, and focuses on the issues of: 1) space based solar power (SBSP) development, and, 2) why it is imperative that we must harness the unparalleled power of the sun in a massive and unprecedented scale, which I believe will be humanity's next giant leap forward. Solar Power from a Historic Perspective Whether terrestrially based or space based, solar energy has not yet emerged as a significant solution in public discussions of global warming. Yet, among scientists and engineers and other visionaries, it is starting to be viewed as one of the most promising and viable ways to eventually remove human dependence on fossil fuels. Nearly three years ago at the Foundation For the Future (FFF) International Energy Conference, my presentation was one of the few that took a look back at energy use in human history[1]. In this paper, I would like to offer a brief summary of the various stages mankind has passed through in our quest for energy, and how long they lasted. To understand and fully appreciate the profound idea that humankind has and can continue to harness sun's energy, it is imperative for us to learn from the history of our civilization and from the perspective of human evolution, especially from those societies in crisis over energy. Previewing the history of human energy consumption and energy technologies, we can see that there were three such eras. In the early years of human presence on this planet, we relied on wood-generated energy, based on the burning of firewood, tree branches and the remains of agricultural harvests. Starting in the 1600s, our forefathers discovered the energy properties of coal, which taught us how to tap stored supplies of fossil fuels. Less than two hundred years later, about the middle of the 1800s, we found petroleum and learned to commercialize the use of oil and gas, which brought about our current industrial civilization. In the 20th century, society witnessed the dawn of electricity generation via hydro-power and atomic energy. Today, demand for energy continues to soar, but we're rapidly using up our supplies of easily accessible fossil fuels. What is more, a profound environmental crisis has emerged as the result of our total reliance on energy sources based on those fuels. In the 21st century, there is great uncertainty about world energy supplies. If you plot energy demand by year of human civilization on a terawatt scale, you will see the huge bump that occurred barely a hundred years ago (Figure 1). Before that, in the Stone Age, basically the cultivation of fire led to the emergence of agriculture, cooking, tool making, and all the early stages of human civilization. Now, after about 150 years of burning fossil fuels, the earth's 3 billion years' store of solar energy has been plundered. In my view, mankind must now embark on the next era of sustainable energy consumption and re-supply. The most obvious source of which is the mighty energy resource of our sun. Adequately guide and using human creativity and innovation; the 21st century will become the next great leap forward in human civilization by taming solar energy, transforming our combustion world economy into a lasting solar-electric world economy In solving humanity's energy problems we must learn from our ancestors. Taming the natural forces of the sun will be much like our ancestors' early efforts to harness the power of wild fire. We must use common sense, as they did, developing the tools and technologies that address the needs of our time. The Romans used flaming oil containers to destroy the Saracen fleet in 670. In the same century, the Japanese were digging wells to a depth approaching 900 feet with picks and shovels in search of oil. By 1100, the Chinese had reached depths of more than 3,000 feet in search of energy. This happened centuries before the West had sunk its first commercial well in 1859 in Titusville, Pennsylvania. With all such human creativities in the past, the searching for energy has been driven by our combustion world economy, which focused primarily on what's beneath the surface of our planet - the secondary energy resources which originated from the power of our sun. Now it's time for mankind to lift their heads and start focusing our profound creativity in harnessing the sun and making our way into the energy technology frontiers in the sky. Solar Energy - The Ultimate Answer to Anthropogenic Climate Change The evidence of global warming is alarming. The potential for a catastrophic climate change scenario is dire. Until recently, I worked at Goddard Space Flight Center, a NASA research center in the forefront of space and earth science research. This Center is engaged in monitoring and analyzing climate changes on a global scale. I received first hand scientific information and data relating to global warming issues, including the latest dynamics of ice cap melting and changes that occurred on either pole of our planet. I had the chance to discuss this research with my Goddard colleagues, who are world leading experts on the subject. I now have no doubt global temperatures are rising, and that global warming is a serious problem confronting all of humanity. No matter whether these trends are due to human interference or to the cosmic cycling of our solar system, there are two basic facts that are crystal clear: a) there is overwhelming scientific evidence showing positive correlations between the level of CO2concentrations in the earth's atmosphere with respect to the historical fluctuations of global temperature changes; and b) the overwhelming majority of the world's scientific community is in agreement about the risks of a potential catastrophic global climate change. That is, if we humans continue to ignore this problem and do nothing, if we continue dumping huge quantities of greenhouse gases into earth's biosphere, humanity will be at dire risk. As a technical and technology risk assessment expert, I could show with confidence that we face orders of magnitude more risk doing nothing to curb our fossil-based energy addictions than we will in making a fundamental shift in our energy supply. This is because the risks of a catastrophic anthropogenic climate change can be potentially the extinction of human species, a risk that is simply too high for us to take any chances. Of course, there will be economic consequences to all societies when we restrict the burning of fossil fuels in an effort to abate "global warming." What we are talking about are options and choices between risks. All human activities involve risk taking; we cannot avoid risks but only make trade-offs, hopefully choosing wisely. In this case, there has to be a risk-based probabilistic thought process when it comes to adopting national or international policies in dealing with global warming and energy issues. As the measure of risk is a product of "likelihood" and "consequence," when consequence or risk of a potential human extinction (due to catastrophic climate change) is to be compared with the potential consequence or risk of loss of jobs or slowing the growth of economy (due to restriction of fossil-based energy consumption), I believe the choice is clear. My view is that by making a paradigm shift in the world's energy supply over time through extensive R&D, technology innovations and increased production of renewable energy, we will create countless new careers and jobs and end up triggering the next level of economic development, the kind of pollution free industrial revolution mankind has never before seen. The aggravation and acceleration of a potential anthropogenic catastrophic global climate change, in my opinion, is the number one risk incurred from our combustion-based world economy. At the International Energy Conference in Seattle, I showed three pairs of satellite images as evidence that the earth glaciers are disappearing at an alarming rate.[2] Whether this warming trend can be reversed by human intervention is not clear, but this uncertainty in risk reduction doesn't justify the human inactions in adapting policies and countermeasures on renewable energy development for a sustainable world economy, and for curbing the likelihood of any risk event of anthropogenic catastrophic climate changes. What is imperative is that we start to do something in a significant way that has a chance to make a difference. Solar Power - The Best Renewable Energy Source for the Future Now mankind faces an energy crossroad. As a species, we have basically two directions in our quest for energy: 1) either we look for energy based on cosmic-based, open and unlimited original resources, which means everything comes from the stars, from the sun, or 2) we continue to rely on earth-based, local and confined secondary energy resources. There is no secret that every single bit of energy on this planet comes from the sun. In my view, we have a small window of opportunity over the next couple of decades. Either we're going to go down or we're going to go up as a species. The direction we follow largely depends upon how we approach our energy challenge. Learning how to harness our sun for solutions to our energy problems will not be unlike our ancestors harnessing the wild fire. I believe it will lead to an inevitable leapfrog in the process of human evolution. Bill Michael, a University of Chicago professor, wrote "Use of fire illustrates that human evolution is a gradual process; modern humans did not emerge overnight in a 'big bang' of development, but rather slowly adapted from their primitive origins. The use of fire by humans throughout time to overcome environmental forces is a fundamental and defining aspect of human nature."[3] Before we reach that tipping point of negative sustainability, there is still time for humankind to tame the natural forces of the sun and harness it for the well-being and survival of our species. The best place, of course, for a nuclear fusion reactor is about 149E6 km (149 x 106 km) away. This one happens to be free of charge and we can count on it being around for a long time. The sun's energy only takes 8 minutes to arrive on earth and leaves no radioactive waste (and it is terrorist proof). Our sun puts out about 3.8E11TWh of energy per hour. Our planet receives about 174,000 terawatt each second. Every minute, earth's surface gets more solar power than we human beings can use in a whole year. Warming causes extinction – our studies are better and postdate yoursSpecktor 19 (Brandon Specktor – editor of Reader's Digest magazine. 6/4/19 “Human Civilization Will Crumble by 2050 If We Don't Stop Climate Change Now, New Paper Claims” , DOA: 8/14/19, kbb) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet**** It seems every week there's a scary new report about how man-made climate change is going to cause the collapse of the world's ice sheets, result in the extinction of up to 1 million animal species and — if that wasn't bad enough — make our beer very, very expensive. This week, a new policy paper from an Australian think tank claims that those other reports are slightly off; the risks of climate change are actually much, much worse than anyone can imagine. According to the paper, climate change poses a "near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization," and there's a good chance society could collapse as soon as 2050 if serious mitigation actions aren't taken in the next decade. Published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne (an independent think tank focused on climate policy) and authored by a climate researcher and a former fossil fuel executive, the paper's central thesis is that climate scientists are too restrained in their predictions of how climate change will affect the planet in the near future. [Top 9 Ways the World Could End] The current climate crisis, they say, is larger and more complex than any humans have ever dealt with before. General climate models — like the one that the United Nations' Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used in 2018 to predict that a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) could put hundreds of millions of people at risk — fail to account for the sheer complexity of Earth's many interlinked geological processes; as such, they fail to adequately predict the scale of the potential consequences. The truth, the authors wrote, is probably far worse than any models can fathom. How the world ends What might an accurate worst-case picture of the planet's climate-addled future actually look like, then? The authors provide one particularly grim scenario that begins with world governments "politely ignoring" the advice of scientists and the will of the public to decarbonize the economy (finding alternative energy sources), resulting in a global temperature increase 5.4 F (3 C) by the year 2050. At this point, the world's ice sheets vanish; brutal droughts kill many of the trees in the Amazon rainforest (removing one of the world's largest carbon offsets); and the planet plunges into a feedback loop of ever-hotter, ever-deadlier conditions. "Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability," the authors hypothesized. Meanwhile, droughts, floods and wildfires regularly ravage the land. Nearly one-third of the world's land surface turns to desert. Entire ecosystems collapse, beginning with the planet's coral reefs, the rainforest and the Arctic ice sheets. The world's tropics are hit hardest by these new climate extremes, destroying the region's agriculture and turning more than 1 billion people into refugees. This mass movement of refugees — coupled with shrinking coastlines and severe drops in food and water availability — begin to stress the fabric of the world's largest nations, including the United States. Armed conflicts over resources, perhaps culminating in nuclear war, are likely. The result, according to the new paper, is "outright chaos" and perhaps "the end of human global civilization as we know it." How can this catastrophic vision of the future be prevented? Only with the people of the world accepting climate change for the emergency it is and getting to work — immediately. According to the paper's authors, the human race has about one decade left to mount a global movement to transition the world economy to a zero-carbon-emissions system. (Achieving zero-carbon emissions requires either not emitting carbon or balancing carbon emissions with carbon removal.) The effort required to do so "would be akin in scale to the World War IIemergency mobilization," the authors wrote. The new policy paper was endorsed with a foreword by Adm. Chris Barrie, a retired Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander who has testified before the Australian Senate about the devastating possibilities climate change poses to national security and overall human well-being. "I told the [Senate] Inquiry that, after nuclear war, human-induced global warming is the greatest threat to human life on the planet," Barrie wrote in the new paper. "Human life on Earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way." Volume 0% Warming is a magnifier for every form of violence and oppression globallyHoerner 8—Former director of Research at the Center for a Sustainable Economy, Director of Tax Policy at the Center for Global Change at the University of Maryland College Park, and editor of Natural Resources Tax Review. He has done research on environmental economics and policy on behalf of the governments of Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States. Andrew received his B.A. in Economics from Cornell University and a J.D. from Case Western Reserve School of Law—AND—Nia Robins—former inaugural Climate Justice Corps Fellow in 2003, director of Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative (J. Andrew, “A Climate of Change African Americans, Global Warming, and a Just Climate Policy for the U.S.” July 2008, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Everywhere we turn, the issues and impacts of climate change confront us. One of the most serious environmental threats facing the world today, climate change has moved from the minds of scientists and offices of environmentalists to the mainstream. Though the media is dominated by images of polar bears, melting glaciers, flooded lands, and arid desserts, there is a human face to this story as well. Climate change is not only an issue of the environment; it is also an issue of justice and human rights, one that dangerously intersects race and class. All over the world people of color, Indigenous Peoples and low-income communities bear disproportionate burdens from climate change itself, from ill-designed policies to prevent it, and from side effects of the energy systems that cause it. A Climate of Change explores the impacts of climate change on African Americans, from health to economics to community, and considers what policies would most harm or benefit African Americans—and the nation as a whole. African Americans are thirteen percent of the U.S. population and on average emit nearly twenty percent less greenhouse gases than non-Hispanic whites per capita. Though far less responsible for climate change, African Americans are significantly more vulnerable to its effects than non- Hispanic whites. Health, housing, economic well-being, culture, and social stability are harmed from such manifestations of climate change as storms, floods, and climate variability. African Americans are also more vulnerable to higher energy bills, unemployment, recessions caused by global energy price shocks, and a greater economic burden from military operations designed to protect the flow of oil to the U.S. Climate Justice: The Time Is Now Ultimately, accomplishing climate justice will require that new alliances are forged and traditional movements are transformed. An effective policy to address the challenges of global warming cannot be crafted until race and equity are part of the discussion from the outset and an integral part of the solution. This report finds that: Global warming amplifies nearly all existing inequalities. Under global warming, injustices that are already unsustainable become catastrophic. Thus it is essential to recognize that all justice is climate justice and that the struggle for racial and economic justice is an unavoidable part of the fight to halt global warming. Sound global warming policy is also economic and racial justice policy. Successfully adopting a sound global warming policy will do as much to strengthen the economies of low-income communities and communities of color as any other currently plausible stride toward economic justice. Climate policies that best serve African Americans also best serve a just and strong United States. This paper shows that policies well-designed to benefit African Americans also provide the most benefit to all people in the U.S. Climate policies that best serve African Americans and other disproportionately affected communities also best serve global economic and environmental justice. Domestic reductions in global warming pollution and support for such reductions in developing nations financed by polluter-pays principles provide the greatest benefit to African Americans, the peoples of Africa, and people across the Global South. A distinctive African American voice is critical for climate justice. Currently, legislation is being drafted, proposed, and considered without any significant input from the communities most affected. Special interests are represented by powerful lobbies, while traditional environmentalists often fail to engage people of color, Indigenous Peoples, and low-income communities until after the political playing field has been defined and limited to conventional environmental goals. A strong focus on equity is essential to the success of the environmental cause, but equity issues cannot be adequately addressed by isolating the voices of communities that are disproportionately impacted. Engagement in climate change policy must be moved from the White House and the halls of Congress to social circles, classrooms, kitchens, and congregations. The time is now for those disproportionately affected to assume leadership in the climate change debate, to speak truth to power, and to assert rights to social, environmental and economic justice. Taken together, these actions affirm a vital truth that will bring communities together: Climate Justice is Common Justice. African Americans and Vulnerability In this report, it is shown that African Americans are disproportionately affected by climate change. African Americans Are at Greater Risk from Climate Change and Global Warming Co-Pollutants ? ? The six states with the highest African American population are all in the Atlantic hurricane zone, and are expected to experience more intense storms resembling Katrina and Rita in the future. ? ? Global warming is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of heat waves or extreme heat events. African Americans suffer heat death at one hundred fifty to two hundred percent of the rate for non-Hispanic whites. ? ? Seventy-one percent of African Americans live in counties in violation of federal air pollution standards, as compared to fifty-eight percent of the white population. Seventy-eight percent of African Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant, as compared to fifty-six percent of non-Hispanic whites. ? ? Asthma has strong associations with air pollution, and African Americans have a thirty-six percent higher rate of incidents of asthma than whites. Asthma is three times as likely to lead to emergency room visits or deaths for African Americans. ? ? This study finds that a twenty-five percent reduction in greenhouse gases—similar to what passed in California and is proposed in major federal legislation—would reduce infant mortality by at least two percent, asthma by at least sixteen percent, and mortality from particulates by at least 6,000 to 12,000 deaths per year. Other estimates have run as high as 33,000 fewer deaths per year. A disproportionate number of the lives saved by these proposed reductions would be African American. African Americans Are Economically More Vulnerable to Disasters and Illnesses ? ? In 2006, twenty percent of African Americans had no health insurance, including fourteen percent of African American children—nearly twice the rate of non-Hispanic whites. ? ? In the absence of insurance, disasters and illness (which will increase with global warming) could be cushioned by income and accumulated wealth. However, the average income of African American households is fifty-seven percent that of non-Hispanic whites, and median wealth is only one-tenth that of non-Hispanic whites. ? ? Racist stereotypes have been shown to reduce aid donations and impede service delivery to African Americans in the wake of hurricanes, floods, fires and other climate-related disasters as compared to non-Hispanic whites in similar circumstances. African Americans Are at Greater Risk from Energy Price Shocks ? ? African Americans spend thirty percent more of their income on energy than non-Hispanic whites. ? Energy price increases have contributed to seventy to eighty percent of recent recessions. The increase in unemployment of African Americans during energy caused recessions is twice that of non-Hispanic whites, costing the community an average of one percent of income every year. ? Reducing economic dependence on energy will alleviate the frequency and severity of recessions and the economic disparities they generate. African Americans Pay a Heavy Price and a Disproportionate Share of the Cost of Wars for Oil ? Oil company profits in excess of the normal rate of profit for U.S. industries cost the average household $611 in 2006 alone and are still rising. ? The total cost of the war in Iraq borne by African Americans will be $29,000 per household if the resulting deficit is financed by tax increases, and $32,000 if the debt is repaid by spending cuts. This is more than three times the median assets of African American households. A Clean Energy Future Creates Far More Jobs for African Americans ? Fossil fuel extraction industries employ a far lower proportion of African Americans on average compared to other industries. Conversely, renewable electricity generation employs three to five times as many people as comparable electricity generation from fossil fuels, a higher proportion of whom are African American. ? ? Switching just one percent of total electricity generating capacity per year from conventional to renewable sources would result in an additional 61,000 to 84,000 jobs for African Americans by 2030. ? ? A well-designed comprehensive climate plan achieving emission reductions comparable to the Kyoto Protocol would create over 430,000 jobs for African Americans by 2030, reducing the African American unemployment rate by 1.8 percentage points and raising the average African American income by 3 to 4 percent. Emissions producing industry is drawn to the least protected areas reifying slow violence Davies 19 (Thom View ORCID profile See all articles by this author Search Google Scholar for this author First Published April 10, 2019 Research Article ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****As this paper will demonstrate, structural and slow violence are inextricably linked. Johan Galtung (1969) forwarded the notion of ‘structural violence’ to account for suffering caused through the denial of basic needs. He argued that violence ‘is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential’ (168). According to Galtung, institutionalized forms of racism, sexism, classism, etc. not only restrict quality of life, but are violent in their outcome. Following this, Nixon (2011) makes it abundantly clear that slow violence is an inherently structural concept, by drawing closely upon Galtung’s work.1 Nixon (2011: 10–11) directly acknowledges the influence of Galtung (1969), commenting on the overlap between structural and slow conceptualizations of violence. Both framings expand violence beyond the personal, the direct, and the immediate. They are both are an attempt ‘to complicate conventional assumptions about violence’ (Nixon, 2011: 3), and they interrogate instances of suffering that have no obvious author. Indeed, both slow and structural theorizations of violence locate sources of brutality within the routinized workings of society itself, through a systemic normalization of that suffering (Tyner and Rice, 2016). Nixon (2011) describes slow violence as ‘out of sight’ (2), and structural violence too shares this camouflaged characteristic. As Galtung (1969) explained, ‘structural violence is silent... [and] may be seen as about as natural as the air around us’ (173). Examples of structural violence – such as the ‘unequal life chances’ (171) of marginalized populations – can be socially concealed, ingrained, and institutionalized beyond recognition. Just as the damage of slow violence can remain unnoticed – such as the deadly accumulation of toxic pollution – so too can the ‘vulgar banality’ of structural forms of suffering remain hidden in plain sight (Davies et al., 2017: 2069). In Galtung’s (1969) reworking of violence, there is an implicit immobility and entrenchment to these harmful structures; it is their very embeddedness, fixity, and ability to appear ‘natural’ that gives structural violence its silent potency. This immobility can be contrasted to Nixon’s (2011) conceptualization of slow violence, which is less static and offers ‘broader, more complex descriptive categories of violence enacted over time’ (11). In doing so, Nixon provokes us to consider the various scales and speeds at which violence takes place, inviting us – in a very geographical sense – ‘to foreground questions of time, movement, and change, however gradual’ (11). As Nixon (2011) explains, ‘what I share with Galtung’s line of thought is a concern with social justice’ (10). I would go further, and suggest that structural and slow violence are irrevocably linked: to evoke slow violence without attending to its structural foundations is an Davies 5 impoverishment of the concept. In order to mobilize the concept within critical geography, it is vital to reveal the structural and political forces that permit gradual brutalities to persist. As I will demonstrate in the empirical section of this paper, structural and slow violence can be symbiotic and mutually reinforcing. In light of Galtung’s work, we can see that slow violence is not simply about time and the uneven velocity of social harms; rather, it is also attuned to the uneven structures that allow such brutalities to gradually propagate. In this sense, slow violence is a concept concerned with ‘who gets to decide the course of human-environment relationships’ (O’Lear, 2018: 94). As Nixon (2011) makes clear, slow violence is built on the bedrock of social inequality, with ‘those people lacking resources [becoming] the principal casualties of slow violence’ (4). Just as the impacts of anthropogenic climate change will not be felt equally, nor too will other drawn-out instances of slow distress (see Sealey-Huggins, 2018). Put another way, the concept of slow violence has a purview that extends beyond the speed of social harms, and includes a desire to expose inherent inequalities. With this in mind, I wish to expand and reify this discussion through an empirical case study that showcases the lived experience of slow violence in a polluted place. The following section focuses on ethnographic research between 2016 and 2018 with a community that inhabits a highly toxic landscape in Louisiana, USA. In doing so, I will demonstrate how structural inequality can mutate into slow violence. I will then probe the assumption that slow violence is necessarily invisible to the populations it impacts. Instead of accepting Nixon’s (2011) oft-cited definition of slow violence as ‘out of sight’ (2), we have to instead ask the question: ‘out of sight to whom?’ In asking this question, and taking seriously the knowledge claims of communities who live in toxic spaces, we can begin to unravel the power structures and politics that sustain the uneven geographies of pollution. Approaching the study of environmental injustice through a sustained ethnographic engagement reflects the gradual temporalities of slow violence and is therefore consistent with the philosophy at the centre of this paper. In doing so, the paper presents a much needed alternative to trends swept up in big data, spatial analysis, and quantitative metrics in which the lived experience of people is overlooked. This approach also complements the representational accounts of slow violence offered by Nixon’s literary focus. This paper builds on a recent body of work that explores the uneven politics of toxic geographies (Bagelman and Wiebe, 2017; Davies, 2018; Liboiron et al., 2018; Micieli-Voutsinas and Cavicchi, 2019; Nunn, 2018; Boudia and Jaz, 2014). The following ethnographic vignettes are part of a larger investigation into the experience of pollution and environmental (in) justice within the global petrochemical industry. Actually existing slow violence The small rural settlement of Freetown is situated on the western banks of the Mississippi River, midway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Surrounded on either side by rolling sugarcane fields, this superficially bucolic setting belies its industrial heritage: the lower course of the Mississippi River hosts the densest cluster of chemical facilities in the western hemisphere (Allen, 2003; Mah, 2015; Singer, 2011). Within an 85 mile stretch of riverscape, no less than 136 petrochemical plants and seven oil refineries undertake the dirty work of processing crude oil into lighter more valuable hydrocarbons – as well as heavier byproducts (Figure 1). As you drive along the concrete interstates that rise above the swamps and bayous of south Louisiana, a metallic assemblage of catalytic crackers, reformers, visbreakers, and fractionating columns dot the horizon. This interconnected and sublime ‘oil assemblage’ 6 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0) (Watts, 2015a: 236) helps to break down – or fractionate – a cocktail of hydrocarbon molecules, from which high octane gasoline, benzene, ethylene, diesel, butadiene, methanol, bitumen, asphalt, polycarbons, jet fuel, sulphur, and solid coke are produced, among many other reactive, mundane, useful, and toxic substances. With Louisiana hosting almost onefifth of total US oil reserves; one-tenth of natural-gas reserves;2 and employing an estimated 16.2% of its labour force directly in the oil and gas sector (API, 2014), this petrochemical assemblage undoubtedly supports ‘a vibrant and distinctive working-class oil culture’ (Watts, 2015b: 172). Yet for some communities and environmental activists who live alongside ‘the guts of the industry’ (Appel, 2015: 18), the region between these two river-cities is regularly referred to as Cancer Alley. Indeed, a perception of increased health risks associated with the visible presence of petrochemical infrastructure is widespread in the region (Allen, 2003; Ottinger, 2013; Pezzullo, 2007). // Living slowly with pollution: Stationary displacement Daisy3 has lived in Freetown her whole life. For seven decades she has witnessed the slow accumulation of pollution gradually impact the local area: the invasive chemical smells, the gossiped-accounts of elevated cancer rates, and the vegetation in her garden wilting where once it thrived. At times, she explained, ‘the air is so full with gas you can hardly breathe’. Sitting in her trailer home, she handed me an old handwritten parchment. The crumpled text proclaimed, in antiquated legalese: ‘Be it known that in the month of January in the year of our Lord 1878...’. It was a succession deed that formally recognized Daisy’s forefather as the owner of the property; one of the first freed slaves to be allowed to own land in this part of postbellum Louisiana. ‘My grandparents bought this land...’, she explained: ‘...We been on this land; every generation been on this land, from eighteen-whatever-it-was when they got it’. The document, which Daisy neatly folded and placed back in her bedside drawer, might one day be crucial, if the legal cases against the surrounding petrochemical companies ever came to fruition. She wasn’t totally sure if she wanted to relocate however. For a start, where would she go? And second, ‘they’re not gonna give us the kind of money we need’. What she did know however, in the words of her local Pastor, was that: ‘If you stay here - you die’. Figure 1. Titled ‘Petrochemical Landscape’, this map showcases the chemical geographies of Cancer Alley, along the lower stretch of the Mississippi River in Louisiana (Misrach and Orff, 2014). Source: Map courtesy of Kate Orff. Davies 7 Looking out from Daisy’s veranda, the tall green sugarcane fields quickly give way to eight cylindrical chemical storage tanks, just some of the 118 large gas containers – known as ‘tank farms’ – that have been built within a 2 mile radius of her home in St James Parish. A sprawling petrochemical assemblage is slowly encroaching on the lives of the local community here, in gradual and intimate ways. ‘It was beautiful to live here before they started putting those tanks and things...’, she reminisced: ‘It really was. It really was a nice place to live. Everything was all healthy’. Like others in Freetown, she described how her family used to cultivate a variety of vegetables in the garden, and how – over the years – pollution had changed the way the vegetation grew: ‘the grass don’t even get green like it used to get’, she explained. Accounts of gradual petrochemical accumulation in Freetown do not correspond to the directly ‘violent dispossessions’ (Watts, 2015a) of other oil frontiers and extractive landscapes (Tsing, 2011). Instead, the slow denigration of the environment near Freetown creates a stationary displacement, whereby pollution ‘leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable’ (Nixon, 2011: 19). Daisy described living slowly with pollution: the gradually changing local environment; the sporadic exposures to noxious chemical odours; and like in so many toxic geographies, the perceived yet contested impacts on human health: ‘So many people have so many cancers and diabetes, and so many have heart failure, respiratory....’ she explained, ‘...You know – it is, it’s just very disheartening. Very disheartening’. The interviews I conducted with Daisy and others in this part of Louisiana were not accounts of explicit ‘petro-violence’ (Peluso and Watts, 2001), as witnessed in the physical brutalities of other oil frontiers, such as the Nigerian Delta or Ecuadorian rainforests (Timsar, 2015). Rather, the temporalities of these ‘toxic biographies’ (Armiero and Fava, 2016: 69) spanned the distance of decades, and harked back to a time before the arrival of industry, to distant and remembered ancestors who first owned the now-contaminated land: ‘every[one] raised their own garden, most of the people lived on their own land’, she explained. Freetown was once part of the Pedescleaux-Landry Sugar Plantation and was founded by former slaves during Reconstruction in 1872, just six years before Daisy’s family bought their land. Mutations of violence The slow violence that the community of Freetown is facing is a form of environmental injustice that can more specifically be viewed as environmental racism (Bullard, 1990). In a pattern that is repeated the world over, environmental risks are commonly placed in the path of least resistance, near communities with the smallest reserves of political, economic, and social capital. In Louisiana, with its recent history of colonial violence, slavery, and the systemic ‘devaluation of nonwhite bodies’ (Pulido, 2017: 2), the path of least resistance has meant toxics are placed near poor and black communities; lives that seemed less worthy of protection. Environmental injustice takes place wherever social inequality and pollution collide (Davies and Mah, 2019), and scholars and activists have repeatedly demonstrated that the geography of toxicity is closely bound to the location of minority and low-income communities (Bullard, 1990; Pastor et al., 2004; Pulido, 2017; United Church of Christ, 1987; Walker, 2012). As Pulido (2015: 814) argues, environmental racism is reproduced through a spectrum of actions at multiple scales, and is not only present in overt forms of racism, but also in the structural tenacity of white privilege. As Murphy (2004: 266) argued, ‘society is set up to protect the privileged from toxic events’ (266). Yet in Freetown, like in so many other contaminated landscapes, the ‘events’ of pollution have no natural endpoint. Instead, such elongated exposures to violence are both ‘historically 8 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0) deep’ (Farmer, 1996) and have drawn out, uneven, and deferred consequences. In the toxic geographies of south Louisiana, pollution leaches its violence into the future. Freetown and its neighbouring settlements between Donaldsonville and Vacherie on the west bank of the Mississippi are approximately 95% African American. The high concentration of petrochemical facilities in this area reflects accounts of environmental racism first articulated in the influential environmental justice book Dumping in Dixie (Bullard, 1990). So too did comments made by African American participants I interviewed, who described white residents being ‘bought-out’ by the neighbouring petrochemical companies, while black residents were left in place. Environmental activists have not overlooked Freetown’s plight and have attempted to use civil rights legislation to quash further industrial expansion in the area. For example, in 2016 Tulane Environmental Law Clinic submitted comments on behalf of environmental organizations and local representatives to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ), arguing that a proposed new methanol plant would contravene ‘Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964’ by disproportionately affecting African American residents. As is so often the case in Louisiana however, the methanol plant received the necessary permits to begin construction, despite the concerted efforts of local activists.Climate change demands justice for those forced into an endless cycle of environmental structural violence – it is our moral obligation to affirm institutional policies directed at solving the effects of warming James S. Mastaler 2019 (James S. Mastaler is the author of Woven Together: Faith and Justice for the Earth and the Poor. He is a research scholar of religion and ecology and holds a PhD in Theology with a specialization in Christian Ethics and a dissertation on Social Justice and Ecological Responsibility from Loyola University Chicago. “Social Justice and Environmental Displacement”. {MCT})****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The violent structural dimension of climate-induced environmental displacement is partly what makes it such a pernicious problem. Climate-induced environmental displacement easily crosses the defining boundaries of institutional violence and structural oppression, because it interrupts ‘‘reasonable access to the fulfillment of legitimate human needs for individuals and groups’’ and it is sustained through ‘‘political ideologies, economic institutions, [and] cultural attitudes and behaviors.’’29 A serious response to such institutional violence and systemic oppression requires a wide-ranging transformation of the policies, systems, and procedures that perpetuate the problem so that transformational change can extend beyond the level of relationships between individual people (even though changes are necessary there too), and so changes can be broadly based, deep, and lasting. Social justice focuses on ‘‘the common good of a whole society including individual members, collective groups and the structures,’’ which order the whole of society and social justice carries a special concern for the most disenfranchised, including ‘‘those unable to demand justice for themselves.’’30 Confronting climate-induced environmental displacement through a lens of social justice is an essential part of adequately addressing the uniquely interwoven social, cultural, and environmental aspects of the problem. For a social justice approach to the problem of climate-induced environmental displacement, I offer a five-part holistic response. To the extent that we are capable as individuals, as families, as members of community organizations or faith-based congregations, and as voting constituents of local, state, and national governments, each of us can and should use those positions to advocate across various spheres of influence for the following actionable steps: Social justice and sustainable development are more attainable when the social fabric of a community is preserved. It is critical we mitigate the worst effects of climate change, so migration is only necessary as a last resort. Nobody should be forced to flee his or her homeland. Although complete mitigation of climate change and environmental displacement is no longer possible, it is possible and necessary to prevent the still-preventable consequences of climate change. The world needs a rapid mobilization of national and global resources to curtail the continued production and consumption of fossil fuels while simultaneously conserving and preserving what remains of the world’s temperate and tropical forests.31 Our very best hope may be only a partial mitigation of the worst effects of climate change, but considering the devastation possible under business-as-usual scenarios, this step ought not to go unnamed. The poorest communities in the world’s poorest nations face unfair social, political, and economic structures that make successful adaptation to climate change exceedingly unlikely. These communities lack the financial resources and infrastructure to fully support adequate climate resilience under current social and environmental conditions. If conditions worsen as expected under business-as-usual climate change scenarios, much more will be required to achieve climate resilience. Although technical solutions to many environmental challenges are available, enduring social injustices stand between those solutions and the communities needing them. Preparing for the future means building more resilient communities now.32 Sustainable economic development programs emphasizing education, women’s development and equity, agricultural productivity and stability in rural areas, and infrastructure projects in dense urban areas would go a long way in building more resilient communities. Solutions to environmental problems are more effective if the scientific and technological aspects are addressed alongside social and political aspects.33 Those aspects include fair economic development, equitable governance, and gender equality so everyone has an opportunity to be part of the solution. Various segments of society must learn to work together collaboratively on problems that are emerging without any concern for traditional disciplinary boundaries.34 This is why specialists argue for formulations of broad-gauged responses to environmental problems.35 Although there has been some progress on this front, it has not yet been on a scale required and more effort is necessary. Individuals, families, and sometimes entire communities face a false choice between a near-certain loss of life and livelihood in their homeland or the risk and uncertainties of an uprooted and stateless life elsewhere. The options available to climate change displacees are not yet on par with those available to refugees of national, political, racial, religious, or social group persecutions.36 When climate-induced environmental displacement cannot be prevented and migration is necessary, there are important social justice questions that need to be addressed: what is the international community’s obligation in providing vulnerable communities a legal option to flee for their lives from environmental disasters, as we do already for social and political disasters where persecution leads to loss of life and livelihood? How do the world’s nations ensure that through international cooperation, global social systems, and governance structures they do the job only they are equipped to do: tackle problems of global significance with shared but differentiated responsibility? Working together, with the best information from the hard and social sciences at our disposal and out of a concern for equity and shared prosperity, is a critical part of creating forward-looking policies better equipped to meet the needs of the world’s most vulnerable populations. A holistic social justice-based response to climateinduced environmental displacement obliges a discussion of the fundamental narratives undergirding personal responsibility in relation to the social institutions and governing structures we create together. The way one sees the world has a direct influence on the way one interacts with it, how someone perceives problems, and whether they choose (or choose not) to work with others towardsolutions to those problems. Individual action is an important way to embody the values that make robust social systems possible. Accordingly, we ought not to exclude ourselves from a critical review of the way we live our lives and whether we might do so in a way that better attests to shared responsibilities. This is a baseline approach to responsible individual conduct, but a social justice approach extends beyond it. A social justice approach focuses concern less on the choices an individual makes and more on the way one works in relation with others and to the institutions best able to effect collective change. We must constantly renew our institutions and transform them, so they more purposefully contribute to the common good and make normative a concern for the most disadvantaged and vulnerable members of society. The power and potential of a social justice response are to transform the way individuals live in relation to the social structures that govern our lives together. The world can no longer completely prevent a phenomenon that is already underway. The climate is changing and communities around the globe are experiencing the consequences. What we can do is actively work to prevent the worst effects of climate change, invest in place-based resilience, build equity into all aspects of society, create forward-looking migration policies, and assess our own personal actions in relation to our communal responsibilities. There is great potential for human civilizations to boldly transform the way we live on this planet and the way we live together. Social justice and environmental justice are possible if we act.Framing The reactions of other actors to the plan should not be the basis for rejection---that infinitely defers moral actionsHarris 8—Alexander Norman Harris, Adjunct Analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, former Koch Summer Fellow at the Cato Institute, holds an A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard College, 2008 (“Libertarian Rights,” Thesis Presented to the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard College, June, Available Online at , Accessed 09-01-2017, p. 23-26) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Finally, consequentialism rests on erroneous views of causality and its relation to moral responsibility: what results of one ‘s actions one can be held responsible for and thus liable to be punished for. Consequentialists claim that a person acts unjustly when she does not act in such away as the most-favored results will arise. She is responsible for preventing the best results from coming about by acting differently. An otherwise innocent person who fails to act in some way (for example, refusing to torture an innocent person) to stop an unspeakable harm is at least partially responsible for the harm that she failed to prevent, and thus guilty. We have to pick between having one rights-violation on our hands, say the consequentialists, and having the blood of millions. It is an unfortunate choice, they say, but we must choose the lesser of the two evils. If this was true, and people were responsible for all of the consequences of their actions, including the actions of others, the consequentialist position could be justified. In response, Alan Gewirth posits a moral standard, which he calls the “principle of intervening actions” (PIA). Gewirth takes the position that we are solely responsible for the morality of our own actions in two senses. First, only we are responsible for the acts we commit, even if someone else’s action caused us to act as we did. (For example, if a woman’s husband cheated on her and she, upon finding out, grew enraged and killed his lover, she – not he – would bear sole responsibility.) Second, we are only responsible for our own actions, even if they lead to other actions. Thus, we have a preeminent duty to never act immorally, even if doing so would preclude others from taking even more immoral actions. Gewirth contends that never violating the negative rights of another “is an obligation so fundamental that it cannot be overridden even to prevent evil consequences from befalling some persons.” 75 He clarifies with an example. Imagine that a group of terrorists kidnaps a woman and offers her son a choice: he must torture his mother or they will blow up a city with a nuclear weapon. Gewirth argues that the son has a primary duty to not violate the rights of his mother, whereas he is not the actor who is blowing up the city – the terrorists are the moral agents responsible for that action, not the son. If the son had the choice, he would pick neither. His duty is to never violate rights; the only way to fulfill this is to not torture his mother. Gewirth argues: “It would be unjustified to violate the mother’s right to life in order to protect the rights to life of the many other residents of the city. For rights cannot be justifiably protected by violating another right.” 76 PIA is the only consistent, justifiable moral theory of consequences. First, one should note that only PIA sets a non-arbitrary limit on the string of effects that can factor into the moral calculation. PIA says that no consequences of other actions can count; the only other non- arbitrary standard says that all consequences in the chain must count. One cannot claim that I am responsible for only, say, the first four other actions resulting from my action. One must either consider only my actions or all resulting actions. Thus, if the destruction of the city by terrorists actually ended up preventing more rights violations by, say, staving off a Malthusian population crunch that would result in mass starvation and world war, then the consequentialist position has to endorse the terrorists? action. Consequentialists have to count every effect in the chain, even in the absurdly far-off future, to determine whether an action is moral. This fact, of course, does not by itself constitute a reason to reject consequentialism in favor of PIA, but it does suggest that PIA is the only reasonable interpretation of the requirement of non-consequentialism. It also suggests an implausible feature of consequentialism. The libertarian first principle of self-ownership (to be further elucidated in the next chapter) shows why the inclusion of all resulting actions is implausible. Since we are born owning ourselves and nothing else, controlling our mind and body and no one else’s, it makes perfect sense that we should be responsible for only the actions that we ourselves commit. Some could argue that we should be responsible for the results of these actions. PIA states that we are. If a person gets a wrecking ball and knocks over a building, which then falls and crushes twenty people, the person is to some degree responsible for those results. But this is not the case if someone else’s action intervenes, because another moral agent is the more proximate cause of the effects; she has stepped into the line of causation to take the moral responsibility. When you act upon a rock that you hurl at an enemy’s face, you are responsible for the effects of the rock for two reasons: first, you are using force upon the rock; secondly, the rock has no agency over the effects it causes. The rock, by the fact that it has no agency of its own, is merely your tool, an extension of your agency. But neither of these reasons holds for using non-coercive measures that result in a person’s action. As long as one does not use coercion to compel another to commit a rights- violating action, one has not reduced that other person’s agency. Possessing full agency, the person is morally responsible for the totality of her actions; thus no one else can assume any portion of that responsibility. You are not responsible for anyone else’s free actions and no one else is responsible for yours. If the son were somehow partially responsible for the terrorists blowing up the city, that would necessarily diminish, by whatever fraction of responsibility the son assumed, the terrorists? responsibility for that action. They would not be wholly responsible, because the son had caused their action. But this must not be the case; the terrorists must be held totally responsible for the destruction of the city. Consequentialists ask, “Which set of rights - violations do you endorse: the torture of the mother, or the deaths of the millions?” Gewirth responds that PIA endorses neither. PIA gives the terrorists complete responsibility for their actions, and emphatically condemns them, in a way that no other position is capable of. Only PIA is capable of giving rights their supreme status by proclaiming that they may never be violated for any reason, including preventing future rights-violations. One-up consequentialism creates rules that would violate PIA. The reason for picking the rules it does is based on the notion that people are responsible for actions other than their own. A rule prohibiting the sale of drugs or handguns or violent videogames, for example, might be established because those items cause people to act violently. My selling them leads to someone else acting wrongly. So I am acting wrongly when I sell them. PIA denies this line of reasoning; it says that punishing people for others? actions is always unjust. The rules that one–up consequentialism establishes, then, are also unjust. The aforementioned reasons (with the exception of the moral liberty objection) show the necessity of formulating principles of justice that are deontological all the way up and all the way down. They must be thoroughly non-consequentialist, and their justification must be non-teleological and not jump the positive-normative gap. In the next chapter, we will see what sorts of justifications can be offered and what principles arise from them.Prioritize slow violence---obsession with short timeframe impacts obscures structural factors. Rob Nixon 10. Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Pages 1-14. 2010. ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****When Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, advocated that the bank develop a scheme to export rich nation garbage, toxic waste, and heavily polluting industries to Africa, he did so in the calm voice of global managerial reasoning.' Such a scheme. Summers elaborated, would help correct an inefficient global imbalance in toxicity. Underlying his plan is an overlooked but crucial subsidiary benefit that he outlined: offloading rich-nation toxins onto the world's poorest continent would help ease the growing pressure from rich-nation environmentalists who were campaigning against garbage dumps and industrial effluent thai they condemned as health threats and found aesthetically offensive. Summers thus rationalized his poison-redistribution ethic as offering a double gain: it would benefit the United States and Europe economically, while helping appease the rising discontent of rich-nation environmentalists. Summers' arguments assumed a direct link between aesthetically unsightly waste and Africa as an out-of-sighl continent, a place remote from green activists' terrain of concern. In Summers' win win scenario for the global North, the African recipients ot his plan were triply discounted: discounted as political agents, discounted as long-term casualties of what 1 call in this book "slow violence," and discounted as cultures possessing environmental practices and concerns of their own. I begin with Summers' extraordinary proposal because it captures the strategic and representational challenges posed by slow violence as it impacts the environments and the environ-mentalism of the poor. Three primary concerns animate this book, chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink—politically, imaginatively, and theoretically what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermath s of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively. The long dyings the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused, time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions from domestic abuse to posttraumatic stress and. in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded. Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Palling bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time? This book's second, related focus concerns the environ mentalism of the poor, for it is those people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Our media bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated as disposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously exacerbating the vulnerability of those whom Kevin Bale, in another context, has called "disposable people."2 It is against such conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent environmentalist!! of the poor, particularly (though not exclusively) across the so-called global South. So a central issue that emerges is strategic: if the neoliberal era has intensified assaults on resources, it has also intensified resistance, whether through isolated site-specific struggles or through activism that has reached across national boundaries in an effort to build translocal alliances. "The poor" is a compendious category subject to almost infinite local variation as well as to fracture along fault lines of ethnicity, gender, race, class, region, religion, and generation. Confronted with the militarization of both commerce and development, impoverished communities are often assailed by coercion and bribery that test their cohesive resilience. How much control will, say, a poor hardwood forest community have over the mix of subsistence and market strategies it deploys in attempts at adaptive survival? How will that community negotiate competing definitions of its own poverty and long-term wealth when the guns, the bulldozers, and the moneymen arrive? Such communities typically have to patch together threadbare improvised alliances against vastly superior military, corporate, and media forces. As such, impoverished resource rebels can seldom afford to be single-issue activists: their green commitments are seamed through with other economic and cultural causes as they experience environmental threat not as a planetary abstraction but as a set of inhabited risks, some imminent, others obscurely long term. The status of environmental activism among the poor in the global South has shifted significantly in recent years. Where green or environmental discourses were once frequently regarded with skepticism as neocolo-nial. Western impositions inimical to the resource priorities of the poor in the global South, such attitudes have been tempered by the gathering visibility and credibility of environmental justice movements that have pushed back against an antihuman environmenialism that too often sought (under the banner of universalism) to impose green agendas dominated by rich nations and Western NGOs. Among those who inhabit the front lines of the global resource wars, suspicions that environmentaUsm is another guise of what Andrew Ross calls "planetary management" have not. of course, been wholly allayed.1 But those suspicions have eased somewhat as the spectrum of what counts as environmenialism has broadened. Western activists are now more prone to recognize, engage, and learn from resource insurrections among the global poor that might previously have been discounted as not properly environmental.' Indeed, 1 believe that the fate of environ mentalism—and more decisively, the character of the biosphere itself—will be shaped significantly in decades to come by the tension between what Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier have called "full-stomach' and "empty-belly" environmenialism.' The challenge of visibility that links slow violence to the environmen-talism of the poor connects directly to this hook's third circulating concern—the complex, often vexed figure of the environmental writer-activist. In the chapters that follow 1 address not just literary but more broadly rhetorical and visual challenges posed by slow violence; however, 1 place particular emphasis on combative writers who have deployed their imaginative agility and worldly ardor to help amplify the media marginalized causes of the environmentally dispossessed. I have sought to stress those places where writers and social movements, often in complicated tandem, have stralcgized against attritional disasters that afflict embattled communities. The writers I engage arc geographically wide ranging—from various parts of the African continent, from the Middle East. India, the Caribbean, the United States, and Britain—and work across a variety of forms. Figures like Wangari Maathai. Arundhati Roy. lndra Sinha. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Abdulrah-man Munif. Njabulo Ndebcle, Nadine Gordimer, Jamaica Kincaid, Rachel Carson, and June Jordan are alive to the inhabited impact of corrosive transnational forces, including petro-imperialism. the megadam industry, outsourced toxicity, neocolonial tourism, antihuman conservation practices, corporate and environmental deregulation, and the militarization of commerce, forces that disproportionately jeopardize the livelihoods, prospects, and memory banks of the global poor. Among the writers 1 consider, some have testified in relative isolation, some have helped instigate movements for environmental justice, and yet others, in aligning themselves with preexisting movements, have given imaginative definition to the issues at stake while enhancing the public visibility of the cause. Relations between movements and writers are often fraught and fric-tional. not least because such movements themselves are susceptible to fracture from both external and internal pressures.* That said, the writers I consider are enraged by injustices they wish to see redressed, injustices they believe they can help expose, silences they can help dismantle through testimonial protest, rhetorical inventiveness, and counterhistories in the face of formidable odds. Most are restless, versatile writers ready to pit their energies against what Edward Said called "the normalized quiet of unseen power."" This normalized quiet is of particular pertinence to the hushed havoc and injurious invisibility that trail slow violence. In this book, I have sought to address our inattention to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media. The insidious workings of slow violence derive largely from the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time. In an age that venerates instant spectacle, slow violence is deficient in the recognizable special effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV. Chemical and radiological violence, for example, is driven inward, somatized into cellular dramas of mutation that—particularly in the bodies of the poor—remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated. From a narrative perspective, such invisible, mutagenic theater is slow paced and open ended, eluding the tidy closure, the containment, imposed by the visual orthodoxies of victory and defeat. Let me ground this point by referring, in conjunction, to Rachel Carson's Silenl Spring and Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. In 1962 Silent Spring jolted a broad international public into an awareness of the protracted, cryptic, and indiscriminate casualties inflicted by dichlorodiphenyltrichlo-roethane (DDT). Yet. just one year earlier, Fanon. in the opening pages of Wretched of the Earth, had comfortably invoked DDT as an affirmative metaphor for anticolonial violence: he called for a DDT-filled spray gun to be wielded as a weapon against the "parasites" spread bv the colonials' Christian church." Fanon's drama of decolonization is, of course, studded with the overt weaponry whereby subjugation is maintained {"by dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons") or overthrown ("by the searing bullets and bloodstained knives") after "a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists."' Yet his temporal vision of violence—and of what Aime Cesaire called "the rendezvous of victory"—was uncomplicated by the concerns thai an as-yet inchoate environmental justice movement (catalyzed in part by Silent Spring) would raise about lopsided risks that permeate the land long term, blurring the clean lines between defeat and victory, between colonial dispossession and official national self determination.11 We can ccr lainly read Fanon, in his concern with land as property and as fount of native dignity, retrospectively with an environmental eye. But our theories of violence today must be informed by a science unavailable to Fanon, a science that addresses environmentally embedded violence that is often difficult to source, oppose, and once set in motion, to reverse. Attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space arc marked above all by displacements temporal, geographical, rhetorical, and technological displacements that simplify violence and underestimate, in advance and in retrospect, the human and environmental costs. Such displacements smooth the way for amnesia, as places are rendered irretrievable to those who once inhabited them, places that ordinarily pass unmourned in the corporate media. Places like the Marshall Islands, subjected between 1948 and 1958 to sixty-seven American atmospheric nuclear "tests," the largest of them equal in force to 1.000 I liroshima-sizcd bombs. In 1950 the Atomic Energy Commission declared the Marshall Islands "by far the most contaminated place in the world," a condition that would compromise independence in the long term, despite the islands' formal ascent in 1979 into the ranks of self-governing nations." The island republic was still in pan governed by an irradiated past: well into the 1980s its history of nuclear colonialism, long forgotten by the colonizers, was still delivering into the world "jellyfish babies"—headless, eyeless, limbless human infants who would live for just a few hours.11 If, as Said notes, struggles over geography are never reducible to armed struggle but have a profound symbolic and narrative component as well, and if, as Michael Watts insists, we must attend to the "violent geographies of fast capitalism." we need to supplement both these injunctions with a deeper understanding of the slow violence of delayed effects that structures so many of our most consequential forgetting*." Violence, above all environmental violence, needs to be seen—and deeply considered—as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time. Wc need to bear in mind Faulkner's dictum that "the past is never dead. It's not even past." His words resonate with particular force across landscapes permeated by slow violence, landscapes of temporal overspill that elude rhetorical cleanup operations with their sanitary beginnings and endings.1'1 Kwamc Anthony Appiah famously asked. "Is the 'Post-' in "PostcoloniaF the 'Post-' in 'Postmodern'?" As environmentalists wc might ask similarly searching questions of the "post" in postindustrial, post Cold War, and post-conflict." For if the past of slow violence isnevcrpast. so too the post is never fully post: industrial particulates and effluents live on in the environmental elements wc inhabit and in our very bodies, which cpidcmiologically and ecologically are never our simple contemporaries.'" Something similar applies to so-called postconflict societies whose leaders may annually commemorate, as marked on the calendar, the official cessation of hostilities, while ongoing intcrgcncrational slow violence (inflicted by, say. uncxplodcd landmines or carcinogens from an arms dump) may continue hostilities by other means. Ours is an age of onrushing turbo-capitalism, wherein the present feels more abbreviated than it used to—at least for the world's privileged classes who live surrounded by technological time-savers that often compound the sensation of not having enough lime. Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental justice. If, under ncoliberalism, the gult between enclaved rich and outcast poor has become ever more pronounced, ours is also an era of enclaved time wherein for many speed has become a sell justifying, propulsive ethic that renders uneventful" violence (to those who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak claimant on our time. The attosecond pace of our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment, prompts us to keep flicking and clicking distractedly in an insatiable and often insensate — quest for quicker sensation. The oxymoronic notion of slow violence poses a number of challenges; scientific, legal, political, and representational. In the long arc between the emergence of slow violence and its delayed effects, both the causes and the memory of catastrophe readily fade from view as the casualties incurred typically pass untallied and unremembered. Such discounting in turn makes it far more difficult to secure effective legal measures for prevention, restitution, and redress. Casualties from slow violence are moreover, out of sync not only with our narrative and media expectations but also with the swift seasons of electoral change. Politicians routinely adopt a "last in, first out" stance toward environmental issues, admitting them when limes are flush, dumping them as soon as times get tight. Because preventative or remedial environmental legislation typically targets slow violence, it cannot deliver dependable electoral cycle results, even though those results may ultimately be life saving. Relative to bankable pocket-book actions—there'll be a tax rebate check in the mail next August—environmental payouts seem to lurk on a distant horizon. Many politicians—and indeed many voters—routinely treat environmental action as critical yet not urgent. And so generation after generation of two- or four-year cycle politicians add to the pileup of deferrable actions deferred. With rare exceptions, in the domain of slow violence "yes, but not now, not yet" becomes the modus operandi. How can leaders be goaded to avert catastrophe when the political rewards of their actions will not accrue to them but will be reaped on someone else's watch decades, even centuries, from now? How can environmental activists and storytellers work to counter the potent political, corporate, and even scientific forces invested in immediate self-interest, procrastination, and dissembling? We see such dissembling at work, for instance, in the afterword to Michael Crichton's 2004 environmental conspiracy novel, Slate of Fear, wherein he argued that we needed twenty more years of daia gaihcringon climate change before any policy decisions could be ventured.1* Although the National Academy of Sciences had assured former president George W. Bush that humans were indeed causing the earth to warm. Bush shopped around for views that accorded with his own skepticism and found them in a private meeting with Crichton, whom he described as "an expert scientist.*' To address the challenges of slow violence is to confront the dilemma Rachel Carson faced almost half a century ago as she sought to dramatize what she eloquently called "death by indirection."'" Carson's subjects were biomagnification and toxic drift, forms of oblique, slow-acting violence that, like climate change, pose formidable imaginative difficulties for writers and activists alike. In struggling to give shape to amorphous menace, both Carson and reviewers of 5ilcn( Spring resorted to a narrative vocabulary: one reviewer portrayed the book as exposing "the new, unplottcd and mysterious dangers wc insist upon creating all around us,"" while Carson herself wrote of "a shadow that is no less ominous because it is formless and obscure."10 To confront slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time. The representational challenges are acute, requiring creative ways of drawing public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but high in long-term effects. To intervene representation-ally entails devising iconic symbols that embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency. Seven years after Rachel Carson turned our attention to ihe lethal mechanisms of "death by indirection," Johan Gaining, the influential Norwegian mathematician and sociologist, coined the term "indirect or structural violence."'' Gakung's theory of structural violence is pertinent here because some of his concerns overlap with the concerns that animate this book, while others help throw inio relief the rather different features I have soughi to highlight by introducing the term "slow violence." Structural violence, forGaltung, stands in opposition to the more familiar personal violence thai dominates our conceptions of what counts as violence per sc." Galtung was concerned, as I am, with widening the field of what constitutes violence. He soughi to foreground ihe vast structures thai can give rise to acts of personal violence and constitute forms of violence in and of themselves. Such structural violence may range from the unequal morbidity that results from a commodificd health care system, to racism itself. What I share with Gal-tung's line of thought is a concern with social justice, hidden agency, and certain forms of violence that are imperceptible. In these terms, for example, we can recognize that the structural violence embodied by a neoliberal order of austerity measures, structural adjustment, rampant deregulation, corporate megamergers, and a widening gulf between rich and poor is a form of covert violence in its own right that is often a catalyst for more recognizably overt violence. For an expressly environmental example of structural violence, one might cite Wangari Maathai's insistence that the systemic burdens of national debt to the IMF and World Bank borne by many so-called developing nations constitute a major impediment to environmental sustainability.JI So. too, feminist earth scientist Jill Schneiderman, one of our finest thinkers about environmental time, has written about the way in which environmental degradation may "masquerade as inevitable."14 For all the continuing pertinence of the theory of structural violent t and for all the modifications the theory has undergone, the notion bears the impress of its genesis during the high era of structuralist thinking that tended toward a static determinism. We see this, for example, in Gakung's insistence that "structural violence is silent, it does not show—its is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters."1* In contrast to the static connotations of structural violence, I have sought, through the notion of slow violence, to foreground questions of time, movement, and change, however gradual. The explicitly temporal emphasis of slow violence allows us to keep front and center the representational challenges and imaginative dilemmas posed not just by imperceptible violence but by imperceptible change whereby vio lence is decoupled from its original causes by the workings of time. Time becomes an actor in complicated ways, not least because the temporal tern plates of our spectacle-driven, 24/7 media life have shifted massively since Galtung first advanced his theory of structural violence some forty years ago. To talk about slow violence, then, is to engage directly with our contemporary politics of speed. Simply put. structural violence is a theory that entails rethinking different notions of causation and agency with respect to violent effects. Slow violence, by contrast, might well include forms of structural violence, but has a wider descriptive range in calling attention, not simply to questions of agency, but to broader, more complex descriptive categories of violence enacted slowly over time. The shift in the relationship between human agency and time is most dramatically evident in our enhanced understanding of the accelerated changes occurring at two scalar extremes—in the life-sustaining circuits of planetary biophysics and in the wired brain's neural circuitry. The idea of structural violence predated both sophisticated contemporary ice-core sampling methods and the emergence of cyber technology. My concept of slow violence thus seeks to respond both to recent, radical changes in our geological perception and our changing technological experiences of time. Let me address the geological aspect first. In 2000, Paul Crutzen. the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, introduced the term "the Anthropo-cene Age" (which he dated to James Watt's invention of the steam engine). Through the notion of "the Anthropocene Age." Crutzen sought to theorize an unprecedented epochal effect: the massive impact by the human species, from the industrial era onward, on our planet's life systems, an impact that, as his term suggests, is geomorphic, equal in force and in long-term implications to a major geological event.* Crutzen's attempt to capture the epochal scale of human activity's impact on the planet was followed by Will Steffen's elaboration, in conjunction with Crutzen and John McNeill, of what they dubbed the Great Acceleration, a second stage of the Anthropocene Age that they dated to the mid-twentieth century. Writing in 2007. Steffen ct al. noted how "nearly three-quarters of the anthropogenically driven rise in COt concentration has occurred since 1950 (from about 310 to 380 ppm), and about half of the total rise (48 ppm) has occurred in just the last 30 years."-7 The Australian environmental historian Libby Robin has put the case succinctly: "We have recently entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. There is now considerable evidence that humanity has altered the biophysical systems of Earth, not just the carbon cycle . . . but also the nitrogen cycle and ultimately the atmosphere and climate of the whole globe."" What, then, are the consequences for our experience of time of this newfound recognition thai we have inadvertently, through our unprecedented biophysical species power, inaugurated an Anthropocene Age and are now engaged in (and subject to) the hurtling changes of the Great Acceleration? Over the past two decades, this high-speed planetary modification has been accompanied (at least for those increasing billions who have access to the Internet) by rapid modifications to the human cortex. It is difficult, but necessary, to consider simultaneously a geologically-paced plasticity, however relatively rapid, and the plasticity of brain circuits reprogrammed by a digital world that threatens to "info-whelm" us into a state of perpetual distraction. If an awareness of the Great Acceleration is (to put it mildly) unevenly distributed, the experience of accelerated connectivity (and the paradoxical disconnects that can accompany it) is increasingly widespread. In an age of degraded attention spans it becomes doubly difficult yet increasingly urgent that we focus on the toll exacted, over time, by the slow violence of ecological degradation. We live, writes Cory Doctorow, in an era when the electronic screen has become an "ecosystem of interruption technologies.''" Or as former Microsoft executive Linda Stone puts it, we now live in an age of "continuous partial attention.?" Fast is faster than it used to be, and story units have become concomitantly shorter. In this cultural milieu of digitally speeded up time, and foreshortened narrative, the intergenerational aftermath becomes a harder sell. So to render slow violence visible entails, among other things, redefining speed: we see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts to recast "glacial"-once a dead metaphor for "slow-as a rousing, iconic image of unacceptably fast loss. Efforts to make forms of slow violence more urgently visible suffered a setback in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11, which reinforced a spectacular, immediately sensational, and instantly hyper-visible image of what constitutes a violent threat. The fiery spectacle of the collapsing towers was burned into the national psyche as the definitive image of violence, setting back by years attempts to rally public sentiment against climate change, a threat that is incremental, exponential, and far less sensationally visible. Condoleezza Rice's strategic fantasy of a mushroom cloud looming over America if the United States failed to invade Iraq gave further visual definition to cataclysmic violence as something explosive and instantaneous, a recognizably cinematic, immediately sensational, pyrotechnic event. The representational bias against slow violence has, furthermore, a critically dangerous impact on what counts as a casualty in the first place. Casualties of slow violence-human and environmental-are the casualties most likely not to be seen, not to be counted. Casualties of slow violence become light-weight, disposable casualties, with dire consequences for the ways wars are remembered, which in turn has dire consequences for the projected casualties from future wars. We can observe this bias at work in the way wars, whose lethal repercussions spread across space and time, are tidily bookended in the historical record. Thus, for instance, a 2003 New York Times editorial on Vietnam declared that" during our dozen years there, the U.S. killed and helped kill at least 1.5 million people.'?' But that simple phrase "during our dozen years there" shrinks the toll, foreshortening the ongoing slow-motion slaughter: hundreds of thousands survived the official war years, only to slowly lose their lives later to Agent Orange. In a 2002 study, the environmental scientist Arnold Schecter recorded dioxin levels in the bloodstreams of Bien Hoa residents at '35 times the levels of Hanoi's inhabitants, who lived far north of the spraying." The afflicted include thousands of children born decades after the war's end. More than thirty years after the last spray run, Agent Orange continues to wreak havoc as, through biomagnification, dioxins build up in the fatty tissues of pivotal foods such as duck and fish and pass from the natural world into the cooking pot and from there to ensuing human generations. An Institute of Medicine committee has by now linked seventeen medical conditions to Agent Orange; indeed, as recently as 2009 it uncovered fresh evidence that exposure to the chemical increases the likelihood of developing Parkinson's disease and ischemic heart disease." Under such circumstances, wherein long-term risks continue to emerge, to bookend a war's casualties with the phrase "during our dozen years there" is misleading: that small, seemingly innocent phrase is a powerful reminder of how our rhetorical conventions for bracketing violence routinely ignore ongoing, belated casualties.Reject other models of impact calculus that make even the most impossible scenarios plausibleOliver Kessler 8. Professor of Sociology at University of Bielefeld. “From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics.” Alternatives 33 (2008). 211-232. ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The problem of the second method is that it is very difficult to "calculate" politically unacceptable losses. If the risk of terrorism is defined in traditional terms by probability and potential loss, then the focus on dramatic terror attacks leads to the marginalization of probabilities. The reason is that even the highest degree of improbability becomes irrelevant as the measure of loss goes to infinity.^o The mathematical calculation of the risk of terrorism thus tends to overestimate and to dramatize the danger. This has consequences beyond the actual risk assessment for the formulation and execution of "risk policies": If one factor of the risk calculation approaches infinity (e.g., if a case of nuclear terrorism is envisaged), then there is no balanced measure for antiterrorist efforts, and risk manage- ment as a rational endeavor breaks down. Under the historical con- dition of bipolarity, the "ultimate" threat with nuclear weapons could be balanced by a similar counterthreat, and new equilibria could be achieved, albeit on higher levels of nuclear overkill. Under the new condition of uncertainty, no such rational balancing is possible since knowledge about actors, their motives and capabilities, is largely absent. The second form of security policy that emerges when the deter- rence model collapses mirrors the "social probability" approach. It represents a logic of catastrophe. In contrast to risk management framed in line with logical probability theory, the logic of catastro- phe does not attempt to provide means of absorbing uncertainty. Rather, it takes uncertainty as constitutive for the logic itself; uncer- tainty is a crucial precondition for catastrophies. In particular, cata- strophes happen at once, without a warning, but with major impli- cations for the world polity. In this category, we find the impact of meteorites. Mars attacks, the tsunami in South East Asia, and 9/11. To conceive of terrorism as catastrophe has consequences for the formulation of an adequate security policy. Since catastrophes hap- pen irrespectively of human activity or inactivity, no political action could possibly prevent them. Of course, there are precautions that can be taken, but the framing of terrorist attack as a catastrophe points to spatial and temporal characteristics that are beyond "rationality." Thus, political decision makers are exempted from the responsibility to provide security—as long as they at least try to pre- empt an attack. Interestingly enough, 9/11 was framed as catastro- phe in various commissions dealing with the question of who was responsible and whether it could have been prevented. This makes clear that under the condition of uncertainty, there are no objective criteria that could serve as an anchor for measur- ing dangers and assessing the quality of political responses. For ex- ample, as much as one might object to certain measures by the US administration, it is almost impossible to "measure" the success of countermeasures. Of course, there might be a subjective assessment of specific shortcomings or failures, but there is no "common" cur- rency to evaluate them. As a consequence, the framework of the security dilemma fails to capture the basic uncertainties. Pushing the door open for the security paradox, the main prob- lem of security analysis then becomes the question how to integrate dangers in risk assessments and security policies about which simply nothing is known. In the mid 1990s, a Rand study entitled "New Challenges for Defense Planning" addressed this issue arguing that "most striking is the fact that we do not even know who or what will constitute the most serious future threat, "^i In order to cope with this challenge it would be essential, another Rand researcher wrote, to break free from the "tyranny" of plausible scenario planning. The decisive step would be to create "discontinuous scenarios ... in which there is no plausible audit trail or storyline from current events"52 These nonstandard scenarios were later called "wild cards" and became important in the current US strategic discourse. They justified the transformation from a threat-based toward a capability- based defense planning strategy.53 The problem with this kind of risk assessment is, however, that even the most absurd scenarios can gain plausibility. By constructing a chain of potentialities, improbable events are linked and brought into the realm of the possible, if not even the probable. "Although the likelihood of the scenario dwindles with each step, the residual impression is one of plausibility. "54 This so-called Oth- ello effect has been effective in the dawn of the recent war in Iraq. The connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that the US government tried to prove was disputed from the very begin- ning. False evidence was again and again presented and refuted, but this did not prevent the administration from presenting as the main rationale for war the improbable yet possible connection between Iraq and the terrorist network and the improbable yet possible proliferation of an improbable yet possible nuclear weapon into the hands of Bin Laden. As Donald Rumsfeld famously said: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." This sentence indicates that under the condition of genuine uncer- tainty, different evidence criteria prevail than in situations where security problems can be assessed with relative certainty. War is increasingly less likely – this card assumes all of their answersFettweis, Tulane University Political Science Associate Professor, 17 [Christopher; 5-8-17; “Unipolarity, Hegemony, and the New Peace”; Security Studies; 26:3; pg 424-428; PAC] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The “New Peace” usefully describes the well-known, unprecedented, system-wide decline in warfare since the end of the Cold War.7 Although not appreciated by the public at large, empirical analyses have consistetly shown that the incidence and magnitude of warfare—interstate, civil, ethnic, revolutionary, etc.—have declined steadily since the end of the Cold War and into the new century.8 Raw conflict numbers tell only part of the story: by almost any measure the world has become significantly more peaceful, with measurable declines in coups, repression, the chances of dying in battle, territorial and border disputes, conquest, genocide, and violence against civilians. Each is at an all-time low.9 Peace settlements have proven more durable over time, and fewer new conflicts are breaking out than ever before.10 Whether these trends represent a fundamental change in the rules that govern state behavior or a temporary respite between cataclysms is not yet clear, but there is no doubt that—thus far at least—the post-Cold War era has been more stable and peaceful than any that preceded it.Absolute numbers of conflicts and other acts of violence are dropping in a system with far more states (the League of Nations had fifty-eight members at its peak, while the UN today has 193) and people (global population has more than tripled since World War II). Rather than fuel Malthusian competition for resources, runaway global population growth has been accompanied by a drastic decline in violence. Furthermore, while some statistics regarding the rate of battle deaths take population growth into account, none attempt to capture the greater number of years people are living. Current life spans are, on average, about twenty years longer than they were in 1950.11 Citizens of the twenty-first century have nearly 30 percent more time to experience warfare. Yet the numbers still decline.Not everyone is convinced by the data, however. Skeptics have raised four objections to the idea that this peace is particularly new, each worthy of consideration. First, some have asserted that it is simply too soon to know whether or not these trends in armed conflict are statistically anomalous. Bear Braumoeller has suggested that a minimum of 150 more years needs to pass before we can say with confidence whether war is actually declining.12 His work focuses exclusively on major, great power wars, however, and excludes both minor and internal conflicts. While it is certainly true that the New Peace is a relatively new phenomenon, perhaps too new to convince everyone, it is also so pervasive across so many measures of violence, and so potentially significant, that surely it is worthy of consideration, even at this early stage.Second, a number of scholars object to the assertion that “peace” is merely the absence of war, drawing upon Johan Galtung’s well-known distinction between “negative peace” (the absence of war) and “positive peace” (the “integration of human society,” or the presence of justice, cooperation, equality, and/or other indicators).13 The New Peace concerns only the former. Surely negative peace has value by itself, but there is also evidence that positive peace is on the rise as well.14 The current era thus contains good news even for those who take a more expansive view of what exactly it means to be free of conflict.Third, there is evidence that the last few years have been marginally more violent than the ones that preceded them. The war in Syria has driven global battle deaths up from 25,000 in 2011 to more than 100,000 in 2014, and has certainly contributed to perceptions of a crumbling international security structure. While that one measure has begun to move in opposite direction, however, the other major trends discussed above remain unchanged.15 Pinker has noted the increase in battle deaths, but also has pointed out that the overall level of deaths remains far below those of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s, “when the world was a far more dangerous place.” 16 There is variation during the New Peace, but levels of violence remain lower than ever before.The last major objection to the New Peace argues not that the statistics are wrong, but that they fail to capture the reality of modern armed conflict. Perhaps the form taken by post-Cold War violence is different from earlier versions, making it harder to detect by traditional measures. In her influential New and Old Wars, Mary Kaldor warned of the rise of “new wars,” which tend to be intrastate, disorganized, unstructured, and deadlier for civilians than those of previous eras.17 By her widely repeated estimate, new wars result in eight civilian deaths for every one combatant, a much higher ratio than in any previous era. Old wars may be on the decline, in other words, but perhaps new wars, which kill more innocents and are more disruptive to society, have taken their place.Time and increased scrutiny have not been kind to Kaldor’s ideas, however. A number of researchers have found that the ratio of civilian-to-combatant casualties has not changed markedly over time.18 If anything, the wars of the post-Cold War era have been less deadly for civilians.19 Proponents of the “new wars” thesis are surely correct when pointing out that civilians suffer horrifically during post-Cold War conflicts, but those fighting in Guatemala, Cambodia, Mozambique, and the other Cold War hotspots were hardly gentlemen following the battlefield version of the Marquis of Queensberry rules. There is no reason to believe that today’s wars are particularly “new” or worse for civilians than those of the 1960s or 1970s. If anything, combat-related mortality is probably lower today, due to the increase in relief agency activity, refugee aid, and emergency medical services. Worldwide attention is focused more on civilian suffering because we are far more aware of it, thanks in part to the ubiquitous smart phone, not because it has necessarily increased.To say that this empirical reality does not match popular perception would be to understate the case. The tragic mess in Syria in particular has blinded many observers to the broader trends, which remain essentially unchanged. Security is, after all, relative; absolute safety is an illusion, something promised by leaders but unattainable in a world of imperfect actors. Safety has meaning only in comparison to other times. And when the current era—as dangerous as it may seem—is compared to any other, the verdict is clear: ours is a golden age of peace and security, one in which the odds of dying in warfare are lower than ever before. Rarely have popular perceptions of the international security environment been at such stark odds with reality.The era of New Peace is hardly without problems, challenges, or lingering violence. Declining conflict does nothing to mitigate climate change, inequality, ISIS, the Ebola virus, or cyberterrorism. However, the number of people who dispute the world’s general stability should shrink as more and more relatively peaceful years go by. Why these welcome trends are occurring is not nearly as clear, although a number of attempts have been made to account for it.Nuclear war wouldn’t cause extinction – it would be regionally confined, cause minimal casualties, and wouldn’t harm the global environment. Seitz 6 (Russell is a Visiting Scholar in Harvard University's Center for International Affairs, published in Nature and Foreign Affairs on the subject of nuclear winter, Dec 20, “The' Nuclear Winter ' Meltdown: Photoshopping the Apocalypse” adamant.seitz/2006/12/preherein_honor.html) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****All that remains of Sagan's Big Chill? are curves such as this, but history is full of prophets of doom who fail to deliver, not all are without honor in their own land.? The 1983? 'Nuclear Winter " papers in Science were so politicized that? even the eminently liberal? President of The Council for a Liveable World called? "The worst example of the mis-representation of science to the public in my memory."?Among the authors was Stanford? President? Donald Kennedy. Today he edits Science?, the nation's major arbiter of climate science--and policy. Below, a case illustrating? the mid-range of the ~.7 to ~1.6 degree C maximum cooling? the 2006 studies suggest? is? superimposed in color on the Blackly Apocalyptic predictions published in Science? Vol. 222, 1983 . They're worth ?comparing, because the range of soot concentrations in the new models? ?overlaps with cases assumed to have dire climatic consequences in the? widely publicized 1983? scenario "Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously, higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the stakes are not as great." wrote Sagan in Foreign Affairs , Winter 1983 -84. But that "evidence" was never forthcoming. ‘Nuclear Winter' never existed outside of a computer? except as air-brushed animation commissioned by the a? PR firm - Porter Novelli Inc. Yet Sagan predicted "the extinction of the human species " as temperatures plummeted 35 degrees C and? the world froze in the aftermath of? a nuclear holocaust.? Last year, Sagan's cohort tried? to reanimate the ghost in a machine anti-nuclear activists invoked in the depths of the Cold War, by re-running equally arbitrary scenarios on a modern?interactive Global Circulation Model. But the Cold War is history in more ways than one. It is a credit to post-modern computer climate simulations that they do not reproduce the apocalyptic?results of what Sagan oxymoronically termed "a sophisticated one dimensional model." The subzero 'baseline case'? has melted down into a tepid 1.3 degrees of average cooling-grey skies do not a Ragnarok make. What remains is just not the stuff that? End of the World myths are made of. It is hard to exaggerate? how seriously " nuclear winter "was once taken by policy analysts who? ought to? have known better. Many were taken aback by the sheer force of Sagan's rhetoric. Remarkably, Science's news coverage of the new results? fails to? graphically compare them with the old ones Editor Kennedy? and other recent executives of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, once proudly co-authored and helped to publicize. You can't say they didn't try to reproduce this Cold War icon. Once again, soot from imaginary software materializes in midair? by the megaton , flying? higher than Mount Everest . This is not physics, but a crude exercise in? ' garbage in, gospel out' parameter forcing designed to maximize and extend? the cooling an aerosol can generate, by sparing it from realistic? attrition by rainout in the lower atmosphere.? Despite decades of progress in modeling atmospheric chemistry , there is none in this computer simulation, and? ignoring? photochemistry further extends its impact.? Fortunately , the history of? science is as hard to erase as it is easy to ignore. Their past mastery of semantic aggression cannot? spare? the authors of "Nuclear Winter Lite " direct comparison of their new results and their old. Dark smoke? clouds in the? lower atmosphere? don't last long enough to spread across the globe. Cloud droplets and? rainfall remove them, rapidly?washing them out of the sky? in a matter of days to weeks- not long enough to sustain a global pall.? Real world weather? brings down particles much as soot is scrubbed out? of power plant smoke by the water sprays in smoke stack scrubbers? Robock acknowledges this- not even a single degree of cooling results when? soot is released? at lower elevations in the models. The workaround is to inject the imaginary aerosol at truly Himalayan elevations -? pressure altitudes of 300 millibar and higher , where the? computer model's vertical transport function modules pass it off to their even higher neighbors in the stratosphere , where it does not rain and particles linger. The new studies like the old suffer from the disconnect between a desire to paint the sky black and the vicissitudes of natural history. As with many exercise in worst case models both at invoke? rare phenomena? as commonplace,? claiming it prudent to assume the worst. But the real world is subject to Murphy's lesser known second law- if everything must go wrong, don't bet on it.? In 2006 as in 1983 firestorms and forest fires that send smoke into the stratosphere? rise to alien prominence in the modelers re-imagined world , but in the real one remains a very different place, where though? every month sees forest fires? burning? areas the size of cities - 2,500 hectares or larger , stratospheric smoke injections arise but once in a blue moon.? So how come these neo-nuclear winter models feature so? much smoke so far aloft for so long? The answer is simple- the modelers intervened.? Turning off vertical transport algorithms? may make Al Gore happy- he has bet on reviving the credibility Sagan's ersatz apocalypse, but there is no denying that in some of these scenarios human desire, not physical forces accounts for the vertical? hoisting of? millions of tons of mass ten vertical kilometers into the sky to the level at which the models take over , with results at once predictable --and arbitrary.? This is not physics, it is computer gamesmanship carried over to a new generation of? X-Box. I must now? return to getting and vetting the new? papers and their references- this has been a prelimnary? examination of what the public has been told, and? more detailed? critiques? of the science? will doubtless be direected to the journals were the new work appeared . This time round , the details are scarcely worth arguing, because the? global frost made famous by the original 'TTAPS' model? has disappeared . From the truly frigid 7,000 degree-day "baseine case" advertised as hard science? in 1983 to a tepid results of? today, "Nuclear Winter has well and truly melted down. The 1986 review of TTAPS reception follows.Coop SolvencyCoop K2 Overcoming Scale HurdlesUS-China coop key to overcome massive tech hurdlesHawkins, 2019, <Amy>, Wired, China and the US are locked in a crucial battle for space domination, March 17, p. , accessed, 6-1-19****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Fifty years after the first moon landing, an American triumph that gripped the world, China marked the start of 2019 with its own lunar achievement. Chang’e-4, a Chinese probe, landed on the far side of the moon in early January, broadcasting – for the first time in human history – images of the cratered surface that faces away from Earth. Chang’e-4 has been billed as a friendly explorer, the latest step in humanity’s mission to better understand and exploit the universe around us. But space exploration has always been about power. Beijing’s lunar feat represents the latest development in the space race between China and the United States – a conflict that will be “important to modern warfare,” according to a US Defense Intelligence Agency report released in January that identified China as a “threat”. The Chinese foreign ministry responded by calling the report “reckless” and “totally groundless,” insisting that China “opposes militarisation and an arms race in space.” The space race is back on, and it’s no longer just about prestige. In February, US president Donald Trump signed a directive ordering the creation of a Space Force, a new branch of the military “to deter and counter threats in space.” Where space might once have been a frontier for international collaboration, China’s launch has made the stars a contested territory for military, civilian and technological progress. “For the US and China, space is clearly a frontier of strategic competition,” says Elsa Kania, an adjunct fellow at the Center for New American Security who is studying for a PhD at Harvard University on China’s technological and military innovation. “In any future conflict scenario, the first blow could be struck in space.” It wasn’t always thus. Two years before Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, an agreement designed to prevent Cold War anxieties from reaching beyond the stratosphere. Only nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction are specifically banned under the treaty – the scope developing other kinds of military strategy was left open – but it outlined the hopes for cosmic peace that went unchallenged for decades. China signed the treaty in 1983. Since then, however, China’s technological ambitions have become astronomical, both literally and metaphorically. In 2015, President Xi Jinping declared that space exploration would be “an important growth point for our military”. Xi’s statement was prompted by the establishment of the Strategic Support Force (SSF) in the People’s Liberation Army, which brings together the military’s space, cyber, and electronic warfare capabilities – a structure unmatched in the west. “Beijing’s space strategy is part of a comprehensive plan to expand its power,” says lieutenant colonel Audricia Harris of the US Army. One of the key assets of the SSF is China’s domestic satellite navigation system, Beidou. With 43 satellites already in orbit providing global coverage, Beidou, which translates as ‘Big Dipper’, is China’s alternative to GPS. Beijing plans to launch 11 more Beidou satellites in 2019, while GPS only has 33. “These advances in Beidou mitigate China’s previous dependence upon GPS, which was seen as a potential vulnerability,” says Kania. Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the US Naval War College, also notes that “the majority of space technology is dual use, meaning of value to both the military and civil communities”. In the domain of what China calls "informatised warfare" – battles fought over the acquisition, transmission, and use of information – satellites are pivotal. A 2018 report to the US Congress on China’s military developments warned that US satellites were likely to be targeted by the Chinese in the event of a conflict, in an attempt to “blind and deafen the enemy”. China sees this method as a “key components of conducting modern warfare,” says Harris. The history of Beidou is not one of all-Chinese creation. Beidou’s development arose from a partnership China struck in 2003 with the European Union to help fund the EU’s nascent satellite navigation system, Galileo. The relationship was dissolved by 2010, but not before China had gained access to Swiss-made atomic clocks, a key component of accurate navigation. Episodes like that, alongside the ongoing trade war, have hampered attempts by US and Chinese space companies to work together. In 2017, the US company NanoRacks, which promotes commercial space activity, launched the first ever Chinese payload to the International Space Station, in partnership with the Beijing Institute of Technology. But “the amount of cooperation between American and Chinese organisations is essentially zero,” says Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Angels, a space venture portfolio company. US regulations “effectively prevent US companies from working with Chinese companies, due to technology transfer concerns,” he adds, citing a Boeing satellite deal that fell apart in 2018 because the customer was controlled by investors in Beijing. Protective policies have not stopped the Chinese commercial space sector from developing apace. While the US still has a much larger proportion of private actors working in space exploration than China, $336 million was invested in Chinese space companies last year, and the sector is set to be worth $120 billion by 2020. The first private space company in China is LinkSpace, which launched in 2014. Wang Ruijing, an assistant manager at LinkSpace, says that they still have a lot to learn from American companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin. “At the same time,” Wang adds, Chinese companies can still “expand [their] competitive advantages” by investing heavily in research and development to set new standards for Chinese technology. But these advances are likely to be inextricable from the military, says Kania, noting that Chinese astronauts are members of the SSF. One area in which mutual cosmic mistrust is stifling progress is the development of a space-based power station for solar energy, which could potentially be a constant source of renewable power for Earth. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation has said that it wants to build a commercially viable space station in the next 30 years. Talking to CNN, Peter Schubert, director of the Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy, said: “the scale is such that Chinese-American collaboration would be the best path to success”. But US regulations prevent Nasa from working with Chinese actors, so while Anderson argues that “space is simply a place to do business,” he notes that national interests will have to be protected by military forces, just as they are on land and sea. And just like on land and sea, the United States’ domination of cosmic exploration can no longer be taken for granted. The growth of private companies has led to more and more countries entering the fray – Israel and Indonesia both recently launched their first payloads with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. But with massive state, military, and venture capital funding, China is by far the biggest challenger to western interests in outer space – a challenger that is being met with unprecedented levels of cosmic militarisation.Coop K2 SBSP RegsInternational will exists for SBSP – cooperative agreements are key to establishing global partnerships that get the tech off the groundNSSO 7 (National Security Space Office, “Space‐Based Solar Power: As an Opportunity for Strategic Security,” Phase 0 Architecture Feasibility Study Report to the Director, National Security Space Office Interim Assessment, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Space‐Based Solar Power is not a small project, but might be considered comparable in scale to the national railroads, highway system, or electrification project than the Manhattan or Apollo endeavors. However, unlike such purely national projects, this project also has components that are analogous to the development of the high‐volume international civil aviation system. Such a large endeavor carries with it significant international and environmental implications and so would require a corresponding amount of political will to realize its benefits. It is therefore important to consider three corresponding questions. First, does the fundamental concept of Space‐Based Solar Power sufficiently address the defining strategic problems and interests of our time to interest a broad spectrum of leaders and policymakers both nationally and internationally? Second, is there a potential coalition of interested parties in the public and private sector? And third, does there appear to be a path toward an enabling legal and policy framework? FINDING: The SBSP Study Group found that no outright policy or legal showstoppers exist to prevent the development of SBSP. Full‐scale SBSP, however, will require a permissive international regime, and construction of this new regime is in every way a challenge nearly equal to the construction of the satellite itself. The interim review did not uncover any hard show‐stoppers in the international legal or regulatory regime. Many nations are actively studying Space‐Based Solar Power. Canada, the UK, France, the European Space Agency, Japan, Russia, India, and China, as well as several equatorial nations have all expressed past or present interest in SBSP. International conferences such as the United Nations‐connected UNISPACE III are continually held on the subject and there is even a UN‐affiliated non‐governmental organization, the Sunsat Energy Council, that is dedicated to promoting the study and development of SBSP. The International Union of Radio Science (URSI) has published at least one document supporting the concept, and a study of the subject by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is presently ongoing. There seems to be significant global interest in promoting the peaceful use of space, sustainable development, and carbon neutral energy sources, indicating that perhaps an open avenue exists for the United States to exercise “soft power” via the development of SBSP. That there are no show‐stoppers should in no way imply that an adequate or supportive regime is in place. Such a regime must address liability, indemnity, licensing, tech transfer, frequency allocations, orbital slot assignment, assembly and parking orbits, and transit corridors. These will likely involve significant increases in Space Situational Awareness, data‐sharing, Space Traffic Control, and might include some significant similarities to the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) role for facilitating safe international air travel. Very likely the construction of a truly adequate regime will take as long as the satellite technology development itself, and so consideration must be given to beginning work on the construction of such a framework immediately. o Recommendation: The complexity of negotiating any type of international legal and policy agreements necessary for the development of SBSP will require significant amounts of time (5 – 10 years). The SBSP Study Group recommends that the policy and legal framework development should begin simultaneously with any science and technology development efforts to ensure that intangible issues do not delay employment of technology solutions. FINDING: The SBSP Study Group found that although there was universal agreement that international cooperation was highly desirable and necessary, there was significant disagreement on what form the cooperation should take. There are multiple values to be balanced with respect to international cooperation. The various goods to be optimized include efficiency, speed of development, cost savings, existing alliances, new partnerships, general goodwill, American jobs and business opportunities, cooperation, safety & assurance, commercial autonomy, and freedom of action. Adding more and new partners may increase goodwill, but add additional layers of approval and slow development. Starting with established alliances and shared values fulfills some expectations and violates others. The spectrum of participation ranges from beginning with a demarche before the UN General Assembly, to privately approaching America’s closest allies, to arranging multi‐national corporate conferences. Many participants felt the International Space Station (ISS) overvalued cooperation for cooperation’s sake, and took mutual dependency too far. FINDING: The SBSP Study Group found in order to successfully address major world problems in energy, environmental and national security, the U.S. needs to identify and then reduce or eliminate all unnecessary barriers to effective international cooperation on, and private industry investment in, the development of SBSP. Regardless of the form of international cooperation, Space‐Based Solar Power will require modification or special treatment under International Trafficking in Arms Regulations (ITAR). ? Partnerships between U.S. and foreign corporations are often much easier to create and implement than government to government level partnerships, and more effective when the purpose is fostering economically affordable goods and services. ? Application of the International Traffic Arms Regulations (ITAR) may constitute a major barrier to effective partnerships in SBSP and negatively impact national security. Right now ITAR greatly restricts and complicates all space‐related business, as it treats all launch and satellite technologies as arms. This has had the effect of causing America’s competitors to develop ITAR‐free products, and had a negative impact on our domestic space industries, which can no longer compete on level ground. Many participants in the feasibility study were very vocal that including satellite and launch technology in ITAR has had a counterproductive and detrimental effect on the U.S.’s national security and competitiveness—losing control and market share, and closing our eyes and ears to the innovations of the competition while selling ourselves on a national illusion of unassailable space superiority. Effective collaboration, even with allies on something of this level, could not take place effectively without some special consideration or modification. o Recommendation: The SBSP Study Group recommends the early inclusion of global corporations from America’s allies as partners in the development of this new strategic energy resource. U.S. corporations should be encouraged to develop partnerships with foreign‐owned corporations of America’s closest and most‐trusted allies. In order to achieve this objective, U.S. industry should be exempt from ITAR when working with our closest and most‐trusted allies on SBSP systems. U.S. government funded SBSP technology maturation efforts should not include “buy America” clauses prohibiting participation of foreign companies as suppliers to U.S. bidders. FINDING: The SBSP Study Group found that SBSP development over the past 30 years has made little progress because it “falls between the cracks” of currently‐defined responsibilities of federal bureaucracies, and has lacked an organizational advocate within the US Government. The current bureaucratic lanes are drawn in such a way to exclude the likelihood of SBSP development. NASA’s charter and focus is clearly on robotic and human exploration to execute the Moon‐Mars Vision for Space Exploration, and is cognizant that it is not America’s Department of Energy (DOE). DOE rightly recognizes that the hard challenges to SBSP all lie in spacefaring activities such as space access, and space‐to‐Earth power‐beaming, none of which are its core competencies, and would make it dependent upon a space‐capable agency. The Office of Space Commercialization in the Department of Commerce is not sufficiently resourced for this mission, and no dedicated Space Development Agency exists as of yet. DoD has much of the necessary development expertise in‐house, and clearly has a responsibility to look to the long term security of the United States, but it is also not the country’s Department of Energy, and must focus itself on war prevention and warfighting concerns. A similar problem exists in the private sector. US space companies are used to small launch markets with the government as a primary customer and advocate, and do not have a developed business model or speak in a common language with the energy companies. The energy companies have adequate capital and understand their market, but do not understand the aerospace sector. One requires a demonstrated market, while the other requires a demonstrated technical capability. Without a trusted agent to mediate the collaboration and serve as an advocate for supportive policy, progress is likely to be slow. o Recommendation: The SBSP Study Group recommends that the US Government re‐order roles and responsibilities to specify SBSP an development champion; one option might included a dedicated sole‐purpose organization.Cooperation key to ensure effective development of space solar power – sets up a regulatory framework and sustained governmental interestGomez, Panier, Sun and Zund 2009 [Raul Gutie?rrez Go?mez, Lieutenant Colonel Colombian Air Force and Planning Director of Military Aeronautical Institute, Evelyn Panier, Finance Application Consultant at H&R Info Tech, Xin Sun, Financial and Organizational Analysis for a Space Solar Power System A business plan to make Space Solar Power a reality, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.728.6758&rep=rep1&type=pdf accessed 8/15/19]jap****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Classical SSPS Strategic Analysis The following section will analyze the SSPS concept from a strategic point of view. The purpose of this analysis will be to determine what constitute the primary impacts on this project. A brief discussion of these impacting items will follow, and how they could potentially help or hurt the final concept. 2.1 Space Solar Power System PEST For the classical SSPS, we have decided to perform a PEST analysis to set the tone for the project as well as the environment in which it resides. The PEST analysis allows us to look at the proposed SSPS idea and brainstorm different conditions, good and bad, which affect the system. The influences on the system are classified into four areas: Politics, Economics, Society, and Technology. Once the brainstorming is completed it is possible to prune the ideas down into a more concise format. The draft brainstorming template used for its execution can be found in Appendix A. The top level PEST analysis is presented above in Figure 1. PEST Analysis Summary The following sections summarize in limited details the top level items presented in Figure 1. Several of the ideas presented here are developed in much further detail in subsequent sections. It is important to note that some items reappear in more than one section of the PEST analysis, and are therefore explored separately from each vantage. 2.1.1 Political Global warming The idea of global warming and the need to take action has finally started to take a serious hold in the culture of world governments. A fundamental paradigm shift from previous decades, governing bodies the world over have started to pass laws and regulations in support of the growing green movement. Examples of international agreements and initiatives include the IPCCi, the Kyoto Protocolsii, EU Emissions Trading Schemeiii, EU Climate Change Programiv, etc. Perhaps the most famous of such agreements, the Kyoto Protocol, can be seen to have faltered since only 63.7% of countries that signed it have actually ratified its contents into their own political system. Furthermore none of these countries have managed to meet the targets that were to have been met by 2005.v Despite this difficult first step, many governments have indicated a strong redoubling of interest in the environment, and have begun to shape their domestic policies to suit. For example many national (and regional) governments have begun to offer incentives and frameworks which encourage citizens and businesses to work towards a greener future. Examples of this are the growing wind energy industry in Germany & Chinavi, as well as the ability for ordinary Canadian citizens to build their own renewable generation projects which can be fed into the normal consumer power grid.vii The main idea here is that governments are finding themselves more and more inclined to work towards a green future, and that they are more willing to work towards mitigating climate change than ever before in the past.4 Oil World reliance on oil from children’s toys to aircraft and motor vehicles is indisputable; however what many people perhaps do not realize is the extent to which fossil fuels, specifically oil and coal, are used to feed the global demand of electricity. According to the International Energy Association (IEA) viii, combustible fuels currently account for 64% of the electricity generation mix for OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries as measured in 2007 and 2008ix. The heavy reliance on this form of energy indicates just how susceptible the world economy is to the fortunes of oil and coal, to say nothing of their environmental impact. This can affect an SSPS system in different ways. Certainly it is conceivable that the current established industry of fossil fuel energy production will offer up different kinds of roadblocks, but also that many governments may still be reluctant to shift their generation mix to other things due to costs and concerns about strategic positioning despite the growing green movements. One thing that needs to be considered is the long heralded arrival of “Peak Oil”. Peak Oil is the point when the production of oil worldwide reaches its maximum and thereafter begins a slow decline. Since not all of the world’s oil reserves have yet been identified, it remains unclear when Peak Oil may occur. Still, optimists and pessimists alike have placed it sometime between 2010 and 2030x. Considering the reliance of the world on oil, the eventual scarcity and then disappearance of this energy source will cause incredible worldwide problems if no replacement can be found. It is conceivable that there will be considerable strife and conflict over these remaining resources, and that it would certainly be in our best interest to find alternatives. Environmental Laws The use of a SSPS would suggest the creation of many new rules and regulatory bodies that will rise to govern its effects on the environment. Some specific areas of concern are the effects of microwave and laser beams on people, animals, flora, and the atmosphere. In the case of microwave effects on people, there are already regulations in place that are applicable for terrestrial uses of the technology, specifically in terms of microwave ovens. Due to their commonality in people’s homes, requirements for energy exposure had to be set and enforced to prevent any harm to the general population. As an example, the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety has defined an exposure limit of 1 mW/cm2 over a period of 6 minutes. Exposure of the general population to a microwave or laser based system would likely need to offer an energy exposure below this magnitude before even being considered for general usexi.5 It will also be important to consider environmental assessments that must be done before the construction of any project can be approved by local and national governments. The purpose of this assessment is to determine the net positive or negative environmental impact of the project, and therefore whether it can be approved or not. These processes are not necessarily complicated however they can be long in durationxii. Space Treaties The SSPS will be subject to many different international legal frameworks that may not up until that point have had any common ground. Not only will a SSPS answer to regulations enforced by the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOUS)xiii, but in the event of a geostationary SSPS it will also be subject to the oversight of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)xiv. In either case significant consultation with these governing bodies will be required, and also with bodies that have yet to be defined. The governing United Nations space treaties under COPUOUS will be explored further in the chapters on organizations and legal treaties. Energy Generation Regulations The SSPS will be subject to energy generation requirements such as those faced by “normal” modern day generation systems. However since the SSPS covers a significant amount of unexplored territory, there may be some questions regarding how best to regulate it. With the exception of rules faced by the space segment of the SSPS, it will be interesting to see how regulations on this subject evolve. Once the electricity is received and processed by a ground station, it is not expected that there will be any difference between the ways in which this electricity is shared throughout the power grid compared to other sources. Furthermore the SSPS will be at the whims of an energy market which can swing between free market price and capped market prices depending on where and when the energy is being delivered. Although market projections suggest significant opportunities to supply energy, the whole SSPS system might be derailed by energy prices that are “too low”. xv Variable Political Support Political favour is a fickle beast whose attention sways, by necessity, between different groups and agendas. In many cases large capital intensive projects live or die by the support that they receive from their home governments. Furthermore many large aerospace projects and agencies are untenable without constant funding from government sources.6 The SSPS can be framed as either a green or strategic (or both) objective. This means that politicians who support the green movement can find reason to support it, and politicians who support strategic initiatives can support it. However with the green movement not far away from its infancy, and more pressing strategic issues often taking the spotlight, the likelihood of funding is not (and never has been) assured. An example of variable political support for a green project can be found in Canada’s “ecoAuto” program which affected the price of automobiles based on their environmental impact. This initiative underwent mixed support and has since been cancelledxvi. Given the highly volatile nature of government spending, it may be critical to find other means of support for the SSPS. Such means will be investigated elsewhere in this document. Technology Sharing The SSPS will most likely require cooperation from different countries and corporations from around the world. As with any large aerospace project there will be limitations on who can work on what, and what can be sent where. Also of importance will be the division and sharing of new technologies that emerge through this project. Does everyone benefit from participation, or only a few key players? Considering present day controlled goods initiatives and trade restrictions by the United States against certain countries, it is certain that moving forward on a large project like the SSPS will require dedicated and rigorous negotiations between partners to ensure it comes to fruitionxvii.Coop K2 Tech SharingSBSP requires international governmental cooperation – techforce knowledge sharingGomez, Panier, Sun and Zund 2009 [Raul Gutie?rrez Go?mez, Lieutenant Colonel Colombian Air Force and Planning Director of Military Aeronautical Institute, Evelyn Panier, Finance Application Consultant at H&R Info Tech, Xin Sun, Financial and Organizational Analysis for a Space Solar Power System A business plan to make Space Solar Power a reality, citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.728.6758&rep=rep1&type=pdf accessed 8/15/19]jap****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Research Having first been proposed in the 1960’s and studied ever since, the idea of a SSPS is not uncommon. Furthermore the technologies and systems behind its use are extremely well understood, enough so that there really is no scientific limitation to its constructionxxvii. This being said research stills need to be done on some of the finer points involved, such as power management, construction and assembly in space, and also the transmission of energy through the atmosphere. Many studies have been done with respect to the effects of a SSPS on the Earth. They have concluded that if constructed correctly, there will be either no or marginal impacts to humans, animals, and the environment as a result of a SSPS’ operation. This cannot be said for many state of the art electricity production methods currently in usexxviii. Development As with any large project, the development of the SSPS will be a long and expensive undertaking. Although the technology is understood, it will still take time to bring the idea from concept to reality. One of the most important steps in this development phase would be the creation and operation of demonstration systems which help to show that the technology is working and worth further investment. Each of the SSPS proposals to date have all made allowances in their roadmaps for demonstration projects, whether on Earth, space to space, or even space to Earthxxix,xxx. Construction The initial concept regarding space construction of the SSPS involved a very heavy, rigid structure that was constructed by hundreds of astronauts on orbit, with components lifted directly to GEO. Perhaps this idea seemed remotely feasible during the space race when the United States Government provided near limitless funding for space activities, however these days such a project is out of the question. Since launch costs are still very much limiting factors when it comes to placing things in orbit, design and construction considerations are generally made around this point. Keeping this in mind, any future construction of a large project such as the SSPS will likely use lightweight flexible/inflatable structures, be built by robots only, and be lifted to LEO instead of GEO with some kind of low energy inter orbital assistance to place it in LEO thereafter.12 Expected Partners The aerospace industry is large in terms of turnover, but small in terms of community and the number of people that work in it. As a result there is often a lot of “cross pollination” between companies when large projects are in the works. If we can consider the European space industry as an example, there are many layers of companies who are at once cooperating on some levels and competing on others. What this means is that no single industry or government will be able to pursue the SSPS concept on its own. It can be expected that there will be significant internal and cross industry cooperation for such a project including academic institutions, government agencies, and other aerospace companies. Furthermore it will be interesting to integrate power delivering companies such as EDFxxxi or OPAxxxii into this mix, since the SSPS is a project which will involve them as well. Competitors Considering that the SSPS would be a newcomer to the energy generation market, it may face serious hurdles from well established competitors. The level of this competition could vary depending on market forecasts. For instance if the projected market were bigger than any one competitor could fill, the amount of resistance would be much lower than if the market were very tight. It will be very important for the SSPS operator to properly set itself apart from these competitors, whether it be in environmental impact, cost, or both.Coop key to overcome tech hurdlesMankins and Kaya 2011 [John C. Mankins (USA) and Nobuyuki Kaya, The First International assessment of space solar power: opportunities, issues and potential pathways forward, accessed 8/15/19]jap****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Solar Power Satellite Development, Deployment and OperationsA broad range of technical challenges must be addressed in order to establish the economic feasibility of SPS, and – if appropriate – to subsequently proceed with their development. It is possible that a single government or major company might surmount these challenges.However, it seems more likely that timely success would result from cooperation in accomplishing R&D objectives among governments, among industry players and among a broad range of government, corporate and academic organizations. A variety of tests and demonstrations of one key SPS technology – wireless power transmission – have been performed since the 1960s. Many of these tests have involved component technologies that are not directly relevant to validating the economic viability of SSP. Moreover, selected early demonstrations have been performed by various organizations almost as a means of “getting their feet wet” – i.e., in learning the basics of WPT and/or SPS. Unfortunately, the next steps in moving higher in the TRL scale require considerably greater funding (i.e., from the lower left to the upper right in the roadmap); these key steps have not yet been taken. Timely communication of plans and results from SPS technology R&D activities is crucial to coordinated progress. The ongoing Power Symposium, organized annually under the auspices of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), has served a highly useful role in this regard. Similarly, periodic conferences dedicated to SPS and WPT have been held over the past 20+ years in various countries (e.g., WPT 1995, SPS 2004, etc.); these have been highly useful in promoting international dialog and coordination of SSP efforts. As noted above, it was the consensus of the IAA study group that SSP systems are technically feasible. However, the successful development of the SPS concept – and the determination of markets might be served economically – cannot be accomplished without investments in systems level, end-to-end studies, ground and flight demonstrations at higher TRL levels, and eventually the launch of major sub- scale SPS pilot plant demonstrations. The preliminary international roadmap for SSP is not highly specific –it does not prescribe a specific budget, nor does it involve a specific schedule. However, it does provide a tractable framework for future SPS related activities by indicating a logical sequence for various steps, and the conceptual relationships among those steps. Moreover, it is the consensus of the IAA study group that significant progress could be accomplished during the next 10-15 years – leading to a large, but sub-scale SPS pilot plant.Trust Framework KeySpace solar power key to combat climate change – agreement is key to get it off the ground but is stalled now because of geopolitical mistrustSnowden 2019 [Scott has written about science and technology for 20 years for various publications around the world, including the BBC, NBC, the FT and . He covers environmental technology for Forbes. Solar Power Stations in space could supply the world with limitless energy, March 12, 2019, accessed 8/15/19]jap****NCC’19 Novice Packet****While on the surface of the Earth, society still struggles to adopt solar energy solutions, many scientists maintain that giant, space-based solar farms could provide an environmentally-friendly answer to the world's energy crisis. Only last week, we reported that China was planning to build the world's first solar power station to be positioned in Earth's orbit. Because the sun always shines in space, an orbital solar power station is seen as an inexhaustible source of clean energy. "Above the Earth, there's no day and night cycle and no clouds or weather or anything else that might obstruct the sun's ray, so a constant power source is available," said Ali Hajimiri, professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and co-director of the university’s Space Solar Power Project. Collecting solar power in space and wirelessly transmitting was first described by Isaac Asimov in 1941 in his short story Reason. In 1968, American aerospace engineer Peter Glaser published the first technical article on the concept – Power From The Sun: Its Future in the journal Science. Space-based solar power attracted considerable attention in the 1970s as the necessary individual technical components – in essence, photovoltaic cells, satellite technology and wireless power transmission – were developed. Despite the concept being technically feasible, it was considered economically unrealistic at the time and research ultimately stalled. “The idea seems to be going through a resurgence and it’s probably because the technology exists to make it happen,” said John Mankins, a former NASA scientist who was at the forefront of this field in the 1990s, before it was abandoned. Global energy demands are only going to grow, says Hajimiri. The global population is expected to reach a staggering 9.6 billion by 2050, according to a United Nations report, so methods of generating large quantities of clean energy must be found. A space-based solar power system could provide energy to everyone, even in places that don't receive sunlight all year round, like northern Europe and Russia. In April of 2015, a research agreement between Northrop Grumman and Caltech provided up to $17.5m for the development of innovations necessary to enable a space solar power system. Three Caltech professors head up the project: joining Hajimiri were Harry Atwater and Sergio Pellegrino. Caltech is just one institution working on developing this technology. We know that scientists at the Chongqing Collaborative Innovation Research Institute for Civil-Military Integration in China are constructing a facility to test the theoretical viability of the concept and plans to develop an orbital photovoltaic array were announced in Japan some time ago. One of the biggest issues to overcome is that of getting an array of solar panels large enough to make the project viable into orbit. Early concept designs in the 1970s featured giant arrays that would've proved very difficult to actually get into orbit. "The systems of the 70s for solar power satellites, the cost estimates suggested, at that time, that it might be as much as a trillion dollars to get to the first kilowatt hour because of the way the designs worked. Essentially a single satellite, a platform, an integrated, monolithic platform about the size of Manhattan," said Mankins. However, with SpaceX and Blue Origin slowly driving the cost of orbital delivery down, suddenly the concept seems a little closer to reality. "Going to modular systems to allow mass production, I believe was the answer to how to get solar power satellite costs down to something more reasonable," said Mankins. Details of China's proposed plans have not been made public, but most concept designs that exist today are based around an idea that the photovoltaic array is composed of a lightweight, deployable structure made of many smaller "solar satellites" that could easily connect together in space to form much larger array and "harvest sunlight." Equally, this approach also makes assembly, maintenance and repair considerably easier. "I've seen a presentation on what they [China] are presumably doing. I can't guarantee that's actually it, but it was by them, about the space solar system. What I've seen appears to be a conventional approach, which is similar to what people are currently contemplating," said Hajimiri. This completed array would orbit about 22,000 miles above the Earth and "beam" the energy back down to the surface. The photovoltaic array converts the sunlight into electricity, which in turn is converted into RF electrical power (microwaves) that are beamed wirelessly to ground-based receivers. These would take the form of giant wire nets measuring up to four miles across that could be installed across deserts or farmland or even over lakes. A solar facility like this could generate a constant flow of 2,000 gigawatts of power, Mankins estimates, compared to the largest solar farm that exists today in Aswan, southern Egypt, that only generates in the region of 1.8 gigawatts. An orbiting solar array, collecting and storing massive amounts of energy that's beamed to the surface... You'd be forgiven for thinking this could be the plot of a James Bond movie, if this array was somehow weaponized. Thankfully, that's not how it works. "The energy densities will not exceed what you normally would get. It would definitely not exceed what you get from the sun," said Hajimiri. The microwaves that transmit the energy to the surface would be at the so-called non-ionizing radiation frequency. "What that means is that the frequencies are such that unlike x-rays, these are the frequencies at which their photons don't have enough energy to induce chemical change, like that ultraviolet or x-rays do," said Hajimiri. "I've been working on wireless power transmitters that would operate in the microwave frequency range, between about 2 gigahertz and 8 gigahertz, roughly. Wavelengths on the order of 10 to 2 inches. Those wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation can pass through the Earth's atmosphere, including clouds and weather, without interruption, without interference." However, Mankins expects there might still be some problems. "There's always the geopolitics issue. Because when you're at an equatorial orbit, geostationary Earth orbit, you can see a great deal of the Earth below you. For me, it's challenging to envision how there would ever be agreement to allow such a thing." The team at Caltech have successfully tested their proof of concept on the ground, their photovoltaic prototypes demonstrated they can collect and wirelessly transmit 10 gigahertz of power, so the next step is to perform scaled down experiments in space. The biggest challenge is to reduce the mass as much as possible without sacrificing efficiency. Of course, that would also help reduce cost, which is probably still the biggest hurdle. "Hopefully, we'll be able to test it in space within a couple of years," said Hajimiri. "Space solar power would transform our future in space and could provide a new source of virtually limitless and sustainable energy to markets across the world," said Mankins. "Why wouldn't we pursue it?"Global Consensus KeyCollaboration key to SSP effectiveness – requires international consensusSilva-Martinez 14 [Silva-Martinez, Jackelynne, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University & Georgia Institute of Technology, 8/1/2014. "Exploring the Viability of Space Solar Power." American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Accessed: 8/19/2019. ] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****SSP will have to go through an approval process by the International Telecommunications Union and other authorities before they can be launched. Licensing requirements will need to be met. For space solar satellites, a similar process to communication satellites will be needed; and for lunar solar systems treaties like the international agreement governing the activities of states on the Moon and other celestial bodies will need to be followed. This agreement provides provisions on the usage of natural resources acquired from the Moon and celestial bodies. It points to other international agreements for how the activities on the Moon should be performed, including the Charter of the United Nations, Charter of the United Nations, and Principles of International Law. In general, they want to ensure the Moon and the celestial bodies are used for peaceful purposes “for the benefit and interests of all countries”. Energy resources obviously affect us all. It is in the best interest of every nation’s government to take a step forward and provide a bigger support to new sources of energy, to go from laboratory studies to actual prototypes. Initially, the government support of every nation is needed; once in operation, commercialization of space for energy resources will be needed.Solves Space ConflictPerm—do the plan and CP provides for a consortium to develop SBSPCox, retired prosecutor and public interest lawyer, 2011(William John, March 23, 2011, , 6-27-11) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****<President Kennedy once said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” The United States readily achieved that objective and, effectively, won the Cold War.? A similar challenge is now presented in the race for space-solar energy.? What, if anything, will President Obama say or do?Rather than a competition, however, the United States, China, Japan, and perhaps Russia, should organize a public service consortium to cooperatively produce energy from outer space.Such a consortium could take advantage of the unique abilities of each nation to collectively produce space-solar energy, and it would avoid private corporate domination over the distribution of a product that is essential to human civilization.A Space-Solar Energy Consortium would be a giant step toward world peace and a small leap into the universe of unlimited and unimaginable futures that surround and await us.>China investing now in space solar – US must establish guidelines to facilitate a cooperative regimeNAMRATA GOSWAMI APRIL 25, 2019 (NAMRATA GOSWAMI, PH.D., SENIOR INDEPENDENT ANALYST. “HEARING ON CHINA IN SPACE: A STRATEGIC COMPETITION?”. {MCT})****NCC’19 Novice Packet****China established, as I mentioned, the first state-funded SBSP base plant in Chongqing. Now the interesting point that I would like to make is that China's space strategy is an incremental development plan to work on these space goals over a very long period. They view their lunar base as enabling their Space Based Solar Power Project as well as space mining and plans for a permanent settlement. The potential for economic return from space-based resources and energy, as laid out in China's space ambitions, are so vast, and the military potential of it is significant, that the U.S. risks two very important losses. One, that space and its vast potential for commerce will not be part of a U.S.-led world order; and two, that there will not be a U.S.-led world order because the nation that leads in space will be economically and militarily dominant. The critical question is, can the Commission take these future Chinese space goals seriously? I have offered my entire statement to you in which I lay out the case; for instance, their success in meeting the goal of Chang'e-4, their goal of the Tianzhou-1 engineered spacecraft. And so, when I looked at that, they've actually met almost all the timelines set in the last 30 years within that stated timeline, and that's very interesting to me. Now the Commission posed me a question about civil-military integration. I would argue that President Xi has offered a clear policy guideline of civil-military integration and has urged China's space civilian agencies and the private sector to work within that civil-military integration. In 2017, the Politburo of the Communist Party of China established the first civil-military integration body. And it's interesting that they look at space within that particular concept. The State Administration on Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense is one of the coordinating bodies, and you will find it in my testimony in terms of what they are looking at. And so, the important point is looking at space as a part of their national defense and to turn China into a comprehensive space power by 2049. Interestingly, China's space officials wear dual hats. So, you have purely generals that are in charge of China's manned mission, China's Space Based-Solar Power Mission, and my testimony records that. Now, in terms of China and multilateral engagement, as of 2016, China signed 121 cooperation agreements with 37 countries and four international organizations. From the perspective of geostrategy and space leadership, China leads the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization and views such cooperation within the Belt and Road Initiative. China is investing $9 billion in its BeiDou Navigation System, and the return from that is predicted to be about $57 billion. The concern I have in terms of China's long-term ambition is that, when I have assessed China's behavior on earth-based territory -- for instance, Tibet, Bhutan, the South China Sea, Antarctica -- I see that China uses first-presence rights, especially in areas which are resourcerich, and then, goes on to establish claims for such territory. I have documented the entire Antarctica case in an article with Lee Foster from the New Zealand Air Force in The Diplomat. Finally, I'll end, based on that, with policy recommendations. So, the first recommendation I would have is that there is this tendency to kind of downplay China's ambitions or, as was mentioned today in the morning, there is a denial that China is actually catching up. I would argue that the U.S. needs to take the Chinese space goals and timeline seriously. The second point I would make is that China's space program is a military-directed and - led program in which the Communist Party of China has staked its legitimacy. As a response to the goals set by China, the U.S. should craft a long-term space resource policy guideline that offers guidelines not just in terms of military space, but actually commercial space; for instance, concepts like resource utilization and extraction. The most important point I make is that there is a serious competition ongoing with China for leadership of space, and China has actually articulated and given speeches and has engaged in diplomacy that wants to show this China as the more attractive option in terms of space leadership. And finally, I would argue that the most useful lens through which to understand the Chinese space program are its terrestrial efforts to secure resources. I have several other recommendations, including for a unified space service within the United States.And, utilizing SSP in the context of peace creates new international cooperation and solves war – also avoids your space mil disadsDinerman 8 – regular contributor to the Space Review(Taylor, “War, peace, and space solar power,” , dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The coming huge increase in demand for energy as more and more nations achieve “developed” status has been discussed elsewhere. It is hard to imagine that large powerful states such as China or India will allow themselves to be pushed back into relative poverty by a lack of resources or by environmental restrictions. The need for a wholly new kind of world energy infrastructure is not just an issue involving economics or conservation, but of war and peace. Moving a substantial percentage of the Earth’s energy supply off the planet will not, in and of itself, eliminate these kinds of dangers, but it will reduce them. Nations that get a large percentage of their electricity from space will not have to fear that their neighbors will cut them off from gas or coal supplies. The need for vulnerable pipelines and shipping routes will diminish. This will not happen overnight. Gasoline, kerosene, and diesel are, weight for weight and volume for volume, by far the most effective transportation fuels, but they are going to be phased out over time in favor of such things as plug-in hybrids. The world is evolving away from oil-based transportation systems. It will probably take decades, but the process is now in motion. John Mankins’ successful experiment, beaming power from Maui to the Big Island of Hawaii, is the first real data point we have (see “A step forward for space solar power”, The Space Review, this issue). Transmitting anyamount of power over nearly 150 kilometers shows what can be done. Even more important is the fact that Mankins and his team were able to navigate the government’s regulatory maze in order to achieve their goal. Getting permission from the FCC, the FAA, as well as from the state and local governments is quite an accomplishment and shows that this technology can be shown to be safe. While most space solar power advocates believe that the basic technology already exists, the engineering challenges are huge, as are the capital requirements. Seen as a simple business proposition space solar power (SSP) is a long way from becoming a viable economic source of energy. It could be subsidized the way that wind power or terrestrial solar has been. Even with subsidies, it is hard to see that the private sector would pay for the development work due to the unknown technological risks and to the long time scale. However, if SSP were perceived as a “war avoidance” mechanism or technology, the investment logic changes. The profit-seeking side of the private sector does not see its role as inflicting peace on an unstable and violent world. Traditionally that has been the role of governments, and in recent decades the so-called NGOs or non-profit sector. Innovative financing propositions such as the idea that a government could promise to buy a certain amount of space-generated power at a set price may become attractive in the future. For the moment, however, governments, especially the US government, should concentrate on reducing the technological unknowns and setting the stage for future developments in the middle or end of the next decade. The old Strategic Air Command’s motto was “Peace is our Profession”. This might be a good one for the emerging SSP industry.China Says Yes – Generic China wants international space cooperation with the US – self interestFoust 18 (Jeff Foust senior space writer for space news bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science from the California Institute of Technology, space news, NASA opens door to additional cooperation with China, October 1st 2018, )tri ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****BREMEN, Germany — The administrator of NASA and his Chinese counterpart have both expressed interest in working together despite the current constraints in U.S. law regarding bilateral cooperation. During a panel discussion at the 69th International Astronautical Conference here Oct. 1 featuring the leaders of several space agencies, Zhang Kejian, administrator of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said China was open to working with a wide range of international partners on projects ranging from lunar exploration to its future space station. “CNSA is willing to join our hands with other international partners for the benefit of human civilization and progress of human society,” Zhang said, speaking through a translator. Asked later if that included working with NASA, he said China was “very open” to working with a variety of international partners on lunar exploration. He noted he met with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine earlier in the day. “I had a very good discussion with NASA Administrator Mr. Bridenstine for bilateral cooperation in this particular area,” he said. “I think the response was very positive.” Bridenstine, appearing on the same panel, noted that there is some cooperation with China today in areas such as aeronautics and Earth science. That cooperation takes place despite the presence of language in appropriations laws colloquially known as the Wolf Amendment, after former Rep. Frank Wolf, who first included it in spending bills several years ago. That provision prohibits bilateral cooperation between NASA and Chinese agencies without prior congressional approval. “We do cooperate in a lot of ways, but that doesn’t mean our interests are always aligned,” he said. “Some of these decisions are going to be made above the pay grade of the NASA administrator.” “To the extent that agencies and countries from around the world can cooperate on space, it is absolutely in our interest to do so,” he added. “I look forward to exploring more opportunities to do that.” “I believe that the working teams of both sides can start preparation of a cooperation list,” Zhang responded. “We can dash out those that cannot be implemented now, or are above our pay grade, and then we can start cooperating on the substantial part.” That included, he added, exchange of scientific data and space situational awareness information. At a press conference held after the panel, Bridenstine agreed that a greater sharing of data was one area of potential enhanced cooperation with China. “They’re doing some amazing scientific experiments,” he said, citing as an example China’s upcoming Chang’e-4 mission that will attempt the first landing on the far side of the moon. “We can share data and collaborate that way so that each country can learn more about science.” He also agreed that sharing space situational awareness and space traffic management information may be another area of cooperation. “There is no issue related to space more important to for all of us to get right than that issue,” he said. “We need to preserve the space environment for generations to come. The only way we’re going to be able to do that internationally is to collaborate.” Those initiatives, he suggested, could open the door to more ambitious joint efforts. “This could be the first confidence-building measure that is necessary to establish the kind of relationship that is necessary to go to the next step,” he said.China says yes to international cooperationXinhua 4/17 [ChinaDaily is a Chinese-based news site. “China to enhance international space cooperation”, 4/17/2019, , Accessed 08-14-2019 ECT] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****BEIJING - China will promote aerospace development, strengthen international cooperation and contribute Chinese wisdom, plans and strength in man's peaceful utilization of outer space, said an official with China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Wednesday. Zhao Jian, deputy director of the Department of System Engineering of CNSA, said at a press conference that "Forum on Space Solutions: Realizing the Sustainable Development Goals" will be held in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province, from April 24 to 27. The forum, co-organized by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and CNSA, aims to bring together space application users and solution providers to forge new partnerships, enhance international space cooperation and contribute to the attainment of the sustainable development goals, according to Zhao. Since 2016, China has set April 24 as the country's Space Day to mark the launch of its first satellite into space on April 24, 1970. About 200 space officials, engineers and scientists from nearly 50 countries will participate in activities for Space Day in China this year. During the same period, the CNSA and the European Space Agency will jointly organize a forum on Earth observation while a Sino-Russian Moon observation forum will also be held.China Says Yes – PrecedentChina says yes to solar space coopBitong 16 [Anna Bitong is a Los Angeles-based journalist who has reported for The Acorn Newspapers and City News Service; “The Next Space Race: Farming Solar Power in the Cosmos” Design + Innovation, 6-27-16; , DOA 8-14-19-SH] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****U.S. scientists are not alone in their quest to develop and deploy solar power satellites. Among the countries investigating them are China, which has heavily researched the concept, and Japan. Jaffe called them “the world leaders right now, with sophisticated long-range wireless power transmission” that will enable the satellites to send energy from space to Earth. Could the nations work together? Such an alliance has precedence, Jaffe said, citing the International Space Station and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, an energy project in France that seeks to build an experimental nuclear fusion reactor to produce carbon-free energy. It involves the U.S., the European Union, Russia, China, India, South Korea, and Japan—“countries that don’t typically cooperate on anything,” he said. “One of the reasons that ITER enjoys this broad international collaboration is there’s a recognition that if that technology comes to fruition, it has literally revolutionary effects for human civilization,” said Jaffe, whose own team includes Mankins and members of NASA and the Department of Defense. “Space solar is similar, although it has the added benefit of global distribution.”China Says Yes – Space ReportChina says yes to working with the US on space debris, space weather, and response to climate change – China White Papers proveU.S.-CHINA ESRC 19 (The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission created to monitor, investigate, and submit to Congress an annual report on the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China, and to provide recommendations, where appropriate, to Congress for legislative and administrative action. DOA: 8/14/2019 AAS) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****China has signed 121 cooperation agreements with 37 countries and four international organization, as per CNSA spokesperson, Li Gouping.145 These include a 30 year relationship with Brazil on earth resource satellites, an ocean observation satellite with France, the construction of a BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) remote sensing satellite constellation, satellites launches for Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Algeria, and satellite data sharing with Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Peru, Chile, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Burma.146 Significantly, China has signed bilateral agreements with Russia, the European Space Agency (ESA), Brazil, Chile, France, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Algeria, Argentina, Belgium, India, Indonesia, and Kazakhstan to strengthen exchanges and cooperation in such areas as space technology, space applications, and space science, education and training. Interestingly, China’s White paper on Space 2016 claims that “China and the United States, within the framework of the China-US Strategic and Economic Dialogue, carried out a civil space dialogue, stating that the two countries would strengthen cooperation in space debris, space weather, response to global climate change, and related areas”.147China says yes to cooperation with the US – our ev is from the Chinese science embassyLee et al 19 [Lee is from the Chinese Embassy Science Section, “US-China Engagement in Space”, March 29, 2019, , DOA: 7/22/19] Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Lee: [53:12] Thank you, Mr. Chair. My name is Lee. I come from the Chinese Embassy Science Section. In the past 15 months, I attended a lot of [inaudible] type of events along this street. Everybody talked about the elephant in the room, but it seems that all organizers were very reluctant to invite the elephant stay on the stage. [53:37] [laughter] Lee: [53:37] I have several observations. I attended several China-US Civilian Space Dialogue and such event. I was very familiar with the bilateral collaboration in the past or several decades. First observation is that I agree with Director Weeden that China has never liked to participate or forced to participate in any kind of race whether it's space race, arms race, or whatever race you'd find. [54:05] However, I also realize that several of the panelists today used the word called dominate or domination. English is not my native language, so I'm not sure what exactly the word dominate means -- monopoly or monopolize or the similar meanings. [54:25] What I would like to say is that, in the field of science and technology, from my experience or from the experience of history, no country could dominate in a specific area for a very long time. Actually, it's this word dominate is very poisonous, to some extent is unethical, I should say, because you just want to dominate and you just want to over compete everybody else here. [54:52] What I would like to say is that we don't want to dominate in any area, whether it's AI, space, or robots. What I learned from all this strategy of our policy document is always say that China would like to keep parallel with other advanced countries or we'd like to join first-tier category of advanced countries by our efforts subsequently. [55:14] What I learn from White House papers are holding papers from, say DoD, is that you yourself want to dominate. It's not China want to use the word dominate. That's what I'd like to clarify. About the Wolf Amendment or Wolf Clause here, Mr. Gold, don't you find some self-contradiction in your comments just now? [55:38] You mentioned that the appalling bureaucracy about export controls seen in the United States, and you said that, seeing that Congress approval or FBI approval is prerequisite for NASA to initiate some dialog or exchange with Chinese side, in my opinion, this just add the administrative burden to the NASA or OSTP. It has nothing to do with us. [56:01] We're OK, because every time we, NASA or OSTP, just ask us to provide some delicate list, it just adds their administrative burden, not ours. Actually, I wonder whether the Congress maybe not trust China, but I'm not sure whether the Congress also has confidence in all administrative agencies. [56:25] They ask NASA or OSTP to report to them before they could contact us, which means that, in my understanding, they don't trust their administrative agencies, it's not Chinese side. Victoria: [56:34] A couple of very interesting questions. Thank you. Hang on. Male Panelist: [56:37] I'm a lawyer and a lobbyist, hypocrisy is my business. [56:40] [laughter] Lee: [56:42] I'm not a goddamn lawyer. [56:44] [laughter] Male Panelist: [56:44] It's one of us. Lee: [56:47] Sorry. Just two more questions. The first one is that you mentioned the UN COPOUS. Just last year the Chinese side made a statement saying that in the future, the new Chinese space station will open to international collaboration with foreign countries. [57:05] We welcome you to send some proposals with the Chinese about any future, potential, collaboration, whether it's manned spaceflight or the scientific experiment in the new Chinese space station in the future. [57:18] The second issue is about the commerce space market. I just learned from my Chinese colleagues that the China National Space Agency say, we open our commercial launching business in China, not only to domestic, private enterprises but also to foreign companies. You can now provide launching service or the satellite in China, manufacturing whole owned foreign companies in China. There's no obstacle here. [57:47] Last but not least, I would like to say a few words about visa issue. We know that later this year United States will host International Astronomical Congress, IAC, in the United States. In the past two decades, many Chinese delegations faced this dilemma that we could not get the visa from the state department. [58:07] Actually, when you just say something, some words, to the visa officer, to the US Embassy in China, you will certainly face the, how to say, denial. It's very interesting, funny story I would like to share with you, because I don't think that any guy from State Department is here. [58:21] One of my colleagues, his academic background in university is remote sensing. When the visa officer to the US Embassy in China asked what means for remote sensing. He explained very excitedly. This science background guy always like to explain what he learned or what he's doing. [58:42] He said, "Remote sensing is used satellite or airplane, use visible obstacle instrument or the infrared, something, to see what happen on the earth." [inaudible] got denial very quickly. [58:54] [laughter] Lee: [58:57] These visa guys may not understand that remote sensing is not for espionage. It could be used for city planning, urban planning, for estimation of agricultural products, for other many use, civilian uses. [59:10] I would like to say, I would like to see whether United States will continue to adopt this, I would like to say, ridiculous, visa policy to turn down all these Chinese scientists who would like to attend international events. Thank you very much. Victoria: [59:27] Thank you, Mr. Lee. We'll ticket your car, and have you come back speak another time on the dais. [59:33] [laughter] Victoria: [59:33] A lot of stuff unpacked in there. We're going to start with Brian and go down the road. Brian: [59:38] I'll take two of those. I'll take the dominance and the visa stuff. I agree with you that words do matter. I think there has been too careless use of words like dominance when it comes space policies or some recent activities. [59:58] I whole-heartedly agree it's not, probably not possible to stay on top for very long or even to have such a major advantage that you're never going to be touched again, unless a perfect set of conditions happens, which may have happened after World War II for a little bit of time. That is very not ideal at all. [60:19] The military, as all militaries do, sometimes talk about the word dominance in a more limited sense. Just the dominance over a certain battlefield or certain point, at a certain time, which I think is very appropriate. [60:31] It's expanding that to talk about complete dominance over an entire domain, for an extended period, is probably as much of a unicorn as anything else that the hippies would want to put out there. I just had to say that you have to be careful about is the word leadership. Sometimes people use the word leadership when they really mean dominance. Leadership should be used in a different context. [61:00] You talk about leadership of a quarterback on a football team or something along those lines, it's not about that person dominating or that individual dominating everybody else they work with. It's about them actually helping the group work better, together. I just want to make that point that we cover our language. [61:19] On the visas thing, I agree with you, it is a huge challenge. Even we as an NGO, we often try to have workshops and discussions, and involve individuals from Russia and from China in those discussions. It's exceedingly difficult to do so if you're located here in the US. [61:37] There has been times we've had to move stuff outside the US to be able to have a discussion that had any participation outside of the NATO countries and Japan. That really makes it difficult to have engagement that can address some of the challenges we've listened to today. I don't know anybody at visa office that can solve this, but I agree that it is a big concern. Victoria: [62:02] Other thoughts. Mike: [62:03] I would echo all of Brian's comments. Except as a Patriot's fan, Tom Brady does seek to dominate. [62:09] [laughter] Mike: [62:09] I think if there's any question there. I guess we'll take on the Wolf Amendment. Again, what I'm trying to point out with Wolf Amendment is I hear far too often it's just a probation. Frankly, as a lawyer, you see this all the time with policymakers, many even from our lawyers. They don't bother to read the actual rule. We just all operate on perception, innuendo, and that this is a prohibition. [62:36] What I was trying to do with my comments is point out it indeed is not, and that there is the possibility of working with China productively on science with NASA. I'd have to go back, but I think it's even been done under the auspices of the Wolf Amendment. [62:51] That being said, I also have children and don't disagree with Brian that when you have to go to mom for permission, there is a chilling effect that occurs there. Certainly, that issue can be looked at. Even prior to getting to that, it would be helpful to begin by having constructive dialogue and activities within the boundaries of the Wolf Amendment as a starting place to see where we might go after that. [63:18] That process is beginning, but I could be wrong. I would have to get my facts there. I hope none of that is hypocritical, but I would invite you if part of this is hypocritical to comment to me now or later. Later. [63:31] [laughter] Victoria: [63:31] [inaudible] . Any other thoughts [inaudible] and Lincoln? Lincoln: [63:37] Hi. I would like to respond to a couple of comments. I also agree that words and language really matter and we have to be careful with the types of language we use. [63:49] Even, for instance, in my own comments when I was trying to emphasize the state of US-China relations and characterize them as much better and more complicated than in the past, you're still even talking about the same rhetorical framework of the Cold War paradigm, which I don't believe exists. [64:07] That said, I believe my own comments may have used the word domination. When I use that, it's for my information dominance that I was talking about. It's actually referring to writings from the People's Liberation Army. I don't have the citations, but there's the winning war under informationized local conditions, etc. These aren't completely out of the blue. This language has been used. [64:28] That said, I recognize that China is, of course, made up of different bureaucratic actors and the People's Liberation Army doesn't speak for China. You have to think about which actors are relevant. Another comment I will talk about, and it goes back to my talk about status, we're talking about China being recognized as being part of a group or a league. [64:51] This goes back to this idea of dominance. In a lot of conversations I've had over the past year, one thing that has been interesting has been how I have recognized that a lot of Chinese individuals that I've spoken with understand status. In a lot of the discussions, it's about equality. It's not about domination. Now, whether that's true or not is something that needs further investigation. [65:13] It is important to think about the assumptions we're bringing into these conversations, and the way we tend to categorize the other. One last note, I will talk about the idea for UN experiments. I don't know how politically palatable it would be for the United States to do this after denying China access to the space station. [65:36] I think this could perhaps be an important window for the United States to informally recognize that China is a member of the international community. I'd be interested in hearing some comments from the rest of the panelists about the viability of this. Thanks. Victoria: [65:54] Other questions? Let's try this side of the room. Marcia, in the blue right here.China Says Yes – Global CommonsChinese space policy centers on a global commons approach to space – they want cooperationBBC 19 [“China open to international cooperation in space exploration”, BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific; London [London]15 Jan 2019, DOA: 7/29/19] Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****BEIJING, Jan. 14 (Xinhua) - China is open to international cooperation in its future space missions, officials from the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) said Monday at a press conference on the Chang'e-4 probe. Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the CNSA, said China is willing to work with the international community to push forward the frontiers of space exploration on the basis of equality, mutual benefit, peaceful use and inclusive development. He expressed gratitude for the international attention from foreign counterparts and media on the Chang'e-4 mission, noting that China has been open for cooperation in its space exploration. Wu said China is also willing to contribute more Chinese wisdom to the international aerospace development. On China's space cooperation with Russia, Li Guoping, secretary-general of the CNSA, said that Russia is one of the key partners in China's space programmes. Under the mechanism of regular meetings between Chinese and Russian heads of governments, the two countries have set up a space cooperation committee and are expected to carry out cooperation in projects like lunar and deep space exploration, Earth observation, satellite communication and space debris till 2022. Li noted that lunar and deep space exploration is an important area in China-Russia space cooperation. The two countries plan to collaborate on the Russian orbital spacecraft Luna-Resurs-1 (Luna-26) and the Chinese project of landing on the south pole of the moon. On the future China Space Station (CSS), Li said China is expected to complete the construction of the space station in 2022. So far, China has carried out cooperation in manned space mission with Russia, Germany, France and the European Space Agency and hopes to have more international cooperation in equipment research, space application and taikonauts training. He added that China announced in Vienna last May that all member states of the United Nations are welcome to cooperate with China to jointly utilize the CSS. Li noted that all foreign counterparts are welcome to participate in its future lunar and deep space missions, especially the lunar probe which plans to land on the south pole of the moon. According to Li, a total of 10 kg of payload on the orbiter and lander will be open to international partners. Meanwhile, the relay satellite Queqiao can still work for about three to five years in space, and China welcomes the international community to carry out science and technology research with the satellite. On space cooperation with the United States, Wu said the scientists of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of NASA cooperated with the team of the Chang'e-4 mission to study the landing of the Chang'e-4 probe. The U.S. side has offered the orbital data of LRO and the Chinese side has provided the landing timing and location. By referencing the footage released by China of Chang'e-4's descent onto the moon, the LRO team has been able to pinpoint where the lander touched down, and NASA posted related images. Wu said leading countries in space exploration should focus on cooperation and make more contribution to mankind's quest and journey into the universe. China announced Friday [11 January] that the Chang'e-4 mission, which realised the first-ever soft-landing on the far side of the moon, was a complete success. The Chang'e-4 probe touched down at the preselected landing area on the far side of the moon on Jan. 3, and the rover Yutu-2 drove onto the lunar surface late that night. Named after the Chinese moon goddess "Chang'e," China's lunar exploration programme, which began in 2004, includes orbiting and landing on the moon and bringing samples back to Earth. According to the CNSA, the programme has achieved five continuous successes, referring to Chang'e-1, Chang'e-2, Chang'e-3, a test craft for Chang'e-5 and Chang'e-4.China Says Yes – Need MoneyChina will say yes – they need moneyChina Power Team. "What’s driving China’s race to build a space station?" China Power. December 7, 2016. Updated February 13, 2019. DOA: 7/22/19 Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Funding the Manned Space Program Some Chinese officials have expressed concern about whether Beijing can afford to continue investing heavily in the manned space program. Official data indicate that China spent over 20 billion yuan ($2.90 billion) on the project between 1992 and 2005, and an additional 15 billion yuan ($2.17 billion) between 2005 and 2011. Today, China allocates a greater share of its space budget to manned spaceflight (roughly 33 percent) than any other country. The U.S. follows at around 27 percent. The OECD estimates that China now has the second-highest combined civil and military space budget in the world. Total government expenditures on space in 2013 were significantly higher in the U.S. ($39.33 billion) than in China ($6.11 billion), but the U.S. budget has contracted in recent years, while China’s has expanded. The Chinese government also plans to boost investment in space science, an area where it has historically lagged behind the United States. In 2015, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent over $5 billion on space science while China spent just $110 million. China is expected to narrow this gap in the coming decades, and has already begun working to increase its cooperation with private investors. At present, it is difficult to estimate the full cost of building and operating a permanent space station. By comparison, the ISS has high annual operating costs (expected to range between $3 and $4 billion through 2024) but is financed by multiple partner countries. For example, NASA is party to an ISS agreement with the Japanese, European, and Canadian space agencies that divides “common systems” operating costs. Within this framework, the U.S. shoulders 76.6 percent of the burden, while the Japanese, European, and Canadian space agencies pay 12.8, 8.3, and 2.3 percent shares, respectively. China has not indicated whether it will seek cost-sharing arrangements with other countries. It has signed space station cooperation agreements with the Russian and European space agencies—and the United Nations—but how much financial support such countries may be willing to provide is unknown.China Says Yes – China Space StationUS Chinese cooperation is key to getting their space station off the groundLong 16 [Jie, “China's space station project and international cooperation: Potential models of jurisdiction and selected legal issues”, Space Policy, Volume 36, May 2016, Pages 28-37, , DOA: 6/17/19] Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****From the experiences of the Mir and ISS, it can be concluded that international space cooperation is a necessary means for the success of a long-term and effective space project. If the impending Chinese space station project is to achieve sustainable development, it is suggested that a pragmatic approach is adopted towards international space cooperation in the process of commercial cooperation in space with various participants from different countries, regardless of the political and ideological differences. Meanwhile, for the purpose of promoting national competitiveness and well-being of humankind, China needs to balance its domestic “independent development policy” and international “space cooperation principle”.Chinese space station is critical to implementing solar power as soon as possible – we need to experimentGoswami 18 [Dr. Namrata Goswami completed her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2005 on the topic "Just War Theory and Humanitarian Intervention: A Comparative Case Study of East Pakistan and Kosovo." Dr. Goswami was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Washington. D.C from October 2012 to June 2013; Visiting Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (November–December 2010); the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), August 2006 to July 2010; and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University, Melbourne from April to August 2009. She is a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship, 2012-2013, “China in Space: Ambitions and Possible Conflict”, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1 (SPRING 2018), pp. 74-97, , DOA: 5/19/19] Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In 2015, China expressed its intention to build a space solar station 36,000 kilometers above the earth. This power station will be placed in geosynchronous orbit and equipped with huge solar panels, and the solar electricity that will be generated will be sent via microwaves or lasers to Earth. One of the biggest advocates of space-based solar power in China is Wang Xiji, the chief designer of China’s first rocket, the Long March 1.56 Wang believes that “the world will panic when the fossil fuels can no longer sustain human development. We must acquire space solar power technology before then. . . . Whoever obtains the technology first could occupy the future energy market. So it’s of great strategic significance.”57 According to Duan Baoyan of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, “If we have space solar power technology, hopefull (sic) we could solve the energy crisis on Earth.”58 These views are supported by senior vice president of CAST, Li Ming, who believes that “China will build a space station in around 2020, which will open an opportunity to develop space solar power technology.”59 Li indicates that once the space station is in place, China would then carry out experiments on developing an SBSP station.60 In a presentation for the 2016 International Astronautical Congress in Mexico, Li further elaborated on the SBSP concept by suggesting that in-situ resource utilization and on-orbit 3-D printing could be applied using resources from asteroids to build SBSP satellites on a lunar base instead of having to lift them from Earth to space. This will bring down manufacturing costs from $536 trillion ($50,000 per kilogram) to $170 billion ($250 per kilogram). Materials present on the lunar surface and asteroids include silicon and aluminum, required for solar panel production.61 Li points out that the low gravity of some asteroids or near Earth objects (NEO) makes it easier for spacecraft to dock, park, or separate, requiring less propulsion. NEOs are attractive as they are rich in resources required for SBSP purposes. More recently, Lt Gen Zhang Yuilin, the Central Military Commission’s deputy chief of GAD (now SSF) stated that solar power generation in space was more efficient than Earth solar, indicating that China would start developing technology for an industrial-scale solar power station once it completes work on its permanent space station by 2020.62 China has invested in developing a blueprint within a timeline of 2050 for its SBSP program. The CAST design by Hou Xinbin for SBSP satellites took the first position at the 2015 SunSat Design Competition.63 Given CAST’s timelines of completing the first 100kW SPS demonstration at LEO by 2025 and the first commercial-level SPS system to be in operation at GEO by 2050, these could turn into China’s own Sputnik moments.A2: China Solves – Tech GapsChina’s goals are all talk, they are not feasible – tech gap is too hugeGoswami 18 [Dr. Namrata Goswami completed her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2005 on the topic "Just War Theory and Humanitarian Intervention: A Comparative Case Study of East Pakistan and Kosovo." Dr. Goswami was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Washington. D.C from October 2012 to June 2013; Visiting Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (November–December 2010); the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), August 2006 to July 2010; and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University, Melbourne from April to August 2009. She is a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship, 2012-2013, “China in Space: Ambitions and Possible Conflict”, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1 (SPRING 2018), pp. 74-97, , DOA: 5/19/19] Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****China’s stated future space goals of developing a SBSP station and beaming that energy wirelessly back to Earth, establishing a manned lunar presence, landing on the dark side of the moon, exploring and mining asteroids, utilizing these resources for in-situ manufacturing, and building a permanent space station are technologically ambitious to achieve in the 20–30 year time span. The skeptics would argue that such goals are not achievable or feasible given the absence of proven technology or that China may rhetorically state these ambitions, but it remains to be seen if these goals are achievable.Chinese SBSP is a long way off – tech hurdles are big and even the Chinese think it is incredibly long-termGoswami 18 [Dr. Namrata Goswami completed her doctorate from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2005 on the topic "Just War Theory and Humanitarian Intervention: A Comparative Case Study of East Pakistan and Kosovo." Dr. Goswami was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), Washington. D.C from October 2012 to June 2013; Visiting Fellow at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg (November–December 2010); the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), August 2006 to July 2010; and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University, Melbourne from April to August 2009. She is a recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship, 2012-2013, “China in Space: Ambitions and Possible Conflict”, Strategic Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 1 (SPRING 2018), pp. 74-97, , DOA: 5/19/19] Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Within China, those who study security and those who are space scientists have divergent perspectives on space-based resources. In general, Chinese experts on China’s missile defense, nuclear, and regional security studies are pessimists when it comes to China’s capability to achieve long-term space goals like SBSP or asteroid mining.73 They believe that long-term space goals articulated by Chinese space policy makers or scientists are aimed mostly at procuring state funding for their projects.74 On the other hand, long-term space investment is a high priority for China’s leadership.75 The commitment of the highest levels of PRC leadership is demonstrated by the close personal association of its highest leaders to space activities. In 1999, Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin personally named China’s first unmanned space-craft, Shenzhou (Our Divine Land), and wrote the calligraphy imprinted on the side of the spacecraft.76 China, via its space program, is aspiring to use its space technology, both for its development needs and the peaceful use of space and to reap economic dividends.77 CAST, one of China’s leading space agencies, views SBSP as meeting several important goals for China, namely, “sustainable economic and social development, disaster prevention and mitigation, and the retaining of qualified personnel and the cultivating of innovative talents.”78 CAST submitted a feasibility report on SBSP, which was approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.79 While the acquisition of technology for SBSP will require the development of cutting-edge technologies including ultra-thin arrays, revolutionary launch capabilities, and on-orbit manufacture/assembly/ integration, China views its investments in developing SBSP technologies for energy as equivalent to the Apollo program that resulted in the US lead in science and technology.80China SBSP fails – technological hurdles and costMatignon 19 [Matignon, Louis, contributor on space legal issues, 4/15/2019. "THE LEGAL STATUS OF CHINESE SPACE-BASED SOLAR POWER STATIONS." Space Legal Issues, Accessed: 8/15/2019. ]****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Space-based solar power systems convert sunlight to microwaves outside the atmosphere, avoiding these losses and the downtime due to the Earth’s rotation, but at great cost due to the expense of launching material into orbit. SBSP is considered a form of sustainable or green energy, renewable energy, and is occasionally considered among climate engineering proposals. It is attractive to those seeking large-scale solutions to anthropogenic climate change or fossil fuel depletion. Various SBSP proposals have been researched since the early 1970s, but none are economically viable with present-day space launch infrastructure. Some technologists speculate that this may change in the distant future if an off-world industrial base were to be developed that could manufacture solar power satellites out of asteroids or lunar material, or if radical new space launch technologies other than rocketry should become available in the future. Besides the cost of implementing such a system, SBSP also introduces several technological hurdles, including the problem of transmitting energy from orbit to Earth’s surface for use. Since wires extending from Earth’s surface to an orbiting satellite are neither practical nor feasible with current technology, SBSP designs generally include the use of some manner of wireless power transmission with its concomitant conversion inefficiencies, as well as land use concerns for the necessary antenna stations to receive the energy at Earth’s surface. The collecting satellite would convert solar energy into electrical energy on board, powering a microwave transmitter or laser emitter, and transmit this energy to a collector on Earth’s surface. CHINESE SPACE-BASED SOLAR POWER STATIONS Is there a new Space Race? After successfully completing the first-ever lunar landing of History on the far side of the Moon, China, with the second largest budget allocated to a space program, intends to send into orbit a giant solar farm by 2025. The Middle Kingdom has announced plans to build a space solar station that would supply the Earth with electricity. In concrete terms, the solar power station would float thirty-six thousand kilometres from the Earth, capture solar energy before sending it back to Earth. The idea may sound like science fiction, but it would be particularly effective. In any case, China believes in the project. The country has announced plans to build a solar power plant that gravitates around the Earth. Full exploitation could be considered for 2050. A solar power plant is based on the conversion of sunlight into electricity, either directly using photovoltaics (PV), or indirectly using concentrated solar power (CSP). Concentrated solar power systems use lenses, mirrors, and tracking systems to focus a large area of sunlight into a small beam. Photovoltaics converts light into electric current using the photoelectric effect. The explosion of demography on our planet results in an increase in energy needs. To meet these needs, renewable energies are slowly becoming a part of our society, even if fossil fuels still seem to have a good time ahead. That’s why China thinks it has found a solution, far from our planet. Chinese scientists believe that solar energy directly from outer space would be much more effective than that harvested from Earth. Hence the idea of launching several small power plants in the stratosphere, between 2021 and 2025, before crossing the level of the megawatt in 2030 and that of the gigawatt by 2050. The advantage of a solar power station is that it would no longer depend on terrestrial climate hazards (a considerable fraction of incoming solar energy is lost on its way through the Earth’s atmosphere by the effects of reflection and absorption) and would thus be an inexhaustible source of energy for its operators. China says such an installation could “reliably deliver 99% of the time, at a sixfold intensity” to solar infrastructures installed on Earth. The Chinese space-based solar power stations could weigh around one thousand tons, which would certainly not facilitate its launch. Not to mention the transport of energy to the Earth. Researchers are imagining the possibility of building space-based solar power stations directly in outer space using robots and 3D printing. Let’s mention that Japan (in 2015, along with researchers from Mitsubishi, the JAXA announced that it was working on microwave transmission technology, which would allow long-distance energy transport, without cable) and the United States of America (after a first attempt by NASA in the 1950s, Caltech researchers announced that they had recently created a prototype that can contain and transmit solar energy from space using lightweight solar panels) have studied in the past the possibility of harvesting solar energy from outer space. The solar power station in orbit would capture the Sun’s rays as it does for all solar power plants. The problem is to transport this energy to Earth safely, without loss and in the exact place. For this, the energy must be converted into microwaves or into a laser beam. Two techniques still being studied in particular because of the possibly negative effects of the radiation of these microwaves on the atmosphere. This important aspect is not yet settled, but the Chinese authorities have already begun the construction of an experimental centre in Chongqing, a major city in southwest China.china solar power failsDzikiy 19 (Phil, Feb. 18th 2019, Chinese media reveals space solar power station plans — pie in the sky?, Electrek, accessed: 8-19-2019, <a class="vglnk" href=") ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Chinese state media recently reported the country’s plans for a solar power station orbiting the Earth that could harness solar power without any interference. The report comes from China’s Science and Technology Daily (via The Sydney Morning Herald). Construction of such a power station is already happening in the city of Chongqing, according to the report. The report goes on to make a number of claims regarding the possible “inexhaustible source of clean energy for humans.” Among them: the station could reliably supply energy 99 percent of the time at six times the intensity of Earth-based solar farms. The Sydney Morning Herald also writes, “electric cars could be charged at any time and any place,” though what that means is unclear. China’s space solar plant would convert solar energy into electric energy, then beam it down to Earth via a laser or microwaves to a receiving station. From there, the energy would be transferred into the power grid. Nothing New Under The Sun This certainly isn’t the first time a space-based solar system has been floated as a possibility — the concept has existed for decades, at least as far back as Isaac Asimov’s 1941 short story, “Reason.” Among other countries, Japan and India have discussed space-based solar power in recent years. Caltech has an ongoing Space Solar Power Project — its website offers progress updates. China has done the same, but this latest report reveals a few more details. The country plans on launching “small to medium-sized solar power stations” into the stratosphere between 2021 and 2025, while a “megawatt-level space solar power station” is planned for 2030. Researchers acknowledge the extreme technical challenges of such a system — including the enormous weight of a large solar space station, and the viability, efficiency, and safety of long-distance energy transfer. But China Academy of Space Technology vice-president Li Ming said China is expected to become the first country to build a space solar power station with practical value. (For what it’s worth, Japan’s JAXA has previously claimed to be the world’s leader in space-based solar power research). There’s also the question of whether or not it’s even worth it to pursue space-based solar, or if such research and money would be better served on improving and deploying Earth-based solar.A2: China Solves – Money China fails alone – money China Power Team. "What’s driving China’s race to build a space station?" China Power. December 7, 2016. Updated February 13, 2019. DOA: 7/22/19 Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Funding the Manned Space Program Some Chinese officials have expressed concern about whether Beijing can afford to continue investing heavily in the manned space program. Official data indicate that China spent over 20 billion yuan ($2.90 billion) on the project between 1992 and 2005, and an additional 15 billion yuan ($2.17 billion) between 2005 and 2011. Today, China allocates a greater share of its space budget to manned spaceflight (roughly 33 percent) than any other country. The U.S. follows at around 27 percent. The OECD estimates that China now has the second-highest combined civil and military space budget in the world. Total government expenditures on space in 2013 were significantly higher in the U.S. ($39.33 billion) than in China ($6.11 billion), but the U.S. budget has contracted in recent years, while China’s has expanded. The Chinese government also plans to boost investment in space science, an area where it has historically lagged behind the United States. In 2015, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration spent over $5 billion on space science while China spent just $110 million. China is expected to narrow this gap in the coming decades, and has already begun working to increase its cooperation with private investors. At present, it is difficult to estimate the full cost of building and operating a permanent space station. By comparison, the ISS has high annual operating costs (expected to range between $3 and $4 billion through 2024) but is financed by multiple partner countries. For example, NASA is party to an ISS agreement with the Japanese, European, and Canadian space agencies that divides “common systems” operating costs. Within this framework, the U.S. shoulders 76.6 percent of the burden, while the Japanese, European, and Canadian space agencies pay 12.8, 8.3, and 2.3 percent shares, respectively. China has not indicated whether it will seek cost-sharing arrangements with other countries. It has signed space station cooperation agreements with the Russian and European space agencies—and the United Nations—but how much financial support such countries may be willing to provide is unknown.Recent failures make it nearly impossible for China to get their space station off the groundJones 19 [Andrew Jones covers China's space industry for GBTIMES and SpaceNews, “China suffers Long March 4 failure”, May 23, 2019, , DOA: 7/17/19] Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Editors note: China’s state-run Xinhua news agency has since confirmed the failure of a Long March 4 carrying the Yaogan-33 satellite. “The first and second stages of the rocket worked normally, while the third stage had abnormal operation,” Xinhua reported. “Based on monitoring data, the third stage of the rocket and satellite debris have fallen on the ground.” HELSINKI — A planned launch of a remote sensing satellite from Taiyuan in north China may have ended in failure, with the lack of an official statement suggesting an issue with the mission. Airspace closure notices issued days in advance indicated a launch of a Long March rocket from Taiyuan was due to take place between 6:45 and 7:06 p.m. Eastern Wednesday (6:45-7:06 a.m. local time Thursday). Amateur footage and images posted on Chinese social media platforms apparently consistent with a morning launch from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center suggest the launch of a Long March 4C three-stage hypergolic rocket took place around 6:49 p.m. Eastern. A successful launch is usually announced by the main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), as soon as the spacecraft have entered their intended orbits. Wednesday’s launch, to place a remote sensing satellite into sun-synchronous orbit, would likely have been followed with an announcement of success within the hour. More than 12 hours after the apparent launch, no statements from CASC nor government space authorities had been released. SpaceNews has contacted the U.S. Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, responsible for space situational awareness including detecting, tracking, cataloging and identifying artificial objects orbiting the Earth for comment on any possible new objects correlating with the launch and is awaiting a reply. The launch took place deep inland, meaning spent rocket stages will fall With the exception of major events such as crewed or lunar exploration missions, Chinese launches are rarely openly announced. Indirect means such as NOTAMS — notices filed with aviation authorities to notify of aircraft of potential hazards — are often the only indication of imminent launches. The payload was expected by amateur aerospace watchers within China to be a Yaogan remote sensing satellite, designated Yaogan-33. Chinese state media typically state that Yaogan series satellites are used for “electromagnetic environment surveys and other related technology tests,” but outside analysts understand the satellites to be optical and synthetic aperture radar satellites for military reconnaissance purposes. A similar launch in August 2016, also using a Long March 4C launch vehicle, believed to be carrying the Gaofen-10 satellite, part of a civilian Earth observation constellation, ended in apparent failure and was also followed by official silence. Loss of the satellite was only confirmed two weeks later by the China Great Wall Industry Corp., a CASC subsidiary. As the issue for the Gaofen-10 launch was confined to the third stage, used only on the Long March 4C, developed by CASC subsidiary, the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), other Long March flights were not affected. The carrier rocket did not fly again until November 2017, and in May 2018 launched the Queqiao relay satellite as a necessary precursor to the Chang’e-4 lunar far side landing on Jan 2. If confirmed, it would be the first Chinese government launch failure since July 2017, when the second Long March 5 suffered a first stage issue. The Long March 5 has been grounded ever since, and a planned return-to-flight in July, announced in January, appears to have slipped. Cargo vessels specially designed to transport the components of the 5-meter-diameter, 56-meter-long heavy-lift launcher from a manufacturing site in Tianjin, north China, to the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, on the southern island province of Hainan, remain moored on the Yangtze river. The two previous Long March 5 launches required two months of launch preparations at Wenchang, leaving a July launch very unlikely. The third Long March 5 is expected to carry an experimental communications satellite before the fourth launch can launch the Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission, previously slated for late 2019. The country’s first independent mission to Mars is also expected to launch on the Long March 5 in the next Hohmann transfer window, in July and August 2020, while the debut of the Long March 5B, a variant for low-Earth orbit launches, is also expected in the first half of 2020, before being able to launch the first module of the Chinese Space Station. The above missions require a successful return-to-flight of the Long March 5, which has undergone a redesign of its liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen YF-77 first stage engines following the 2017 failure. Another slip could place huge pressure on the schedule for China’s most ambitious space projects. Wednesday’s launch was China’s ninth of 2019, including a first orbital launch attempt by private launch firm OneSpace, which ended in failure. It follows the failure of commercial counterpart Landspace to reach orbit in October 2018. The next attempt from the nascent Chinese private launch sector is expected from iSpace in early June.A2: China Solves – WeaponsChina’s solar power program is paper designed, will be weaponized, takes too long, and faces technical problems. --use cooperative regs framework cards solve the barriers ev if you make this argChen 16 (Stephen Chen - investigates major research projects in China, a new power house of scientific and technological innovation. He has worked for the Post since 2006. He is an alumnus of Shantou University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Semester at Sea programme which he attended with a full scholarship from the Seawise Foundation. 3/8/16, “China sets up laboratory to research building solar power station in space” , DOA: 8/15/19, kbb) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****China’s solar power project in space has been largely confined to designs on paper, according to previous reports, but the latest remarks by the senior space official suggest it has moved into a higher phase of development.The technology could potentially have military applications as a weapon if high sources of energy could be beamed at earth.No timeline was given in the newspaper report on when China might start building the orbiting solar power plant, but previous media reports have suggested it might be launched between 2030 and 2050.Researchers in other countries such as the United States and Japan had proposed similar designs since the 1970s, but no project has come to fruition due to the enormous costs and technical challenges involved.These include finding a method to beam the high amount of energy back to earth. The longest distance for the wireless transmission of energy was reported by researchers in Japan last year. They only managed to beam 1.8 kilowatts of energy to a small receiver 50 metres away.Zhang told state media at the meeting of China’s legislature in Beijing this month that one breakthrough had been made through the design of “multiple rotary joints”, but he did not elaborate on the nature of the technology.A2: Wolf ActThe plan doesn’t require a repeal of the Wolf Amendment—China and NASA have already cooperated in spaceHuang 19 (Echo, reporter for Quartz based in Hong Kong. She graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a master's degree in journalism, “The small ways NASA still cooperates with China’s space program, despite a ban,” 1/15/19, Accessed: 8/14/19) -JD****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In its recent landing on the far side of the Moon, China had help from scientists from a handful of countries, while more and more institutes around the world are cooperating with China in space exploration. NASA, however, is left out, thanks to restrictions imposed by the US government since 2011. The US banned the space agency from working with China and its state-owned companies out of concerns regarding national security and technology transfers. As a result, China was locked out of the International Space Station because NASA is one of the participating bodies. More recently, scientists from other countries such as Germany and Sweden who were helping China with its exploration of the far side of the Moon were cautious of not falling afoul of US export controls on sensitive technology. China’s space agency, however, announced that the two countries had shared data on its exploration of the far side of the Moon. “Cooperation is the joint will of scientists,” said Wu Yanhua, deputy director of China’s National Space Agency in a press conference yesterday (Jan. 14). He also noted that both organizations have met “frequently.” According to Wu, China had discussed the possibility of NASA using its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which orbits the Moon, to observe the landing of the Chang’e-4 spacecraft on the lunar far side. Wu said that China had told NASA the exact landing time and position of the spacecraft, but the LRO wasn’t in the right position to do so as it wasn’t able to adjust its orbit with what little fuel it had left. Before the touchdown on Jan. 3, the LRO managed to capture pictures of the landing site. In a statement last week, NASA confirmed those discussions, and said that “for a number of reasons” the LRO wasn’t able to be at the optimal location for the landing. But it added that the orbiter has been collecting data since Chang’e-4’s arrived on the far side, and will take photos of the landing site on Jan. 31. The agencies have agreed to share data on significant findings, if any, at a meeting of a subcommittee of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to be held next month. “NASA’s cooperation with China is transparent, reciprocal and mutually beneficial,” the US space agency said. NASA’s administrator, James Bridenstine, in an earlier interview with Quartz (paywall), had also said that the agency can share data with China. “When they do a science mission to the Moon, we’re hopeful they will be able to share with us the data they receive, and when we do a mission to the moon, we can share data with them,” Bridenstine told Quartz. “Understanding and characterizing the Moon and doing that kind of science is in the interest of all humanity. It’s not something any one country should try to retain for itself.”Warming AdvantageSBSP Solves Warming – EXTSpace based solar power ensures endless energy – better than any alternatives. NSS 19 ([National Space Society, led by Karlton Johnson, USAF and Dale Skran of AT&T Bell Labs], “Space Solar Power: Enabling a Green Future with Economic Growth”, 7/20/19, , accessed 8/13/19) NKAZ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The Importance of Space Solar Power The United States and the rest of the world face a two-fold energy problem: (1) the need to find clean alternative sources of energy to move away from fossil fuels and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, and (2) the need to increase total energy production to meet global demands for an increased standard of living. The National Space Society (NSS) believes that one of the most important long-term solutions for meeting both energy needs is Space Solar Power (SSP), which gathers energy from sunlight in space and sends it to Earth. We believe that SSP can solve our future energy requirements and greenhouse gas emissions problems. Not just help, not just take a step in the right direction, but solve. Space solar power is both clean and inexhaustible and is by far the largest potential energy source available, dwarfing all others combined. SSP can provide large quantities of clean energy to every person on Earth with very little environmental impact. NSS recommends that SSP be included along with ground-based solar collectors and wind turbines as a safe, renewable, and clean energy option. Energy and Quality of Life Access to energy has been a foundation of an increasing quality of life since humans first learned to make fires and domesticate animals. The usefulness of more energy has inspired many technological innovations—giving us water wheels, steam engines, factories, automobiles, air conditioning, air travel, and even space exploration. Two centuries ago, the use of fossil fuels, with their dense energy content and affordability, put human economic growth on an exponential curve. 2 The good news is that the availability of ever larger amounts of affordable energy has granted a steadily improved standard of living for many and the promise of the same for the rest. The bad news is that increasing levels of fossil fuel combustion are seriously harming our precious planet and cast serious doubt on the wisdom of or even our ability to increase energy consumption further. It is simply not sustainable for a fossil fuels-based global economy to continue to grow sufficiently to support a high standard of living on a global basis. NSS believes that SSP can be a key element in achieving a much greener and more abundant future, where every human has access to inexpensive energy, contributing to a much higher quality of life. In this future, fossil fuels will have been replaced by a mix of carbon-neutral energy sources, with SSP playing a major role. What Is Space Solar Power? SSP extends terrestrial power grids into space where the sun shines almost continuously, and where there is no atmosphere or clouds to diminish its intensity. A solar power satellite, placed in a high, geostationary Earth orbit could harvest sunlight, convert it into a focused but low intensity microwave beam for transmission to receivers near markets on Earth as much as 99.5% of the time each year. Solar power on Earth is available only 50% of the time (day-night annual average) at best. In many locations of the world, weather eliminates this option for days or weeks at a time. As a result, terrestrial solar is not a reliable source of baseload power even with major advances in battery technologies, and coal continues to be the number one source of baseload electricity. A major economic and practical advantage of SSP for baseload power utilities is that it requires almost zero energy storage because sunlight is continuously available in space. Although SSP would primarily be used to provide continuous baseload power, some of the power can be used for intermittent or emergency use as needed, partly due to its ability to be redirected from one receiver to another in less than a few seconds. An SSP system to deliver 10 gigawatts of baseload power at an average of 100 watts per square meter to the receiving antenna would cover a ground area of about 36 square miles. However, 10 GW of baseload power delivered on average by ground solar power would require a solar array covering about 360 square miles, after accounting for nighttime, seasonal variations in solar intensity, spacing of the solar collectors, and the effects of clouds and other weather conditions. This is 10 times as much area as the SSP requirement. As another comparison, the 3-Gorges dam project in China required the inundation of over 100 square miles of valuable farmland to produce on average 10 GW of electrical power1 . 3 There are natural concerns over the safety of the power beams from space to Earth. Technical studies show that the low-density beams will be able to meet all radio frequency safety standards for both humans (including onsite workers) and wildlife. However, NSS recommends an extensive test program before deployment and then continuous monitoring during operations. The Limits of Earth-bound Green Energy NSS sees terrestrial green energy as a crucially important step on the evolution towards a cleaner, less polluted Earth. However, terrestrial renewable sources provide power only when the wind blows or the sun shines, or where mountains enable hydroelectric power (and when the water is not needed urgently for farming). Moreover, not all geographic regions are suitable for economically-viable large-scale terrestrial solar or wind power generation either due to weather conditions (e.g., frequent overcast or low wind speeds), inherently low sun angles at high (i.e., near polar) latitudes or just the absence of available and suitable land (e.g. not rain forest, crop lands, too mountainous, etc.). On the other hand, orbiting solar power satellites (SPS) connected to terrestrial energy networks could provide continuous energy to almost any region on Earth. SSP can complement and enhance terrestrial green energy. SSP would not generate carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, would produce no radioactive waste for disposal, and would require no water withdrawal or consumption for cooling. See table below. Energy Source CO2 (lbs/MWh) Waste Heat (BTU/MWh) Water Withdrawal (Ga/MWh) Water Consumption (Ga/MWh) Coal ~2,170 7,016,000 15,000 500 Oil ~2,115 7,402,000 11,000 400 Natural Gas 1,700 4,495,000 2,000 180 Nuclear ~0 7,047.000 17,000 500 Hydro ~0 6,098,000 ~0 ~0 SSP ~0 570,000 ~0 ~0 Terrestrial green solutions alone may only support humanity’s increasing energy needs for a relatively short period, perhaps a few decades. As argued by Hoffert, et al in Science: “a broad range of intensive research and development is urgently needed to produce technological options that can allow both climate stabilization and economic development”2 . This is because there are real life limits to the deployment of solar, wind, hydro power, and other non-fossil 4 fuel energy systems. Eventually the increasing demand for energy will likely overwhelm the combined capacity of these green sources, absent significant reductions in the global standard of living. While all viable energy options should be pursued with vigor, SSP has a number of substantial advantages over other energy sources: ? Unlike oil, gas, ethanol and coal, SSP does not emit greenhouse gases. ? Unlike nuclear power plants, SSP will not produce hazardous waste, which needs to be stored and guarded for hundreds of years. ? Unlike terrestrial solar and wind power plants, SSP can be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in huge quantities. It works regardless of cloud cover, daylight, or wind speed. ? Unlike nuclear power plants, SSP does not provide death-inducing targets for terrorists. ? Unlike coal and nuclear fuels, SSP does not require environmentally problematic mining operations. ? SSP will provide energy independence and even energy dominance for the nations that develop it. Making Space Solar Power Affordable Space solar power facilities must be numerous and large to generate the levels of power humanity desires. For space solar power to be a reality, we need fully reusable rockets utilizing, as much as possible, non-polluting propellants. With SpaceX repeatedly flying its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters safely back to launch sites or drone ships, the company has already achieved great success in making at least the first stages of its launch vehicles reusable3 . SpaceX is also working on a new large fully reusable rocket called the Starship/Super Heavy4 . Blue Origin is also developing reusable rockets and has repeatedly launched and landed its New Shepard rocket successfully during flight tests5 . Against a backdrop of already plunging launch costs provided by SpaceX’s first-stage reusable vehicles6 , the company’s Starship, with its Super Heavy first stage, is expected to enable a very significant reduction from the launch cost of the Falcon Heavy (currently below $1700 per kg to LEO7 ), thereby making it much easier to close the SSP business case. It is estimated that with the developing reductions in launch costs, SPS electricity can be potentially delivered to end users for less than 5 cents per kW-hour8 , which is below current end-user electricity cost worldwide9 . 5 Longer-Term Prospects NSS advocates development of the vast resources of space for the dramatic betterment of humanity. This includes not only energy from space (the subject of this paper) but also material resources from space, including mining of the Moon and asteroids. Space based solar power will eventually have an even more positive impact on Earth if we derive most of the required mass for the orbiting solar power facilities from lunar or asteroid materials. With the Moon’s gravity being one-sixth that of Earth’s, it may prove to be far easier to get the mass from the lunar surface than from the Earth’s surface. Near Earth asteroids are another potential source of materials for the construction of space based solar power systems. As the use of SSP grows, the potential market for materials mined and processed in space will grow with it, eventually allowing for large scale construction of SPS while minimizing the number of rocket launches required. SSP not only can provide abundant energy and economic growth on Earth but can provide energy and economic growth in space. Space-to-space solar power beaming could provide energy for cis-lunar and lunar surface vehicles carrying out exploration and construction, while improving technologies for beaming to Earth10. Using space-to-space power beaming from an SPS has the potential to greatly reduce the cost of Earth-Moon and Earth-asteroid transportation11, in turn lowering the cost of constructing solar power satellites. Combined with the usage of water mined on the Moon or asteroids as fuel, space-to-space power beaming heralds a new age of “greener” cis-lunar transportation. Space Solar Power and Geopolitical Dominance Energy plays a decisive role in global geopolitics, and the country that develops a working SSP system will be tapping into an enormous energy resource which is capable of rapid growth, which is very easy to export, and which will transform global energy markets. China knows this, but the U.S. is ignoring it. China has plans to put a commercial-scale solar power station in orbit by 205012. Because inexpensive, emissions-free power will be hard for many countries to turn down, China will gain great international leverage with that move. Solar power stations in orbit will also advance China’s goal of creating the world’s first global electrical “supergrid” as part of its Global Energy Interconnection Initiative, itself a part of China’s broader Belt and Road Initiative13. 6 Recommendations NSS recommends government investment of at least $500 million per year with the goal of an orbiting demonstration in 5-10 years and full-size operational units in 10-15 years. This would put SSP funding on a par with federal funding for fusion energy, which would be a minimum reasonable amount considering the enormous benefit either energy source would confer. While NSS also supports funding for fusion energy14, we note that whereas SSP requires significant engineering development, unlike fusion energy it requires no major breakthroughs in science or technology to be implemented. Therefore, SSP offers a nearer term opportunity than fusion’s uncertain development timeline. Had SSP been funded at the same level as fusion research for the last 10-20 years we could now be deploying full-scale operational systems. NSS recommends that the United States, and the world, diversify energy investments by adding SSP to the mix.Space based solar power solves global warming Garretson et al 12 (Peter Garretson lieutenant colonel USAF, Solar Power In Space?, 2012, ) TRI****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Space-based solar power (SBSP) is a concept for a revolutionary energy system. It involves placing into orbit stupendously large orbital power plants—kilometers across—which collect the sun’s raw energy and beam it down to where it is needed on the earth. In theory, SBSP could scale to meet all of humanity’s energy needs, providing virtually unlimited green, renewable power to an energy-hungry world. Most renewable energy schemes suffer from intermittency and low energy density, requiring vast amounts of land and extensive storage as well as fossil fuel backup systems. Not so with SBSP systems. When placed in orbit where the sun shines constantly, they can deliver stable, uninterrupted, 24-hour, large-scale power to the urban centers where the majority of humanity lives. A network of thousands of solar-power satellites (SPS) could provide all the power required for an Earth-based population as large as 10 billion people, even for a fully developed “first world” lifestyle but without the environmental downsides of nuclear or coal. Should space-based solar power have a role in the US grand strategy for space? Should Airmen advocate for a US program in SBSP? Depending on your viewpoint, SBSP is either the most important space project of our generation—critical to securing American long-term interests and requiring the advocacy of Airmen—or a fool’s errand, an impossible dream threatening to divert valuable resources from where they are most needed today. Some consider SBSP an embarrassment deserving contempt and active suppression, a proposal from which Airmen should steer well clear. Airmen must seriously consider advocating for SBSP, because today there are several space-faring states with stated national objectives and active interest in developing this technology. Two very capable space-faring states already have funded programs. The implications are vast. The advocacy should consider the scope and feasibility of SBSP and the desirable space strategy for the concept. Additionally, any argument must recognize both the concerns of the detractors and international activity surrounding SBSP while presenting the opportunities and recommendations for the future of the idea. The world needs a constant supply of uninterrupted electrical power to enable and sustain economic growth; power its cities, factories, and vehicles; and provide energy for heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, and desalination. Long term, it is desirable to transition from an energy system based on fossil fuels—an exhaustible resource which alters the composition of our atmosphere with unknown long-term effects on our climate— to a system based upon renewable sources. Many see solar power as the answer, because the resource is so vast and available. However, traditional solar power has limitations that make it less than a perfect match for our society. It is highly intermittent (only a 20-percent duty cycle) due to weather effects (clouds, rain, dust), and its low density requires vast tracks of land. Worst of all, it is not available at night, requiring vast storage or nonrenewable backup systems. Space-based solar is an innovation designed to retain the advantages of traditional solar power while sidestepping the disadvantages.Space-based solar power solves global warmingGarretson 17 (Lt Col Peter, Space Horizons Research Group, “Better than Paris: space solar power,” 7/19/17, accessed 8/13/19, , CP) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****A national program in space-based solar power (SBSP) could do more for solving climate change than the Paris Accord ever could. SBSP is the advanced energy source that “shovel ready,” is fully renewable, produces no greenhouse gasses, is not intermittent, has 24-hour availability, could be made-in-America and could scale to all global demand six times over. Within a generation, we could transform our society to abundant clean energy, enable a $300-trillion global economy, create five million new jobs, drive all carbon emissions to zero, and then have spare energy to suck carbon out of the air. Now if that’s technically feasible—and a lot of credible institutions have said that it is, including NASA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, the International Academy of Astronautics, and the National Academies—then why isn’t this on the agenda? Maybe because our national space program has been run by public servants who think about flags and footprints to show off national plumage, and not businesspeople looking for new markets and competitive advantage. Look, I’m a “Pentagon Green”—strong on defense, and a fiscal conservative who believes that climate change and energy security represents real national security threats. I’m with Elon Musk that we need to figure out how to stop experimenting with dumping carbon in to out atmosphere and find a better way. I believe in the power of innovation. But I’m pro-business and pro-growth, not anti-growth, and believe that business and technological innovation are more powerful tools than restraint. Few have articulated the really big picture better than Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos: We need to go into space if we want to continue to have a growing civilization. If you take baseline energy usage on Earth and compound it at just 3 percent a year for 500 years you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth with solar cells. That's just not going to happen. If we want to continue to grow—another route would be to just face stasis and not continue to grow—I don't think that's as interesting, I don't think you want to survive on this planet, I think you want to–you know—thrive and do amazing things. And to do that we need to go out into the solar system… I predict that in the next few hundred years, all heavy industry will move off the planet. It will just be way more convenient to do it in space, where you have better access to resources, better access to 24-hour solar power. You know, solar power on Earth is not that great because the planet shades us half the time. In space you get power all the time. So there will be a lot of advantages to doing heavy manufacturing there, and Earth will end up zoned residential and light industry. You know, we want to go to space to save the Earth. Amen. Jeff’s sentiments are right on. And, by the way, widely shared in the American public. Surveys by Matula and Loveland have shown that when offered the choice, Americans overwhelmingly choose “Build satellites in Earth orbit to collect solar energy to beam to utilities on Earth” above other space goals. A pity they have never been given such a choice. The Pentagon tried to give America that choice in 2008, publishing a report “Space Based Solar Power: An Opportunity for Strategic Security” aimed to get the attention of President George W. Bush to get us off our addition to foreign oil, but without any luck. We thought the incoming Obama Administration would take action on it given its capability to solve climate change, but despite pushing it as one of the administration’s first white papers, and an “all of the above” energy strategy, the administration was literally not looking “above.” The Obama Administration started its Open Government Internet initiative. Space Solar Power became the number one idea at OpenNASA, OpenEnergy, and OpenOSTP, but no action was taken. The State Department tried in 2010 to make it a deliverable for international cooperation for Obama’s first trip to India, but it was stillborn. India’s former president, Dr. APJ Kalam, and the US-based National Space Society tried to put it on the agenda with a public initiative aimed at the administration, but was ignored. The Pentagon tried again in 2016, holding competitions across the federal government for the best ideas that could advance comprehensive national power. The Space Solar Power D3 Proposal took first honors, and even presented their vision video at the White House, but no action was taken. Even with eight years of a president with an agenda for renewable energy, innovation, and action on climate change, the one idea that could have been truly revolutionary was ignored, and an opportunity for a real legacy was lost. In that interim, of course, first Japan, and then China, started national programs. While we had our head in daydreams of the Martian sand, China’s scientists elaborated their plan to “carry out the most ambitious space project in history. Once completed, the solar station, with a capacity of 100MW, would span at least one square kilometre, dwarfing the International Space Station and becoming the biggest man-made object in space.” Its generals articulated China’s plans to “exploit Earth-Moon space for industrial development. The goal would be the construction of space-based solar power satellites that would beam energy back to Earth,” in the words of Lt. Gen. Zhang Yulin, Strategic Support Force. China boldly publishes vision videos of their designs for a global audience. Mike Snead, a visionary formerly at Air Force Research Lab noted that the Paris accords instantiated what were anticipated to be an annual transfer of $100 billion to nations considered “victims of climate change.” (See “A Trump Administration path to advance commercial space solar power”, The Space Review, December 12, 2016.) That $100 billion could be spent to much greater effect on space solar power. Past estimates have suggested that the total non-recurring capital to develop economic solar power satellites, build factories, and launch fleets to turn them out, one after another, would only be about $100 billion (spent over 10 years), with industry paying 90 percent of that, after less than $10 billion of taxpayer investment to help prove initial designs. That’s one-tenth the cost of the International Space Station, and less than America is spending on its Apollo-on-Steroids Space Launch System (SLS). It’s not even a percent of what we spent on our overseas adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, not even a percent of what we are considering on national infrastructure. I used to be the Chief of Air Force Future Technology for Headquarters Air Force. Now I train the next cadre of Air Force Officers in long-term strategy for comprehensive national power in space. In my judgement, America could easily get the launch costs required to make space solar power possible, and at least three American companies have viable paths to reduce the mass of satellites to make them profitable even without further launch cost reductions. But private industry can only do so much. Major new markets require action on the part of the government to advance pre-competitive technology, establish clear policies, lower barriers to entry, and establish a business- and innovation-friendly environment of authorization, regulation, and liability. Government can accelerate US advantage and cultivate national strategic industries by using becoming anchor customers and making advanced purchases. At least until the actual stand-up of the National Space Council, the true center of gravity for comprehensive space power—and the only meaningful source of US government space leadership—is now Congress. Not NASA: they are tone deaf to anything that is not planting new flags and footprints or compelling new science. Not the Air Force, as they are entirely focused on warfighting, missing out entirely on the larger conversation about space industrialization. No, it only a few visionary leaders in Congress who are engaged and understand the vast opportunities for wealth and power afforded by the energy and material wealth of the inner solar system. It was not the President, but Congress that established the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act that affirmed private industry’s ability to mine asteroids. NASA and the Air Force are not leading the conversation. It has been Congressman Rohrabacher (R-CA) who for decades have supported Space Solar Power and asteroid defense. It is Congressman Mike Rogers (R-AL) who is pushing our nation to go after comprehensive space power, to organize for victory. It is Congressman Bridenstine (R-OK) who sought empowering legislation in a Space Renaissance Act. It is Senator Cruz (R-TX) currently holding hearings on re-opening the American frontier. One need not be motivated to limit carbon to begin a US space solar program: there are sufficient other motives. Whether these men believe in climate change hardly matters if they do something effective about it. Certainly those ideologically committed to the problem had their opportunity and failed. It might be ironic if men who are unconcerned with carbon emissions might do the most to solve it, but climate is not the only issue at stake—so is US primacy in space and the possibility of another American century. If America is not to lose this space race—the only one that matters—to exploit the energy and material wealth to make our planet a cleaner, greener place, it will fall to the few Congressmen with the vision and engagement to place us on that course.SBSP solves global warmingFaure 11 [Faure, Jamie, author and contributor, 7/15/2011. "Can space-based solar power save the climate?" YS Journal, Accessed: 8/13/2019. BBB] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Space-based Solar Power What I think has the most potential in reducing global warming is Space-based Solar Power (SBSP) Figure 1. This technology involves placing solar satellites in space, where their energy production is unaffected by seasons, weather, the day and night cycle, and the filtering effect of the Earth’s atmosphere. The Sun’s energy for us is virtually unlimited (around 5 billion years to go).1 In addition, the satellites are placed nearer to the Sun in space than to the Earth, so they receive more of the Sun’s energy. The satellite then transmits power to the Earth using a laser or microwave beam.2 Transmission by microwaves has already been tested by NASA, and proven possible. In space, solar irradiance is 144% higher than in the Earth,2 which means there is a lot more power available up there! Japan has already been working on this idea for 30 years and invested over 20 billion dollars, hoping to finish their project by 2030.3 The Americans and the Russians are also at the breach, working on a similar idea. The problem with this solution is that we would need to make sure the laser or microwave beam is perfectly orientated toward its receptor on Earth, and would not hit planes or other satellites. Further development is needed before this method is actually feasible. On 19 November 2009, two astronauts went into space to begin the installation of solar cells on the International Space Station (ISS). The two astronauts were part of the crew of the shuttle Discovery. More outings like this are scheduled to take place in the next few years, providing the space station with a greater supply of power. Soon, the station would be able to host not only three, but six astronauts permanently.4 The Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) wants to buy 200 MW of power in space from the firm Solaren. Solaren has been planning for 7 years to send a satellite to space, which is designed to gather power. A PG&E representative says, “We are convinced this technology is to be taken very seriously. It is astounding to see how much energy is available in space”.5 Another company called Space Energy is also developing this technology. There is also the option of placing solar cells on our only natural satellite, the Moon. This idea involves building a solar plant on the moon using resources found locally. The stations would be built on the two quarters of the moon that are visible to us, as one of them is always facing the sun. Energy is retransmitted to Earth using microwaves or laser, but this only works when the solar cells are in a direct line with the station on Earth.Space based solar power solves global warmingRosenbaum and Russo 19, Eric Rosenburg is an editor at CNBC, Donovan Russo is is a Strategic Content intern and former Assignment Desk intern for CNBC, 3/17/19, “China plans a solar power play in space that NASA abandoned decades ago,” CNBC, , accessed 8/13/19, JLB****NCC’19 Novice Packet****John Mankins has spent his professional life working on novel ideas that could transform the way humans use technology in space, solar power among them. But Mankins’ interplanetary musings went beyond the way solar is already used to power satellites and the International Space Station. During a 25-year career at NASA and CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he devised multiple concepts to extend the use of solar in space, among them a solar-powered interplanetary transport vehicle and a space-based power system. It’s that second idea, in particular, that had Mankins’ attention while holding top research positions at NASA during the 1990s and 2000s, including overseeing the $800 million Exploration Systems Research and Technology group. Mankins — who now runs his own private aerospace firm, Artemis Innovation Management Solutions — had the task of figuring out whether there was a way to deliver electricity to the planet by beaming it from space. It’s an idea that could fundamentally reshape the idea of the utility business — and give control over it, on a global scale, to whichever world power gets there first. “If you can dramatically lower the cost of space solar, you can take over most of the energy market of the world, ” said Mark Hopkins, a member of the National Space Society board of directors and former Rand Corp. executive. Mankins got close to seeing the idea make it into reality, with support from the Bush White House and Congress in the 2000s, and positive reviews from the National Academy of Sciences and a national security unit within the Department of Defense. But the program never took flight, for a variety of reasons. So when the news recently broke that the idea — abandoned decades ago by NASA — was coming back to life with a big push from government, it was cause for excitement. But it isn’t NASA finally backing the idea. It’s the Chinese government. The space race heats up China’s ambitions in space rival that of the United States. Its two main objectives were originally human spaceflight (accomplished in 2003) and a permanent Chinese space station, which is coming closer to reality — it announced in early March that a manned space station similar to ISS is now on schedule for 2022, earlier than expected. As the two geopolitical foes increasingly turn their attention to a technological and military race beyond the earth’s atmosphere, space-based solar power projects are an overlooked, often criticized idea. But with China recently announcing that within the next decade it expects to finish the high voltage power transmission and wireless energy tests that would be needed for a space-based solar power system, the concept is likely to get renewed attention. All of the plans in the space race have potential implications for a new military build-out in space of increasing relevance to the world’s powers. The Trump administration formalized plans in February for a branch of U.S. military known as the Space Force. The solar power station plans being contemplated by China include the launch of small- to medium-sized solar power projects in the stratosphere to generate electricity between 2021 and 2025, followed by a space-based solar power station that can generate at least a megawatt of electricity in 2030, and a commercial-scale solar power plant in space by 2050. This is not posturing; this is a real plan from serious organizations with revered scientists in China. They have a perfectly good technical plan, and they can do it by 2030. John Mankins PRESIDENT OF SPACE SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY FIRM ARTEMIS INNOVATION MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS “The dramatically stated interest on the part of the Chinese will do a lot to engender interest,” Mankins said. “Around a decade ago the Chinese started working seriously on this, and about five years ago they started coming to international meetings. Before that, they were in the dark. Now they are coming out of the shadows and talking much more openly about this.” He added, “There is absolutely progress from the Chinese at this point. This is not posturing; this is a real plan from serious organizations with revered scientists in China. They have a perfectly good technical plan, and they can do it by 2030,” Mankins said, describing a small-scale solar power project producing megawatts of electricity, but not a commercial-scale project able to produce gigawatts needed to compete with utilities. A space-based solar power station would capture the sun’s energy that never makes it to the planet and use laser beams to send the energy back to Earth to meet energy demand needs. China said in a recent announcement about the project that a big advantage of space-based solar power is its ability to offer energy supply on a constant basis and with greater intensity than terrestrial solar farms. One of the issues with renewable-energy projects like solar and wind power plants are their intermittency — that refers to the fact that the sun isn’t shining and the wind is not blowing 24-hours a day, limiting the periods of time during which these projects can be a source of power generation. H/O: China space-based solar power project concept A slide from a presentation Chinese scientists made in South Korea showing an early design idea for a solar power project in space that could beam energy back to the Earth. Mark Hopkins, National Space Society Space-based solar would not only offer a solution to intermittency, but also delivery. Today, utility power generation is regional, if not local, but electricity generated in space and near the equator could be beamed almost anywhere across the globe, except for the poles. “You could beam electricity from Canada to the Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America from a satellite at equator,” Mankins said. Roughly one billion people live in the Americas. Hopkins said the current Chinese view is, “We want to be major dominant power in space solar power by 2050. This has the potential to really turn the geopolitics in our favor if we are a leader, so let’s look at it seriously.” Meanwhile, the U.S. says, “Are you kidding? Let’s worry about something else.” New life for a ‘losing proposition’ The idea of collecting solar power in space was popularized by science fiction author Isaac Asimov in 1941 in a short story that envisioned space stations that could transport energy from the sun to other planets with microwave beams. In 1968, Asimov’s vision was brought closer to reality when an American aerospace engineer named Peter Glaser wrote the first formal proposal for a solar-based system in space. After experimenting in the 1970s with transporting solar power, Glaser was able to land a contract with NASA to fund research. However, the project suffered with changes in federal administrations and it was not until 1999 that NASA’s solar power exploratory research and technology program jumped back in to study the issue. In the end “NASA didn’t want to do it,” Mankins said. But a lot has changed, especially relating to the cost equation and rapid advances in technologies like robotics. A NASA spokeswoman said it is not currently studying space-based solar power for use on Earth. It is exploring several advanced power and energy technologies to enable long-duration human exploration of the Moon and Mars, such as its Kilopower project, a small, lightweight nuclear fission system that could power future outposts on the Moon to support astronauts, rovers and surface operations. Next year, this project is expected to transition from ground-based testing to an in-space demonstration mission. Historically, the cost of rocket launches and the weight that would be required for a project of this scale, made the idea of space-based solar unfeasible. There are scientists who still hold that view today. “The energy, mass and cost budgets involved show that this is a losing proposition, not just now but perhaps for centuries to come,” said Olivier L de Weck, a professor of Aeronautics, Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The energy we need to put in to launch the mass required for the SBSP [spaced-based solar power] station is so enormous that we may never recoup it.” H/O rendering of space-based solar power project A concept designed by aerospace engineer John Mankins for a space-based solar project dubbed SPS-ALPHA. Mankins worked for NASA before returning to the private sector and created several space-based solar concepts at the space agency, from a ‘Solar Clipper’ interplanetary transport vehicle to the ‘SunTower’ space solar power system. SPS-ALPHA concept & image provided by John C. Mankins Mankins said this view is becoming quickly outdated due to a dramatic lowering of rocket launch costs through efforts funded by billionaires including Tesla founder Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. Meanwhile, developments in robotics and modular-manufacturing — being able to produce many small modular pieces to make a whole rather than one huge piece of equipment — could lead to cost-effective ways to construct these projects in orbit without having to build a multi-billion-dollar factory in space. He referenced a major review conducted by the federal government in 1981 that when looked at in today’s dollars would have cost up to $1 trillion to deliver the first kilowatt/hour of solar from space. “The whole program was killed in the U.S.,” he said. Now the studies conducted on feasibility are decades old and simply no longer relevant to the discussion, Mankins said. “Whenever a gray-haired senior scientist tells you something can be done, they are almost certainly right. When they tell you it can’t be done, he or she may very well be wrong,” he said, referencing an adage by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke from his famous “three laws.” “We have had a revolution in robotics, drones and warehouse robots that didn’t exist. Previously, the whole thing had to be built as one huge system, an enormous thing like a aircraft carrier shipyard in space to fabricate one enormous object weighing 10,000 tonnes rather than 10 million small units each weighing a few pounds that can use mass production,” he said. “We no longer need a stupendously huge factory in space and hundreds of astronauts to put it together. The whole world, other than the space program, has moved forward to mass-produced modular network devices. That’s the way you would do it, and it was unthinkable 40 years ago, but suddenly it is physically, technically and economically doable.” American scientists are tinkering with the idea to this day. A group at the California Institute of Technology claims to have created a prototype that is able to capture and transmit solar energy from space, using light weight tiles, work sponsored by a $17.5 million research agreement with Northrop Grumman. Weight has always been a key issue to resolve because of the cost of rocket launches being based on weight of cargo. Thin film solar panels are lightweight, which reduces launch cost. Though as launch costs come down it may be less of a make-or-break issue. Thin film may also have a structural advantage in space — the lighter weight is no issue in the zero-gravity environment. Other nations are exploring the concept. In India and in Europe scientists are working on additional concepts for solar based power in space. Japan’s JAXA, an aerospace exploration agency, has been researching how to overcome technological barriers, such as microwave wireless power transmission tech and robotic assembly tech. The US military has begun exploring the idea The most important U.S. effort underway today is arguably the one being conducted by the U.S. military, which received $178 million in its current fiscal year to explore space-based solar power. For the military, space-based solar could solve big issues with delivering power to posts in remote locations, such as in Afghanistan, where getting fuel to a base means driving a truck loaded with flammable gasoline through hostile territory. Solar power beamed from space would also offer bases a new method of powering their operations, recharging the huge battery packs that soldiers carry today because they have so many electronic devices, and could lead to a ramp up in use more electric vehicles. “Anything the military does will push the technology, and CalTech is pushing hard too with the thin film cells, and that work is going well,” Hopkins said. A Department of Defense spokesman said the DoD routinely conducts research to explore concepts such as space-based solar power, but it did not have details to provide at this time. One of the concerns that has dogged the concept is the idea that these projects are really clandestine efforts to develop a space-based laser cannon. Mankins said those fears are based in real physics, but not supported by the reality of military equipment monitoring by the world’s powers. High frequency lasers could be concentrated to serve as a weapon, but any equipment with that purpose would be obvious in its construction, and that is construction that is easily monitored from the earth. “If you look at armored vehicles with machine guns versus a Ford F150 pickup, the difference would be discernible from the ground, even if there are some similarities,” Mankins said. “You would see something that looked like a Hubble telescope.” Risks of solar in space Hughes said that going into space and intercepting sunlight that would have otherwise gone past the earth can heat up the temperature within our atmosphere, though he added that this effect depend on the size of the solar collector in space. “If the plan is to capture solar energy in space, that means the total amount of solar energy going into earth goes up, that increases the earth’s temperature,” Hughes said. “Now of course that depends on how much energy is being brought in. It only becomes a problem when the area of the solar connectors in space becomes comparable to the size of earth.” Mankins said there are significant risks for the planet that need to be considered, including an increase in temperature and unintended consequences for various forms of life. “There is a reason birds like to sit on utility wires.” But it is no different that worries about UV rays, and the concerns are “not known showstoppers.” He said the length of microwaves being contemplated for these projects do not pose a significant health risk. He also studied the global warming argument in detail and said it is a fact that beaming power from space to the earth will have an impact on surface temperatures. But when you look at how efficient the delivery of solar from space could be versus the addition of more coal-powered, natural gas-fired or diesel power generation, the resulting greenhouse gas emissions are still much lower.Space based solar power solve global warming – other ways cant Alifnur Sampad July 14, 2019 (Alifnur Sampad is a freelance contributor at The Bangladesh Today. “Considering Space-based Solar Power (SBSP)”. {MCT})****NCC’19 Novice Packet****My keen concern about space-based solar power rose while Professor Sergio Pellegrino addressed his scheme to install a solar panel in outer space or orbital zone. By his addressed scheme, I became enthusiastic enough and my enthusiasm propelled me to evaluate the feasibility of this comprehensive concept in reality. To evaluate space-based solar power first I would like to introduce basic concepts associated with space-based solar power (SBSP). Concept of SBSP gives a forefront idea about the process of collecting unlimited solar energy and distributing that obtained energy to earth by deploying solar panel in outer space. In an elaborated context, installed space solar panels’ photovoltaic cell would receive photons released by the sun which comes along with sunlight, which would generate electricity like our surface-based solar panel does (perhaps SBSP would get installed away from the earth’s atmosphere or 22,000 miles above from the earth’s surface). Now question emerged how to transmit that obtained electricity unto the earth. The idea of transmitting obtained electricity through a wire would be a mere paradox. Because the earth is constantly moving and for many other scientific rational reasons. Now we need to go back in 1941 for a resolution of this emerged setback. Science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s published short story book called Reason in 1941 and another after that called The Last Question contained the initial idea of transmitting energy through microwave beam in long distance. However back in 1973 international management consulting firm Arthur D’ Little (ADL)’s former vice president Peter Glaser invented a method of transmitting energy or power over long distance by microwave connected with a receiving station in earth surface generally called Rectenna. Now the narrative gestures a method by which it seems like any installed space solar panel will generate electricity and will transform that electricity to the microwave which will beam down to earth-based receiver called Rectenna. Then Rectenna would transform that microwave back to electricity. Associated individuals with SBSP were confronted in front of a question that, implementing microwave method are going to be hazards for earth resources or not. So far claimed by many microwaves as eco-friendly, hazardless and would not damage terrestrial life. Talking about the hazard reminds non-renewable conventional ways of generating electricity requires the burning of fossil fuel like coal, natural gas and oil, that creates gigantic co2 emission which strangled our ecosystem and enforcing global warming. Renowned organizations associated with climate change had shown their headache surrounding climate change and emphasizing to initiate a large scheme to protect our climate from the potency of global warming. As I recall all the devastating and catastrophic event led by global warming it would not emerge like an individual dogma that we need a path to skip global warming and move towards a viable resolution by a green energy resource like space-based solar power, before our climate get devoured by co2 emission or the greenhouse effect. Statistics show about 87% of human-caused co2 emission comes from the burning of fossil fuels. In 2016, generation from combustible fuels accounted for 67.3% of total gross electricity production. Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC) report named global warming of 1.5 degree Celsius says surface temperature had reached 0.87 degree Celsius above in the 2006-2015 decade. If we unveil the causeways of electricity generation would be one of the peak reasons. Moreover, along with co2 emission, there is plenty of negative stuff with electricity generation by fossil fuels which concern a lot of individuals. Such as very high land requirement, very high air pollution emission (Air pollution killed 1.23 Lakh individuals in 2017), there was a probability of explosion in the power plant if anything went wrong and highly hazardous occupation along with many other strangled facts. However, even though nuclear power plant claimed by many as eco-friendly and co2 emission less but its waste would remain for a thousand year. Moreover, the nuclear power project requires a gigantic water resource. In comparison, renewable resources of electricity generation don’t contaminate climate in large number and seem to be dependable. Although renewable power resource generates honorable volume of electricity, there is some setback to generate sufficient, eco-friendly and viable electricity through renewable sources. Like wind power method is captive in the windy areas, we cannot operate wind power method without a windy area, hazardous for birds and low generation volume in comparison with cost or investment. Along with it, another renewable energy resource earth-based solar panel requires a gigantic verge of land, along with it cannot generate power in a cloudy day, night and sun being too far from earth it misses suns intense sunlight or heat. On the other hand, SBSP would be eligible to generate electricity 24/7 cause in space there would be no cloud even no atmosphere, space remains always sunny and there would be nothing left by which sunlight would get cramped before sunlight heats space deployed solar panel. Those speculations emerged with an optimum gesture for NASA along with much other space agency. Back in 1978 NASA and US department of energy (DOE) conducted research about the feasibility of SBSP. Which they abandoned later due to a deficit of knowledge about space-based solar power concept. However, in 1997 NASA restarted their research and initiated fresh look study to examine the modern state of space-based solar powers feasibility. Along with NASA, other organizations are well about the fact that electricity became a significant commodity in personal life along with the industrial sector. The demand for electricity is magnifying in a phenomenon speed with the increment of the population (United Nation estimated population would grow 7.6 billion from 2017 to 9.8 billion by 2050), rapid urbanization and industrialization. As a result, the consumption rate magnified like never before. In 2013 world energy consumption was 1,57,481 terawatt-hours in 2008 it was 1,43,851 TWH, in 2005 consumption rate was 1,33,602 TWH, in 2000, 1,17,687 TWh and 1,02,569 TWh in 1990. On the other hand, many countries and organizations emphasizing to transmit electricity in regional areas and countries where has no or little access to electricity. Such as in South Sudan 5.1% of the population has access to electricity, in Chad 6.4%, Malawi 9.8 %, Liberia 9.8% and Central African Republic 10.8% population has access to electricity. Along with its statistics shows 67% of the developing world still goes without household electricity obtained substandard electricity. This significant notable thing indicates electricity consumption rate will increase in a large momentum in the near future. By considering all of this, perhaps it’s emerged as a peak task for associated organizations to find a power resource which extensively or proportionally co2 emission-free, viable, substantial and would fulfil the demand in coming eras. As a matter of fact, in a question of revamped electricity, we cannot imagine anything else rather than space-based solar power. Moreover, SBSP gives a hope to supply limitless electricity to earth. For that this concept propelled numerous countries and organizations to show no apathy about SBSP concept and to initiate program surrounding SBSP. International Academy of Astronautics (IIA), Japans national aerospace and space agency (JAXA), China even the US military had taken the scheme to install SBSP in the near future. As we know nothing has all the positivity as well as negativity at all. There is a setback to install SBSP in outer space. Space-based solar powers expenditure would be approximately over a trillion-dollar. There would be high maintenance and from the earth to space cargo transferring expenditure are high. But thanks to SpaceX and other space organizations as transferring cost of cargo in space decaying in a large momentum because of them. However, this narratives modality gestures positive feasibility for SBSP to become a significant power resource in the near future which would uplift civilization in the edge of new thrives.Space based solar power solves global warmingAutry 19 [Greg Autry, director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative. “Space research can save the planet-again,” Foreign Policy, Accessed 8/13/19]PK****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The first glimpse humanity got of the world from above was transformative. In 1968, the U.S. astronaut William Anders returned from circling the moon in Apollo 8 with a photograph. It was a simple snapshot of the Earth, the wholeEarth, rising above the desolate lunar surface. But it was also momentous, representing the very first time anyone had gotten far enough away to view how fragile the world was. The contrast between the lone blue-and-green marble and the cold emptiness of space was beautiful and shocking. As Anders later remarked, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Anders’s Earthrise photo provided conservationists with the iconic illustration they needed. On April 22, 1970, 20 million people turned out for the largest civic event in U.S. history: Earth Day. Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. IT WAS NASA SATELLITE DATA THAT REVEALED A FRIGHTENING AND GROWING HOLE IN THE OZONE LAYER OVER THE SOUTH POLE, GALVANIZING PUBLIC CONCERN THAT, IN 1987, PRODUCED THE MONTREAL PROTOCOL: THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENT ADDRESSING A GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar technology. Moving solar power generation away from Earth—already possible but held back by the current steep costs of lifting the materials into space—would preserve land and cultural resources from the blight of huge panel farms and save landfills from the growing problem of discarded old solar panels. Sustainable energy advocates in the U.S. military and the Chinese government are actively pursuing space-based solar power, but just making solar cells damages the environment due to the caustic chemicals employed. Space technology offers the possibility of freeing the Earth’s fragile biosphere and culturally important sites from the otherwise unavoidable damage caused by manufacturing and mining. The U.S. start-up Made in Space is currently taking the first steps toward manufacturing in orbit. The company’s fiber-optic cable, produced by machinery on the International Space Station, is orders of magnitude more efficient than anything made on Earth, where the heavy gravity creates tiny flaws in the material. Made in Space and others are eventually planning to build large structures, such as solar power stations, in space. As these technologies develop, they will augment each other, bringing costs down dramatically; space manufacturing, for instance, slashes the cost of solar installations in space. MINING THE SOLAR SYSTEM COMES WITH ITS OWN POTENTIAL IMPACTS, BUT EXTRACTING RESOURCES FROM DISTANT AND LIFELESS WORLDS IS CLEARLY PREFERABLE TO THE CONTINUED DEGRADATION OF THE EARTH. Eventually, firms will be able to supply endeavors in space with materials from the moon and asteroids, avoiding the cost and environmental impact of lifting them into orbit. Mining the solar system comes with its own potential impacts, but extracting resources from distant and lifeless worlds is clearly preferable to the continued degradation of the Earth. Perhaps the most powerful role space can play is as inspiration. Space tourism might seem like a frivolity for the rich, but it can be so much more. I’ve spent some time with astronauts, and they all report that seeing the Earth without borders and observing its fragile atmosphere shook them to their core, inspiring in them a powerful sense of connection and respect for the environment. As Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist and physician who has studied this “overview effect,” put it, “You can often tell when you’re with someone who has flown in space. It’s palpable.” Subjecting thousands of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals to a transcendent experience couldn’t hurt—especially if less wealthy Earthlings soon get a chance to follow them. The leaders of the biggest space firms are already thinking way beyond tourism. Tory Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance, envisions a future in which a thousand or more people work in Earth and moon orbits. These people would build stations, conduct research, and produce goods for use in space and on Earth. The Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos imagines a spacefaring civilization that keeps our home planet pristine and protected, as a sort of national park, while dirty extractive and manufacturing processes take place in orbital facilities. SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to transform Mars back into the healthy world it once was and then fill it with life-forms from Earth—including a significant human population. Some experts have mocked this idea. But experts also lampooned Musk’s plans for reusing rocket boosters and building a high-performance electric car for the masses. The fact is that while some of the plans described by Musk, Bezos, and others might seem utopian or hubristic, given the realities of climate change, humanity needs hope. A future that concentrates only on managing apocalypse, without offering the potential for something better, is no future at all. In the worst scenario, our precious blue-and-green marble will end up looking like its neighbors Venus or Mars simply because we chose not to learn from them.Space based solar power solves global warming NSS 19 (NSS is an independent nonprofit nonpartisan educational membership organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization. “Space Solar Power Limitless clean energy from space” DOA 8/13/19] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****About Space Solar Power (SSP) Also known as Space-Based Solar Power, or SBSP The United States and the world need to find new sources of clean energy. Space Solar Power gathers energy from sunlight in space and transmits it wirelessly to Earth. Space solar power can solve our energy and greenhouse gas emissions problems. Not just help, not just take a step in the right direction, but solve. Space solar power can provide large quantities of energy to each and every person on Earth with very little environmental impact. The solar energy available in space is literally billions of times greater than we use today. The lifetime of the sun is an estimated 4-5 billion years, making space solar power a truly long-term energy solution. As Earth receives only one part in 2.3 billion of the Sun’s output, space solar power is by far the largest potential energy source available, dwarfing all others combined. Solar energy is routinely used on nearly all spacecraft today. This technology on a larger scale, combined with already demonstrated wireless power transmission (see 2-minute video of demo), can supply nearly all the electrical needs of our planet. Another need is to move away from fossil fuels for our transportation system. While electricity powers few vehicles today, hybrids will soon evolve into plug-in hybrids which can use electric energy from the grid. As batteries, super-capacitors, and fuel cells improve, the gasoline engine will gradually play a smaller and smaller role in transportation – but only if we can generate the enormous quantities of electrical energy we need. It doesn’t help to remove fossil fuels from vehicles if you just turn around and use fossil fuels again to generate the electricity to power those vehicles. Space solar power can provide the needed clean power for any future electric transportation system. While all viable energy options should be pursued with vigor, space solar power has a number of substantial advantages over other energy sources. Advantages of Space Solar Power Unlike oil, gas, ethanol, and coal plants, space solar power does not emit greenhouse gases. Unlike coal and nuclear plants, space solar power does not compete for or depend upon increasingly scarce fresh water resources. Unlike bio-ethanol or bio-diesel, space solar power does not compete for increasingly valuable farm land or depend on natural-gas-derived fertilizer. Food can continue to be a major export instead of a fuel provider. Unlike nuclear power plants, space solar power will not produce hazardous waste, which needs to be stored and guarded for hundreds of years. Unlike terrestrial solar and wind power plants, space solar power is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in huge quantities. It works regardless of cloud cover, daylight, or wind speed. Unlike nuclear power plants, space solar power does not provide easy targets for terrorists. Unlike coal and nuclear fuels, space solar power does not require environmentally problematic mining operations. Space solar power will provide true energy independence for the nations that develop it, eliminating a major source of national competition for limited Earth-based energy resources. Space solar power will not require dependence on unstable or hostile foreign oil providers to meet energy needs, enabling us to expend resources in other ways. Space solar power can be exported to virtually any place in the world, and its energy can be converted for local needs – such as manufacture of methanol for use in places like rural India where there are no electric power grids. Space solar power can also be used for desalination of sea water. Space solar power can take advantage of our current and historic investment in aerospace expertise to expand employment opportunities in solving the difficult problems of energy security and climate change. Space solar power can provide a market large enough to develop the low-cost space transportation system that is required for its deployment. This, in turn, will also bring the resources of the solar system within economic reach.Space-based solar power solves global warming – continual power from orbital solar power stations allows for a constant supply of clean power to Earth.Autry 7/20 [Greg Autry is the director of the Southern California Commercial Spaceflight Initiative at the University of Southern California, vice president at the National Space Society, and chair of the International Space Development Conference. SPACE RESEARCH CAN SAVE THE PLANET—AGAIN The solutions to climate change lie far, far away.”, 7/20/2019, , Accessed 08-13-2019 ECT] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The first glimpse humanity got of the world from above was transformative. In 1968, the U.S. astronaut William Anders returned from circling the moon in Apollo 8 with a photograph. It was a simple snapshot of the Earth, the whole Earth, rising above the desolate lunar surface. But it was also momentous, representing the very first time anyone had gotten far enough away to view how fragile the world was. The contrast between the lone blue-and-green marble and the cold emptiness of space was beautiful and shocking. As Anders later remarked, “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Anders’s Earthrise photo provided conservationists with the iconic illustration they needed. On April 22, 1970, 20 million people turned out for the largest civic event in U.S. history: Earth Day. Today conservationists and other critics are more likely to see space programs as militaristic splurges that squander billions of dollars better applied to solving problems on Earth. These well-meaning complaints are misguided, however. Earth’s problems—most urgently, climate change—can be solved only from space. That’s where the tools and data already being used to tackle these issues were forged and where the solutions of the future will be too. Space research has already been critical in averting one major environmental disaster. It was NASA satellite data that revealed a frightening and growing hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole, galvanizing public concern that, in 1987, produced the Montreal Protocol: the first international agreement addressing a global environmental problem. Since then, thanks to worldwide restrictions on damaging chlorofluorocarbons, the ozone situation has stabilized, and a full planetary recovery is expected. As this case showed, space can provide the vital information needed to understand a problem—and a surprising range of ways to solve it. Climate change is a poster child for the critical role of space data. Trekking across the globe to measure ice sheets with drills and gauge sea temperatures from the sides of ships is an expensive, slow, and insufficient way to assay the state of the planet. Satellites operated by NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and an increasing number of commercial firms provide a plethora of multispectral imaging and radar measurements of developments such as coral reef degradation, harmful plankton blooms, and polar bears negotiating thinning ice. Much of the technology involved in observing the Earth today was initially developed for probes sent to explore other planets in our solar system. Indeed, understanding the evolution of other planets’ climates is essential for modeling possible outcomes on Earth. NASA probes revealed how, roughly 4 billion years ago, a runaway greenhouse gas syndrome turned Venus into a hot, hellish, and uninhabitable planet of acid rain. Orbiters, landers, and rovers continue to unravel the processes that transformed a once warm and wet Mars into a frigid, dry dust ball—and scientists even to conceive of future scenarios that might terraform it back into a livable planet. Discovering other worlds’ history and imagining their future offers important visions for climate change mitigation strategies on Earth, such as mining helium from the moon itself for future clean energy. Spinoff technologies from space research, from GPS to semiconductor solar cells, are already helping to reduce emissions; the efficiency gains of GPS-guided navigation shrink fuel expenditures on sea, land, and air by between 15 and 21 percent—a greater reduction than better engines or fuel changes have so far provided. Modern solar photovoltaic power also owes its existence to space. The first real customer for solar energy was the U.S. space program; applications such as the giant solar wings that power the International Space Station have continually driven improvements in solar cell performance, and NASA first demonstrated the value of the sun for powering communities on Earth by using solar in its own facilities. Promisingly, space-based solar power stations could overcome the inconvenient truth that wind and solar will never get us anywhere near zero emissions because their output is inherently intermittent and there is, so far, no environmentally acceptable way to store their power at a global scale, even for one night. Orbital solar power stations, on the other hand, would continually face the sun, beaming clean power back through targeted radiation to Earth day or night, regardless of weather. They would also be free from clouds and atmospheric interference and therefore operate with many times the efficiency of current solar technology. Moving solar power generation away from Earth—already possible but held back by the current steep costs of lifting the materials into space—would preserve land and cultural resources from the blight of huge panel farms and save landfills from the growing problem of discarded old solar panels. Sustainable energy advocates in the U.S. military and the Chinese government are actively pursuing space-based solar power, but just making solar cells damages the environment due to the caustic chemicals employed. Space technology offers the possibility of freeing the Earth’s fragile biosphere and culturally important sites from the otherwise unavoidable damage caused by manufacturing and mining. The U.S. start-up Made in Space is currently taking the first steps toward manufacturing in orbit. The company’s fiber-optic cable, produced by machinery on the International Space Station, is orders of magnitude more efficient than anything made on Earth, where the heavy gravity creates tiny flaws in the material. Made in Space and others are eventually planning to build large structures, such as solar power stations, in space. As these technologies develop, they will augment each other, bringing costs down dramatically; space manufacturing, for instance, slashes the cost of solar installations in space. Eventually, firms will be able to supply endeavors in space with materials from the moon and asteroids, avoiding the cost and environmental impact of lifting them into orbit. Mining the solar system comes with its own potential impacts, but extracting resources from distant and lifeless worlds is clearly preferable to the continued degradation of the Earth. Perhaps the most powerful role space can play is as inspiration. Space tourism might seem like a frivolity for the rich, but it can be so much more. I’ve spent some time with astronauts, and they all report that seeing the Earth without borders and observing its fragile atmosphere shook them to their core, inspiring in them a powerful sense of connection and respect for the environment. As Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist and physician who has studied this “overview effect,” put it, “You can often tell when you’re with someone who has flown in space. It’s palpable.” Subjecting thousands of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals to a transcendent experience couldn’t hurt—especially if less wealthy Earthlings soon get a chance to follow them. The leaders of the biggest space firms are already thinking way beyond tourism. Tory Bruno, the CEO of United Launch Alliance, envisions a future in which a thousand or more people work in Earth and moon orbits. These people would build stations, conduct research, and produce goods for use in space and on Earth. The Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos imagines a spacefaring civilization that keeps our home planet pristine and protected, as a sort of national park, while dirty extractive and manufacturing processes take place in orbital facilities. SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to transform Mars back into the healthy world it once was and then fill it with life-forms from Earth—including a significant human population. Some experts have mocked this idea. But experts also lampooned Musk’s plans for reusing rocket boosters and building a high-performance electric car for the masses. The fact is that while some of the plans described by Musk, Bezos, and others might seem utopian or hubristic, given the realities of climate change, humanity needs hope. A future that concentrates only on managing apocalypse, without offering the potential for something better, is no future at all. In the worst scenario, our precious blue-and-green marble will end up looking like its neighbors Venus or Mars simply because we chose not to learn from them.Space Based Solar Power solves warming through replacing greenhouse emissionsNankivell 18 (Kirk, Founder of futurology site, , “Why the Future of Solar Power Is From Space,” 12/31/18, Accessed: 8/13/19) -JD****NCC’19 Novice Packet****With SBSP, we could solve our energy and greenhouse gas emission problems with little environmental impact. Professor Sergio Pellegrino of CalTech?recently said an SBSP system would receive eight times more energy than Earth does. With SBSP’s continuous massive energy output capability and the fact that our sun is slated to exist for another 10 billion years, we can safely assume we will not run out of this energy source anytime soon. One of NASA’s most extensive studies ever devised, the Satellite Power System Concept Development and Evaluation Program (PDF) was specifically on SBSP and cost over $50 million, taking place from 1976 to 1980. Another fundamental study NASA funded to re-evaluate and understand the feasibility of SBSP was the Space Solar Power Exploratory Research and Technology (PDF) program. An enormous amount of solid research was accomplished in the study, but the general conclusion was that: Large-scale SSP is a very complex integrated system of systems that requires numerous significant advances in current technology and capabilities… A technology roadmap has been developed that lays out potential paths for achieving all needed advances – albeit over several decades… With all that being said, let’s dive in to better understand this exponential technology and its viability. Space-based solar power is the concept of capturing solar energy in outer space and transferring it directly to Earth or other nearby planets. In simple terms, we would put some mechanism in outer space to capture the sun’s energy almost continuously and transmit that energy to Earth. This would happen day or night, rain or shine. Once we have received the energy on Earth at a rectenna (a special antenna for receiving energy), we can then easily distribute the power through our normal methods. Easy enough. There are many ideas related to the SBSP mechanism configuration and architecture we could utilize. Location of the SBSP system, satellite architecture, energy collection, and energy transmission are a few basic areas to look at when understanding the different SBSP systems. Given the number of proposed concepts, we will only look at a few of the more notable options. Where exactly will we put this SBSP system? Geosynchronous orbit (GEO), mid Earth orbit (MEO), and low Earth orbit (LEO) are a few of the proposed choices. The most promising is utilizing GEO due to the simplistic geometry and alignment of the antenna to rectenna, scalability, and nearly constant power transmission. The main problem with GEO is the large amount of radiation exposure. General space hazards like micrometeors or solar flares also pose a threat. From creating lunar factories with mass drivers or mining asteroids to fabricate these self-assembling SBSP satellites, creating autonomous space-based factories is still rather challenging. Designs built in space utilizing local and free materials (e.g. lunar materials) to build these SBSP systems allow for different concepts compared to those that can be much more complex to construct on Earth. One interesting setup we are currently ahem, building on Earth, is a modular roll out solar array being developed by Caltech and Northrop Grumman. The researchers discuss their functional prototype in the video below. Another interesting concept is from private company Solaren. They plan to experiment in the future with building a 250 MW SBSP solar array plant in GEO. They even struck a deal with PG&E, California’s biggest energy utility company, in 2009 to provide space solar power (PDF). Solaren also maintains multiple patents and will definitely be an interesting player in this field to watch for new developments. Even NASA’s SPS-ALPHA via Arbitrarily Large Phased Array concept (developed in 2012) has been getting some recent attention from John C. Mankins, one of the top SBSP experts in the world. The two basic concepts related to energy collection are utilizing photovoltaics(solar panels) or solar thermal. One concept of solar thermal essentially captures solar energy by using mirrors to concentrate light and heat up a liquid. This in turn spins a turbine to generate electricity (e.g. by generating steam). This concept allows for a potential weight advantage over solar panels, as it could reduce overall mass per watt. The majority of concepts, however, look to utilize ultra lightweight and highly efficient photovoltaics in their prototypes. Microwave power transmission is the typical choice in SBSP designs due to general efficiency, but utilizing laser power beaming is another highly regarded option due to lower weight and cost. However, there is the first initial thought of potential misuse wherein one could turn either choice into a space weapon (e.g. a death ray). Safety protocols can easily deter this unlikely threat given the technology being utilized. Designs incorporate microwave transmission power levels to be within OSHA’s required workplace exposure limits. There would be no worry of microwaving cities and all the living beings within it. A simple handshake between antenna and rectenna would disable the transmission if it came off course. Now that we have a better understanding of what SBSP is, let’s delve into its biggest limitation. There is always a catch. Some general safety issues were noted above, but the main impediment is related to the cost in sending all the materials required for the SBSP. Current cost estimates to send roughly 1 kg of payload into space vary from $9,000 – $43,000 depending on the rocket and spacecraft utilized. If we look at sending up solar panels alone, the low end of the spectrum for launch costs of an ultra-lightweight 4 MW SBSP system is 4,000 metric tons (per Wikipedia). However, estimates a SBSP to be more likely in the 80,000 metric ton range. While these numbers are not totally accurate to state-of-the-art systems and are simply an estimate, we are still looking at a very rough low cost of $36 billion up to a slightly more expensive cost of $3.4 trillion. Utilizing a lunar or asteroid factory suddenly seems within budget. NASA’s SERT study results show that space solar power is “economically viable” if recurring launch costs range from $100 – $200 per kg of payload. While prices continue to fall thanks in part to SpaceX’s reusable rockets, there is still a long way to go. Nonetheless, this trend will follow Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns and the prices of these launches will continue to come down, from billions to millions to thousands and, finally, into the hundred-dollar range. Needless to say, it is not the tech that is the problem, it is the cost. SBSP’s ability to provide clean, reliable power for the planet 24/7 at a cheaper cost than any other energy source is real. It will take decades of investment, building, testing, and successful implementation before the system can begin to recoup its initial costs. Isaac Arthur explores this concept in this incredibly informative video, and looks beyond the next decade of where this exponential technology can take us. Nonetheless, one key component to moving SBSP forward as the de facto energy source is the right political climate, including leaders to drive this innovation. Bruce Dorminey from Forbes sums up this general sentiment to any future world leaders by stating: If President Trump were to champion space-based solar energy as a means of delivering unlimited, renewable electricity from Earth orbit, it’s arguable that his administration could leave the US and the world at large with a revolutionary new source of energy.Solves resource shortage conflicts, warming, and the Ice AgePatrick Collins and Marco Bernasconi, Azabu University and MCB Consultants Researchers, “Risk Analysis of Climate Change, and Potential SPS Contribution to Global Warming or Global Cooling Mitigation”, Trans Terrestrial, , 8-13-19, -PGR****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The argument that SPS could be a good "low-carbon" energy source has been used for some years. From this point of view, a good example of research on the potential of SPS for mitigation is the environmental impact analysis using Input-Output tables led by Professor Kanji Yoshioka: this work showed clearly that SPS would emit very little CO2 - less even than nuclear power [16]. However, this idea was not part of the original justification for SPS research - which was as a way to use solar energy to supply continuous electric power on Earth, thereby overcoming one of the major drawbacks of solar energy. Even in Spain, a country with strong insolation, photovoltaic systems were found to generate only 700 kWh of electrical energy per kW of capacity per year – a utilisation factor of less than 8% [9]. Hence, even if the lack of urgency of the AGW threat reduces the need to develop low-carbon energy sources, if SPS can become economically competitive it could still make a major contribution to 21st century energy supply. The strong endorsement given to space-based solar power (SBSP) by the US Department of Defence's National Security Space Office (NSSO) [17] as a promising means of avoiding “Resource Wars” in the 21st century, is further recent evidence of the potentially major benefits of SPS as an effectively inexhaustible energy source for Earth. If every member of a population of 10 billion is to reach a standard of living similar to the rich countries today, humans will need to build about 10,000 GW of electricity generation capacity through the 21st century. Even allowing for great progress in other energy technologies, the possibility of space-based solar energy systems supplying perhaps 1,000 GW may well make an important contribution to preventing energy shortages that might lead to international friction. For Japan, a particularly attractive result of successfully developing SPS is that Japan could thereby become an energy-exporting country. That is, microwave power supplied to other countries from satellites built by Japanese companies would count as exports in the national accounts. This might grow to a larger business than supplying power domestically, because Japan's limited land area makes siting of rectennas within Japan difficult. Such a development would help remedy the greatest strategic weakness of the Japanese economy: its dependence on imports of energy. In considering a scenario involving development of SPS it is also necessary to include likely “spin-offs”. These include particularly the development of large-scale manufacturing in Earth orbit and on the lunar surface. The logic of such developments was understood even decades ago: if some hundreds of GW of SPS capacity are to be assembled in geo-stationary orbit (GEO), this will involve delivering millions of tons of aluminium, silicon and other minerals to GEO. This scale of activity is so large that it could enable recovery of the initial costs of establishing mining activities, processing plants and factories on the lunar surface, from where the cost of delivering aluminium and other materials to geo-stationary orbit could be considerably lower than delivery from the Earth's surface. Similar arguments apply to asteroidal and other extra-terrestrial resources. Such developments will depend on entrepreneurial companies planning how to deliver lunar-derived materials to GEO at prices competitive with the cost of delivery from Earth [18]. Although it is not possible to predict this in detail, the overall business opportunity is easy to understand. Another example of the spontaneous industrial development that can be expected if SPS-generated electricity becomes competitive with other electricity supplies on Earth, is that the cost of using electricity in orbit will then be roughly one quarter that on the Earth's surface. (This is because the space-to-Earth power transmission system is expected to lose about 50% of the power, and its cost, including both transmitting and receiving antennas, is likely to be about half of the total cost of an SPS.) This fact alone will create numerous business opportunities for companies to perform industrial activities that use large quantities of electric power in orbital factories. Starting with products for use in space, such as components of SPS units, and orbiting facilities such as research stations and space hotels, made from aluminium, silicon, glass, etc, the range of products will presumably grow steadily to include products for use elsewhere, as well as products that use the unique properties of space, such as "metal foam" structures that can only be made in weightlessness. If this longer-term effect of gradually moving energy-consuming industries off Earth is considered, it is clear that developing SPS will represent a major change, a new industrial revolution, with great potential to reduce humans' overall environmental impact. That is, even if reduction of CO2 emissions is not itself required, SPS could make a unique contribution to reducing other forms of pollution resulting from energy production and use, including progressively removing energy industries from the Earth's surface, which could bring many benefits, environmental, economic and social. As described briefly above, the prospect of the next Ice Age is so dramatic, and the scale of the climatic change so huge, that it is tempting to conclude that any attempt made by humans to mitigate such a large-scale natural process would be futile. However, we must at least recognise that the feasibility of mitigation depends on how much time humans have to prepare before the Ice Age arrives. For example, if onset of the next Ice Age was confidently understood to take more than 100 years, many counter-measures may become feasible that are not possible today. By contrast, if it was likely within a few years, little could be done to prevent it. Consequently, genuinely scientific research on the onset of past Ice Ages, on precursor events that may enable more precise prediction, and on current weather and climate trends in different regions, are clearly all very important for evaluating the threat humans face from global cooling. However, what is of particular interest for SPS researchers is that SPS-like systems may be the only means by which humans may be able to significantly mitigate the coming Ice Age, by melting snow over very wide areas. Consequently it is interesting to at least review the scale of activity that could be required: some simple calculations show the magnitude of the task.IT is the only technology that can actually solve warmingDr. Feng Hsu, 10, Sr. Vice President?Systems Engineering & Risk Management Space Energy Group, Winter 2010, (Online Journal of Space Communication, Harnessing the Sun: Embarking on Humanity's Next Giant Leap, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Solar Energy vs. Other Forms of Renewable Sources We must set priorities and choose wisely. Within the next 30 years, we're going to have an explosive increase in demand for new sources of fuel. According to recent U.S. Department of Energy data, all renewable sources of energy including biomass, hydropower, geothermal, wind and solar represent only about 6 percent of total U.S. energy production in the US. Nonrenewable energies, namely fossil fuels, represent the other 94 percent. To see solar energy as the best option for our future, we have to set comprehensive criteria for energy priorities. This seems to be a major challenge for us. We need to define criteria, and they must be quantifiable and measurable. First, energy has to be at low cost, to be affordable for all human beings. Next, it should be inexhaustible in terms of livable planetary lifetimes. Also, it must cause no harm to the environment, ecosystem or to human lives. And it must be readily available and accessible around the globe. It has to be in a usable form, decentralized, scalable and manageable. There must be low risk of potential misuse; it must not be convertible to a weapon of mass destruction. Such requirements have to be achievable. The energy options pursued must satisfy basic needs and goals of humanity, help improve quality of life, retain human values and facilitate global collaboration. Goals must include expanding human presence and survivability within our solar system, to be achievable through citizen participation and organized demonstrations of creativity. They have to be consistent with the elevation of human culture and the advancement of civilization. When you evaluate renewable energy sources against these requirements and criteria, it is not hard to understand why solar power is the most viable for sustainable human development. Our nonrenewable oil/gas fuels will be depleted in another 40 to 60 years; coal will be depleted in about 300 to 500 years. Some people estimate our reserves in coal to last a thousand years; but that doesn't really matter since the global environment far before that time will likely have suffered catastrophic changes. The mining of nuclear fission material will be depleted in about 50 years. Nuclear power based on this material has major issues with waste deposit, and the risks of proliferation and misuse are high. Nuclear had 40 years of opportunity and did little to help the world solve its strategic energy problem. Hydro power is renewable but such an energy source is limited and unstable. Liquid biomass competes for land with food production. Hydrogen (fuel cell), a form of energy storage rather than a source of energy, carries certain risks in storage and transport. Wind, geothermal and tidal solutions tend to also be unstable, intermittent and costly. Solar energy, on the other hand, basically doesn't matter whether it is surface or space-based; it has some limitations, but one of them is not harm to human beings.v The Prospects for Solar Energy Development from Space Why solar energy from space? Is it technologically feasible? Is it commercially viable? My answer is positively and absolutely yes. One of the reasons that less than one percent of the world's energy currently comes from the sun is due to high photovoltaic cell costs and PV inefficiencies in converting sunlight into electricity. Based on existing technology, a field of solar panels the size of the state of Vermont will be needed to power the electricity needs of the whole U.S. And to satisfy world consumption will require some one percent of the land used for agriculture worldwide. Hopefully this will change when breakthroughs are made in conversion efficiency of PV cells and in the cost of producing them, along with more affordable and higher capacity batteries. Roughly 7 to 20 times less energy can be harvested per square meter on earth than in space, depending on location. Likely, this is a principal reason why Space Solar Power has been under consideration for over 40 years. Actually, as early as 1890, inventor of wireless communication Nikola Tesla wrote about the means for broadcasting electrical power without wires. Tesla later addressed the American Institute of Electrical Engineers to discuss his attempts to demonstrate long-distance wireless power transmission over the surface of the earth. He said, "Throughout space there is energy. If static, then our hopes are in vain; if kinetic - and this we know it is for certain - then it is a mere question of time when men will succeed in attaching their machinery to the very wheel work of nature."[4] Dr. Peter Glaser first developed the concept of continuous power generation from space in 1968[5]. His basic idea was that satellites in geosynchronous orbit would be used to collect energy from the sun. The solar energy would be converted to direct current by solar cells; the direct current would in turn be used to power microwave generators in the gigahertz frequency range. The generators feed a highly directive satellite-borne antenna, which beamed the energy to earth. On the ground, a rectifying antenna (rectenna) converted the microwave energy to direct current, which, after suitable processing, was to be fed into the terrestrial power grid. A typical Solar Power Satellite unit - with a solar panel area of about 10 square km, a transmitting antenna of about 2 km in diameter, and a rectenna about 4 km in diameter - could yield more than1 GW electric power, roughly equivalent to the productive capability of a large scale unit of a nuclear power station. Two critical aspects that have motivated research into SPS systems are: 1) the lack of attenuation of the solar flux by the earth's atmosphere, and 2) the twenty-four-hour availability of the energy, except around midnight during the predictable periods of equinox. The Technological and Commercial Viability of SPS Among the key technologies of Solar Power Satellites are microwave generation and transmission techniques, wave propagation, antennas and measurement calibration and wave control techniques. These radio science issues cover a broad range, including the technical aspects of microwave power generation and transmission, the effects on humans and potential interference with communications, remote sensing and radio-astronomy observations. Is SPS a viable option? Yes, in my opinion, it can and should be a major source of base-load electricity generation powering the needs of our future. SPS satisfies each of the key criteria except for cost based on current space launch and propulsion technology. We all know that the expense of lifting and maneuvering material into space orbit is a major issue for future energy production in space. The development of autonomous robotic technology for on-orbit assembly of large solar PV (or solar thermal) structures along with the needed system safety and reliability assurance for excessively large and complex orbital structures are also challenges. Nevertheless, no breakthrough technologies or any theoretical obstacles need to be overcome for a solar power satellite demonstration project to be carried out. Our society has repeatedly overlooked (or dismissed) the potential of space based solar power. The U.S. government funded an SPS study totaling about 20 million dollars in the late 1970s at the height of the early oil crisis, and then practically abandoned this project with nearly zero dollars spent up to the present day. A government funded SPS demonstration project is overdue. Ralph Nansen, a friend of mine, who was the former project manager of the Apollo program at Boeing and who later managed the DOE-NASA funded SSP proof of concept study in the late 1970s, detailed the Boeing study in his excellent 1995 book Sun Power: The Global Solution for the Coming Energy Crisis[6]. In 2009, he authored another book entitled Energy Crisis: Solution From Space[7]. I highly recommend the reading of each of these two books for those interested in this topic. Of course, Dr. Peter Glaser's 1968 book and other papers[8] are superb reading on this topic as well. What I really want to point out here is that we can solve the cost issue and make Solar Power Satellites a commercially viable energy option. We can do this through human creativity and innovation on both technological and economic fronts. Yes, current launch costs are critical constraints. However, in addition to continuing our quest for low cost RLV (reusable launch vehicle) technologies, there are business models for overcoming these issues. Climate change is anthropogenic and SBSP solvesFaiyetole 2018 [Ayodele Adekunle Faiyetole, EarthSpace, Lagos, Nigeria; The Federal University of Technology, Potentialities of Space-Based Systems for Monitoring Climate Policies and Mitigation of Climate Process Drivers, Astropolitics, 16:1, 28-48, DOI: 10.1080/14777622.2018.1436329 accessed 8/22/19]jap****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Space technology and anthropogenic climate change management As depicted inFigure 1, naturally induced climatic changes (NCC) and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) make up the totality of the changes on Earth’s climate. The focus herein is on the key issue of ACC, since that is what constitutes the global climate change problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 13 states that, for ACC, the principal para- meters are socioeconomic conditions (SEC), CPD, climate change indicators (CCI), and impact and vulnerability. The interactive consequence of these parameters constitutes the climate change issue. Clearly, climate change needs to be abated or managed to reduce its adverse effects on humans. The human efforts for managing climate change, including the monitoring or measuring of climatic parameters, aid in the precise prediction of climatic events, and consequently, provide the necessary informa- tion for effective and efficient mitigation techniques, thus increasing our capa- city for adaptation. 14 The interconnections of climate change strategies shown inFigure 1as a dotted, compartmentalized segment among monitoring of climatic parameters, precise prediction of climatic events, effective and efficient climate change mitigation techniques, and increasing adaptation capacity amount to what is referred to as climate change management. The aspirations of humans for development are characterized by socioeco- nomic conditions. For instance, socioeconomic development factors that put enormous pressure on Earth’s system, as depicted inFigure 1, include govern- ance, literacy, gross domestic product (GDP) or well-being, energy, technology, transportation, production and consumption, trade, and socio-cultural prefer- ences, among other factors. 15 Consequently, aspirations for development lead to the emissions and concentrations of GHG and aerosols, 16 together known as CPD. GHG, of which CO 2 is a positive climate-forcing agent at about 43% of the total GHG, 17 are heat trapping, leading to global warming. 18 Aerosols, on the other hand, are dimming agents and produce a cooling effect on the climate. 19 Thus, it is the relative emissions and concentrations of the CPD, including both the GHG and aerosols, which cause the changes that take place in the Earth’s climate, such as temperature change, precipitation change, sea level rise, and extreme climatic events. These changes are the primary indicators of climate change and they are categorized here as climate change indicators. Impacts and vulnerability (I&V) complete the cycle of human-induced climate change. I&V reflect the changes in CCI on ecosystems, water resources, food security, energy security, human health, settlement, and society. Strategies are usually devised to mitigate or adapt to the unusual effects of these factors. In the context of global climate change issues, space technology is an indis- pensable tool, occupying a vantage point with respect to monitoring all of the factors of climate change depicted inFigure 1. Global climate monitoring from space started from early proposals, such as the recognition in 1945 that three GEO satellites, according to Clarke, 20 could cover the whole Earth in view and services. Since then, climate monitoring spacecraft have continued to evolve in sophistication. 21 Today, satellites 22 are viable tools for monitoring the imple- mentation of international treaties. Furthermore, as discussed herein, space-based systems can also be deployed as a mitigation strategy. 23SBSP key to mitigation strategies but won’t get off the ground soonFaiyetole 2018 [Ayodele Adekunle Faiyetole, EarthSpace, Lagos, Nigeria; The Federal University of Technology, Potentialities of Space-Based Systems for Monitoring Climate Policies and Mitigation of Climate Process Drivers, Astropolitics, 16:1, 28-48, DOI: 10.1080/14777622.2018.1436329 accessed 8/22/19]jap****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The yes rate (84.44%) on the potentiality of space-based systems for direct climate change mitigation, as shown inTable 8, implies that the potential use of the space environment for mitigating climate change on Earth cannot be under- valued. The potentiality of mitigation strategy from space is mostly considered for the significant role mitigation plays in climate change management. 42 The IPCC 43 and the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) 44 refer to climate change mitigation as efforts to reduce or prevent the emis- sion of GHG. The AI SCCR and RII SCCR t for mitigation are, respectively, 3.50/6 and 15.32%, placing mitigation as the fourth most important strategy for addressing climate change vulnerability, after governance, monitoring, and financing. 45 Climate change mitigation has become synonymous with the utilization of low- or no-carbon-emission sources of energy, which may also relate to energy efficiency. The terrestrial renewable energy, for instance, is one source of energy that can mitigate climate change because of its relatively low carbon intensity when compared to an equal power generated through fossil fuels and coal. Concomitantly with low- or no-carbon-emitting terres- trial renewable energy utilization, the course of production and the processes of transportation for consumption are not totally free of carbon emissions. 46 The AI SEC and RII SEC t indices for energy production, preferences, and efficiency as a socioeconomic condition are, respectively, 8.47/11 and 11.60%, making energy the second most important socioeconomic condition after governance that may impact climate change. 47 Addressing energy use is crucial for sustainable development, as all of the technological efforts for energy exploitation and production have concentrated on the terrestrial Earth. However, the 84.44% yes response shows that the space environment holds the potential for energy production that could be beamed for use on Earth. 48 Furthermore, production is the third most important socioeconomic condition for climate variability and change. Transportation, though low on the table at AI SEC of 5.57/11 and RII SEC t of 7.63%, is important to climate variability and change, considering that most of the current means of trans- portation run on fossil fuels with high carbon propensity. 49 Space-based solar power and climate change mitigation Techniques for direct climate change mitigation from space are important. They include solar geoengineering or space-based climate engineering. 50 Another potential technique for direct climate change mitigation from space is SBSP technology. This technology addresses not only energy secur- ity, but environmental, economic, and space security as well. 51 In the 1970s, Glaser et al. 52 submitted a NASA-sponsored contractor report:Feasibility Study of a Satellite Solar Power Station. Since then, subsequent designs of different concepts have been repeatedly visited and abandoned, 53 including a proposal by a SBSP study group of the U.S. National Security Space Office. 54 Aside from the fact that the energy from SBSP is renewable, thereby greatly reducing the carbon footprint, its production will be entirely done in the space environment. This scenario may potentially alter the AI SEC and RII SEC tvalues for energy production, given the positive (versus negative) environmental externality. Considering the strong mitigating power of renewable energy, SBSP would effectively compete with monitoring as a base measurement for strategies most needed for climate change response. Nevertheless, experts view SBSP as not likely in the next five to 10 years, asTable 9shows. As shown inTable 10, the weighted mean of the feasibility of deploying the SBSP system by even the most advanced countries of the world is 1.77 at 0.959 variations on a range of 4-Likert-type data. This information reflects the fact that 51.28% of the respondents think it is not likely that a SBSP system would be deployed, as shown inTable 9. In fact, only about 7.7% of respondents show optimism that such a system is going to be deployed at some point in time. The next logical concern is if there is any possibility for deploying SBSP. This result is again captured inTable 9, where 51.11% of the respondents think that a SBSP system will not be deployed by any country in the next 25+ years. Even though the U.S. National Security Space Office identified oppor- tunity in SBSP for strategic security, 55 only 22.22% of the respondents, including a space and security veteran who had logged in over 40 years’ experience in U.S. government space and military programs, are of the opinion that it could take 50+ years before SBSP technology will be deployed. To better evaluate the results of SBSP feasibility, the feasibility of deployment and possible start times for deployment were cross-tabulated.Table 11shows the results. None of the respondents considered the deployment of SBSP as most likely or very likely in the next five years; 25% concluded likely, while 33.33% concluded that it is not likely. Only 11.11% thought it is most likely that SBSP will be deployed in the next 10 years; 66.67% think it is not likely; and 38.89% of the respondents think it is most likely that SBSP will be deployed in the next 25 years. Notably, 50% conclude that it will take at least 50 years for SBSP to be deployed. These statistics show that the further away the possible start time for deployment, themorelikelythatSBSPwillbedeployed,andthenearerthepossiblestarttime, the more unlikely that SBSP will be deployed. The log-likelihood (LR) ratio, which measures the association between the cross-tabulated variables, turns out to be significant (p= 0.009) at 99% level of significance. Also, the Ken tau-b confirms the strength of association between the variable atp= 0.000.SBSP Solves Energy Poverty - EXTSPS is key to lifting the world’s poor into a sustainable existenceIAA 11International Academy of Astronautics, Academy that brings together the world's foremost experts in the disciplines of astronautics on a regular basis to recognize the accomplishments of their peers, and explores and discuss cutting-edge issues in space research and technology, 4-2011, “The First International Assessment of Space Solar Power: Opportunities, Issues and Potential Pathways Forward,” Green Energy From Space Solar Power, ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****There are three critical observations to be drawn from this global energy and environmental context for the IAA study. ? First, it will be impossible for the projected population of Earth to realize a high quality of life without huge increases in total energy production / consumption during the remainder of this century. ? Second, the annual energy needed to assure economic opportunity for an increasing fraction of Earth’s population (which will most likely continue to grow) will not be provided without massive deployment of new power generation capacity and other forms of energy utilization (e.g., transportation, primary heat / cooling, etc.). ? And, finally, the expected environmental impact of these increases in energy consumption will depend directly on dramatic advances in the technologies used to deliver that energy. In the absence of other factors (e.g., peaking of fossil fuel production, discussed below), it is evident that radical changes in the energy mix will be needed – not just by the end of the century, but within the next two decades: to realize the low-end of CO2 emissions goals, the total amount of energy delivered by renewable sources must increase from roughly 12,000 Billion kW-hours per year in 2010, to more than 110,000 Billion kW-hours per year in 2030-2040, and to more than 430,000 Billion kW-hours per year by 2100. Summary Observations It is clear that solar power delivered from space could play a tremendously important role in meeting the global need for energy during the 21 st century. There are four principal drivers for this conclusion. First, there is the likely (but not certain) increase in global populations. Second, there is the projected dramatic increase in the worldwide per capita demand for energy to enable economic development. In addition, there is an urgent and continuing need to develop huge new renewable energy sources to resolve the challenge of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, and the increasingly certain risk of global climate change. And, finally there is the growing uncertainty in global supplies of existing fossil fuels; the issue of “peaking”, which if it occurs earlier rather than later and affects multiple fossil fuels could lead to drastic increases in energy prices (thereby strangling economic development). This assessment of space solar power has formally incorporated these considerations through the use of a family of strategic scenarios which attempt to reflect all four of the factors noted above, but focusing on the likely impact on energy prices that might result from (a) increasing demand; (b) GHG policies; and/or, (c) fossil fuel peaking. (See Chapter 6 for these Scenarios; and see Chapter 7 for the results of an assessment of examined SPS system concepts in the context of these alternative futures.That solves global energy deprivationSnead 9 – MS in Aerospace EngineeringMike Snead, MS in Aerospace Engineering from Air Force Institute of Technology, Past Chair of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Former director of Science & Technology, HQ Air Force Materiel Command, Awarded Outstanding Achievement for Excellence in Research @ USAF, 5-4-2009, “The vital need for America to develop space solar power,” The Space Review, ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In my recent white paper, “The End of Easy Energy and What to Do About It”, I focused on the issue of energy security and what needs to be done as we move toward 2100. To accept the paper’s conclusion that starting the development of SSP is now vital, an appreciation of the future energy needs and supply situation is needed. Thus, a few energy statistics are helpful to better understand the challenges that we all will face in the coming decades—within the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren—to successfully provide what is correctly described as the “lifeblood” of modern civilization. By 2100 and due entirely to population growth, the United States will require about 1.6X more energy than we are using today. With a population of about 307 million, the United States today uses about 17 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) of energy annually from all sources—with roughly 85 percent coming from non-sustainable easy energy (oil, coal, and natural gas). By 2100, with a projected population of 560 million, the United States will require about 28 billion BOE annually even with a modest decrease in per capita energy use through “energy conservation”. From 2010 to 2100, the United States will need in total about 2,000 billion BOE of energy. At $100 per BOE, Americans would spend about $200 trillion on energy over the next nine decades. The world’s energy needs during the remainder of this century are likely to climb even more rapidly than those of the United States as the world’s developing nations seek economic prosperity and political stability. Today, with only about five billion modern energy consumers, the world uses about 81 billion BOE per year—at roughly the same average per capita energy use as in the United States in 1900. As in the United States, about 85 percent of the world’s energy comes from non-sustainable easy energy sources. To project the world’s energy needs in 2100, 90 percent of today’s average per capita energy use in Japan, Western Europe, and South Korea was used as the basis for the projection. Per capita energy use in these industrial nations—about one-half of that in the United States—represents an energy-frugal standard of living that still enables widespread prosperity and political stability. In 2100, with about 10 billion energy consumers in economically-prosperous and politically-stable countries, the world will need about 280 billion BOE annually. This constitutes an increase from today’s energy consumption by a factor of about 3.5X. With these assumptions, between 2010 and 2100, the world will need about 17,000 billion BOE of energy and, at $100 per BOE, would spend roughly $1,700 trillion on energy. With such a dramatic increase in world energy demand, a reasonable question is how much easy energy resources are left to use? Using the World Energy Council’s 2007 estimates, current world proved reserves of all oil, coal, and natural gas total about 6,000 billion BOE. Based on the optimistic estimates of some experts, a further 6,000 billion BOE of easy energy might be obtained through additional exploration and recovery improvements. For example, if nearly all shale oil in the United States were to be recovered, this could add upwards of 2,000 billion BOE. At best, one may conclude that there might be about 12,000 billion BOE of easy energy left to recover. A less optimistic planning value, due to growing legal and treaty constraints on exploration and recovery, would be 9,000 billion BOE. To highlight the difficulty in finding significant additional resources of this magnitude, the much debated Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) has an optimistic total of only about 12 billion BOE of recoverable oil. To add 3,000 billion BOE of additional proved reserves this century, a new “ANWR” must be discovered about every four months! Recent oil exploration history shows that such new major “finds” are now rare. Most additional proved reserves will likely come from improved extraction methods that increase recovery from known deposits and from opening known deposits to production that have been previously set aside, such as shale oil. How long will easy energy supplies last? A prosperous world will require on the order of 17,000 billion BOE of energy through 2100. Against this demand, easy energy may be expected to supply 9,000-12,000 billion BOE. Without an aggressive increase in new sustainable energy sources—nuclear and renewables—world easy energy supplies will be exhausted before the end of the century unless a large portion of the world’s population remains in a state of energy deprivation. Even with an aggressive increase in building new sustainable energy sources, it is likely that all of the known 6,000 billion BOE of oil, coal, and natural gas proved reserves will be used as the world builds the sustainable energy infrastructure needed to supply 280 billion BOE of energy annually by 2100. Today, Americans live at the peak of the era of easy energy. By the end of the century and perhaps decades earlier, this will change as most of the world, including the United States, will be running on sustainable energy sources. The greater extent to which additional easy energy resources are excluded from exploration and production, the sooner we will by necessity transition to a general reliance on sustainable energy sources and the sooner we may experience energy scarcity by having insufficient sustainable energy supplies. Time is not on our side in addressing this challenge! The threat of energy scarcity, even in the United States, is very real. It will likely become a primary public policy driver as public awareness of the challenges inherent in transitioning to sustainable energy, as discussed in the following, are better understood. Today’s terrestrial sustainable energy sources can only provide a modest part of the solution Both the United States and the entire world get about 15 percent of their energy from sustainable sources. To meet the 2100 need for 1.6X more energy for the United States, our current sustainable energy production must expand by a factor of about 11. To meet the world’s needs for 3.5X more energy by 2100, current world sustainable energy production must expand by a factor of about 23. In the United States, this means that today’s total energy production capacity of nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, ground solar electric, and land biomass must be added every decade through the end of the century. For the world, the current sustainable energy production capacity must be added every four years. To help put the needed growth into perspective, assume that hydroelectricity will be used to provide the world’s additional sustainable energy production. China’s Three Gorges Dam will have about 23 GW of generation capacity when completed. America’s Hoover Dam has 2 GW of generation capacity. If the world’s additional sustainable energy needs were to be met solely with hydroelectricity, 12 Three Gorges Dams (equal to 138 Hoover Dams) must be brought online every year through the end of the century. This raises the important planning questions: Can this be accomplished with only current terrestrial solutions? Can it be accomplished in the United States? Some argue that terrestrial sustainable energy sources can meet this challenge. In my white paper, this possibility was explored through a simple 2100 sustainable energy scenario focusing on meeting the United States’ 2100 needs. (Note that in 2100, the United States will need about 10 percent of the world’s total energy supplies.) In this scenario, these optimistic assumptions were made regarding nuclear and renewable energy expansion in the United States: Nuclear enriched uranium fission electrical power generation would be expanded from 101 GW today to 175 GW in 2100 (representing 10 percent of the world’s total 2100 nuclear capacity and consistent with a 120-year world supply of uranium from land resources without reprocessing or breeding). Hydroelectric generation capacity would be expanded from 78 GW to 108 GW (the estimated practical maximum in the US). Geothermal energy would be expanded from 3 GW to 150 GW (reflecting the Department of Energy’s goal for the western United States by 2050). 1.1 million 265-ton land and off-shore wind turbines would be built covering 390,000 square kilometers and stretching in a 8-kilometer wide band along 7,200 kilometers of coastline. 153,000 square kilometers of ground solar photovoltaic systems would be built in the southwestern desert states (with 100 percent land use). 1.3 billion dry tons of land biomass (based on 2005 Departments of Energy and Agriculture projections) would be collected annually from all cropland and accessible forestland and converted to biofuels and oil substitutes. Nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, and a modest percentage of wind-generated electrical power are assumed to provide dispatchable electrical power generation to replace coal- and natural gas-fired generators. (Dispatchable generation capacity is what utilities require to prevent brownouts and blackouts while ensuring that customer needs can be met anytime.) Because of the variability of the wind and ground insolation, most wind-generated electricity and all ground solar electricity is assumed to be used to produce hydrogen and hydrogen-based synfuels. All biomass is assumed to be converted to fuels and other oil substitutes. Even with these optimistic assumptions, these expanded sustainable energy sources would provide only about 30 percent of the United States’ needed 1,750 GW of 2100 dispatchable electrical power generation capacity and about 39 percent of the needed 17 billion BOE of 2100 annual fuels production. In the post-easy energy era, the United States would have a shortfall of about 1,200 GW of dispatchable generation capacity and 11 billion BOE of annual fuels production despite over 540,000 square kilometers of the continental United States being used for wind and solar farms. In 2100, with a population that will have nearly doubled, these optimistic projections of US sustainable energy sources would only provide about the same per capita energy supply as the United States had in 1900—about one-third of what is currently being provided. As discussed in my white paper, the 2100 sustainable energy supply situation for the entire world will be comparable to the United States. With 10X more energy needs and 20X more population than the United States, comparable projections for the sustainable energy production potential for the world finds that only about 47 percent of the needed 17,500 GW of 2100 dispatchable electrical power generation capacity and 37 percent of the needed 172 billion BOE of 2100 annual fuels production could be optimistically provided. The world would have a shortfall of about 9,300 GW of dispatchable generation capacity and 108 billion BOE of annual fuels production despite having nearly 5.2 million square kilometers of land being used for wind and solar farms, collecting and converting 12 billion dry tons of biomass from all cropland and accessible forestland, and building the equivalent of 3,000 Hoover Dams of hydroelectric, geothermal, and nuclear generation capacity. Absent a clear public consensus to dramatically reduce US per capita energy use to near 1900 levels and a willingness to let many billions of people worldwide continue to live in a state of energy deprivation—currently 1.6 billion people do not have access to electricity and 2.4 billion people do not have access to modern fuels per the UN—additional sustainable energy sources will need to be developed. A rational US energy policy and implementation plan must address this issue. This is why starting the commercial development of SSP gains importance.SBSP Solves DA And, literally no negative scenario can happen in the world of the aff—SBSP solves warming and eliminates the possibility of war. Morgan 2007 [James, “Ray of Hope on Energy,” Science Notebook, , July 9, BLS] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****These dreams were always shot down by the costs - exorbitant when compared with the plentiful reserves of fossil fuels. Now, with spiraling oil prices and the threat of runaway climate change, the balance has tipped, according to the National Security Space Office, part of the Department of Defense. Its study claims that space-based solar power (SBSP) could be economically competitive in the near future. In just a year, it calculates, satellites orbiting in a continuous sunlight could generate energy nearly equivalent to all of the energy available in the world's oil reserves. Not only might that put the brakes on global warming, it says, it could help to stifle the wars and political tension that the oil trade creates. The result - a peaceful world."This is a solution for [human]mankind," said former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, chairman of the space f light advocacy group, ShareSpace Foundation, at the unveiling of the report in Washington. The report urges the US government to invest GBP5bn in a pilot project, to spur private investment in the concept. It argues that SBSP could generate so much power it could transform the gas guzzling United States into an energy-exporting nation.ImpactsAction Now Keyglobal warming causes global death – action now is key before it’s too late!AP 19 (Associated Press, 4-26-2019, UN climate chief warns we are leading to global warming ‘catastrophe’, New York Post, accessed: 8-14-2019, //ng) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****UNITED NATIONS — The UN climate chief says world leaders must recognize there is no option except to speed-up and scale-up action to tackle global warming, warning that continuing on the current path will lead to “a catastrophe.” Patricia Espinosa stressed in two recent interviews with the Associated Press that climate scientists are saying there’s still a chance to make things right “but the window of opportunity is closing very soon” and the world has 12 years until carbon emissions reach “a point of no return.” That means the world needs to accelerate all efforts to keep from reaching that level, “and therefore all efforts are absolutely indispensable” to cut carbon emissions and keep temperatures from rising, she said. Some top scientists say reaching the “tipping point” in 12 years is an oversimplification of a UN report last year. Espinosa said carbon emissions were expected to rise in the immediate future after the landmark Paris agreement was adopted in 2015 to address climate change because the transformations needed to go to a downward trajectory “cannot be done overnight.” In addition, global population is growing and more people demand more energy and resources, she said. “What has become clear, however, is that if we continue to grow or to behave in a way that this kind of trajectory is maintained we will not be able to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement,” said Espinosa, who is executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Paris agreement called for global temperatures to rise a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The world has already warmed 1 degree Celsius, so the goal is really about preventing another 1 or 0.5 degrees Celsius (1.8 or 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) increase from now. A report last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, concluded that while it’s technically possible to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, it is highly unlikely because this would require a dramatic overhaul of the global economy, including a shift away from fossil fuels. Deep in the report, scientists say less than 2 percent of 529 of their calculated possible future scenarios kept warming below the 1.5 degree C (2.7 degrees F) goal. “What science is showing now since Paris is that 1.5 degrees C is really necessary because the consequences of staying at 2 degrees C are very big,” Espinosa said. “And secondly, it is also showing that 1.5 degrees C is possible. It takes more effort. It takes much more political will.” She said the IPCC scientists gave the world 12 years “to speed-up and scale-up the actions” to cut emissions before they start spiraling out of control. “It doesn’t mean that we need to wait 12 years and then look at it as the moment to do this,” Espinosa said. “It means that we need to accelerate the tipping point and therefore all efforts are absolutely indispensable.” The UN report does not say 2030, the date used, is a last chance, hard deadline for action, as it has been interpreted in some quarters. The panel “did not say we have 12 years left to save the world,” James Skea, co-chairman of the report and professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London, told The Associated Press. “The hotter it gets, the worse it gets, but there is no cliff edge.” “This has been a persistent source of confusion,” agreed Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The report never said we only have 12 years left.” Espinosa said in an interview Tuesday that the attention the issue is getting “is clearly growing” but not “at the speed and the breadth that it should.” Governments get trapped in dealing with immediate needs “and we are not yet in a situation where we can say we have a broad understanding that the threat to climate change is part of those immediate needs,” Espinosa said. She said communities that suffer destruction from the effects of climate change have woken up, the movement by children from schools around the world is “a wake-up call,” and mass protests to combat climate change will hopefully spur decision-makers. But Espinosa said some people say climate change isn’t happening, “this is not man-made,” and “others are just very, very indifferent to the issue.” “So we have a lot of work to do to still to get everybody on board,” she said. “We have a very long, long way to go.” Espinosa stressed that the goal is “to get to a moment where leaders recognize that there is no option.” “The truth is that if we continue to produce, consume, to function as we are doing now, we know that we are going toward a catastrophe,” she said and that will mean loss of lives, serious impacts on different sectors of the economy, massive displacement and instability. Leaders must understand “that the business as usual scenario is not an option anymore,” she said.No AdaptationWarming will cause catastrophic collapse – no possibility to adaptDavid Spratt & Ian Dunlop, Researchers at the National Centre for Climate Restoration, May 2019, “Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach”, Breakthrough - National Centre for Climate Restoration, , 8-14-19, -PGR****NCC’19 Novice Packet****With the commitments by nations to the 2015 Paris Agreement, the current path of warming is 3°C or more by 2100. But this figure does not include “long-term” carbon-cycle feedbacks, which are materially relevant now and in the near future due to the unprecedented rate at which human activity is perturbing the climate system. Taking these into account, the Paris path would lead to around 5°C of warming by 2100. 7 Scientists warn that warming of 4°C is incompatible with an organised global community, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems, and has a high probability of not being stable. The World Bank says it may be “beyond adaptation”. But an existential threat may 8 also exist for many peoples and regions at a significantly lower level of warming. In 2017, 3°C of warming was categorised as “catastrophic” with a warning that, on a path of unchecked emissions, low-probability, high-impact warming could be catastrophic by 2050. 9 The Emeritus Director of the Potsdam Institute, Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, warns that “climate change is now reaching the end-game, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences.” He says 10 that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.” 11 Unfortunately, conventional risk and probability analysis becomes useless in these circumstances because it excludes the full implications of outlier events and possibilities lurking at the fringes. 12 Prudent risk-management means a tough, objective look at the real risks to which we are exposed, especially at those “fat-tail” events, which may have consequences that are damaging beyond quantification, and threaten the survival of human civilisation. Global warming projections display a “fat-tailed” distribution with a greater likelihood of warming that is well in excess of the average amount of warming predicted by climate models, and are of a higher probability than would be expected under typical statistical assumptions. More importantly, the risk lies disproportionately in the “fat-tail” outcomes, as illustrated in Figure 1. This is a particular concern with potential climate tipping-points — passing critical thresholds which result in step changes in the climate system that will be irreversible on human timescales — such as the polar ice sheets (and hence sea levels), permafrost and other carbon stores, where the impacts of global warming are non-linear and difficult to model with current scientific knowledge. Recently, attention has been given to a “hothouse Earth” scenario, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining. This “hothouse Earth” planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even lower. 13Warming causes extinction and affects the most marginalized first – climate predictors are UNDERESTIMATING the threat nowPiper 19 (Kelsey Piper Staff Writer Kelsey is a Staff Writer for Vox's new vertical with a focus on the global poor, animal welfare, and risks affecting a stable future for our world. She previously worked as the head of the writing team at Triplebyte, and ran Stanford Effective Altruism during college.“Is climate change an “existential threat” — or just a catastrophic one?” --- Jun 28, 2019, --- accessed 8/14/19 --- )JSKI ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Another way of looking at it is that the predicted effects of climate change are very bad, but not in a cinematic way. Sea levels will rise, but not up to the Statue of Liberty’s neck (if all the ice in the world melted, sea levels would rise to approximately the statue’s waist). Lots of people will die, most of them low-income. It’s not surprising that this gets less viral attention than extreme, extinction-focused scenarios.? But that isn’t to say extreme scenarios are made up from nothing. Where do some people conclude that climate change might swallow up civilization itself?? Well, for one thing, lots of climate policy analysts agree that the IPCC is too optimistic. In particular, the IPCC has kept insisting that it’s still possible to keep warming under 2 degrees Celsius when at this point, that’s really unrealistic. As my colleague David Roberts put it:? Models have often included unrealistically low estimates of current and future emissions growth, unrealistically early peaks in global emissions, and unequitable estimates of emission curves in developing countries (implicitly assuming stunted development). ... Models routinely show 4 or even 6 percent annual reductions, a rate of emissions decline that has never been achieved by anyone, anywhere, ever, much less consistently over 50 years.? So it’s not surprising that some people got interested in more pessimistic models. What if we assume that we don’t get our emissions under control? What if we assume that there are severe “feedback cycles” where warming causes the release of carbon dioxide currently contained in the land and in the oceans, fueling further warming? And what if, instead of trying to model the most likely outcome, we look at outcomes that may only have a 10 percent chance of occurring but would be particularly disastrous if they did?? The Breakthrough report, authored by former fossil fuel executive Ian Dunlop and author David Spratt, for the most part summarizes cases for pessimism that have been raised in other papers and public statements.? It says, for example, “attention has been given to a ‘hothouse Earth’ scenario, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining. This ‘hothouse Earth’ planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even lower.”? “Our argument is in essence that on the present path, including the commitments in Paris, warming will be three or three and a bit degrees,” Spratt told me. “If you include climate cycle feedbacks, which are not included in the IPCC analysis, it’ll be effectively higher.” For both those claims, there’s significant published science backing him. Then he gets to the controversial bit: “Three degrees may end our civilization.”? For that claim, he cites climate scientist John Schellnhuber, who said in an interview early this year, “if we get it wrong, do the wrong things ... then I think there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation,” and UN Secretary General António Guterres, who has said “The problem is that the status quo is a suicide.”Warming = AnthropogenicWarming is anthropogenic and guarantees extinctionPlumer 19 [Brad Plumer is a reporter covering climate change, energy policy and other environmental issues for The New York Times’s climate team; “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace” New York Times, , DOA 8-14-19-SH] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded. The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year. Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.” At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction. As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts. Image Cattle grazing on a tract of illegally cleared Amazon forest in Pará State, Brazil. In most major land habitats, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century.CreditLalo de Almeida for The New York Times The report is not the first to paint a grim portrait of Earth’s ecosystems. But it goes further by detailing how closely human well-being is intertwined with the fate of other species. “For a long time, people just thought of biodiversity as saving nature for its own sake,” said Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which conducted the assessment at the request of national governments. “But this report makes clear the links between biodiversity and nature and things like food security and clean water in both rich and poor countries.” A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines. But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling. Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet’s land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding. The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for “transformative changes” that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture’s environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing. “It’s no longer enough to focus just on environmental policy,” said Sandra M. Díaz, a lead author of the study and an ecologist at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina. “We need to build biodiversity considerations into trade and infrastructure decisions, the way that health or human rights are built into every aspect of social and economic decision-making.” Scientists have cataloged only a fraction of living creatures, some 1.3 million; the report estimates there may be as many as 8 million plant and animal species on the planet, most of them insects. Since 1500, at least 680 species have blinked out of existence, including the Pinta giant tortoise of the Galápagos Islands and the Guam flying fox. Though outside experts cautioned it could be difficult to make precise forecasts, the report warns of a looming extinction crisis, with extinction rates currently tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past 10 million years. “Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before,” the report concludes, estimating that “around 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken.” Unless nations step up their efforts to protect what natural habitats are left, they could witness the disappearance of 40 percent of amphibian species, one-third of marine mammals and one-third of reef-forming corals. More than 500,000 land species, the report said, do not have enough natural habitat left to ensure their long-term survival. Over the past 50 years, global biodiversity loss has primarily been driven by activities like the clearing of forests for farmland, the expansion of roads and cities, logging, hunting, overfishing, water pollution and the transport of invasive species around the globe. In Indonesia, the replacement of rain forest with palm oil plantations has ravaged the habitat of critically endangered orangutans and Sumatran tigers. In Mozambique, ivory poachers helped kill off nearly 7,000 elephants between 2009 and 2011 alone. In Argentina and Chile, the introduction of the North American beaver in the 1940s has devastated native trees (though it has also helped other species thrive, including the Magellanic woodpecker). All told, three-quarters of the world’s land area has been significantly altered by people, the report found, and 85 percent of the world’s wetlands have vanished since the 18th century. And with humans continuing to burn fossil fuels for energy, global warming is expected to compound the damage. Roughly 5 percent of species worldwide are threatened with climate-related extinction if global average temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the report concluded. (The world has already warmed 1 degree.) “If climate change were the only problem we were facing, a lot of species could probably move and adapt,” Richard Pearson, an ecologist at the University College of London, said. “But when populations are already small and losing genetic diversity, when natural landscapes are already fragmented, when plants and animals can’t move to find newly suitable habitats, then we have a real threat on our hands.” The dwindling number of species will not just make the world a less colorful or wondrous place, the report noted. It also poses risks to people. Today, humans are relying on significantly fewer varieties of plants and animals to produce food. Of the 6,190 domesticated mammal breeds used in agriculture, more than 559 have gone extinct and 1,000 more are threatened. That means the food system is becoming less resilient against pests and diseases. And it could become harder in the future to breed new, hardier crops and livestock to cope with the extreme heat and drought that climate change will bring. “Most of nature’s contributions are not fully replaceable,” the report said. Biodiversity loss “can permanently reduce future options, such as wild species that might be domesticated as new crops and be used for genetic improvement.”Global Warming Causes Extinction – and YES it is human causedWoodward, 19 [Aylin, writer for Business Insider, 18 signs we're in the middle of a 6th mass extinction, June 18th, , 8/14/2019] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The planet appears to be undergoing?a mass extinction: the sixth time in the history of life on Earth that global fauna has experienced a major collapse in numbers. Historically, mass extinctions have been caused by catastrophic events like asteroid collisions. This time, human activities — including deforestation, mining, and carbon dioxide-emissions — are to blame. Frogs and?insects are dying off at record rates, animal species are experiencing a "?biological annihilation," and invasive aliens are driving native species out. A report from the United Nations?found that up to 1 million species are threatened with extinction. The phrase "mass extinction" typically conjures images of the asteroid crash that led to the twilight of the dinosaurs. Upon impact, that 6-mile-wide space rock caused a tsunami in the Atlantic Ocean, along with earthquakes and landslides up and down what is now the Americas. A heat pulse baked the Earth, and the Tyrannosaurus rex?and its compatriots died out,?along with 75% of the planet's species. Although it may not be obvious, another devastating mass extinction event is taking place today — the sixth of its kind in Earth's history. The trend is hitting global fauna on multiple fronts, as?hotter oceans, deforestation, and?climate change?drive animal populations to drop in unprecedented numbers. These alarming extinction trends are driven by one key factor: humans. According to?a 2014 study, current extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than they would be if humans weren't around.?A summary of a United Nations report?released last month put it another way: "Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before," the authors wrote. That report, which assessed the state of our planet's biodiversity, found that up to 1 million plant and animals species face extinction, many within decades, due to human activity.Extinction – Permian LevelClimate change causes Permian-level mass extinction – no tech fixesGaworecki 19 // “Worst mass extinction event in Earth’s history was caused by global warming analogous to current climate crisis” 1/3/19 // // CSL 8/14/19****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The Permian period ended about 250 million years ago with the largest recorded mass extinction in Earth’s history, when a series of massive volcanic eruptions is believed to have triggered global climate change that ultimately wiped out 96 percent of marine species in an event known as the “Great Dying.” According to Justin Penn, a doctoral student at the University of Washington (UW), the Permian extinction can help us understand the impacts of climate change in our own current era. Penn led a team of researchers that combined models of ocean conditions and animal metabolism with paleoceanographic records to show that the Permian mass extinction was caused by rising ocean temperatures, which in turn forced the metabolism of marine animals to speed up. Increased metabolism meant increased need for oxygen, but the warmer waters could not hold enough oxygen to meet those needs, and ocean life was left gasping for breath. New research by scientists at the United States’ University of Washington and Stanford University suggests that the most destructive mass extinction event in Earth’s ancient history was caused by global warming that left marine life unable to breathe. The Permian period, the last period of the Paleozoic Era, ended about 250 million years ago with the largest recorded mass extinction in Earth’s history. Before the dinosaurs emerged during the Triassic period somewhere around 243 and 233 million years ago, a series of massive volcanic eruptions is believed to have triggered global climate change that ultimately led to the Permian extinction, which wiped out 96 percent of marine species in an event known as the “Great Dying.” According to Justin Penn, a doctoral student at the University of Washington (UW), the Permian extinction can help us understand the impacts of climate change in our own current era. He’s the lead author of a study published in Science last month that builds off of previous research by Curtis Deutsch, a professor of oceanography at UW. “In 2015, Curtis published a paper demonstrating that temperature and oxygen act as invisible barriers to habitat for animals in the modern ocean,” Penn told Mongabay. “We wanted to know whether this framework could be used to understand the link between ocean warming, oxygen loss, and marine ecosystems. The end-Permian mass extinction served as the perfect case study because there is clear evidence for ocean warming and oxygen loss during that time period, and the fossils recorded the response of marine biodiversity.” Penn led a team of researchers that combined models of ocean conditions and animal metabolism with paleoceanographic records to show that the Permian mass extinction was caused by rising ocean temperatures, which in turn forced the metabolism of marine animals to speed up. Increased metabolism meant increased need for oxygen, but the warmer waters could not hold enough oxygen to meet those needs, and ocean life was left gasping for breath. During the Permian period, Earth’s land masses were still joined together in the supercontinent of Pangaea, and before volcanic eruptions in Siberia increased the concentrations of greenhouse-gas’s in the atmosphere, ocean temperatures and oxygen levels were similar to those of today. The researchers constructed a model based on Earth’s configuration and climate in the Permian, then raised greenhouse gases in the model until ocean surface temperatures in the tropics had risen by 10 degrees Celsius (20 degrees Fahrenheit), the conditions driven by the global warming that was occurring at the time. This illustration shows the percentage of marine animals that went extinct at the end of the Permian era by latitude, from the model (black line) and from the fossil record (blue dots). A greater percentage of marine animals survived in the tropics than at the poles. The color of the water shows the temperature change, with red being most severe warming and yellow less warming. At the top is the supercontinent Pangaea, with massive volcanic eruptions emitting carbon dioxide. The images below the line represent some of the 96 percent of marine species that died during the event. Includes fossil drawings by Ernst Haeckel/Wikimedia; Blue crab photo by Wendy Kaveney/Flickr; Atlantic cod photo by Hans-Petter Fjeld/Wikimedia; Chambered nautilus photo by ?2010 John White/CalPhotos. Image Credit: Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch/University of Washington. The global warming and oxygen loss simulated in the Earth System model Penn and team built matched reconstructions of these changes made from the fossil record of the end of the Permian period. The oceans lost about 80 percent of their oxygen, and around half of the ocean seafloor became completely oxygen-free, especially at lower depths. The researchers then used published lab measurements on 61 modern marine species like crustaceans, fish, shellfish, corals, and sharks to examine how those animals might respond to those oxygen and temperature conditions. Today’s marine wildlife are expected to have similar tolerances to high temperatures and low oxygen as Permian animals because of the similar environmental conditions under which they evolved. “Warming and oxygen loss would have led to a loss of aerobic habitat for marine animals by increasing their temperature-dependent oxygen demand amid declining supply,” Penn said. “The predicted geography and severity of the resulting mass extinction explain the patterns observed in the global marine fossil record from the ‘Great Dying.’” In a statement, Curtis Deutsch explained that by combining species’ traits with the team’s paleoclimate simulations, the researchers were able to predict the geography of the extinction event. “Very few marine organisms stayed in the same habitats they were living in — it was either flee or perish,” Deutsch, a co-author of the Science paper, said. The model predicted that, because animals found at high latitudes far from the tropics are the most sensitive to oxygen levels, their numbers would have suffered the most, with those that have particularly high oxygen demands being almost completely wiped out. Many tropical species would have gone extinct, as well, the model showed. “Since tropical organisms’ metabolisms were already adapted to fairly warm, lower-oxygen conditions, they could move away from the tropics and find the same conditions somewhere else,” Deutsch said. “But if an organism was adapted for a cold, oxygen-rich environment, then those conditions ceased to exist in the shallow oceans.” This roughly 1.5-foot slab of rock from southern China shows the Permian-Triassic boundary. The bottom section is pre-extinction limestone. The upper section is microbial limestone deposited after the extinction. Photo Credit: Jonathan Payne/Stanford University. To test the predictions made by the climate model, study co-authors Jonathan Payne and Erik Sperling of Stanford University turned to the Paleobiology Database, a virtual archive of published fossil collections. By looking at how fossils are distributed in ancient seafloor rocks, it’s possible to piece together where animals existed before the extinction event, where they they fled to or went extinct, or where they were confined to a fraction of their previous habitat. The fossil distributions of the late-Permian period confirmed that species far from the equator were hit the hardest by the mass extinction event. “The signature of that kill mechanism, climate warming and oxygen loss, is this geographic pattern that’s predicted by the model and then discovered in the fossils,” Penn said in a statement. “The agreement between the two indicates this mechanism of climate warming and oxygen loss was a primary cause of the extinction.” Penn and co-authors say that other shifts in the ocean environment, such as acidification or changes in the productivity of photosynthetic organisms, probably contributed to the Permian extinction, but that warmer temperatures leading to insufficient oxygen levels accounts for more than half of the losses in marine life. That could help us understand how marine life will fare in our current age of global warming, Penn added, because the conditions in the late Permian are similar to conditions today. The drivers of the Permian mass extinction — volcanic CO2 emissions into the atmosphere leading to global warming — are analogous to human-caused CO2 emissions occurring today, Penn noted. “These results allow us to compare the scale of our modern problem to the largest extinction in Earth’s history,” he told Mongabay. “Under a business-as-usual emissions scenarios, by 2100 warming in the upper ocean will have approached 20 percent of warming in the late Permian, and by the year 2300 it will reach between 35 and 50 percent.” The study, therefore, highlights the potential for a mass extinction driven by anthropogenic climate change due to mechanisms similar to those that caused the Permian mass extinction, Penn said: “The ocean cannot be cooled or oxygenated on a global scale by any feasible means. The only sustainable solution to reduce the risk of temperature-dependent hypoxia is to halt the anthropogenic accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.”Extinction – Laundry ListGlobal warming results in un-survivable heat waves, food shortages, nuclear conflict, could result in conflictSpratt and Dunlop 5/22 [David Spratt is a Research Director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, Melbourne. Ian T. Dunlop is a member of the Club of Rome. “Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach”, pp. 8-9, 5/22/2019, , Accessed 08-14-2019 ECT] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****A 2050 SCENARIO 2020–2030: Policy-makers fail to act on evidence that the current Paris Agreement path — in which global human-caused greenhouse emissions do not peak until 2030 — will lock in at least 3°C of warming. The case for a global, climate-emergency mobilisation of labour and resources to build a zero-emission economy and carbon drawdown in order to have a realistic chance of keeping warming well below 2°C is politely ignored. As projected by Xu and Ramanathan, by 2030 carbon dioxide levels have reached 437 parts per million — which is unprecedented in the last 20 million years — and warming reaches 1.6°C. 18 2030–2050: Emissions peak in 2030, and start to fall consistent with an 80 percent reduction in fossil-fuel energy intensity by 2100 compared to 2010 energy intensity. This leads to warming of 2.4°C by 2050, consistent with the Xu and Ramanathan “baseline-fast” scenario. However, another 0.6°C of warming occurs 19 — taking the total to 3°C by 2050 — due to the activation of a number of carbon-cycle feedbacks and higher levels of ice albedo and cloud feedbacks than current models assume. [It should be noted that this is far from an extreme scenario: the low-probability, high-impact warming (five percent probability) can exceed 3.5–4°C by 2050 in the Xu and Ramanathan scheme.] 2050: By 2050, there is broad scientific acceptance that system tipping-points for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a sea-ice-free Arctic summer were passed well before 1.5°C of warming, for the Greenland Ice Sheet well before 2°C, and for widespread permafrost loss and large-scale Amazon drought and dieback by 2.5°C. The “hothouse Earth” scenario has been realised, and Earth is headed for another degree or more of warming, especially since human greenhouse emissions are still significant. While sea levels have risen 0.5 metres by 2050, the increase may be 2–3 metres by 2100, and it is understood from historical analogues that seas may eventually rise by more than 25 metres. Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability. The destabilisation of the Jet Stream has very significantly affected the intensity and geographical distribution of the Asian and West African monsoons and, together with the further slowing of the Gulf Stream, is impinging on life support systems in Europe. North America suffers from devastating weather extremes including wildfires, heatwaves, drought and inundation. The summer monsoons in China have failed, and water flows into the great rivers of Asia are severely reduced by the loss of more than one-third of the Himalayan ice sheet. Glacial loss reaches 70 percent in the Andes, and rainfall in Mexico and central America falls by half. Semi-permanent El Nino conditions prevail. Aridification emerges over more than 30 percent of the world’s land surface. Desertification is severe in southern Africa, the southern Mediterranean, west Asia, the Middle East, inland Australia and across the south-western United States. Impacts: A number of ecosystems collapse, including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic. Some poorer nations and regions, which lack capacity to provide artificially-cooled environments for their populations, become unviable. Deadly heat conditions persist for more than 100 days per year in West Africa, tropical South America, the Middle East and South-East Asia, contributing to more than a billion people being displaced from the tropical zone. Water availability decreases sharply in the most affected regions at lower latitudes (dry tropics and subtropics), affecting about two billion people worldwide. Agriculture becomes nonviable in the dry subtropics. Most regions in the world see a significant drop in food production and increasing numbers of extreme weather events, including heat waves, floods and storms. Food production is inadequate to feed the global population and food prices skyrocket, as a consequence of a one-fifth decline in crop yields, a decline in the nutrition content of food crops, a catastrophic decline in insect populations, desertification, monsoon failure and chronic water shortages, and conditions too hot for human habitation in significant food-growing regions. The lower reaches of the agriculturally-important river deltas such as the Mekong, Ganges and Nile are inundated, and significant sectors of some of the world’s most populous cities — including Chennai, Mumbai, Jakarta, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Lagos, Bangkok and Manila — are abandoned. Some small islands become uninhabitable. Ten percent of Bangladesh is inundated, displacing 15 million people. Even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and In high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end. 21 21 Wariaro, V., et al. 2018. Global Catastrophic Risks 2018, Stockholm, Global Challenges Foundation, 24. National security consequences: For pragmatic reasons associated with providing only a sketch of this scenario, we take the conclusion of the Age of Consequences ‘Severe’ 3°C scenario developed by a group of senior US national-security figures in 2007 as appropriate for our scenario too: Massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario, nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervor to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature’. (emphasis added)Slow ViolenceClimate change disportionally harms communities of color – ensuring a continual practice of environmental injustice globallyLai-Peterson?18 (Jennifer Lai-Peterson?– Senior Attorney at Advancement Project. 4/30/18, “Climate Change Is Not A Future Problem For Communities of Color. It Is a NOW Problem.” , DOA: 8/14/19, kbb) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The discourse around climate change today is not about whether (no pun intended), but when. Even oil and gas companies are openly stating in federal court that they “accept the consensus in the scientific communities on climate change. HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn1" [1] Some climate scientists say we have about 20 years before catastrophic changes are upon us. HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn2" [2] Others say due to fracking, “we’re almost there today.” HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn3" [3] For communities of color, however, the when is now. “It’s not about one or ten or twenty years before climate change. Nah. It’s happening right now in the Black community. We’ve been dying,” a Black elder who survived Hurricane Katrina, Curtis Muhammad, told me recently. “We live in the low-lying flood areas. We’re in Cancer Alley. We are the canaries in the coal mine.” Indeed, communities of color have long been “living on the front lines of both the causes and effects of climate change,” says Monique Harden, Assistant Director of Law and Policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ). HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn4" [4] Studies show polluting industries that release both toxic and climate pollution are disproportionately located near communities of color. In addition, there is little disagreement today that due to structural inequities based on race, communities of color continue to be hit “first and worst” in the climate crisis. HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn5" [5] “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana is one example. It is an area that stretches along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and the Gulf of Mexico with over 200 petrochemical facilities. African American and Indigenous communities bear the brunt of that pollution. Such pollution can cause not only asthma and cancer, but also the warming of the planet and the creation of stronger hurricanes that wreak havoc on communities of color in the Gulf of Region. “These are all of one piece,” Ms. Harden concludes. HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn6" [6] Ms. Harden’s group, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ), is leading local efforts to stop a proposed gas power plant that is planned near predominantly African American and Vietnamese American neighborhoods in East New Orleans. HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn7" [7] Residents of East New Orleans continue to struggle to rebuild their communities after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and levee failure. Their struggle is difficult not only because of the hurricane, but because of the inequities in governmental disaster funds that have skipped over them. HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn8" [8] Adding to this injustice, Entergy, a utility corporation, is seeking environmental permits for the gas power plant, which would allow on an annual basis more than one million pounds of toxic air pollution near homes and schools in East New Orleans and over one billion pounds of greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. “Climate science indicates a level at which greenhouse gas emissions should be cut back to mitigate climate change. Environmental science tells us that there is no safe level for many of the pollutants that are spewed into the air. How long would it take to establish laws and policies that respond to this science if, on a national and global scale, predominantly white children and families bore the brunt of all the risks and harm of climate change and toxic pollution?” Ms. Harden asked in a recent discussion. Communities of color face tremendous challenges during and after climate-related extreme weather events. For example, communities of color often have fewer resources to evacuate. And when evacuated, communities of color are displaced for long periods of time without governmental recognition of their fundamental right to return. In this period of displacement, the machinations of “disaster capitalism” then descend and the wholesale dismantlement of public systems (schools, utilities, housing) is suddenly on the table. HYPERLINK "" \l "_edn9" [9] It is beyond the scope of this post to detail the tireless and brilliant work of all those in the Gulf South, Puerto Rico, and Houston who fight this fight every single day. Instead, what I lift up today is a foundational principle that has stayed with me through the years: Nothing about us without us is for us. This was the rallying cry of Black survivors of Hurricane Katrina. The people most affected by the impacts of climate change must be at the center of the response to the climate crisis. Those most affected must lead our collective efforts. And those leaders and efforts should be identified and expanded now. And, the energy-oppressed poor experience hell on a daily basisDriessen 6 – senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and author of?Eco-Imperialism: Green power and Black death(Paul, “Nuclear to the rescue”, , dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****No wonder. Without electricity, modern life reverts to her childhood: no lights, refrigeration, heating, air-conditioning, radio, television, computers, safe running water or mechanized equipment for homes, schools, shops, hospitals, offices and factories. Incredibly, this is what life is like every day for 2 billion people in developing countries. Viewed at night from outer space, Africa really is the Dark Continent: only 10% of its 700 million people regularly have electricity. While 75% of South Africa is now fully electrified, only 5% of Malawi, Mozambique and other countries are so fortunate. Much of poor and rural Asia and Latin America faces a similar predicament. Instead of rolling blackouts, neighborhoods have rolling power. “In the western part of my country, families get electricity maybe three hours every two weeks,” says Pastor Abdul Sesay, a Sierra Leone native who now resides in Maryland. “Eastern communities get it maybe once a month!” Instead of turning on a light or stove, millions of women and children spend their days gathering wood, grass and dung, to burn in primitive hearths for cooking and heating. Instead of turning a faucet, they spend hours carrying water from distant lakes and rivers that are often contaminated with bacteria. Pollution from their fires causes 4 million deaths a year from lung infections. Tainted water and spoiled food cause intestinal diseases that kill another 2 million annually. Clinics and hospitals lack modern equipment, reliable refrigeration and clean tap water, exacerbating health problems that keep millions out of work for extended periods. The dearth of electricity also means minimal manufacturing and commerce – and impoverished countries forever dependent on foreign aid. And, a lack of energy access dooms billions in developing countries to continual poverty and marginalizes them in the political sphere – plan solvesBradbrook and Gardam 6 – *Bonython Professor of Law, University of Adelaide, Australia AND **Professor of International Law, Unversity of Adelaide, Australia(Adrian and Judith, “Placing Access to Energy Services within a Human Rights Framework,” 28 Hum. Rts. Q. 389, dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****While energy is a multifaceted issue and needs a coordinated international response on many fronts, the issue that has attracted most the attention recently has been the need to provide universal access to modern energy services. This is something that is taken for granted in developed countries, which perhaps explains the tardiness of the world community in coming to grips with the issue. Somewhat belatedly, the link between poverty and the lack of access to modern energy services has been recognized, because without access to energy services, people are destined to live in poverty.3 The provision of such services many decades ago was the major factor lifting the standard of development in developed countries and is a key ingredient to providing a sustainable way of living for all the world's population. The magnitude of the challenge is apparent from the fact that approximately two billion people, one-third of the world's population, lack access to electricity supplies. Traditional energy sources principally include locally collected and unprocessed biofuels, such as animal dung, wood, and crop residues.4 Between 1970 and 1990, rural electrification programs in some countries, particularly in China, connected 800 million people to the electricity grid and provided 500 million with better cooking facilities. But- the number without access to modern energy services remains at two billion as a result of increases in population.5 Consequently, the majority of the population of developing countries does not have electric lighting; clean cooking facilities; modern, efficient, and nonpolluting fuel supplies; or adequate clean water and sanitation systems6 that those in the developed countries take for granted. The former must rely on traditional energy sources for their basic needs, such as cooking.7 The lack of access to modern energy services constrains the ability of the population of developing countries to benefit from opportunities for economic development and increased living standards.8 Ironically, but importantly in terms of future planning, the amount of energy required to lift people out of poverty is extremely small by the standards of developed countries. It has been estimated that each person needs the energy equivalent of only 100 watts of electricity to meet their most basic energy needs.' While there may be some scope to develop new and to extend existing electricity grid systems in developing countries, it is anticipated that in most cases access to electricity services would be provided by stand-alone systems based on renewable energy resources.GenderClimate change magnifies colonial and patriarchal structures – causes precarity and massive violenceRuder & Sanniti 19 // “Transcending the Learned Ignorance of Predatory Ontologies: A Research Agenda for an Ecofeminist-Informed Ecological Economics” 1/19 // // CSL 8/14/19****NCC’19 Novice Packet****As white-settlers in the Region of Waterloo, we acknowledge that we live and work on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnawbe, and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is also situated on the Haldimand Tract: land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometres on each side of the Grand River.We make this statement to act against the erasure of ongoing colonial legacies across Turtle Island and to acknowledge that we contribute to and benefit from the expulsion, assimilation, and genocide of Indigenous Peoples. 1. Introduction As extreme shifts in global climate bring about unprecedented economic, socio-political and environmental stressors, there is an urgent need for transformative change in the ways in which humans collectively live, eat, work and interact with each other, other living things, and the planet [1,2,3,4]. Despite the necessity of a shift in normative paradigm, change has been slow and incremental, while climate change, economic disparity, food insecurity and biodiversity loss, among many others, continue to worsen [5,6]. Solutions to these ‘wicked problems’ [7] demand radically alternative approaches to economy that emphasize the ecological and conceptualize ‘economy’ as emergent from the cultural, political, legal and spiritual dimensions of society so as to prioritize intersectional, interspecies and intergenerational justice. In response, the transdisciplines of ecological economics and ecological feminisms have long aimed to theorize more sustainable and equitable futures and they offer a number of key insights. This paper lauds the progress and critical focus of ecological economics as a heterodox transdiscipline that aims to understand and transform socio-economic systems in the face of cataclysmic crises. Over the past forty years, ecological economics scholarship has advocated for an ‘epistemic shift’ [8] in understandings of the human economy away from “contemporary economic models [that] float free from biophysical reality, blind to the energy and material flows essential for human existence and to the ‘natural capital’ stocks that produce them” [9] (p. 4). Instead, ecological economics proposes a thermodynamic model of economic processes that limits the scale of the economy to fit within the Earth’s finite biophysical capacities [10,11,12,13]. As the field continues to mature, it is essential to think critically about its strengths and weaknesses. Our objective in this paper is to perform a theoretical critique of the underlying framework of ecological economics and the overarching paradigm it inescapably perpetuates. Using the established theoretical frames of ecological feminisms and ecofeminism in particular, we argue that the discipline of ecological economics is inhibited by a pervasive ignorance regarding power differentials and a limited epistemology rooted in Western, androcentric, anthropocentric thinking. Our analysis demonstrates how the logics of extractivist capitalism that justify gender biased and anti-ecological structures of power in the dominant growth-oriented economic paradigm also directly inform the theoretical basis of ecological economics and its subsequent post-growth proposals [14,15,16,17,18,19]. Our analysis is especially pertinent, as there exists a persistent gap in knowledge on the political nature of adaptation to multiple, concurrent environmental and social changes. In particular, critical socio-political dimensions of transformational change “suffer from an under-theorization of the political mechanisms of social change and the processes that serve to reproduce vulnerability over time and space” [20]. Without addressing these prevalent gaps, if indeed this is possible, ecological economics will continue to advance implicitly gendered assumptions that normalize and perpetuate oppressive institutions. Specifically, the discipline fails to recognize the burdens related to transformational change, such as risk, responsibility, expertise and work hours that are disproportionately placed on marginalized groups, including women and girls, people of colour, First Peoples, nature and other Others. Tropical StormsClimate change exacerbates tropical storms that disproportionately affect poorer countriesHarris 19 [Harris, Nicole and Parra, Vanessa, media contacts with CARE, 4/30/2019. "Climate change experts warn of disproportionate impacts and financial burdens on poor countries as Cyclone Fani bears down on India and Bangladesh." CARE, Accessed: 8/14/2019. BBB] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****As Cyclone Fani approaches India and Bangladesh, CARE experts have warned that the increased occurrences of disasters in poorer countries is saddling millions of innocent people with the “debt of climate change.” Severe cyclonic storm Fani is expected to result in very heavy rainfall and cause significant destruction in parts of India and Bangladesh between May 3rd and 4th, weather forecasters have predicted. This comes as the toll from Cyclone Kenneth is beginning to emerge across northern Mozambique. Last week, the southern African country was struck by Kenneth, a Category 4 storm described as one of the strongest cyclones to hit Africa since modern record-keeping began. It came barely a month after Cyclone Idai killed more than 1,000 people across Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique. While no study has specifically measured how climate change affected the likelihood of these cyclones, global warming is known to intensify certain tropical storm effects. Although poorer countries in the global south – such as Mozambique and Bangladesh – have contributed the least to climate change, they are already experiencing devastating climate impacts and will bear the brunt of future global warming, according to CARE experts. “We know that poor countries are being forced to shoulder the burden caused by fossil fuel emissions,” said Sven Harmeling, CARE’s global policy lead on climate change. “They not only endure the worsening impacts of climate change, resulting in more frequent and intense disasters, but also face a worsening financial situation. We call on the countries and companies most responsible for the causes of climate disruption to heed our warning: if coordinated climate action is not urgently taken, poor countries will suffer even more from increasing injustice.” Mozambique - considered one of the most indebted countries in the world - was last week granted a $118.2 million rebuilding credit facility by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) following the climate-linked cyclone Idai disaster. Though this appears generous, it still leaves the country responsible to pay off the substantial loan. “Developed countries must immediately ramp up financial support to those suffering from these disasters and commit to fund disaster preparedness and response,” Harmeling said. "It is unacceptable to continue offering loans that result in insurmountable debt for disaster-stricken countries. The only way for the main contributors of climate change to take responsibility is to provide full support for the consequences of their actions.” Marc Nosbach, country director for CARE in Mozambique said: “The injustice around this scenario is that Mozambique is the sixth-poorest country in the world, by the IMF’s reckoning. Most people here earn about $1.30 a day; and less than 30 percent of the population has access to electricity. It is therefore unfair to saddle this poor country with the costs of a problem they did little to cause. InequalityBlack and poor communities are disproportionately affected by climate change due to various effectsHolley 18 (Betty, holds multiple degrees in Mathematics, Education, and Theology. She is an Associate Professor at?Payne Theological Seminary, where she is the director for the Master of Divinity Degree Program. Dr. Holley serves as a member of the?Broader Social Impacts Committee?(BSIC), for the Smithsonian Institute of Natural History and as the African Methodist Episcopal Church representative for the Board of Directors for?Creation Justice Ministries. PhD, “Climate Change: The Evidence and Consequence for the African American Community,” 10/24/18, Accessed: 8/14/19) -JD ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The?Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC), projects a possible global temperature rise of up to six degrees by 2100, with its best estimate, a 4.5 degree Celsius rise during this century. Long-term changes in climate have been observed at global, continental, and regional levels, including changes in Arctic temperatures and ice, ocean salinity, and wind patterns, resulting in extreme weather to include droughts, heavy precipitation, and heat waves. Scientists predict that heat waves in North America will become more intense, more frequent, and longer lasting in the second half of the century. Heat waves have stronger effects on urban populations, especially the urban poor. One major reason for urban areas being more prone to heat-related deaths, the “heat island” effect, is due to its surface-covering is typically asphalt and concrete, which retains heat. As a result, temperatures in these areas are higher, especially during heat waves. African Americans are more than twice as likely as Whites to live in the inner city. African Americans, particularly, should be concerned about the issue of climate change. Climate change is expected to increase the range of many diseases, as warmer conditions will allow disease-spreading insects such as ticks and mosquitoes to live in places they previously could not live. Scientists estimate that the potential for a malaria epidemic could increase by up to 27% due to climate change. Warmer and wetter conditions in the United States are likely to increase malaria rates in this country. African Americans are one and a half times less likely than White Americans to have medical insurance and are less likely to have regular access to medical care. As a result, increases in diseases put African Americans more at risk than other communities. Higher temperatures of global warming are expected to degrade air quality through increased ozone formation. In every major city in the United States, African Americans are more likely than Whites to be exposed to higher air toxics concentrations. Over 70% of African Americans live in counties in violation of federal air pollution standards. Due to violation of these standards, there is an expected increase in the incidence of asthmas in the general population. African Americans are nearly three times as likely to be hospitalized or killed by asthmas as Whites. Climate change has a direct impact on ministry in our churches. Unemployment and economic hardship associated with climate change will fall most heavily on the African American community. Gasoline prices are affected by climate change. There is a direct correlation between social justice, economic justice, and climate justice. Although African Americans are disproportionately affected by climate change, they also have more to gain from policies to slow global warming. According to one study, reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to 15% below 1990 levels would save an estimated 10,000 African Americans lives per year by 2020.Warming leads to increased flooding – harming Lower income, monitories, and the elderly at the highest rate DENCHAK 19 (MELISSA DENCHAK AUTHOR A freelance writer and editor, Melissa Denchak has contributed to Fine Cooking, Adventure Travel, and Departures. She has a culinary diploma from New York City’s Institute of Culinary Education and loves writing stories about food. “Flooding and Climate Change: Everything You Need to Know” --- April 10, 2019 --- accessed 8/14/19 --- )JSKI****NCC’19 Novice Packet****As ocean temperatures rise and the world’s glaciers and ice sheets melt (phenomena exacerbated by climate change), global sea levels are rising. Our oceans are approximately seven to eight inches higher than they were in 1900 (with about three of those inches added since 1993 alone)—a rate of rise per century greater than for any other century in at least the past 2,000 years. And while the IPCC predicts seas around the world will rise anywhere from one foot to more than four feet above 2000 levels by century’s end, NOAA’s projections show that, due to regional factors such as currents bringing water to coastlines, places such as the East Coast could see seas as much as 9.8 feet higher by 2100. (Check out NOAA’s interactive map that demonstrates where flooding will occur as sea levels rise.)? In addition to amplifying storm surge because the water starts at a higher level, sea level rise increases high-tide flooding, which has doubled in the United States over the past 30 years and is expected to rapidly worsen in the coming decades. According to the Fourth National Climate Assessment, for example, by 2045, Charleston, South Carolina could see as many as 180 tidal floods per year, compared with just 11 in 2014.? When flooding inundates a home or community, it upends lives and introduces a litany of potential short- and long-term consequences. The most obvious include loss of life (floods cause more than 100 U.S. fatalities annually) and vast property damage. Repairing and replacing flood-damaged roads, bridges, utilities, and other public infrastructure cost FEMA an estimated $48.6 billion between 1998 and 2014.? Between 2007 and 2017, the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) paid an average of $2.9 billion per year to cover flood-related losses, with individual years often costing far more. Following 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, for example, property owners filed approximately $8.8 billion in flood claims. Another $8.8 billion would be filed five years later, after Hurricane Harvey. And many times, the same homes are repeatedly flooded—more than 30,000 properties flooded an average of five times each have been covered under the NFIP. And not only has the NFIP been deeply in debt since Hurricane Katrina, but costly major floods are only becoming more common. An NRDC analysis found that in some cases, it would save money for the government to buy flood-damaged properties, demolish them, and not rebuild on the land. This would also allow families to move somewhere safer and avoid the hardship of additional floods.? Flooding also brings contamination and disease. Floodwaters can carry raw sewage, leaked toxic chemicals, and runoff from hazardous waste sites and factory farms. They can pollute drinking water supplies and cause eye, ear, skin, and gastrointestinal infections. When floodwaters recede, bacteria and mold may remain, increasing rates of respiratory illnesses, such as asthma. Flooding can also contribute to mental health problems, lead to economic loss (as in the form of lost business or wages), and uproot whole communities.? And while it is true that floods do not discriminate, affecting anyone in their path regardless of wealth or ethnicity, it is most often lower-income people, the elderly, and minority communities who suffer the greatest impacts. These populations are least likely to have flood insurance, access to transportation during an evacuation, cash on hand, or the ability to relocate.Impoverished groups suffer—climate change causes hunger Shwartz 19 (Emma Shwartz an environmental journalist, How climate change affects people living in poverty, mercy corps, August 13 2019, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****While everyone around the world feels the effects of climate change, the most vulnerable are people living in the world’s poorest countries — like Haiti and Timor-Leste — and the world’s 2.5 billion smallholder farmers, herders and fisheries who depend on the climate and natural resources for food and income. Increasingly unpredictable weather patterns, shifting seasons, and natural disasters disproportionately threaten these populations, increasing their risk and their dependency on humanitarian aid. Three out of four people living in poverty rely on agriculture and natural resources to survive. For these people, the effects of climate change — shifting weather, limited water sources and increased competition for resources — are a real matter of life and death. Climate change has turned their lives into a desperate guessing game. As the effects of climate change increase, so will their desperation. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, shifts in the timing and magnitude of rainfall undermine food production and increase competition for remaining arable land, contributing to ethnic tensions and conflict. And in places like central Nigeria and Karamoja, an area of land that straddles the border of Kenya and Uganda, where resource scarcity has been a long-standing challenge, climate change has further reduced pasture and water resources, increasing competition and resulting in violence, such as cattle raiding. “Climate change is not a distant threat. It’s a driver of fragility and conflict, and it’s leading to a hungrier and more vulnerable world.” — Eliot Levine, Mercy Corps Deputy Director of Environment, Energy and Climate But while climate change can lead to conflict, it can also provide an opportunity for collaboration. These challenges present a unique opportunity for collective action and cooperation in order to mitigate the impacts. For some communities, food, health and lives will depend on cooperation over conflict. Floods and droughts brought on by climate change make it harder to produce food. As a result, the price of food increases, and access becomes more and more limited, putting many at higher risk of hunger. Undernutrition is the largest health impact of climate change in the 21st century. The number of undernourished people in the world has been increasing since 2014, reaching nearly 821 million — a staggering 11 percent of the entire global population — in 2017. The vast majority live in developing countries — research shows hunger to be particularly on the rise in South America and almost every region in Africa. More than 30 percent of people in eastern Africa faced hunger in 2017. Much of the increase is linked to the growing number of conflicts, which are often exacerbated by climate-related shocks. According to the 2019 Global Report on Food Crises, more than 113 million people in 53 countries were plunged into crisis levels of hunger in 2018; two-thirds of them were in places affected by conflict or insecurity. And climate and natural disasters alone triggered food crises for an additional 29 million people — mostly in Africa — with shocks such as drought leaving them in need of urgent assistance. Warming = inequalityNoah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke, 5-14-2019, "Global warming has increased global economic inequality," PNAS, , 8-14-2019, -PGR****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories from a suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ～90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historical warming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries’ energy consumption.Climate change affects indigenous groups disproportionally Jones 19 [Dr. Rhys Jones, Ngāti Kahungunu, is a Public Health Medicine Specialist and Senior Lecturer in Māori Healthat the University of Auckland; “Climate change and Indigenous Health Promotion” UHPE – Global Health Promotion Vol. 26, Supp. 3 2019, , DOA 8-14-19-SH] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Despite considerable diversity in socio-political, cultural, economic, and environmental contexts, there is a general pattern of poor health and social outcomes for Indigenous peoples relative to nonIndigenous populations (20–23). In Aotearoa, there are pervasive health inequities, with Māori experiencing higher rates of mortality and morbidity than non-Māori (24). These health inequities have been demonstrated across a wide range of health issues and determinants (25–27). Elimination of health inequities between Māori and non-Māori is implicit in the Treaty of Waitangi, and part of upholding Indigenous rights for Māori in Aotearoa (28). The Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, established a contractual relationship between Māori, as Indigenous peoples, and the British Crown. The articles of Te Tiriti (the Māori language version of the treaty) provided for: the Queen to assume ‘te Kawanatanga katoa’ (governance over the land); Māori chiefs to retain ‘te tino rangatiratanga’ (chieftainship) over their lands, villages and all treasured things; and an assurance that Māori would have all the rights and privileges accorded to British subjects (29). Health impacts of climate change There is a considerable body of scientific literature and consensus on the harmful impacts of climate change on health (2,30,31). Direct impacts include death, illness, and injury due to heat waves and extreme weather events. Powerful indirect impacts on health are mediated by a complex interaction of social, environmental, and economic factors. These include shifting patterns of infectious disease, air pollution, freshwater contamination, impacts on the built environment from sea level rise, forced migration, economic collapse, conflict over scarce resources, and increasing food insecurity (31). Health impacts are already being seen, even in relatively protected parts of the world such as Aotearoa, and, as climate change progresses, the negative health impacts will become more severe (32). These impacts will be disproportionately borne by vulnerable groups and those already experiencing poorer health outcomes in Aotearoa (15,33). Climate change and Indigenous health Climate change is a serious threat to the health and well-being of Indigenous populations around the world (14). Indigenous peoples live in diverse contexts and climate change brings many different kinds of risks and opportunities, but Indigenous peoples are subject to conditions that result in disproportionate vulnerability to climate change (11). These include a tendency to live in geographical locations that are particularly prone to the impacts of climate change, dependence on lands and environmental resources for basic needs and economic security (e.g., food, shelter, medicines, fuel), and experiencing economic deprivation as well as social and political marginalization (13). Despite often having significant adaptive capacity and responding actively to future climate-related health risks, Indigenous populations face considerable barriers to adaptation due to the legacy and ongoing impacts of colonization (11). As a result of Indigenous peoples’ greater vulnerability and poorer access to resources to respond, climate change threatens cultural survival and undermines human rights (34). In Aotearoa, the higher risk of adverse health impacts from climate change for Māori can be attributed to a range of factors (33,35). Māori have a greater existing burden of disease due to climate-sensitive health conditions such as infectious diseases, chronic heart and lung diseases, and mental illness (27,36–39). As a result of occupational inequities, Māori are more likely to work outdoors and therefore have greater exposure to outdoor heat and air pollution (40). Climate change increases the risk of contamination of seafood (32), a common customary food source for coastal Māori communities. Systemic inequities exist in New Zealand’s health care services, resulting in poorer access to and quality of care for Māori (24,41–45). Māori experience disproportionate socioeconomic deprivation (27), leading to increased risk of problems such as food insecurity and damage to vulnerable housing and infrastructure as a result of climate change (33). Climate change also has broader implications for the cultural, social, and economic determinants of health for Māori, particularly due to heavy investment in climate-sensitive primary industries such as agriculture, fishing, and forestry (46). In addition to the impacts of climate change itself, societal responses to climate change threaten to disadvantage Māori, thereby exacerbating existing social and health inequities (15,33). For example, carbon pricing mechanisms such as New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme can increase the cost of goods and services, with disproportionate impacts on low-income households (47). Climate change, land and Indigenous health Land is central to Indigenous peoples’ identities and well-being. In Aotearoa, for example, Māori are recognized as tangata whenua (people of the land) and, from a Māori worldview, humanity is seen as being inseparable from the natural world. This is exemplified in many tribal oral traditions, such as the Whanganui iwi proverb, ‘Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au’ (‘I am the river and the river is me’) (48). Land and its associated natural systems are connected to health through a variety of pathways, providing cultural, spiritual, social, and economic benefits for well-being (49). Climate change is leading to a fundamental disruption of Indigenous peoples’ relationships with lands and territories (34). Through environmental effects such as sea level rise and coastal erosion, climate change threatens the very existence of land in certain regions. In the Pacific, for example, rising sea levels could render low-lying island nations such as Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu uninhabitable (50). Many communities face displacement from their lands and may need to confront the possibility of migration to other territories in the foreseeable future (51). Indigenous peoples’ homelands could disappear and, if entire nations were to become submerged, loss of statehood is a potential outcome (52). The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples acknowledges that ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired’ (53). Climate change represents an acute threat to this right, although this is by no means a new phenomenon when viewed in a historical context. Environmental changes to Indigenous peoples’ lands brought about by colonization have often led to relocation and displacement of the original inhabitants (54). In Aotearoa, for example, British colonization led to vast areas of forest and scrubland being cleared for farms and cropping; by 2005, forest cover was less than a quarter of the total land area (55). In addition to the threat of climate change, adaptation and mitigation policies can be associated with negative impacts on Indigenous peoples’ relationships with lands and territories. For example, reforestation projects can lead to appropriation of Indigenous lands and disruption of traditional practices including hunting and gardening (56). Renewable energy projects have also been associated with negative impacts on sites of cultural significance for Indigenous peoples (57). Climate change as an intensification of colonialism Climate change acts as a threat multiplier in relation to adverse health impacts, compounding existing pressures faced by communities in accessing the determinants of health (58). From an Indigenous health perspective, climate change can be seen as an intensification of colonialism (59). Indeed, the worldviews, values, and systems that underpin the colonization of Indigenous peoples are also at the root of environmental changes that threaten local and global ecosystems (60). Modern Western societies are underpinned by anthropocentric understandings of the world and individualistic values, and tend to associate consumption with improvements in quality of life (61). The resulting capitalist systems have driven the commodification and exploitation of natural resources, with societies pursuing economic growth while externalizing the negative environmental impacts (62). Colonial expansion into Indigenous peoples’ lands in pursuit of capital has led to an escalating process of environmental degeneration and destruction. Significantly, development of activities and industries that produce greenhouse gas emissions has been dependent on the appropriation of Indigenous lands and resources (63). This is exemplified by the alienation and subsequent deforestation of Māori land for the purposes of agriculture, as described above, which is currently responsible for almost half of New Zealand’s emissions (64). There is a long history of extractive industries, including oil, coal, and gas, exploiting resources in Indigenous peoples’ lands around the world (65). Climate action Tackling climate change is essential if we are to avoid exacerbation of health inequities (66). Societal responses to climate change can be broadly classified as either mitigation (limiting the degree of warming of the earth’s atmosphere by reducing net global greenhouse gas emissions) or adaptation (adapting to the impacts of climate change). In relation to Indigenous health, both are important, although mitigation is arguably the most urgent and critical type of action given the limitations of adaptation. Actions to mitigate climate change can influence Indigenous health and equity through a variety of mechanisms and can have both positive and negative impacts (9,10). Many of the possible actions to stabilize or reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be enacted in ways that also improve health (4,67). For example, policies to encourage a mode shift from motor vehicles to active transport and public transport not only reduce transport emissions, but also increase physical activity, reduce air pollution, and reduce road traffic injuries (68). Building healthy and energy-efficient homes is associated with lower household emissions, as well as reducing diseases associated with cold, damp, poorly ventilated housing (69). Reducing dietary consumption of animal products, particularly red meat and dairy, and shifting to a more plant-based diet can lead to significant population health benefits while at the same time reducing agricultural emissions (70). However, it is readily apparent that these potential benefits are being forgone in many societies (58), including Aotearoa, as a result of inaction or poorly planned action. Climate Change harms marginalized groups the most Amnesty International 19, Amnesty International is a global movement of more than 7 million people who take injustice personally. We are campaigning for a world where human rights are enjoyed by all, 2019, “Climate Change,” , accessed 8/14/19, JLB ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Climate change is and will continue to harm all of us unless governments take action. However, its effects are likely to be much more pronounced for certain groups – for example, those communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods – as well as those who are generally already vulnerable, disadvantaged and subject to discrimination. These are some of the ways climate change can and is exacerbating inequalities: Between developed and developing nations: At a national level, those in low-lying, small island states and less developed countries will be and already are among those worst affected. People in the Marshall Islands already regularly experience the devastating flooding and storms that destroy their homes and livelihoods. The 2018 heatwave in the northern hemisphere made headlines across Europe and North America, but some of the worst effects were also felt in places like Pakistan, where more than 60 people died – mostly labourers already working in intense heat – as temperatures soared above 44°C. Between different ethnicities and classes: The effects of climate change and fossil fuel-related pollution also run along ethnicity and class lines. In North America, it is largely poorer communities of colour who are forced to breathe toxic air because their neighbourhoods are more likely to be situated next to power plants and refineries. They experience markedly higher rates of respiratory illnesses and cancers, and African Americans are three times more likely to die of airborne pollution than the overall US population. Between genders: Women and girls are disproportionately affected by climate change, reflecting the fact that they are more likely in many countries to be marginalized and disadvantaged. This means that they are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate-related events as they are less able to protect themselves against it and will find it harder to recover. Between generations: Future generations will experience the worsening effects unless action is taken now by governments. However, children and young people are already suffering due to their specific metabolism, physiology and developmental needs. This means, for example, that the forced displacement experienced by communities impacting a whole range of rights – from water, sanitation and food to adequate housing, health, education and development – is likely to be particularly harmful to children. Between communities: Indigenous peoples are among the communities most impacted by climate change. They often live in marginal lands and fragile ecosystems which are particularly sensitive to alterations in the physical environment. They maintain a close connection with nature and their traditional lands on which their livelihoods and cultural identity depend.Climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities – political will is critical to shifting to greener policiesHamilton 19 [Jori Hamilton is a writer for red pepper, “Poor and marginalised people bear the brunt of climate change”, April 2, 2019, , DOA: 8/14/19] Ian M****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Climate change often posited as a problem in which we are all complicit — a defect of humanity. This isn’t the case. We know that carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect are to blame for the widespread changes that our planet has begun to see. Over and over again, we hear reports of the real and devastating havoc that climate change is likely to wreak upon the world, as temperatures continue to rise. We hear reports regarding rising sea levels flooding major metropolitan areas and powerful wildfires destroying thousands of homes. Likewise, we hear about blistering summer heat and blizzards in unexpected areas of the globe. The brunt of blame for these disastrous changes can be placed on one group: the rich. Economic inequality damages the environment because the 1 percent cannot reel in environmentally damaging behavior. Catastrophic corporate practices like wreckless pollution, large-scale factory farming, and fracking are destroying environments, displacing and killing wildlife, and increasing the speed at which climate change is affecting our planet. And the law permits it. Environmental law in the US, for instance, is crumbling due to the influence of powerful lobbyists and the disdain the Trump administration has for the EPA. Many in the U.K. blame Brexit on the desires of corporate influencers to escape stringent environmental regulations. People in China face water shortages and shocking levels of air pollution due to practically nonexistent environmental oversight — though that is slowly changing now that it is beginning to have serious effects on their economy. These facts — the economical impacts of pollution — are what make the headlines. What we often do not hear much about is the particularly severe impact these issues are having on lower-income neighborhoods, even within the most well-developed countries. All too frequently, marginalized communities in poor neighborhoods are experiencing the brunt of a changing climate’s negative effects. These communities lack the resources to spare themselves from the injustice brought upon them by capitalistic policies and corporate powerhouses. Environmental justice issues are a serious concern in many communities, not only in the UK but across the globe. The prevalence of these issues can be linked to an ingrained system of classism and racism, where poorer and often minority communities are disproportionately impacted by environmental pollution. These communities are at a far greater risk of negative health outcomes that could have serious consequences. Multiple studies have linked these marginalized peoples to more significant health issues related to environmental concerns. For instance, one study out of Yale University found evidence to support a profoundly widening gap in racial and economic composition when it comes to air pollution levels. Poor communities and those comprised predominantly of racial minorities experienced substantially higher exposure to air pollution due to increased particulate matter when compared to more affluent, white neighborhoods nearby. Studies based out of the UK have found that poorer communities also tend to live within lower quality natural environments. These communities have fewer trees, parks, and wild areas, which can reduce the biodiversity and overall resilience of the area they live. Not only are these communities often experiencing some of the worst negative pollution impacts but also the fewest positive environmental amenities and mitigating factors. Unfortunately, addressing issues of environmental justice can be difficult in court systems due to policy issues and a lack of political motivation for change. The UK recently came under scrutiny by the UN for making the fight for environmental justice incredibly difficult for the average citizen. These obstacles are placed by design in an attempt to quieten public discontent about poor business practices and the changing climate of the Earth. Regrettably, this struggle is experienced by many advocating for eco-friendly policies in multiple countries. The curious case of Flint, Michigan, USA Perhaps one of the starkest examples of the serious impacts on marginalized communities in developed countries has taken place in the town of Flint, Michigan in the US. Starting back in the spring of 2014 the city began switching its water supply location in a cost-savings effort. Within a short period, citizens were complaining about poor drinking water, as well as illnesses associated with drinking it. Government officials refused to acknowledge the issue until the fall of 2015 and didn’t publicly address the matter until early 2016, causing a public outcry and deterioration of government trust. Flint is one of the poorest cities in the state of Michigan and perhaps even the entire US. Nearly 40 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and upwards of 50 percent is African American. The protracted water crisis — which is still ongoing to date — has cost the city significantly as businesses have pulled out of the community and many new organizations choose to settle elsewhere. As of late 2018, about 75 percent of a new waterline was complete. Across the US water pollution and supply issues abound; by 2050 nearly 70 percent of US counties could face water shortage problems due to population growth, economic activity, and climate change if current consumption rates remain consistent. The EPA estimates that it will take over $91 billion to properly upgrade and maintain water and wastewater systems across the nation. Roughly a third of this money was funded, likely going to wealthier municipalities that are able to afford cost-matching avenues. The Alberta Tar Fields Another case study of marginalized communities taking the brunt of environmental degradation takes place in the Alberta tar fields of Alberta, Canada. The tar fields have become a hot topic issue as the Canadian government and multinational corporations work to develop them for their valuable fossil fuel products. Due to the nature of the soil composition and fossil fuels location, extraction is messy, pollutant heavy, and extremely environmentally detrimental. The environment — a UNESCO world heritage site for its floral and faunal diversity—- is not the only loser in the tar field extraction process. Members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation have lived in the area since time immemorial and stand to lose a significant chunk of historically important lands. Tribal leaders and community activists link this power grab by the Canadian government to a long line of tribal marginalization and societal injustice. Beyond losing an area of cultural significance, First Peoples in the areas are also bearing the brunt of the health-related impacts of fossil fuel extraction as well. Water quality in nearby towns has been impacted and reported to reek of methane, but little has been done to address the issue. Likewise, some small towns directly affected by the tar fields have experienced rising rates of rare and difficult-to-treat cancers. Marginalized communities are far likely to bear the brunt of the environmental impacts associated with development and resource extraction. These effects cause serious health risks and warrant substantial concern regarding environmental justice in many nations. Unless we can begin to hold the greedy corporate elite responsible for their business practices and shift to greener policies, we will not be able to stem the destruction that will continue to be wrecked by pollution and climate change.Climate Change devastates Marginalized Groups Wallace-Wells, 19 [David, deputy editor of New York magazine and fellow of New America, ‘The devastation of human life is in view’: what a burning world tells us about climate change, February 2nd, , 8/14/2019] JB****NCC’19 Novice Packet****A few years ago, I began collecting stories of climate change, many of them terrifying, gripping, uncanny narratives, with even the most small-scale sagas playing like fables: a group of Arctic scientists trapped when melting ice isolated their research centre on an island also populated by a group of polar bears; a Russian boy killed by anthrax released from a thawing reindeer carcass that had been trapped in permafrost for many decades. At first, it seemed the news was inventing a new genre of allegory. But of course climate change is not an allegory. Beginning in 2011, about?a million Syrian refugees were unleashed on Europe?by a civil war inflamed by climate change and drought; in a very real sense, much of the “populist moment” the west is passing through now is the result of panic produced by the shock of those migrants. The?likely flooding of Bangladesh threatens to create?10 times as many, or more, received by a world that will be even further destabilised by climate chaos – and, one suspects, less receptive the browner those in need. And then there will be the refugees from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the rest of south Asia –?140 million by 2050, the World Bank estimates, more than 10 times the Syrian crisis. My file of stories grew daily, but very few of the clips, even those drawn from new research published in the most pedigreed scientific journals, seemed to appear in the coverage about climate change we watched on television and read in newspapers.?Climate change?was reported, of course, and even with some tinge of alarm. But the discussion of possible effects was misleadingly narrow, limited almost invariably to the matter of sea level rise. Just as worrisome, the coverage was sanguine, all things considered. One California fire burned so quickly, evacuees sprinting past exploding cars found their sneakers melting to the asphalt As recently as the?1997 signing of the landmark Kyoto Protocol, 2C of global warming was considered the threshold of catastrophe: flooded cities, crippling droughts and heatwaves, a planet battered daily by hurricanes and monsoons we used to call “natural disasters” but will soon normalise as simply “bad weather”. More recently, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific?offered another name for that level of warming: “genocide”. There is almost no chance we will avoid that scenario. The?Kyoto Protocol?achieved, practically, nothing; in the 20 years since, despite all our climate advocacy and legislation and progress on green energy,?we have produced more emissions than in the?20 years before. In reading about warming, you will often come across analogies from the planetary record: the last time the planet was this much warmer, the logic runs, sea levels were here. These conditions are not coincidences. The geologic record is the best model we have for understanding the very complicated climate system, and gauging just how much damage will come from turning up the temperature. Which is why it is especially concerning that recent research into the deep history of the planet suggests that our current climate models may be?underestimating the amount of warming we are due for in 2100?by as much as half. The authors of one recent paper suggested that slashing our emissions could still bring us to 4 or 5C, a scenario, they said, would pose severe risks to the habitability of the entire planet.?“Hothouse Earth”, they called it. Because these numbers are so small, we tend to trivialise the differences between them – one, two, four, five. But, as with world wars or recurrences of cancer, you don’t want to see even one. At 2C,?the ice sheets will begin their collapse, bringing, over centuries, 50 metres of sea-level rise.?An additional 400 million?people will suffer from water scarcity, major cities in the equatorial band of the planet will become unlivable, and even in the northern latitudes heatwaves will kill thousands each summer. There would be 32 times as many extreme heatwaves in India, and each would last five times as long, exposing 93 times more people. This is our best-case scenario. At 3C, southern Europe would be in permanent drought, and the average drought in Central America would last 19 months longer. In northern Africa, the figure is 60 months longer: five years. At 4C, there would be?8m more cases of dengue fever?each year in Latin America alone and close to annual global food crises. Damages from river flooding would grow thirtyfold in Bangladesh, twentyfold in India, and as much as sixtyfold in the UK. Globally, damages from climate-driven natural disasters could pass $600tn – more than twice the wealth that exists in the world today. Conflict and warfare?could double.Climate change disproportionately affects minorities Minority Rights Group 2019 (The Minority Rights Group works to secure the rights of ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities and indigenous peoples "Climate change further reinforces inequalities and disproportionately affects minorities and indigenous peoples, according to MRG’s annual Trends Report," DOA 8/14/2019 AAS) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Minority Rights Group International (MRG) launches today the 2019 edition of its annual ‘Minority and Indigenous Trends’. This year’s report focuses on the distinct impact that climate change has on minorities and indigenous peoples as the discrimination and exclusion they face around the world leave them disproportionately vulnerable to its effects. Although the climate crisis leaves no country or community unaffected, its social impacts deepen the inequalities of the world’s most marginalised. Minorities and indigenous peoples are already acutely feeling its consequences before many other communities. ‘“Business as usual” trajectories have been unable to unravel the structural discrimination that characterises global societies. This has left minorities and indigenous peoples behind, inevitably forming the frontline to the unfolding climate disaster’, says Joshua Castellino, MRG’s Executive Director. While recognition of the social and institutional dimensions of extreme weather events and other ‘natural’ disasters is increasing, not enough is being done to address their impact on marginalised communities. This new report covers a range of case studies from every continent which describe how minorities and indigenous peoples are shouldering the burden of such disasters. Examples from the text include: South Asia’s Dalits, frequently concentrated in areas lacking access to water and sanitation, are often left vulnerable during monsoons. These communities may also be excluded from emergency assistance due to discrimination. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 disproportionately impacted African Americans and other minorities. Similar outcomes were seen in the wake of disasters such as Hurricane Sandy in coastal New Jersey in 2012 and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017. The Sámi and other indigenous communities are rapidly having to adapt as melting ice and other changes threaten traditional livelihoods in the Arctic region, where temperatures are rising twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Global migration movements are also reflecting a quickly changing environment. For instance: Pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in countries such as Chad where changes to the climate are severe, are having their traditionally nomadic way of life challenged by factors such as desertification, drought and reduced rainfall. Changing weather patterns and a lack of resources have disrupted traditional migration routes and intensified competition and conflict with other sedentary communities. For low-lying Pacific island states such as Kiribati, rising sea levels pose an existential threat to a wealth of cultural and spiritual traditions tied to ancestral lands. Faced with the prospect of an uninhabitable homeland, the Kiribati government is planning a resettlement of much of its population. Even if these countries avert a humanitarian catastrophe in the decades to come, their unique heritage could face extinction due to forced displacement. Meanwhile, indigenous knowledge systems and other traditional practices related to sustainable management of the environment are already under threat. Indigenous peoples’ unique understanding of local ecosystems, developed over centuries, means that approximately 80 per cent of the world’s remaining biodiversity is being stewarded by indigenous peoples – a situation that would logically justify their place at the centre any environmental decision-making. However, power inequalities have left minority and indigenous communities on the fringes of climate change negotiations. Even worse, despite these communities being among those least responsible for the climate crisis, they are the most affected by its consequences. These include the damage being caused by governments in their attempts at mitigation and adaptation. For example: In the Brazilian Amazon, indigenous communities face displacement following the construction of hydroelectric dams such as Belo Monte without their free, prior and informed consent. Besides the damage inflicted on local communities, with thousands of lives uprooted, the supposed environmental benefits of these developments are increasingly being called into question. Likewise, Kenya’s Sengwer people have been violently evicted by Kenya Forest Service guards with connections to environmental and climate change mitigation programmes funded by international donors such as the European Union and the World Bank.Climate change disproportionately affects marginalized groups, yet the negative impacts aren’t reported or studied Lloyd and Hales 2/22 [Simon Lloyd works at the Department of Public Health, Environments, and Society, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. Simon Hales works at the Department of Public Health, University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand. “Challenges and gaps in assessing impacts of climate change on health in rural areas”, pp. 1-4, 02/22/2019, , Accessed 08-14-2019 ECT] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Introduction Climate change is expected to cause significant harms to population health, with poor and disenfranchised groups facing the greatest risks (Smith et al., 2014). On the other hand, ongoing progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will greatly improve health, particularly of those currently living in poverty (Dzebo et al., 2018). These two processes will interact, with climate change potentially impairing development and its health benefits (Watts et al., 2018) and development potentially bringing both synergies and trade-offs for climate change mitigation and adaptation (Roy et al., 2018). Both climate change and progress on the SDGs will have distinct impacts on the health of rural populations (Dasgupta, 2014, De La O Campos et al., 2018). Presently, rural communities bear a significant proportion of the global burden of disease and are home to around 80% of the world’s population living in extreme poverty (De La O Campos et al., 2018), making them particularly vulnerable to climate change. Further, ill health may pull people and households into poverty or prevent them from moving out of it (Hallegatte and Rozenberg, 2017) and, conversely, poverty may contribute to ill health in rural populations (e.g. Lloyd et al., 2018). The mutually supportive and contradictory interactions between climate change, actions to mitigate and adapt to it, progress towards the SDGs, poverty, and population health pose major challenges to assessing (and reducing) the potential the impacts of climate change on the health of rural populations. This background paper gives an overview of these challenges from the perspective of population health research and modelling. We note that this paper does not set out to provide a comprehensive review of the current state of knowledge; rather, we draw on our experience of assessing the impacts of climate change on health – which is largely based in scenario-based modelling - to identify more widely applicable challenges and gaps. The paper is structured as follows. The remainder of this section briefly outlines the relations between climate change, population health and the SDGs. The subsequent sections focus on three sets of challenges faced when assessing the health impacts of climate change in rural areas, broadly moving from the general to the more particular. Firstly, the challenges in untangling the mutually conditioning relations between climate change and development, and between poverty1 and health. Secondly, the challenge of representing the distinct qualities of rural areas in climate-health impact assessments. Thirdly, we discuss challenges when assessing health impactsin scenario-based modelling2 . Finally, we tie the challenges together to identify how gaps may be filled to develop policy-relevant research and modelling. Climate change and population health Patterns of population health may be characterised as ‘structured chance’ (Krieger, 2012). That is, within a given population, any individual’s risk of poor health is partly driven by chance, while overall population-level rates of poor health are structured by contextual factors and differ systematically across populations. Climate change, which occurs at large spatial scales, changes these structural conditions and - in combination with other contextual factors- affectsrisk in entire populations, albeit the distribution of risk is likely to vary by sub-group (McMichael et al., 2017). For rural areas, the combinations of particular contextual factors and climate change are likely to pose a different set of risks than in urban areas. There are three general routes from climate change to population health (Figure 1, Panel A). Direct routes, for instance via increased heat waves; indirect routes via ecosystem changes, which may, for example, alter the range of disease-carrying vectors; and, indirect routes through impacts on societal systems, such as parts of the global-food system. As these routes become more complex, a wider array of non-climate factors come into play. Underlining this, McMichael (2017) warned against “climate determinism” when assessing future health under climate change, with climate instead being seen as a contributor or amplifier. This suggests that to understand potential patterns of health risks, as well as steps that may be taken to reduce vulnerability, it is necessary to focus on both climatic and social conditions. The major impacts of climate change on health (compared to no climate change) – based on the scenarios assessed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) – are summarized in Figure 1, Panel B. The health impacts of climate change are already being increasingly felt via a wide range of exposures and outcomes, as tracked, for example, by the “Lancet Countdown” (Watts et al., 2018) (see Box 1). Many, if not most, of these impacts are likely to be significantly affecting poor rural communities (e.g. agricultural labour loss due to heat stress; food security and undernutrition due to crop yield reduction; extreme weather impacts on livelihoods). However, given the scope of the Lancet Countdown (which aims to develop a global monitoring system), but also “… the need for more detailed, national-level, and local-level analyses”, specific effects on rural and/or poor communities are not reported. Under the Paris Agreement (United Nations, 2015a) attention has been drawn to the implications of limiting future warming to 1.5?C or 2?C 3 . The IPCC recently assessed the potential health impacts in such futures based on papers published since 2008 (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018). Overall, it was concluded that 2°C warming poses greater risks to human health than warming of 1.5°C, with the risks often varying regionally. The authors reported, “There is very high confidence that each additional unit of warming could increase heat-related morbidity and mortality, and that adaptation would reduce the magnitude of impacts. There is high confidence that ozone-related mortality could increase if precursor emissions remain the same, and that higher temperatures could affect the transmission of some infectious diseases, with increases and decreases projected depending on the disease (e.g., malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus and Lyme disease), region and degree of temperature change.” An associated paper (Ebi et al., 2018) also reported that, “Three studies compared health risks associated with food insecurity at 1.5?C and 2?C, concluding that risks are higher at 2?C.” The authors noted that there was a lack of assessments that specifically aimed to estimate health impacts for a given temperature change, with estimates instead made for a given future time-slice. Using these latter estimates to derive temperature change-related impacts compromises the potential to assess the combined impacts of climate and development on health under which 1.5?C and 2?C of warming may be reached. Further, in the above, rural-specific impacts were not reported. It was noted that since IPCC AR5, there has been limited research on climate impacts on livelihoods, poverty and rural areas. These areas, along with research on health in the context socioeconomic conditions and climate change at 1.5?C – i.e. precisely the focuses of this background document - were highlighted as areas with gaps in understanding (Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2018). The SDGs, climate change, and population health SDG 3 is specifically about health, but there are more than 50 health-related SDG targets across at least 10 goals (WHO, 2018). In general, progress is being made, but for some indicators, the required rates of change to meet the targets are far higher than the pace of progress achieved in any country in the recent past: these include child malnutrition, several infectious diseases including malaria and neglected tropical diseases, and violence associated with conflict (GBD 2017 SDG Collaborators, 2018). Climate change poses a threat to the achievement of many of the health-related SDG targets; Table 1 shows the health-related SDG targets that climate change may affect. However, the interactions between climate change and the SDGs are complex, posing difficulties for health impact assessments. We discus this in the next section.Climate change harms marginalized populations the most and that hasn’t changed in the past yearCottrell 18 (Clif, “Indigenous Peoples in the US are Disproportionately Affected by Climate Change Says New US Climate Reports, 11/29/19 accessed 8/14/19 , CP) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Researchers have long noted disparities in pollution impacts: climate change hits people of color the hardest. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto met with Chispa Nevada and activists this week to hear from, and highlight, voices who have traditionally been left behind in climate change politics and policy. The socioeconomically disproportionate impacts of pollution have driven environmental justice campaigns for recognition, protections, and interventions in areas affected by pollution. Ample research has demonstrated that minorities, on average, are subjected to poorer air quality than white Americans. People of color are still far more likely to live near polluters and breathe polluted air than white people across the U.S., according to the Environmental Protections Agency’s National Center for Environmental Assessment. According to the study’s authors, “results at national, state, and county scales all indicate that non-Whites tend to be burdened disproportionately to Whites.” During this week’s discussion with Cortez Masto, Emily Zamora, a mother of a four-year-old boy living in North Las Vegas – a city with a high rate of poverty and high concentration of minority communities – held up a red and white plastic inhaler. “I just want to show you what it’s like to have a kid with severe asthma each and every day,” she said, her voice cracking. “Something that fails a lot in the conversation of environmental justice is the intersection with health care.” In the last two years she said her son has been in the hospital for asthma complications three times, the last one hospitalizing him for a whole week. “His last attack he started off with a cough and that lead to him going into respiratory failure and going into cardiac arrest,” said Zamora, who also volunteers with Chispa. She told Cortez Masto the lower quality of air in communities of color make her fear for the safety of her son. Once he starts pre-k, putting him in a school bus is one of her biggest fears, she said, noting the pollution produced by diesel fuel school buses. According to Chispa Nevada there are approximately 181,000 students in Nevada who ride school buses in over 17 school districts. Chispa estimates that over half of those children are Latino or African-American. More than 1 in 12 children in Nevada suffer from asthma, and that number is higher in lower income urban neighborhoods. Pollution from school buses, at least, is an issue that has even been taken up by the Nevada Legislature. On Tuesday, SB299, which makes up to $15 million available for school districts to purchase electric school buses, was unanimously supported by the Nevada Senate with a 21-0 vote. “I don’t want to put him in a situation where he’s going to have more attacks,” Zamora said. Dr. Mary House, who leads Mountaintop Faith Ministries and is a member of the Faith Organizing Alliance, said she hears how environmental issues and air quality affects her congregation and their families. “Because of poverty, especially in our communities, our children are suffering,” House said. “Black children are two times more likely to have asthma than white kids.” “In the African-American community we sometimes feel like we don’t exist” when it comes to environmental issues, House said, noting that there is little outreach in her community on the environmental issues that affect them. “We need to be included in the steps,” House said. Kimberly Estrada, a student at Nevada State, said children in her own family who face the most health issues are the ones living in low-income communities with dense housing near major roads and highways. Poorer neighborhoods are often sited closer to factories or highways, both of which contribute significantly to pollution levels. In a study published in Environmental Research Letter, researchers determined that polluters— factories, warehouse and other facilities using toxic substances — were overwhelmingly located near minority or poor communities. Communities she grew up in are often ignored when investing in new clean energy technology, said Estrada. “When we talk about issues on clean air and clean energy, we need to think of them as opportunities, and make sure those opportunities go to people who are affected the most,” Estrada said, “including making sure we are encouraging people in low-income neighborhoods to be a part of the solution, like community solar panels.” Barbra Hartzell, who is of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe of Lake Havasu, said that for the longest time indigenous communities were not included in the conversation on environmental justice, and were largely sidelined by environmental agencies, large environmental organizations, and academics. “We’ve done so much damage to the earth and now here we are,” Hartzell said. “It’s time to embrace our indigenous communities who are the stewards of this land. This is where they came from. If anyone knows how to help mend this broken road it is our elders and it is our youth.” “The land is our mother. You respect her like your mother,” Hartzell said. Cortez Masto said the issues and points underscore why front line communities must be included in discussions on the environment, and highlighted her new appointment to the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis. “At the end of the day this is probably the most important issue for all of us and the future of this planet,” Cortez Masto said. “There’s no planet B. We need to get it right.” It’s here now The first sentence of last year’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment that “The impacts of climate change are already being felt in communities across the country.” Climate change will make Nevada more expensive and less habitable, according to some of the assessment, which also found that low-income people are the ones being hit the hardest by climate change. “Impacts within and across regions will not be distributed equally,” the report states. “People who are already vulnerable, including lower-income and other marginalized communities, have lower capacity to prepare for and cope with extreme weather and climate-related events and are expected to experience greater impacts.” In hot, desert areas like Southern Nevada, even hotter temperatures will mean increased air conditioning, pressuring demands on the energy infrastructure that can lead not only to higher utility bills but power outages and blackouts. Researchers reported earlier this month that Las Vegas is getting hotter faster than any other city in the nation. More than 90 percent of Nevadans live in urban areas. “Urban populations experiencing socioeconomic inequality or health problems have greater exposure and susceptibility to climate change,” according to the Climate Assessment. People without access to housing with sufficient insulation and air conditioning (for example, renters and the homeless) have greater exposure to heat stress, according to the report. Not only that but extreme weather can disrupt the public transportation network which would disproportionately affect low-income people, older adults, people with limited English proficiency, and other vulnerable urban populations. “These changes strain household budgets, increase people’s exposure to heat, and limit the delivery of medical and social services,” the Climate Assessment explained. Bringing forward legislature to combat climate change and avoid more damage to communities of color and low-income communities must be a top priority for the Senate, said Cortez Masto, calling for the development and investment of new technology to reduce the country’s carbon footprint including electric cars, smart communities, and other innovations. “If we are not planning strategically and preparing” for the strains climate change will put on Nevada infrastructure and communities, said Cortez Masto, “we are going to be caught off guard when it comes, and many of our communities are going to be damaged.”Squo environmental policies are devastating for people of color- the aff solves Noisecat 19 (Julian Brave Noisecat is an independent journalist specializing in indigenous issues. No, climate action can't be separated from social justice. The Guardian. 6/11/19 DOA 8/14/19) SB****NCC’19 Novice Packet****And that’s just the energy sector. To decarbonize our economy, we must make equally challenging choices across many other sectors – transportation, agriculture, buildings, manufacturing. In this vast and tangled web of society-wide choices, questions of social justice are everywhere. Up until now, legislators have mostly made these decisions in ways that harm communities of color, working families and the poor. We build much of our polluting infrastructure – power plants, industrial sites, highways and waste facilities – in these communities. As a consequence, African Americans are nearly three times more likely to die from asthma-related causes than white people. Nearly half of Latinos live in counties where air quality does not meet EPA clean air standards. Indigenous communities like the Navajo nation live with the residual effects of uranium pollution in their water, exposing as many as 54,000 Navajos to harm – and that’s just one tribe. At the same time, the climate crisis is a driver of injustice, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. Communities of color number among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change because they live in areas at higher risk of wildfires and flooding – often without basic economic protections like insurance. In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina displaced 75,000 African Americans and hollowed out the city’s black middle class, which has never recovered. Today, the city’s black population is smaller and poorer. Similar dynamics are at play in Houston, where a year after Hurricane Harvey the poorest communities – primarily Latino and black – have been the slowest to recover.Energy PovertyAll individuals deserve electricity access – but most don’t get it – we have an obligation to rectify the government’s failure to provide energy to the poorTully 6 – former BP Postdoctoral Fellow of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation and of the Law Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science(Stephen, “The Human Right to Access Electricity,” The Electricity Journal vol 19 issue 3, April 2006, pg 30-39, dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Characterizing electricity as an essential civic service implies that governments are expected to provide access to an equal supply of electricity to all individuals within their jurisdiction or control. Drawing upon the sources identi?ed in Section I, the normative content and scope of the human right to access electricity entitles everyone to access a reliable, adequate, and affordable electricity supply of suf?cient quality for personal and household (domestic) use. Elaborating upon each of these elements in turn, ‘‘everyone’’ implies that electrical facilities and services are universally available without discrimination. Special protective measures to ensure that marginalized social groups enjoy electricity access would not qualify as discrimination. Signi?cantly, the human right is formulated as one of access rather than a right to electricity per se. ‘‘Access’’ must be physical (an adequate infrastructure exists), geographically proximate (located near end users) and economical (affordable). The term ‘‘access’’ ?rst implies equality of opportunity which permits everyone to develop their own capabilities without undue restriction. It also requires governments to remedy situations of de facto inequality by removing barriers to participation and instituting af?rmative measures in favor of disadvantaged groups. Second, the duty of suppliers to provide electricity upon demand is contingent upon consumers ?rst being eligible, namely, satisfying the supply conditions including the ability to make ?nancial payment. Third, access is consistent with the obligation of progressive realization envisaged by the ICESCR which acknowledges the resource constraints confronting government. Governments would be expected to incrementally expand electricity networks over time in light of available energy sources, local energy requirements, and population density. Fourth, access is consistent with the terminology of relevant political declarations within the sustainable development context, a topic considered further below. Finally, individuals do not want electricity per se but rather the goods and services it produces (in other words, their demand is derived). Returning to the right as formulated above, ‘‘reliable’’ means that electricity supplies are regular, dependable, secure, and continuous. Disconnection must not be arbitrary: it is only permissible in certain de?ned circumstances (for example, non-payment, illegal use, and risk to human health or safety) and must be exercised consistently with proper procedures (for example, noti?cation and opportunity to rectify). An ‘‘adequate’’ electricity supply means that consumers should not be deprived of the minimum essential level necessary to lead a life in human dignity, a particularly vague normative expectation. ‘‘Suf?cient quality’’ means that the supply constitutes an acceptable strength to power the appliance for which it is intended whereas ‘‘personal and household use’’ implies that electricity dedicated to satisfying basic human needs enjoys priority above directly productive but competing agricultural or industrial applications.Warming Turns DAAll of your DA impacts ranging from disease, immigration, the economy, to terrorism will be exacerbated by climate change – action now prevents runaway warming Becker, executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP),worked on energy efficiency and renewable energy programs for 15 years at the U.S. Department of Energy, 2011(Bill , “ Will global warming chill Obama’s legacy?” January 24, 2011 accessed6-27 TM) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Finishing the job in Afghanistan and Iraq, reforming immigration policy and bringing the economy back to health will be high on the President’s priority list, as they should be. He’s expected to pay special attention to economic recovery in his State of the Union speech tomorrow.However, unmitigated climate change would almost certainly sabotage the achievements on which he has invested so much time and political capital.? Consider these impacts if climate change goes unchecked:Immigration: Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton estimates that, depending on the severity of climate disruption, as many as 7 million residents of Mexico may immigrate to the United States over the next seven decades because of reduced food production. In other words, the United States is not immune to the problem of climate refugees. There goes immigration reform.Health Care: Last September, the leaders of 18 national medical organizations and scores of state health officials wrote to the White House and Congress, warning that because of global warming “more Americans will be exposed to conditions that can result in illness and death due to respiratory illness, heat- and heat-related stress and disease carried by insects. Children, the elderly, the poor and people with serious health conditions will be most adversely affected.” There goes Obama’s historic attempt to control health care costs.Terrorism: Defense and intelligence experts predict that climate change will destabilize many of the world’s most volatile regions, producing new recruiting grounds for terrorists.? “Well before glaciers melt or sea levels rise, global climate change will spur instability on a global scale, which will exacerbate many of the traditional national security challenges with which we are grappling today, including terrorism,” according to experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There go Obama’s efforts – and the enormous investment of American lives and treasure – to defeat terrorism.A Healthy Economy: Just the hydrological impacts of climate change will result in net losses of $1.2 trillion to America’s GDP between 2010 and 2050, cost 7 million jobs and reduce real disposable personal income by $1.7 trillion, according to researchers at Sandia National Laboratory. We’re already bearing high collateral costs for fossil energy consumption. The National Research Council reports that burning fossil fuels for transportation and electricity resulted in hidden costs of $120 billion in 2005. There goes prosperity.Energy Insecurity: We remain addicted to imported oil and vulnerable to the economic body blows inflicted by oil prices.? Oil price shocks preceded and contributed to nearly all of our recessions since 1947. There goes economic stability.Because climate change is progressing so rapidly toward tipping points and because it becomes more difficult and expensive to mitigate with each passing year, Obama may be the last U.S. president with the opportunity to head off its worst damages. Two or three decades from now, he is likely to be the leader history judges most responsible if people around the world are suffering from intense, diverse and irreversible stresses.? If the world of 2030 is hard to imagine, look at all the extreme weather events and natural disasters in 2010 – the second-worst year on record – and multiply them by many times. Last year’s fires, floods, mudslides, blizzards and drought, some still underway in this new year, are evidence of what happens when weather variability and climate change combine.FramingStructural Violence O/W PredictionsStatus quo oppression is functionally a militaristic war on the poor – reject the desire to revert to the status quo in the face of wildly constructed threats in favor of including the narratives of the oppressedCuomo 96 – Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies @ Univ of Cincinnati(Chris, “War is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia, Vol. 11, No. 4, Women and Violence (Autumn, 1996), pp. 30-45, dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the depth and specificity of the every- day effects of militarism on women, on people living in occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant pres- ence of militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declara- tions of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embed- ded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state. Moving away from crisis-driven politics and ontologies concerning war and military violence also enables consideration of relationships among seemingly disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of state-sponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war." Given current American obsessions with nationalism, guns, and militias, and growing hunger for the death penalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot underestimate the need for philosophical and political attention to connec- tions among phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded militaristic campaigns.Structural violence is the proximate cause of all war- creates priming that psychologically structures escalationHughes et al 4 Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn) (Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace, pg. 19-22****NCC’19 Novice Packet****This large and at first sight “messy” Part VII is central to this anthology’s thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized, bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Daly’s version of US apartheid in Chicago’s South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter 38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the “smelly” working classes (Orwell, Chapter 36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions, interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US “inner city” to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37 and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada, Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34). Absolutely central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime violence. Close attention to the “little” violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of “violence studies” that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of “small wars and invisible genocides” (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996; 1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes, courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The violence continuum also refers to the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable into expendable nonpersons and assuming the license - even the duty - to kill, maim, or soul-murder. We realize that in referring to a violence and a genocide continuum we are flying in the face of a tradition of genocide studies that argues for the absolute uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust and for vigilance with respect to restricted purist use of the term genocide itself (see Kuper 1985; Chaulk 1999; Fein 1990; Chorbajian 1999). But we hold an opposing and alternative view that, to the contrary, it is absolutely necessary to make just such existential leaps in purposefully linking violent acts in normal times to those of abnormal times. Hence the title of our volume: Violence in War and in Peace. If (as we concede) there is a moral risk in overextending the concept of “genocide” into spaces and corners of everyday life where we might not ordinarily think to find it (and there is), an even greater risk lies in failing to sensitize ourselves, in misrecognizing protogenocidal practices and sentiments daily enacted as normative behavior by “ordinary” good-enough citizens. Peacetime crimes, such as prison construction sold as economic development to impoverished communities in the mountains and deserts of California, or the evolution of the criminal industrial complex into the latest peculiar institution for managing race relations in the United States (Waquant, Chapter 39), constitute the “small wars and invisible genocides” to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are “invisible” genocides not because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. In this regard, Bourdieu’s partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of “normal” social practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror and state repression, Similarly, Basaglia’s notion of “peacetime crimes” - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime and peacetime violence. Peacetime crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary, everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US immigration and naturalization border raids on “illegal aliens” versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the Cherokee “Trail of Tears.” Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. Internal “stability” is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied “strangle-holds.” Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic “peace” possible. It is an easy-to-identify peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The public consensus is based primarily on a new mobilization of an old fear of the mob, the mugger, the rapist, the Black man, the undeserving poor. How many public executions of mentally deficient prisoners in the United States are needed to make life feel more secure for the affluent? What can it possibly mean when incarceration becomes the “normative” socializing experience for ethnic minority youth in a society, i.e., over 33 percent of young African American men (Prison Watch 2002). In the end it is essential that we recognize the existence of a genocidal capacity among otherwise good-enough humans and that we need to exercise a defensive hypervigilance to the less dramatic, permitted, and even rewarded everyday acts of violence that render participation in genocidal acts and policies possible (under adverse political or economic conditions), perhaps more easily than we would like to recognize. Under the violence continuum we include, therefore, all expressions of radical social exclusion, dehumanization, depersonal- ization, pseudospeciation, and reification which normalize atrocious behavior and violence toward others. A constant self-mobilization for alarm, a state of constant hyperarousal is, perhaps, a reasonable response to Benjamin’s view of late modern history as a chronic “state of emergency” (Taussig, Chapter 31). We are trying to recover here the classic anagogic thinking that enabled Erving Goffman, Jules Henry, C. Wright Mills, and Franco Basaglia among other mid-twentieth-century radically critical thinkers, to perceive the symbolic and structural relations, i.e., between inmates and patients, between concentration camps, prisons, mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other “total institutions.” Making that decisive move to recognize the continuum of violence allows us to see the capacity and the willingness - if not enthusiasm - of ordinary people, the practical technicians of the social consensus, to enforce genocidal-like crimes against categories of rubbish people. There is no primary impulse out of which mass violence and genocide are born, it is ingrained in the common sense of everyday social life. The mad, the differently abled, the mentally vulnerable have often fallen into this category of the unworthy living, as have the very old and infirm, the sick-poor, and, of course, the despised racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic groups of the moment. Erik Erikson referred to “pseudo- speciation” as the human tendency to classify some individuals or social groups as less than fully human - a prerequisite to genocide and one that is carefully honed during the unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, “seemingly unintelligible” outbreaks of mass violence. Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of “angel-babies,” and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby coffins but no food to hungry families. Everyday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations. It is close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by “symbolic violence,” the violence that is often “nus-recognized” for something else, usually something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls “terror as usual.” All these terms are meant to reveal a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and “peace-time crimes.” Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies “rneconnaissance” as the prerequisite of the social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate. While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of “controlling processes” (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide possible? In this volume we are suggesting that mass violence is part of a continuum, and that it is socially incremental and often experienced by perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders - and even by victims themselves - as expected, routine, even justified. The preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches, hospitals, and the military. They harbor the early “warning signs” (Charney 1991), the “priming” (as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the “genocidal continuum” (as we call it) that push social consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable “social parasites” (the nursing home elderly, “welfare queens,” undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated communities; and reversed feelings of victimization).Ethics O/WEthics First –you can’t separate ethical orientation from politics Meszaros 95 (Istavan, Prof. Emeritus @ U of Sussex, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, p 409-410) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Politics and morality are so closely intertwined in the real world that it is hardly imaginable to confront and resolve the conflicts of any age without bringing into play the crucial dimensions of both. Thus, whenever it is difficult to face the problems and contradictions of politics in the prevailing social order, theories of morality are also bound to suffer the consequences. Naturally, this relationship tends to prevail also in the positive direction. As the entire history of philosophy testifies, the authors of all major ethical works are also the originators of the seminal theoretical works on politics; and vice versa, all serious conceptualizations of politics have their necessary corollaries on the plane of moral discourse. This goes for Aristotle as much as for Hobbes and Spinoza, and for Rousseau and Kant as much as for Hegel. Indeed, in the case of Hegel we find his ethics fully integrated into his Philosophy of Right, i.e. his theory of the state. This is why it is so astonishing to read in Lukácss ‘Tactics and Ethics’ that ‘Hegel’s system is devoid of ethics’: a view which he later mellows to saying that the Hegelian treatment of ethics suffers the consequences of his system and the conservative bias of his theory of the state. It would be much more correct to say that — despite the conservative bias of his political conception — Hegel is the author of the last great systematic treatment of ethics. Compared to that, the twentieth century in the field of ethics (as well as in that of political philosophy) is very problematical. No doubt this has a great deal to do ‘eith the ever narrowing margin of alternatives allowed by the necessary mode of functioning of the global capital system which produces the wisdom of ‘there is no alternative’. For, evidently, there can be no meaningful moral discourse on the premiss that ‘there is no alternative’. Ethics is concerned with the evaluation and implementation of alternative goals which individuals and social groups can actually set themselves in their confrontations with the problems of their age. And this is where the inescapability of politics makes its impact. For even the most intensely committed investigation of ethics cannot be a substitute for a radical critique of politics in its frustrating and alienating contemporary reality. The slogan of ‘there is no alternative did not originate in ethics; nor is it enough to reassert in ethical/ontolog!cal terms the need for alternatives, no matter how passionately this is felt and predicated. The pursuit of viable alternatives to the destructive reality of capital’s social order in all its forms without which the socialist project is utterly pointless —is a practical matter. The role of morality and ethics is crucial to the success of this enterprise. But there can be no hope of success without the joint re-articulation of socialist moral discourse and political strategy, taking fully on board the painful lessons of the recent past. For the left, on the other hand, politics must be the art of building social force in opposition to the system. The left must not, therefore, see the people or popular social force as something given that can be manipulated and only needs to be stirred up, but as something that has to be built. Positive PeaceTheir depictions of crisis-based politics reflect a narrow view of IR that reinforces militarism and causes error replication – reject them to create a new IR framework through the inclusion of alternate narratives that represent excluded subaltern perspectivesRichmond 8 – Director for the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews(Oliver, Peace in International Relations pg 4-7, dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****More than ever, research and policy informed by a contextual understanding of peace is needed, rather than merely a focus on fear reproduced by worst case security scenarios stemming from a balance of power or terror derived from military, political or economic analytical frameworks that assume violence and greed to be endemic. Indeed, in the contemporary context it is also clear that any discussion of peace as opposed to war and conflict must also connect with research and policy on development, justice and environmental sustainability. These are the reasons why, for example, the liberal peace – the main concept of peace in circulation today – is in crisis. Much of the debate about war that dominates IR is also indicative of assumptions about what peace is or should be. This ranges from the pragmatic removal of overt violence, an ethical peace, ideology, to a debate about a self-sustaining peace. Anatol Rapoport conceptualised ‘peace through strength’; ‘balance of power’; ‘collective security’; ‘peace through law’; ‘personal or religious pacifism’; and ‘revolutionary pacifism’.14 Hedley Bull saw peace as the absence of war in an international society,15 though of course war was the key guarantee for individual state survival. These views represent the mainstream approaches and indicate why the creation of an explicit debate about peace is both long overdue and vital in an international environment in which major foreign policy decisions seem to be taken in mono-ideational environment where ideas matter, but only certain, hegemonic ideas. With the exception of orthodox versions of realism and Marxism, approaches to IR theory offer a form of peace that many would recognise as personally acceptable. Realism fails to offer much for those interested in peace, unless peace is seen as Darwinian and an unreflexive, privileged concept only available to the powerful and a commonwealth they may want to create. Most realist analysis expends its energy in reactive discussions based upon the inherency of violence in human nature, now discredited in other disciplines,16 which are ultimately their own undoing. This is not to say that other approaches do not also suffer flaws, but the focus on individuals, society, justice, development, welfare, norms, transnationalism, institutionalism or functionalism offers an opportunity for a negotiation of a form of peace that might be more sustainable because it is more broadly inclusive of actors and issues. In other words, parsimony, reductionism and rationalism run counter to a peace that engages fully with the diversity of life and its experiences. Methodological considerations Any discussion of peace is susceptible to universalism, idealism and rejectionism, and to collapse under the weight of its own ontological subjectivity. This study is indebted to a genealogical approach that can be used to challenge the common assumption of IR theorists that peace as a concept is ontologically stable, in terms of representing an objective truth (plausible or not), legitimating the exercise of power, and representing a universal ethic.17 To rehearse this, a genealogical approach allows for an investigation of the subject without deference to a meta-narrative of power and knowledge in order to unsettle the depiction of a linear projection from ‘origin’ to ‘truth’. The camouflaging of the subjective nature of peace disguises ideology, hegemony, dividing practices and marginalisation. In addition, it is important to note the framework of negative or positive epistemology of peace, as developed by Rasmussen, which indicates an underlying ontological assumption within IR theory as to whether a broad or narrow version of peace is actually possible.18 Many of the insights developed in this study of IR theory and its approaches to peace arise through the author’s reading of, and about, and research in, conflict resolution, peacekeeping and peacebuilding in the context of the many conflicts of the post-war world, the UN system, and the many subsequent ‘operations’ that have taken place around the world. The investigation of discourses indicates the problematic dynamics of positivist approaches19 and allows for a deeper interrogation reaching beyond the state than a traditional positivist theoretical/empirical approach.20 This enables an examination of competing concepts and discourses of peace derived from IR theory rather than accepting their orthodoxies. Peace, and in particular the liberal and realist foundations of the liberal peace, can be seen as a result of multiple hegemonies in IR.21 Deploying these approaches allows for an identification of the key flaws caused by the limited peace projects associated with peace in IR, and for a theoretical and pragmatic move to put some consideration of peace at the centre of what has now become an ‘inter-discipline’. For much of the existence of IR, the concept of peace has been in crisis, even though on the discipline’s founding after the First World War it was hoped it would help discover a post-war peace dividend. In this it failed after the First World War, but it has been instrumental in developing a liberal discourse of peace after the Second World War, though this in itself has become much contested (as it certainly was during the Cold War). Even peace research has been criticised for having the potential to become ‘a council of imperialism’ whereby telling the story of ‘power politics’ means that researchers participate and Introduction 5 reaffirm its tenets through disciplinary research methods and the continuing aspiration for a ‘Kantian University’.22 This effectively creates a ‘differend’ underlining how institutions and frameworks may produce injustices even when operating in good faith.23 This requires the unpacking of the ‘muscular objectivism’ 24 that has dominated IR in the Western academy and policy world, allowing an escape from what can be described as a liberal–realist methodology and ontology connected to positivist views of IR. The demand that all knowledge is narrowly replicable and should be confirmed and implemented by ‘research’ in liberal institutions, organisations, agencies and universities without need for a broader exploration is not adequate if IR is to contribute to peace.25 Thus, underlying this study is the notion of methodological pluralism, which has become a generally accepted objective for researchers across many disciplines who want to avoid parochial constraints on how research engages with significant dilemmas, and who accept the growing calls for more creative approaches to examining the ‘great questions’ of IR.26 To gain a multidimensional understanding of peace as one of these great questions, one needs to unsettle mimetic approaches to representation that do not recognise subjectivity, rather than trying to replicate an eternal truth or reality.27 IR theory should fully engage with the differend – in which lies its often unproblematised claim to be able to interpret the other – that its orthodoxy may be guilty of producing, and open itself up to communication and learning across boundaries of knowledge in order to facilitate a ‘peace dividend’ rather than a ‘peace differend’. The critique developed here is not ‘irresponsible pluralism’ as some would have it,28 but an attempt to contribute to the ongoing repositioning of a discipline now increasingly concerned with IR’s connections with everyday life and agency. In this context, each chapter of this book interrogates the theoretical debates in IR as well as their theoretical, methodological and epistemological implications for peace. The nature of international order is heavily contested in theoretical, methodological, ontological and epistemological terms, meaning that the consensus on the contemporary liberal peace represents an anomalous agreement rather than a broad-ranging consensus. Rather than support this unquestioningly, IR requires a research agenda for peace if its interdisciplinary contribution to knowledge – and speaking truth to power29 – is to be developed. IR needs to engage broadly with interdisciplinary perspectives30 on peace if it is to contribute to the construction of a framework that allows for the breadth and depth required for peace to be accepted by all, from the local to the global, and therefore to be sustainable. Like social anthropology, IR needs to have an agenda for peace, not just to deal with war, violence, conflict, terrorism and political order at the domestic and international level, but also incorporating the interdisciplinary work that has been carried out in the areas of transnationalism and globalisation, political economy, development, identity, culture and society, gender, children, and the environment, for example. Yet where social anthropology, for example, has elucidated this agenda clearly, IR has been more reticent, despite the claims about peace made on the founding of the discipline.31 As with anthropology, IR should ‘uncover 6 Introduction counterhegemonic and silenced voices, and to explore the mechanisms of their silencing’.32 Of course, this happens in the various areas, and especially in the sub-disciplines of IR. Where there have been efforts to develop peace as a concept, this is by far counterbalanced by the efforts focused on war, terrorism or conflict. Concepts of peace should be a cornerstone of IR interdisciplinary investigation of international politics and everyday life. For the purposes of this study, peace is viewed from a number of perspectives. It can be a specific concept (one among many): it infers an ontological and epistemological position of being at peace, and knowing peace; it infers a methodological approach to accessing knowledge about peace and about constructing it; and it implies a theoretical approach, in which peace is a process and outcome defined by a specific theory.Militarism causes environmental degradationCuomo 96 – Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies @ Univ of Cincinnati(Chris, “War is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia, Vol. 11, No. 4, Women and Violence (Autumn, 1996), pp. 30-45, dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****There are many conceptual and practical connections between military practices in which humans aim to kill and harm each other for some declared "greater good," and nonmilitary practices in which we displace, destroy, or seriously modify nonhuman communities, species, and ecosystems in the name of human interests. An early illustration of these connections was made by Rachel Carson in the first few pages of The Silent Spring (1962), in which she described insecticides as the inadvertent offspring of World War II chemical weapons research. We can now also trace ways in which insecticides were part of the Western-defined global corporatization of agriculture that helped kill off the small family farm and made the worldwide system of food production dependent on the likes of Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Military practices are no different from other human practices that damage and irreparably modify nature. They are often a result of cost-benefit analyses that pretend to weigh all likely outcomes yet do not consider nonhuman entities except in terms of their use value for humans and they nearly always create unforeseeable effects for humans and nonhumans. In addition, everyday military peacetime practices are actually more destructive than most other human activities, they are directly enacted by state power, and, because they function as unquestioned "givens," they enjoy a unique near-immunity to enactments of moral reproach. It is worth noting the extent to which everyday military activities remain largely unscrutinized by environmentalists, espe- cially American environmentalists, largely because fear allows us to be fooled into thinking that "national security" is an adequate excuse for "ecological military mayhem" (Thomas 1995, 16). If environmental destruction is a necessary aspect of war and the peacetime practices of military institutions, an analysis of war which includes its embeddedness in peacetime militarism is necessary to address the environmen- tal effects of war. Such a perspective must pay adequate attention to what is required to prepare for war in a technological age, and how women and other Others are affected by the realities of contemporary military institutions and practices.Their description of war and conflict presupposes that violence is the baseline human emotion that needs to be regulated by liberal governance. This necessitates a violent methodology of crises control.Richmond 8 [Oliver Richmond, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2008. ISSN 0305-8298, Vol. 36 No. 3, pp. 439-470] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****What is peace? This basic question often appears in contemporary literature to have been settled in favour of the ‘liberal peace’, made up of a victor’s peace at its most basic level, an institutional peace to provide international governance and guarantees, a constitutional peace to ensure democracy and free trade, and a civil peace to ensure freedom and rights within society.2 Yet, the liberal peace has, in many post-conflict settings, proved to create a ‘virtual peace’, empty states and institutions that are ambivalent about everyday life.3 In this context peace is widely referred to but rarely defined. Though the concept of peace is often assumed to be normatively irreproachable, formative in the founding of the discipline, and central to the agendas of liberal states, it has rarely been directly approached as an area of study within IR. Instead various sub-disciplines have taken on this challenge. Developing accounts of peace helps chart the different theoretical and methodological contributions in IR, and contributes to IR’s envisaged mission by highlighting the complex issues that then emerge. These include the pressing problem of how peace efforts become sustainable rather than merely inscribed in international and state-level diplomatic and military frameworks. This also raises issues related to an ontology of peace, culture, development, agency and structure, not just in terms of the representations of the world, and of peace, presented in the discipline, but in terms of the sovereignty of the discipline itself and its implications for everyday life.4 In an interdisciplinary and pluralist field of study – as IR has now become – concepts of peace and their sustainability are among those that are central.5 Orthodox IR theory (by which I mean those deploying positivist methods for realist, liberal, or Marxist-oriented approaches) has been in crisis for some time. Orthodox IR has found it very difficult to attract the attention of those working in other disciplines, though critical IR scholars have themselves drawn on other disciplines.6 Even those, for example, working in the sub-disciplines of peace and conflict studies, an area where there has been a long-standing attempt to develop an understanding of peace, have often turned away from IR theory because it has failed to develop an account of peace, focusing instead on the dynamics of power and war, and assuming the realist inherency of violence in human nature and international relations, and the sovereignty of such views, encapsulated by the state, over rights and justice. This raises the question of what the discipline is for, if not for peace. For many, IR theory simply has not been ambitious enough in developing an ‘agenda for peace’ in addition to investigating the causes of war. Axiomatically, Martin Wight once wrote that IR was subject to a poverty of ‘international theory’, focusing as it did on the problem of survival.7 Commonplace arguments usually support the view that liberal polities, notably in the western developed world, are linked oases of democratic peace, and legitimate their constant struggle for survival – or a ‘war for peace’.8 This infers a peace-as-governance. Yet, many orthodox approaches to IR theory routinely ignore the question – or problem – of peace: how is it constituted, one peace or many? Many hoped that science would, as Hobbes wrote, open the way for peace.9 Hobbes, writing in the aftermath of a bloody civil war, wrote Leviathan (often held up to be the epitome of tragic realism in IR) to illustrate that peace was plausible in spite of hatred, scarcity, and violence. Of course, he also developed the notion of the Leviathan as a way to moderate the ‘natural state’ of war. IR has focused on war as a natural state rather than peace and the supposed Freudian death instinct has resonated powerfully through the discipline,10 legitimating liberal notions of global (even hegemonic) governance, conditionality, and on occasion, coercion. Yet, as Fry has argued, a vast range of anthropological and ethnographic evidence shows that peace, conflict avoidance, and accommodation, are the stronger impulses of human culture.11 Critical innovations in the discipline infer searching questions in terms of methodology, epistemology, and ontology about peace, ranging from ways of knowing peace, knowing the minds of others, connecting with debate on gender, culture, and identity. This concerns peace as emancipation, and post-structuralist concerns with discourse, knowledge and power, identity, othering, and empathy. This has opened up pluralist methodologies, empowered feminist readings of the discipline and of peace, a move towards texts, language, artistic expression, and emotions as legitimate sites of concern. These developments have provided fertile ground for placing an everyday peace at the centre of IR. This paper explores such issues in the context of a collage of orthodox and critical IR theory, methods, and ontology, and offers some thoughts about the implications of placing peace at the centre of IR. Focus on war as an event destroys the environmentCuomo 96 – Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies @ Univ of Cincinnati(Chris, “War is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence,” Hypatia, Vol. 11, No. 4, Women and Violence (Autumn, 1996), pp. 30-45, dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****I turn now to a discussion of the environmental effects of war, because I believe these effects to be significant to feminists for two basic reasons. Though women are no more essentially connected to nature than any other organic beings, cultural constructions associate women with nature and help justify the mistreatment of both. Many feminists and ecological feminists have discussed these problematic conceptual connections as created or fueled by the dichot- omous thinking discussed above (Griffin 1989; King 1990; Warren 1990; Cuomo 1992; Plumwood 1993). Others, including Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies (1993), focus on the practical, or material connections between environ- mental degradation and women's oppression. In any case, if women's oppression is connected to the unjustified destruction of nature, or if, as Karen Warren argues, feminists must be against oppression in any form, including the oppression of nature, it is arguable that the ecological effects of war and militarism are feminist issues. Because military ecological destruction occurs primarily "during peacetime," and because it is so directly tied to other forms of ecological and social violence, attention to the ecological impacts of war further illustrates the limitations of only thinking of war in terms of events.Economic Calculus BadTheir representations of an economic threat are merely an expression of capitalist failures that are inevitable – only through rejecting their discourse can we avoid perpetual error replication and have chance at real economic securityTooze 5 Roger, Visiting Professor of International Relations at City University “The Missing : Security, Critical International Political Economy, and Community” Book: Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Edited by Ken Booth (pg. 144) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****We are living at a time of underlying but largely unrecognized economic and financial crisis. In these first years of the twenty-first century, the world's financial, investment, and trading structures are creaking. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has described this time as offering the biggest challenge facing the world economy for over fifty years. It’s a time of high drama and much talk of systemic risk and threats to security, a time when the world economy is affected by uncertainty, risk, and the impediments to economic activity imposed in the search for security, for which the world's governments are desperately seeking solutions,23 Suddenly, past orthodoxies, embedded and institutionalized at every level of government and economy, are no longer automatically seen by academics and policymakers alike as the common sense they have been portrayed as. The values and policies that have driven the operation, institutions, and governance of the world political economy are now part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Although it often seems easy to put the blame for problems on the intransigence or self-interest of the United States or the European Union, this is to mistake the symptoms for the structural imperatives of the embedded logic of neoliberalism. That being the case, the crisis that CSS has identified in common-sense IR with respect to security converges dramatically with the crisis that a critical IPE reveals in orthodox IPE. The continuing concern over financial structures and the failure of the post-2001 Doha Round of the World Trade Organization are fundamental in the sense that these structures and their associated modes of behavior are a necessary and integral part of the system of advanced financial capitalism. Yet from the gaze of a critical IPE this concern is just one element of a larger problem that very few of the analysts and commentators on the world economy acknowledge or, indeed, can even recognize given their assumptions, concepts, and values. Other manifestations of this larger problem include the massive and increasing disparities of wealth and poverty that have accompanied the overall growth of the world product—both within and between national political economies.24 By the early 1990s, for example, the top 1 percent of earners in the United States received more income than the combined total of the bottom 40 percent, and the 400 richest individuals listed by the U.S. Forbes magazine had a net worth equal to the gross domestic product (GDP) of India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Srf Lanka—which together had a combined population of more than 1 billion.25 There has been increasing world unemployment and underemployment, with all the implications of these conditions; the total is now more than 1 billion people, one-third of all possible employees. There is a growing search for meaningful alternatives and complementary forms of community in the face of the manifest problems and limitations of the state, as shown both by the efforts of regional organizations and subnational social movements. And not least, we can see the hardening of the global scientific consensus on the conclusion that human beings, through our economic activities, have destroyed one-third of our natural habitat since 1970 and are also destroying the ozone layer at rates previously thought impossible. Together, these elements making up the contemporary global situation indicate a far broader and a far deeper problem than the myriad economists and business analysts who regularly pontificate in and on our media are able and willing to recognize and discuss. Despite this, these are the people to whom we—as concerned and aware citizens—invariably turn to for knowledge. Our societies have seemingly given them legitimacy to be the only bona fide interpreters of these matters (apart from politicians, who properly claim democratic legitimacy, but most of whom have simply accepted the values and assumptions of a neoliberal economism). Moreover, as this chapter illustrates, we do not seem to be getting much help from those academic disciplines that we might have expected to have had the expertise and critical distance to provide analyses and understanding, namely, international political economy, international relations, and economics. To the extent that these disciplinary practices of knowledge in their mainstream or orthodox manifestations have accepted particular values and assumptions, they have weakened their own ability to offer anything other than system-supporting analyses. This is particularly the case when the prevailing structures of neoliberal capitalism are under threat or are under conditions of longer-term change. Practitioners of orthodox disciplines (particularly, but not solely, economics) are content to offer us their solutions, derived from universal and nomological categories, on the implicit basis of problem-solving theory,26 rather than acknowledge the limitations and inappropriateness of such knowledge for the conditions in which we now find ourselves.27 Robert Cox has developed an important and original critical perspective on political economy.28 He makes and uses the fundamental distinction between two types of theory defined by their purpose: critical theory and problem-solving theory. For Cox problem-solving theory takes the existing institutions and structures as given and attempts to resolve problems within this existing framework, whereas critical theory stands apart from and questions the historical and structural context of problems and attempts to make clear the broader and more long-term forces at work in political economy.29 Cox's two categories are helpful in distinguishing between theories, in setting up different ontologies, and in posing some of the essential questions for a critical IPE. In particular, whose interests are being served by theory and whose purpose is this theory for? What is clearly at stake within the gyrations of the world political economy is our security as individuals and groups. What happens in and to the world political economy today has an impact on most of the world's population, and that impact can be life-threatening or merely lifestyle-threatening, direct or indirect, immediate or long-term, concrete or ideational, and/or any combination of these. The threat often appears to be in the conditions of high instability, high risk, and the demonstrated propensity for rapid, directionless change (with the possibility of systemic crisis and meltdown). Yet, it would be wrong to focus only on the crisis, because it is not only in crisis that our security may be challenged. The very operation of the system of global financial capitalisir/creates significant insecurity for many through the spread of uncertainty but principally through the growth of inequality and poverty. In 1998, Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board—in effect, the world's most powerful financial institution—wrote that "the problems we see with such force today are systemic—they arise from the ordinary workings of global financial capitalism."30 The crisis of the war on terror and the overwhelming mass of debate, discussion, and political noise following developments associated with it, have all worked to obscure this fact. But it is a core feature of capitalism. Barry Buzan argued that "competitive capitalism is . . . founded on a considerable degree of permanent insecurity for all the units within it (individuals, firms, states), making the idea of economic security within capitalism seem a contradiction in terms."31 He concluded: "Without a substantial level of insecurity the system does not work."32 This is an important and often forgotten conclusion which highlights a key structural feature of security within a capitalist system. However, because of the inherent limitations of his approach, Buzan was unable to resolve the more intractable problems of the political economy of security; these stem from his misunderstanding of history, his ontological categories, and his understanding of reality. The impact of normal systemic crisis amplifies the ordinary workings of the world political economy, and the results clearly impact on the security of individuals, families, companies, organizations, and states and governments. But as we said earlier, those ordinary workings in and of themselves increasingly constitute insecurity.33 In this way, the activities of global corporations, rather than constituting the economic security that they and neoliberal commentators claim, can be and are seen by many as a threat. In David Korten's view, "The protection of people and communities from predatory global corporations and finance is arguably the central security issue of our time."34 The human consequences of the structural insecurity of the current world political economy are unfortunately all too easy to illustrate: the closing of factories in Scotland and the North-East of England through the global restructuring of the silicon chip industry; the major disruptions in and the coming closures of automobile and steel factories in the new "old industrial areas" of the United States, which throw whole families and towns out of work; the enormous and unprecedented mass migrations in China from country to city in search of jobs; the daily insecurity of child labor in India, where whole families become dependent upon their children because their parents' labor is too expensive in the global marketplace; the corruption of Colombia by a drug cartel whose legitimacy derives from the fact that the world demand for cocaine provides a better living for the people than the subsistence agriculture under which they previously existed; and the millions directly affected by the problems of the Indonesian economy, many of whom are now living off the contents of municipal rubbish dumps. Each of these illustrations is a powerful indictment of the abstract and formal analysis offered to us daily; it reflects the total failure of the mainstream view (what became labeled the Washington Consensus) on how the world political economy actually works and how it should work. Indeed, for many in the world, through their understanding of what constituted common sense, the key element of security has come to be understood and constituted as economic security—security of sustenance and shelter, security of employment and income, security of energy supplies, security of savings, security of the economy, and security of the global economic system. This does not mean that other aspects of social existence35 are not constituted as relevant to security, but it does reflect what I understand as the economization of both material and ideational life, which together construct the basis and framework for common sense.36 By this, I mean the way in which the values and language of economy have come to dominate and construct all our social, political, and personal lives and spaces; as a result, market values become the sole criteria for social and personal behavior. And notwithstanding all the debates on the nature and extent of globalization,37 the focus on economic security also reflects the widely held perception that there is a global economy and that it is largely uncontrollable by any of the actors who claim to be able to exert control, including the government of the United States. It is the apparently increasingly arbitrary, random, sudden, and unpredictable nature of the workings of the global economy that have heightened the sense that these matters concern our security. At the heart of the problem of making sense of these developments is the limitation on our understandings imposed by the theories and concepts we use. This in turn inhibits our understanding of the s between economy, security, and community. The concepts and language we use to describe and interpret what is going on in the world political economy are not neutral—in their origin, use, or purpose. Nor are they merely instruments through which we can discover an autonomous preexisting reality of political economy.38 Economic theory, concepts, and language are constitutive of reality; this is only too well demonstrated through the problems faced by the poor and the dispossessed in the world political economy.39 In this epistemology, the distinction between theory and practice held by orthodox neopositivist international political economists such as Stephen \ Krasner40 is dissolved. Here, theory and practice are mutually constitutive. No less a successful capitalist than George Soros has clealrly identified the centrality of this mutuality when he writes, in an article entitled "The Capitalist Threat," that markets must be understood “reflexively” because "buyers and sellers in financial markets seek to discount a future that depends on their own decisions."41 The change in our understanding that is brought about by such a recognition of a constitutive theory of IPE is as dramatic as it is fundamental. It is dramatic because it should make us reflect on our own daily lives as a place where the struggles of world political economy are carried on—not at some distant and abstract level of globalization. Consider, for example, that over the period of the most recent crisis in global finance, whose public beginnings were in July 1997, the knowledge most used to comment on the situation, and to make public analyses of it, in most of the media has been through what I call a socialized form of economics—notably economists employed by banks and investment houses. Think of this when you next watch TV news and see who is brought forward by Fox News, BBC, CNN, or whatever broadcasting system. It will normally be an individual working for a bank or financial organization such as NatWest or Morgan Grenfell. The knowledge that is put before viewers and listeners constructs economics as an autonomous, self-contained, objective, rational, and nonpolitical realm of activity and, as such, takes "one part of the human experience— the interaction between buyers and sellers—and makes it the narrow and fragile base for a rickety and unstable Theory of Everything."42 The 1997 global economic crisis was portrayed as a major threat to economic stability and hence to our security. It was explained as a failure of Asian governments to supervise and regulate their banking sectors, or the failure of Japanese policymakers to reflate the Japanese economy, or a failure in the architecture of governance of the world financial system. The crisis was portrayed as the result of contingent factors and not a product of the political, social, and economic forces of the very system so lauded by mainstream analysts. The analyses of the latter are characteristically offered as neutral, objective, disinterested, factually based comment by technical experts, in line both with the social status of economics and the presumed scientific status of the knowledge so promulgated. However, the nature of the analysis offered, based on assumptions and concepts of rationality and of the market, have been widely discredited by other—and I believe—more reflective economists43 and also attacked by political economists.44 Even so, the authority given to these experts serves not only to insulate the system of global financial capitalism from its critics but also to maintain the legitimacy, validity, and social and political hegemony of the theories, concepts, and knowledge used in these expert analyses. The most significant import of these economic theories and concepts for our understanding of security and political economy is that they define and then describe a world of rational economic man in which economics is both separated from polity and society and made the dominant, privileged, and defining sphere of human life. Prioritization of economic growth enables the constant sacrifice in the name of competitiveness and growth, enabling permanent crises to continue by ignoring suffering. Wendy BROWN 16, Professor at U.C. Berkeley, teaches in political science and critical theory [“Sacrificial Citizenship: Neoliberalism, Human Capital, and Austerity Politics,” Constellations, Vol. 23, No. 1, March 2016, p. 3-14, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In short, at the same time that links between the state, finance, and corporate capital are intensified, concerted action by workers, consumers, and citizens is all but eliminated in fact, in political discourse, and in the elite and popular political imagination. And when consumer, worker, and citizen organizations are defanged by the law, these forms of identity and the antagonism they represent soon dissolve, generating that “transformation of the soul” Margaret Thatcher identified as fundamental to the success of the neoliberal project. These kinds of legal decisions combined with the neutralizing strategies of governance aim at this effect, replacing such identities with that of human capital. Conversion of the worker, the consumer, the activist citizen — all entities capable of linking together into a social force — into isolated bits of self-investing human capital both makes them more governable and integrates them into a project: economic growth, to which they may potentially be sacrificed. The conversion breaks down barriers to this governance and integration; it also abets both. To grasp how and why this occurs, however, we must return to the general problematic of neoliberal governance formations and consider in particular two of its component parts, devolution and responsibilization.Devolution, Responsibilization and Shared SacrificeNeoliberalism's economization of the political, its jettisoning of the very idea of the social, and its displacement of politics by governance diminishes all significant venues for active citizenship. One can see these three forces combined in the metrics by which the costs of higher education are now appraised — on the one hand, in terms of the investment by consumers in their own economic future, on the other hand in terms of the investment by the state in its economic future. These metrics occlude the historical concern of higher education with developing or renewing citizens, knowledge, civilization, culture, or the public's capacity to govern itself.Another example of compressing democratic citizenship and democratic justice into economic purposes can be seen in President Obama's 2013 “State of the Union” address, delivered shortly after his re-election. In a speech soaring with calls for social justice and ecological renewal, each item in what many pundits saw as a revived progressive agenda was expressly legitimated by its contribution to economic growth. Thus, while Obama argued on behalf of Medicare, tax reform, immigration reform, an end to Washington bickering and brinksmanship, raising the minimum wage, fighting sex discrimination and domestic violence, and increased government investment in science and technology research, clean energy, home ownership, education, each cause was framed in terms of its contribution to economic growth or American competitiveness. “A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts,” Obama declared.23 “Every day,” he intoned midway through the speech, “we must ask ourselves three questions as a nation.” And what were these questions whose answers would constitute supervenient guides to law and policy formation, and to collective and individual conduct in the world's oldest democracy and most dominant nation?How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?24Success in these three areas, Obama promised, would in turn yield the ultimate goal of the nation and the government stewarding it: broad-based growth for the economy as a whole.This framing weighs all policy issues, including justice and planetary survival, according to their GDP-generating capacities. Indeed, if one item on Obama's progressive agenda turns out to deter (or even fail to stimulate) growth, it would apparently have to get scratched from the program. This framing also reduces citizenship to participation in national growth and thus to political passivity, continuous with (if more subtle than) G.W. Bush's infamous encomium to “shop, fly, and spend” as consummate acts of patriotism in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. From a governance perspective, where what is prized is teamwork in achieving the goal of growth rather than contestation and deliberation about norms, there is no place for agitated or agonistic citizenship. Nor is there a place for citizen expression bound to interest groups and ad hoc mobilizations, both of which are treated as failures of buy-in or consensus-building.However, while neoliberal political rationality administered through governance eliminates the last classical republican traces of citizenship formulated as public engagement, it retains even as it transforms the idea of citizen sacrifice. If citizen virtue is reworked as responsibilized entrepreneurialism, it is also reworked as the “shared sacrifice” potentially required for a healthy or troubled but above all a flexible economy. Such sacrifice may range from suffering the direct effects of job outsourcing, furloughs or pay and benefits cuts, to suffering the indirect effects of stagflation, credit crunches, liquidity or currency crises. It may be shared widely as the curtailed state investment in education; it may be suffered individually as a “last-hired, first-fired” phenomenon; or, as is most often the case, it may be suffered disproportionately by a weak group or class, as is the case with furloughs or reduced government services. Whatever the case, active citizenship is slimmed to tending oneself as responsibilized human capital, while sacrificial citizenship expands to include anything related to the health of a firm or nation, or again, the health of the nation as firm. This slimming and expansion are facilitated through the neoliberal supplanting of democratic political values and discourse with governance, that consensus model of order that integrates all into a supervenient project. Recall that governance replaces law with guidelines related to project goals, conflicting class positions with “stakeholders,” class consciousness with team consciousness, and political or normative challenges with a focus on the technical and the practical. It is through such replacements and the reduction of national political purpose to economic survival and growth that, for example, tax-paying workers become an acceptable revenue source for the bailouts of investment banks managed by billionaires. This is also what legitimates slashing public employee salaries and pensions or hiking student tuition in response to finance capital meltdowns, state fiscal crises, and regressive tax policy. In short, neoliberal governance converts the classically modern image of the nation comprising diverse concerns, issues, interests, and points of power to the nation on the model of Walmart where managers are “team leaders,” workers are “junior associates,” and consumers are “guests” — each is integrated into the smooth functioning of the whole and bound to the single end of economic prosperity defined in terms of investment climate and growth.Intervening Actors BadWe aren’t ethically responsible for intervening actors.Gewirth 82 (University of Chicago) ’82 (Alan, 1982, Human rights: essays on justification and applications, University of Chigcago press, pp. 229) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The required supplement is provided by the principle of intervening action. According to this principle, when there is a casual connection between some person A’s performing some action (or inaction) X and some other person C’s incurring a certain harm Z, A’s moral responsibility for Z is removed if, between X and Z, there intervenes some other action Y of some person B who knows the relevant circumstances of his action and who intends to produce Z or who produces Z through recklessness. The reason for this removal is that B’s intervening action Y is more direct of proximate cause of Z and, unlike A’s action (or inaction), Y is the sufficient condition of Z as it actually occurs. An example of this principle may help to show its connection with the absolutist thesis. Martin Luther King Jr. was repeatedly told that because he led demonstrations in support of civil rights, he was morally responsible for the disorders, riots, and deaths that ensued and that were shaking the American Republic to its foundations. By the principle of intervening action, however, it was King’s opponents who were responsible because their intervention operated as the sufficient conditions of the riots and injuries. King might also have replied that the Republic would not be worth saving if the price that had to be paid was the violation of the civil rights of black Americans. As for the rights of the other Americans to peace and order, the reply would be that these rights cannot justifiably be secured at the price of the rights of blacks.Threat Construction BadThreat construction is epistemologically rooted in the logic that produces threats to begin and makes impacts inevitable. Spanos 2k (William V, Professor of English and Comp Lit @ Binghamton, America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire pg 191-192) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****What I have argued in this book about the relationship between philosophy and imperialism is that the euphoric annunciation of the end of history and the advent of the New World Order by the deputies of the dominant American culture at the end of the Cold War is symptomatic of the achievement of the global hegemony of "America" understood not simply as a political order, but as a way of thinking. I have claimed that this triumphant "American" way of thinking is not exceptionalist, as it has always been claimed by Americans, especially since de Tocqueville's announcement of the advent of democracy in America, but European, which means metaphysical: an imperial thinking, whose provenance resides in Roman antiquity, that sees the being into which it inquires as a totalized spatial image, a "field" or "region" or "domain" to be comprehended, mastered, and exploited. ? But this way of putting this imperial metanarrative, though necessary in the context of the amnesiac imperatives of thinking the Enlightenment as an epochal emancipatory moment in world history, is too general. It does not account for the historically specific transformation of this European mode of knowledge production accomplished in the wake of America's emergence as a global power: the fulfillment of the Enlightenment's "developmental model" in the effacement of the visible imperial logos informing traditional metaphysics by way of the apotheosis of the "objectivity" of empirical science and the advent of the classificatory table. Under the aegis of a triumphant America, the narrative economy of European metaphysics has come to its end in the form of a universal instrumentalism, a Man-centered thinking for which everything in time and space is seen as a "problem" that the larger comparative "picture" renders susceptible to a final and determinate solution.? In Heidegger's proleptic terms, European metaphysical thinking in the technological age dominated by America has become "Americanized," a "re-presentational"/"calculative" thinking or "planning" that has transformed the uncalculability of being at large into a planetary "world picture": ? "We get the picture" concerning something does not mean only that what is, is set before us, is represented to us, in general, but that what is stands before us — in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it — as a system. "To get the picture" throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it. Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirely, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself. Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.1? Reconstellated into the context of this Heideggerian diagnosis of modernity, the American end-of-history discourse undergoes a resonant strangement. What is euphorically represented as "good news" —the global fulfillment ("end") of the emancipatory promise of History — comes to be seen as the Pax Metaphysica: the colonization of the errant mind of humanity at large by a banal and banalizing thinking that has reduced everything, including human beings, to "standing [or disposable] reserve."2 This "end of philosophy" in the form of a "triumphant" instrumentalist thinking that has reduced being to disposable commodity is everywhere manifest in the post-Cold War era. And, I suggest, its most telling symptom is the globalization of (American) English as the lingua franca of the "free market," which has as one of its most devastating consequences the "Americanization" not simply of the Western nation-states but of entire Third World cultures.Predictions BadJudges should change how they evaluate risk. DAs with multiple internal links should be assigned vanishingly low probability because they rely on many assumptions that are false until proven true, each multiplied together, exponentially decreasing the chance of occurrence. The most definitive cards have the least definitive proof. Even without refutation that reduces the risk of nuclear war or extinction to near zero. Cohn 13 [Nate Cohn is a domestic correspondent for The Upshot at The New York Times, previously worked as a staff writer for The New Republic, as a research associate at The Henry L. Stimson Center and a debate coach at Whitman college, 12-12-2013, ] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****That’s not to say there hasn’t been any effort to challenge modern policy debate on its own terms—just that they’ve mainly come from the middle of the bracket and weren’t very successful, focusing on morality arguments and various “predictions bad” claims to outweigh. Judges were receptive to the sentiment that disads were unrealistic, but negative claims to specificity always triumphed over generic epistemological questions or arguments about why “predictions fail.” The affirmative rarely introduced substantive responses to the disadvantage, rarely read impact defense. All considered, the negative generally won a significant risk that the plan resulted in nuclear war. Once that was true, it was basically impossible to win that some moral obligation outweighed the (dare I say?) obligation to avoid a meaningful risk of extinction.There were other problems. Many of the small affirmatives were unstrategic—teams rarely had solvency deficits to generic counterplans. It was already basically impossible to win that some morality argument outweighed extinction; it was totally untenable to win that a moral obligation outweighed a meaningful risk of extinction; it made even less sense if the counterplan solved most of the morality argument. The combined effect was devastating: As these debates are currently argued and judged, I suspect that the negative would win my ballot more than 95 percent of the time in a debate between two teams of equal ability.But even if a “soft left” team did better—especially by making solvency deficits and responding to the specifics of the disadvantage—I still think they would struggle. They could compete at the highest levels, but, in most debates, judges would still assess a small, but meaningful risk of a large scale conflict, including nuclear war and extinction. The risk would be small, but the “magnitude” of the impact would often be enough to outweigh a higher probability, smaller impact. Or put differently: policy debate still wouldn’t be replicating a real world policy assessment, teams reading small affirmatives would still be at a real disadvantage with respect to reality. . Why? Oddly, this is the unreasonable result of a reasonable part of debate: the burden of refutation or rejoinder, the responsibility of debaters to “beat” arguments. If I introduce an argument, it starts out at 100 percent—you then have to disprove it. That sounds like a pretty good idea in principle, right? Well, I think so too. But it’s really tough to refute something down to “zero” percent—a team would need to completely and totally refute an argument. That’s obviously tough to do, especially since the other team is usually going to have some decent arguments and pretty good cards defending each component of their disadvantage—even the ridiculous parts. So one of the most fundamental assumptions about debate all but ensures a meaningful risk of nearly any argument—even extremely low-probability, high magnitude impacts, sufficient to outweigh systemic impacts. There’s another even more subtle element of debate practice at play. Traditionally, the 2AC might introduce 8 or 9 cards against a disadvantage, like “non-unique, no-link, no-impact,” and then go for one and two. Yet in reality, disadvantages are underpinned by dozens or perhaps hundreds of discrete assumptions, each of which could be contested. By the end of the 2AR, only a handful are under scrutiny; the majority of the disadvantage is conceded, and it’s tough to bring the one or two scrutinized components down to “zero.”And then there’s a bad understanding of probability. If the affirmative questions four or five elements of the disadvantage, but the negative was still “clearly ahead” on all five elements, most judges would assess that the negative was “clearly ahead” on the disadvantage. In reality, the risk of the disadvantage has been reduced considerably. If there was, say, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform would pass, an 80 percent chance that political capital was key, an 80 percent chance that the plan drained a sufficient amount of capital, an 80 percent chance that immigration reform was necessary to prevent another recession, and an 80 percent chance that another recession would cause a nuclear war (lol), then there’s a 32 percent chance that the disadvantage caused nuclear war. I think these issues can be overcome. First, I think teams can deal with the “burden of refutation” by focusing on the “burden of proof,” which allows a team to mitigate an argument before directly contradicting its content. Here’s how I’d look at it: modern policy debate has assumed that arguments start out at “100 percent” until directly refuted. But few, if any, arguments are supported by evidence consistent with “100 percent.” Most cards don’t make definitive claims. Even when they do, they’re not supported by definitive evidence—and any reasonable person should assume there’s at least some uncertainty on matters other than few true facts, like 2+2=4.Take Georgetown’s immigration uniqueness evidence from Harvard. It says there “may be a window” for immigration. So, based on the negative’s evidence, what are the odds that immigration reform will pass? Far less than 50 percent, if you ask me. That’s not always true for every card in the 1NC, but sometimes it’s even worse—like the impact card, which is usually a long string of “coulds.” If you apply this very basic level of analysis to each element of a disadvantage, and correctly explain math (.4*.4*.4*.4*.4=.01024), the risk of the disadvantage starts at a very low level, even before the affirmative offers a direct response. Debaters should also argue that the negative hasn’t introduced any evidence at all to defend a long list of unmentioned elements in the “internal link chain.” The absence of evidence to defend the argument that, say, “recession causes depression,” may not eliminate the disadvantage, but it does raise uncertainty—and it doesn’t take too many additional sources of uncertainty to reduce the probability of the disadvantage to effectively zero—sort of the static, background noise of prediction.Now, I do think it would be nice if a good debate team would actually do the work—talk about what the cards say, talk about the unmentioned steps—but I think debaters can make these observations at a meta-level (your evidence isn’t certain, lots of undefended elements) and successfully reduce the risk of a nuclear war or extinction to something indistinguishable from zero. It would not be a factor in my decision.Based on my conversations with other policy judges, it may be possible to pull it off with even less work. They might be willing to summarily disregard “absurd” arguments, like politics disadvantages, on the grounds that it’s patently unrealistic, that we know the typical burden of rejoinder yields unrealistic scenarios, and that judges should assess debates in ways that produce realistic assessments. I don’t think this is too different from elements of Jonah Feldman’s old philosophy, where he basically said “when I assessed 40 percent last year, it’s 10 percent now.”Honestly, I was surprised that the few judges I talked to were so amenable to this argument. For me, just saying “it’s absurd, and you know it” wouldn’t be enough against an argument in which the other team invested considerable time. The more developed argument about accurate risk assessment would be more convincing, but I still think it would be vulnerable to a typical defense of the burden of rejoinder. To be blunt: I want debaters to learn why a disadvantage is absurd, not just make assertions that conform to their preexisting notions of what’s realistic and what’s not. And perhaps more importantly for this discussion, I could not coach a team to rely exclusively on this argument—I’m not convinced that enough judges are willing to discount a disadvantage on “it’s absurd.” Nonetheless, I think this is a useful “frame” that should preface a following, more robust explanation of why the risk of the disadvantage is basically zero—even before a substantive response is offered.There are other, broad genres of argument that can contest the substance of the negative’s argument. There are serious methodological indictments of the various forms of knowledge production, from journalistic reporting to think tanks to quantitative social science. Many of our most strongly worded cards come from people giving opinions, for which they offer very little data or evidence. And even when “qualified” people are giving predictions, there’s a great case to be extremely skeptical without real evidence backing it up. The world is a complicated place, predictions are hard, and most people are wrong. And again, this is before contesting the substance of the negative’s argument(!)—if deemed necessary.Linear predictions risks extinction- error replication Ahmed 12 Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development (IPRD), an independent think tank focused on the study of violent conflict, he has taught at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex "The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society" Global Change, Peace & Security Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011 ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The twenty-first century heralds the unprecedented acceleration and convergence of multiple, interconnected global crises – climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity, and economic instability. While the structure of global economic activity is driving the unsustainable depletion of hydrocarbon and other natural resources, this is simultaneously escalating greenhouse gas emissions resulting in global warming. Both global warming and energy shocks are impacting detrimentally on global industrial food production, as well as on global financial and economic instability. Conventional policy responses toward the intensification of these crises have been decidedly inadequate because scholars and practitioners largely view them as separate processes. Yet increasing evidence shows they are deeply interwoven manifestations of a global political economy that has breached the limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which it is embedded. In this context, orthodox IR's flawed diagnoses of global crises lead inexorably to their ‘securitisation’, reifying the militarisation of policy responses, and naturalising the proliferation of violent conflicts. Global ecological, energy and economic crises are thus directly linked to the ‘Otherisation’ of social groups and problematisation of strategic regions considered pivotal for the global political economy. Yet this relationship between global crises and conflict is not necessary or essential, but a function of a wider epistemological failure to holistically interrogate their structural and systemic causes. In 2009, the UK government's chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddington warned that without mitigating and preventive action 'drivers' of global crisis like demographic expansion, environmental degradation and energy depletion could lead to a 'perfect storm' of simultaneous food, water and energy crises by around 2030.1 Yet, for the most part, conventional policy responses from national governments and international institutions have been decidedly inadequate. Part of the problem is the way in which these crises are conceptualised in relation to security. Traditional disciplinary divisions in the social and natural sciences, compounded by bureaucratic compartmentalisation in policy-planning and decision-making, has meant these crises are frequently approached as largely separate processes with their own internal dynamics. While it is increasingly acknowledged that cross-disciplinary approaches are necessary, these have largely failed to recognise just how inherently interconnected these crises are. As Brauch points out, 'most studies in the environmental security debate since 1990 have ignored or failed to integrate the contributions of the global environmental change community in the natural sciences. To a large extent the latter has also failed to integrate the results of this debate.*" Underlying this problem is the lack of a holistic systems approach to thinking about not only global crises, but their causal origins in the social, political, economic, ideological and value structures of the contemporary international system. Indeed, it is often assumed that these contemporary structures are largely what need to be 'secured* and protected from the dangerous impacts of global crises, rather than transformed precisely to ameliorate these crises in the first place. Consequently, policy-makers frequently overlook existing systemic and structural obstacles to the implementation of desired reforms. In a modest effort to contribute to the lacuna identified by Brauch, this paper begins with an empirically-oriented, interdisciplinary exploration of the best available data on four major global crises — climate change, energy depletion, food scarcity and global financial instability — illustrating the systemic interconnections between different crises, and revealing that their causal origins are not accidental but inherent to the structural failings and vulnerabilities of existing global political, economic and cultural institutions. This empirical evaluation leads to a critical appraisal of orthodox realist and liberal approaches to global crises in international theory and policy. This critique argues principally that orthodox IR reifies a highly fragmented, de-historicised ontology of the international system which underlies a reductionist, technocratic and compartmentalised conceptual and methodological approach to global crises. Consequently, rather than global crises being understood causally and holistically in the systemic context of the structure of the international system, they are 'securitised* as amplifiers of traditional security threats, requiring counter-productive militarised responses and/or futile inter-state negotiations. While the systemic causal context of global crisis convergence and acceleration is thus elided, this simultaneously exacerbates the danger of reactionary violence, the problematisation of populations in regions impacted by these crises and the naturalisation of the consequent proliferation of wars and humanitarian disasters. This moves us away from the debate over whether resource 'shortages* or 'abundance* causes conflicts, to the question of how either can generate crises which undermine conventional socio-political orders and confound conventional IR discourses, in turn radicalising the processes of social polarisation that can culminate in violent conflict. Util BadUtilitarian politics of survivalism magnifies every internal link to extinctionCook 06, Prof. of Phil. Univ. Windsor, 2006 [Deborah, “STAYING ALIVE: ADORNO AND HABERMAS ON SELF-PRESERVATION UNDER LATE CAPITALISM,” Rethinking Marxism, 18(3):433-447] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In the passage in Negative Dialectics where he warns against self-preservation gone wild, Adorno states that it is “only as reflection upon … self-preservation that reason would be above nature” (1973, 289). To rise above nature, then, reason must become “cognizant of its own natural essence” (1998b, 138). To be more fully rational, we must reflect on what Horkheimer and Adorno once called our underground history (1972, 231). In other words, we must recognize that our behavior is motivated and shaped by instincts, including the instinct for self-preservation (Adorno 1998a, 153). In his lectures on Kant, Adorno makes similar remarks when he summarizes his solution to the problem of self-preservation gone wild. To remedy this problem, nature must first become conscious of itself (Adorno 2000, 104). Adopting the Freudian goal of making the unconscious conscious, Adorno also insists that this critical self-understanding be accompanied by radical social, political, and economic changes that would bring to a halt the self-immolating domination of nature. This is why mindfulness of nature is necessary but not sufficient to remedy unbridled self-preservation. In the final analysis, society must be fundamentally transformed in order rationally to accommodate instincts that now run wild owing to our forgetfulness of nature in ourselves. By insisting on mindfulness of nature in the self, Adorno champions a form of rationality that would tame self-preservation, but in contrast to Habermas, he thinks that the taming of self-preservation is a normative task rather than an accomplished fact. Because self-preservation remains irrational, we now encounter serious environmental problems like those connected with global warming and the greenhouse effect, the depletion of natural resources, and the death of more than one hundred regions in our oceans. Owing to self- preservation gone wild, we have colonized and destabilized large parts of the world, adversely affecting the lives of millions, when we have not simply enslaved or murdered their inhabitants outright. Famine and disease are often the result of ravaging the land in the name of survival imperatives. Wars are waged in the name of self-preservation: with his now notoriously invisible weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein was said to represent a serious threat to the lives of citizens in the West. The war against terrorism, waged in the name of self-preservation, has seriously undermined human rights and civil liberties; it has also been used to justify the murder, rape, and torture of thousands As it now stands, the owners of the means of production ensure our survival through profits that, at best, only trickle down to the poorest members of society. Taken in charge by the capitalist economy, self-preservation now dictates that profits increase exponentially to the detriment of social programs like welfare and health care. In addition, self- preservation has gone wild because our instincts and needs are now firmly harnessed to commodified offers of satisfaction that deflect and distort them. Having surrendered the task of self-preservation to the economic and political systems, we remain in thrall to untamed survival instincts that could well end up destroying not just the entire species, but all life on the planet.No miscalc or nuclear escalation—every crisis ever disproves and nuclear taboo checks irrationalityQuinlan 09 (Michael, Former Permanent Under-Sec. State – UK Ministry of Defense, “Thinking about Nuclear Weapons: Principles, Problems, Prospects”, p. 63-69) *we don’t endorse gendered language****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Even if initial nuclear use did not quickly end the fighting, the supposition of inexorable momentum in a developing exchange, with each side rushing to overreaction amid confusion and uncertainty, is implausible. It fails to consider what the situation of the decisionmakers would really be. Neither side could want escalation. Both would be appalled at what was going on. Both would be desperately looking for signs that the other was ready to call a halt. Both, given the capacity for evasion or concealment which modem delivery platforms and vehicles can possess, could have in reserve significant forces invulnerable enough not to entail use-or-lose pressures. (It may be more open to question, as noted earlier, whether newer nuclear-weapon possessors can be immediately in that position; but it is within reach of any substantial state with advanced technological capabilities, and attaining it is certain to be a high priority in the development of forces.) As a result, neither side can have any predisposition to suppose, in an ambiguous situation of fearful risk, that the right course when in doubt is to go on copiously launching weapons. And none of this analysis rests on any presumption of highly subtle or pre-concerted rationality. The rationality required is plain. The argument is reinforced if we consider the possible reasoning of an aggressor at a more dispassionate level. Any substantial nuclear armoury can inflict destruction outweighing any possible prize that aggression could hope to seize. A state attacking the possessor of such an armoury must therefore be doing so (once given that it cannot count upon destroying the armoury pre-emptively) on a judgement that the possessor would be found lacking in the will to use it. If the attacked possessor used nuclear weapons, whether first or in response to the aggressor's own first use, this judgement would begin to look dangerously precarious. There must be at least a substantial possibility of the aggressor leaders' concluding that their initial judgement had been mistaken—that the risks were after all greater than whatever prize they had been seeking, and that for their own country's survival they must call off the aggression. Deterrence planning such as that of NATO was directed in the first place to preventing the initial misjudgement and in the second, if it were nevertheless made, to compelling such a reappraisal. The former aim had to have primacy, because it could not be taken for granted that the latter was certain to work. But there was no ground for assuming in advance, for all possible scenarios, that the chance of its working must be negligible. An aggressor state would itself be at huge risk if nuclear war developed, as its leaders would know. It may be argued that a policy which abandons hope of physically defeating the enemy and simply hopes to get him to desist is pure gamble, a matter of who blinks first; and that the political and moral nature of most likely aggressors, almost ex hypothesi, makes them the less likely to blink. One response to this is to ask what is the alternative—it can only be surrender. But a more positive and hopeful answer lies in the fact that the criticism is posed in a political vacuum. Real-life conflict would have a political context. The context which concerned NATO during the cold war, for example, was one of defending vital interests against a postulated aggressor whose own vital interests would not be engaged, or would be less engaged. Certainty is not possible, but a clear asymmetry of vital interest is a legitimate basis for expecting an asymmetry, credible to both sides, of resolve in conflict. That places upon statesmen, as page 23 has noted, the key task in deterrence of building up in advance a clear and shared grasp of where limits lie. That was plainly achieved in cold-war Europe. If vital interests have been defined in a way that is dear, and also clearly not overlapping or incompatible with those of the adversary, a credible basis has been laid for the likelihood of greater resolve in resistance. It was also sometimes suggested by critics that whatever might be indicated by theoretical discussion of political will and interests, the military environment of nuclear warfare—particularly difficulties of communication and control—would drive escalation with overwhelming probability to the limit. But it is obscure why matters should be regarded as inevitably .so for every possible level and setting of action. Even if the history of war suggested (as it scarcely does) that military decision-makers are mostly apt to work on the principle 'When in doubt, lash out', the nuclear revolution creates an utterly new situation. The pervasive reality, always plain to both sides during the cold war, is `If this goes on to the end, we are all ruined'. Given that inexorable escalation would mean catastrophe for both, it would be perverse to suppose them permanently incapable of framing arrangements which avoid it. As page 16 has noted, NATO gave its military commanders no widespread delegated authority, in peace or war, to launch nuclear weapons without specific political direction. Many types of weapon moreover had physical safeguards such as PALs incorporated to reinforce organizational ones. There were multiple communication and control systems for passing information, orders, and prohibitions. Such systems could not be totally guaranteed against disruption if at a fairly intense level of strategic exchange—which was only one of many possible levels of conflict— an adversary judged it to be in his interest to weaken political control. It was far from clear why he necessarily should so judge. Even then, however, it remained possible to operate on a general fail-safe presumption: no authorization, no use. That was the basis on which NATO operated. If it is feared that the arrangements which 1 a nuclear-weapon possessor has in place do not meet such standards in some respects, the logical course is to continue to improve them rather than to assume escalation to be certain and uncontrollable, with all the enormous inferences that would have to flow from such an assumption. The likelihood of escalation can never be 100 per cent, and never zero. Where between those two extremes it may lie can never be precisely calculable in advance; and even were it so calculable, it would not be uniquely fixed—it would stand to vary hugely with circumstances. That there should be any risk at all of escalation to widespread nuclear war must be deeply disturbing, and decision-makers would always have to weigh it most anxiously. But a pair of key truths about it need to be recognized. The first is that the risk of escalation to large-scale nuclear war is inescapably present in any significant armed conflict between nuclear-capable powers, whoever may have started the conflict and whoever may first have used any particular category of weapon. The initiator of the conflict will always have physically available to him options for applying more force if he meets effective resistance. If the risk of escalation, whatever its degree of probability, is to be regarded as absolutely unacceptable, the necessary inference is that a state attacked by a substantial nuclear power must forgo military resistance. It must surrender, even if it has a nuclear armoury of its own. But the companion truth is that, as page 47 has noted, the risk of escalation is an inescapable burden also upon the aggressor. The exploitation of that burden is the crucial route, if conflict does break out, for managing it, to a tolerable outcome--the only route, indeed, intermediate between surrender and holocaust, and so the necessary basis for deterrence beforehand. The working out of plans to exploit escalation risk most effectively in deterring potential aggression entails further and complex issues. It is for example plainly desirable, wherever geography, politics, and available resources so permit without triggering arms races, to make provisions and dispositions that are likely to place the onus of making the bigger, and more evidently dangerous steps in escalation upon the aggressor volib wishes to maintain his attack, rather than upon the defender. (The customary shorthand for this desirable posture used to be 'escalation dominance'.) These issues are not further discussed here. But addressing them needs to start from acknowledgement that there are in any event no certainties or absolutes available, no options guaranteed to be risk-free and cost-free. Deterrence is not possible without escalation risk; and its presence can point to no automatic policy conclusion save for those who espouse outright pacifism and accept its consequences. Accident and Miscalculation Ensuring the safety and security of nuclear weapons plainly needs to be taken most seriously. Detailed information is understandably not published, but such direct evidence as there is suggests that it always has been so taken in every possessor state, with the inevitable occasional failures to follow strict procedures dealt with rigorously. Critics have nevertheless from time to time argued that the possibility of accident involving nuclear weapons is so substantial that it must weigh heavily in the entire evaluation of whether war-prevention structures entailing their existence should be tolerated at all. Two sorts of scenario are usually in question. The first is that of a single grave event involving an unintended nuclear explosion—a technical disaster at a storage site, for example, Dr the accidental or unauthorized launch of a delivery system with a live nuclear warhead. The second is that of some event—perhaps such an explosion or launch, or some other mishap such as malfunction or misinterpretation of radar signals or computer systems—initiating a sequence of response and counter-response that culminated in a nuclear exchange which no one had truly intended. No event that is physically possible can be said to be of absolutely zero probability (just as at an opposite extreme it is absurd to claim, as has been heard from distinguished figures, that nuclear-weapon use can be guaranteed to happen within some finite future span despite not having happened for over sixty years). But human affairs cannot be managed to the standard of either zero or total probability. We have to assess levels between those theoretical limits and weigh their reality and implications against other factors, in security planning as in everyday life. There have certainly been, across the decades since 1945, many known accidents involving nuclear weapons, from transporters skidding off roads to bomber aircraft crashing with or accidentally dropping the weapons they carried (in past days when such carriage was a frequent feature of readiness arrangements----it no longer is). A few of these accidents may have released into the nearby environment highly toxic material. None however has entailed a nuclear detonation. Some commentators suggest that this reflects bizarrely good fortune amid such massive activity and deployment over so many years. A more rational deduction from the facts of this long experience would however be that the probability of any accident triggering a nuclear explosion is extremely low. It might be further noted that the mechanisms needed to set off such an explosion are technically demanding, and that in a large number of ways the past sixty years have seen extensive improvements in safety arrangements for both the design and the handling of weapons. It is undoubtedly possible to see respects in which, after the cold war, some of the factors bearing upon risk may be new or more adverse; but some are now plainly less so. The years which the world has come through entirely without accidental or unauthorized detonation have included early decades in which knowledge was sketchier, precautions were less developed, and weapon designs were less ultra-safe than they later became, as well as substantial periods in which weapon numbers were larger, deployments more widespread and diverse, movements more frequent, and several aspects of doctrine and readiness arrangements more tense. Similar considerations apply to the hypothesis of nuclear war being mistakenly triggered by false alarm. Critics again point to the fact, as it is understood, of numerous occasions when initial steps in alert sequences for US nuclear forces were embarked upon, or at least called for, by, indicators mistaken or misconstrued. In none of these instances, it is accepted, did matters get at all near to nuclear launch--extraordinary good fortune again, critics have suggested. But the rival and more logical inference from hundreds of events stretching over sixty years of experience presents itself once more: that the probability of initial misinterpretation leading far towards mistaken launch is remote. Precisely because any nuclear-weapon possessor recognizes the vast gravity of any launch, release sequences have many steps, and human decision is repeatedly interposed as well as capping the sequences. To convey that because a first step was prompted the world somehow came close to accidental nuclear war is wild hyperbole, rather like asserting, when a tennis champion has lost his opening service game, that he was nearly beaten in straight sets. History anyway scarcely offers any ready example of major war started by accident even before the nuclear revolution imposed an order-of-magnitude increase in caution. It was occasionally conjectured that nuclear war might be triggered by the real but accidental or unauthorized launch of a strategic nuclear-weapon delivery system in the direction of a potential adversary. No such launch is known to have occurred in over sixty years. The probability of it is therefore very low. But even if it did happen, the further hypothesis of it initiating a general nuclear exchange is far-fetched. It fails to consider the real situation of decision-makers as pages 63-4 have brought out. The notion that cosmic holocaust might be mistakenly precipitated in this way belongs to science fiction. No WarThe world is complex – a failure to come to terms with the international system means their disads rely on unverifiable premises AND the prescribed internal link chains are destined to fall apartFreier, Strategic Studies Institute national security studies professor, 6-17-15[Nathan, “Does Anyone Really Know What's Going On? Likely Not.” , accessed 9-14-15, TAP] ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****National security elites have fallen into a funk over the recent course of U.S. policy. At first glance, it seems the mythical Midas Touch of the United States as indispensable to solving the world’s most compelling challenges is just that . . . myth. Even a cursory examination of current events betrays a veritable dog’s breakfast of U.S. policy gone or going substantially wrong. Indeed, on the heels of widely perceived disappointments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States appears persistently plagued by serial misfortune. Making matters worse, each individual letdown seems to arrive via unforced error; and, all seem to bring with them their own catalog of unanticipated costs and hazards. Let us review the bidding. In spite of some substantial American commitment to reverse Islamic State gains in Iraq and Syria, more territory falls victim to its predations by the day. Further, the U.S.-enabled liberation of Libya from decades of dictatorship has become instead a clinic in unintended consequences. Further, Yemen, once heralded as an American counterterrorism success, has devolved into a new round of lethal civil conflict. The Gulf States, too, are suddenly vulnerable, as they find themselves hemmed in by violent disorder on three fronts and Iranian provocation on a fourth. A more traditional state-based set of challenges appears to be emerging somewhat unchecked—or, at a minimum, undeterred—as well. In East Asia, the pivot has not slowed Chinese adventurism, as China continues to press on multiple fronts for substantial change in the international status quo. Likewise, in Europe, the U.S. reset with Russia is now a footnote—maybe worse, a punch line, as hope for rapprochement has yielded to despair over Russia’s re-emergence as a manipulative spoiler and subversive regional contender. The list goes on, and with the U.S. election season heating up, a predictable and unsophisticated blame game threatens to all but swallow competent debate about the pathology of our most recent policy disappointments. Hyperpoliticized chatter will follow, decrying indecisive and feckless policymakers recklessly putting U.S. interests at risk. The case will be simple: the United States is currently neither faithful enough to its friends nor aggressive or assertive enough with its foes and is, as a consequence, reaping the whirlwind. The remedy, according to those holding this view, is impulsive and visceral, relying on heavier, more unqualified doses of good faith and guts to roll back our perceived losses. I say, Not so fast! There is merit in all thoughtful criticisms of contemporary U.S. policy. For example, let us stipulate to some mishandling of U.S. foreign and security affairs over the last 15 years. However, there is also more to the story than meets the eye. In this case, failure is not, as the saying goes, an orphan, but, rather, born of innumerable conventional perspectives wedded more to what was or is preferred than what actually is or is likely to be. Indeed, the real failure of contemporary policy is more elemental, frightening, and collective in origin than a simple shortage of good faith and guts. In reality, we (and I really mean all of us) no longer understand the system within which we are operating well enough to make rational national security decisions that have a prayer of even modest durability over time. We live in complex and uncertain times where there are frankly more “known unknowns” than we are all comfortable admitting. Further, the speed of both system-level change and threat generation are quantum leaps ahead of a national security bureaucracy that fully matured during the predictable, binary competition of the Cold War. Thus, in fairness to those in office and as a caution to those hoping to succeed them, healthy acknowledgement of our fundamental fallibility is good place to start for future national security strategy. The rules governing international security and the context within which those rules are applied change so fast now that no one is intellectually well-postured yet to chart reasonable, effective, and sufficiently adaptable courses of action for U.S. policy going forward. The number and diversity of consequential actors, competing priorities and interests, and sources of hazard make new-age statecraft a complex and ambiguous business to be sure; clear definitions of success or failure are illusive, and the margin of error separating the two is razor thin regardless. There, I said it. Alarming as it may sound, no one has a lock on wisdom anymore in national security. We will, for a time, all drive blind through a thicket of modern challenges that, in reality, present serial discontinuities from our collective past. Perhaps as early as November 9, 1989—and the fall of the Berlin Wall—American officials have been on an extended course of discovery, learning a great deal about the definition, extent, and limits of 21st-century power. All too often, they rushed to the old playbook for answers when new challenges arose. It had some residual value through the 1990s. However, it was exposed as grossly unsophisticated with the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath. Nonetheless, the old playbook lingers as the world changes fundamentally around us. Until there is a new, more sophisticated appreciation of the strategic context within which the United States is operating, there will not be an effective replacement for those in the game to reference. Further, without keen sensitivity to what is actually afoot in international relations, the more impulsive remedies of the good faith and guts crowd may prove more harmful than doing nothing at all. Thus, patience just may be the new currency of risk-informed national security decisionmaking. Those in power and those who want it need a more nuanced, holistic, and systemic understanding of why events are unfolding as they are. Getting to that understanding will require substantial courage, temperance, honesty, and endurance among the policy elite. After all, the road to real understanding is likely to be littered with new rounds of perceived failure. In military terms, it will be less a well-planned deliberate attack on the future and more a movement to contact. There will be policy objectives and a general path to achieve them. However, the number, form, and aggregate hazard of the threats and challenges that emerge along the way will not be fully appreciated (if they ever are) until fully upon us. That, in a nutshell, is the burden of 21st century decisionmaking. I suggest all parties should hold fire with their criticism until they have thoughtfully reimagined contemporary security conditions together in a more sophisticated manner. They will not, of course. There is no media bounce in patience. However, truth be told, most of the adversity U.S. policymaking has experienced lately springs from widespread systemic volatility lying largely beyond the proximate control of American authorities. Without adequate preparation, tomorrow’s leaders will be as ill-equipped for it as their predecessors have been; and thus, today’s critic will be tomorrow’s scapegoat.No large-scale wars --- multiple warrantsJohn Aziz, Reporter at The Week Magazine, 3-6-2014, "Don't worry: World War III will almost certainly never happen," The Week, , 12/26/17, -PGR****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Next year will be the seventieth anniversary of the end of the last global conflict. There have been points on that timeline — such as the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and a Soviet computer malfunction in 1983 that erroneously suggested that the U.S. had attacked, and perhaps even the Kosovo War in 1999 — when a global conflict was a real possibility. Yet today — in the shadow of a flare up which some are calling a new Cold War between Russia and the U.S. — I believe the threat of World War III has almost faded into nothingness. That is, the probability of a world war is the lowest it has been in decades, and perhaps the lowest it has ever been since the dawn of modernity. This is certainly a view that current data supports. Steven Pinker's studies into the decline of violence reveal that deaths from war have fallen and fallen since World War II. But we should not just assume that the past is an accurate guide to the future. Instead, we must look at the factors which have led to the reduction in war and try to conclude whether the decrease in war is sustainable. So, what's changed? Well, the first big change after the last world war was the arrival of mutually assured destruction. It's no coincidence that the end of the last global war coincided with the invention of atomic weapons. The possibility of complete annihilation provided a huge disincentive to launching and expanding total wars. Instead, the great powers now fight proxy wars like Vietnam and Afghanistan (the 1980 version, that is), rather than letting their rivalries expand into full-on, globe-spanning struggles against each other. Sure, accidents could happen, but the possibility is incredibly remote. More importantly, nobody in power wants to be the cause of Armageddon. But what about a non-nuclear global war? Other changes — economic and social in nature — have made that highly unlikely too. The world has become much more economically interconnected since the last global war. Economic cooperation treaties and free trade agreements have intertwined the economies of countries around the world. This has meant there has been a huge rise in the volume of global trade since World War II, and especially since the 1980s. Today consumer goods like smartphones, laptops, cars, jewelery, food, cosmetics, and medicine are produced on a global level, with supply-chains criss-crossing the planet. An example: The laptop I am typing this on is the cumulative culmination of thousands of hours of work, as well as resources and manufacturing processes across the globe. It incorporates metals like tellurium, indium, cobalt, gallium, and manganese mined in Africa. Neodymium mined in China. Plastics forged out of oil, perhaps from Saudi Arabia, or Russia, or Venezuela. Aluminum from bauxite, perhaps mined in Brazil. Iron, perhaps mined in Australia. These raw materials are turned into components — memory manufactured in Korea, semiconductors forged in Germany, glass made in the United States. And it takes gallons and gallons of oil to ship all the resources and components back and forth around the world, until they are finally assembled in China, and shipped once again around the world to the consumer. In a global war, global trade becomes a nightmare. Shipping becomes more expensive due to higher insurance costs, and riskier because it's subject to seizures, blockades, ship sinkings. Many goods, intermediate components or resources — including energy supplies like coal and oil, components for military hardware, etc, may become temporarily unavailable in certain areas. Sometimes — such as occurred in the Siege of Leningrad during World War II — the supply of food can be cut off. This is why countries hold strategic reserves of things like helium, pork, rare earth metals and oil, coal, and gas. These kinds of breakdowns were troublesome enough in the economic landscape of the early and mid-20th century, when the last global wars occurred. But in today's ultra-globalized and ultra-specialized economy? The level of economic adaptation — even for large countries like Russia and the United States with lots of land and natural resources — required to adapt to a world war would be crushing, and huge numbers of business and livelihoods would be wiped out. In other words, global trade interdependency has become, to borrow a phrase from finance, too big to fail. It is easy to complain about the reality of big business influencing or controlling politicians. But big business has just about the most to lose from breakdowns in global trade. A practical example: If Russian oligarchs make their money from selling gas and natural resources to Western Europe, and send their children to schools in Britain and Germany, and lend and borrow money from the West's financial centers, are they going to be willing to tolerate Vladimir Putin starting a regional war in Eastern Europe (let alone a world war)? Would the Chinese financial industry be happy to see their multi-trillion dollar investments in dollars and U.S. treasury debt go up in smoke? Of course, world wars have been waged despite international business interests, but the world today is far more globalized than ever before and well-connected domestic interests are more dependent on access to global markets, components and resources, or the repayment of foreign debts. These are huge disincentives to global war. But what of the military-industrial complex? While other businesses might be hurt due to a breakdown in trade, surely military contractors and weapons manufacturers are happy with war? Not necessarily. As the last seventy years illustrates, it is perfectly possible for weapons contractors to enjoy the profits from huge military spending without a global war. And the uncertainty of a breakdown in global trade could hurt weapons contractors just as much as other industries in terms of losing access to global markets. That means weapons manufacturers may be just as uneasy about the prospects for large-scale war as other businesses. Other changes have been social in nature. Obviously, democratic countries do not tend to go to war with each other, and the spread of liberal democracy is correlated against the decrease in war around the world. But the spread of internet technology and social media has brought the world much closer together, too. As late as the last world war, populations were separated from each other by physical distance, by language barriers, and by lack of mass communication tools. This means that it was easy for war-mongering politicians to sell a population on the idea that the enemy is evil. It's hard to empathize with people who you only see in slanted government propaganda reels. Today, people from enemy countries can come together in cyberspace and find out that the "enemy" is not so different, as occurred in the Iran-Israel solidarity movement of 2012. More importantly, violent incidents and deaths can be broadcast to the world much more easily. Public shock and disgust at the brutal reality of war broadcast over YouTube and Facebook makes it much more difficult for governments to carry out large scale military aggressions. For example, the Kremlin's own pollster today released a survey showing that 73 percent of Russians disapprove of Putin's handling of the Ukraine crisis, with only 15 percent of the nation supporting a response to the overthrow of the government in Kiev. There are, of course, a few countries like North Korea that deny their citizens access to information that might contradict the government's propaganda line. And sometimes countries ignore mass anti-war protests — as occurred prior to the Iraq invasion of 2003 — but generally a more connected, open, empathetic and democratic world has made it much harder for war-mongers to go to war. The greatest trend, though, may be that the world as a whole is getting richer. Fundamentally, wars arise out of one group of people deciding that they want whatever another group has — land, tools, resources, money, friends, sexual partners, empire, prestige — and deciding to take it by force. Or they arise as a result of grudges or hatreds from previous wars of the first kind. We don't quite live in a superabundant world yet, but the long march of human ingenuity is making basic human wants like clothing, water, food, shelter, warmth, entertainment, recreation, and medicine more ubiquitous throughout the world. This means that countries are less desperate to go to war to seize other people's stuff. Now, the future is infinite and today's trends don't last forever. Declarations of the " end of history " often come back to haunt those who make them, and I am well aware that a world war is still possible. Trying to predict the actions of nations in the present is hard enough, and further into the future becomes exponentially more difficult. (Then again, my take is like Pascal's Wager: If I'm wrong, who's going to be around to tell me so?) Further into the future, severe climate change, and resource depletion, for example, could lead to new pressures to go to war (although climate mitigation and adaptation as well as recycling technologies mean both of these possibilities are avoidable). The development of robotic soldiers and drones may make it easier for countries (or even corporations) to go to war. Technical errors, computer glitches, or diplomatic misunderstandings can lead to war. Terrorism, inequality, and internal political or civil strife can all create the pressure for war. But the tendency toward inertia is strong. It is clear at least that the incentives for world war are far lower than they were in previous decades, and the disincentives are growing. The apocalyptic visions of a new world war between nations or empires that three generations of children have been raised into continue to diminish.Major war is extinct—institutions, MAD, resilient economic ties, and de-escalationTertrais 12 (Bruno, Dr. Bruno Tertrais is a Senior Research Fellow at the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique. He was the Special Assistant to the Director of Strategic Affairs at the French Ministry of Defense between 1993-2001, as Visiting Fellow at RAND Corporation in 1995/96, and Director of the Civilian Affairs Committee at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, “The Demise of Ares: The End of War as We Know It?” Page 9-11) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****However, this is not the only perceptible trend. The number of international conflicts (both ‘‘interstate,’’ or classic international wars, and ‘‘extrastate,’’ or interventions against a foreign non-state actor) has declined, too. In the first decade of the 21st century, interstate conflicts represented less than 7 percent (two out of 29) of the total number of conflicts; in 2010, for the seventh year in a row, there was no ongoing interstate war. 9 Classic international conflict has practically disappeared from the modern world. This is all the more remarkable since the number of states has tripled since the end of World War II. (There may actually be a causal link here more on this later.) No major power war has erupted since 1939. This is unique in modern history that is, in the post-Westphalia world. There were one or two dozen such conflicts (depending on the definition) in the 70 years that followed the signing of the 1648 treaties, and five during the same amount of time following the Vienna peace.10 We are living in the longest era of major power peace of the past five centuries, perhaps unrivaled since the Roman Empire.11 As documented by Professor Steven Pinker in his magisterial book The Better Angels of Our Nature, we are living on the tail-end of a slow-motion process that began four centuries ago.12 The diminution in the number of major power wars has been gradual. Since the Westphalia peace, their frequency has been one-third of what it had been in the 150 years that preceded the peace.13 One counts nine to 11 such wars between 1700 and 1815, two to six between 1815 and 1930, and two or three since 1930.14 This exceptionality of war is a new phenomenon in human history. It is estimated that in prehistoric times, two-thirds of human groups were constantly in a state of conflict, and that nearly 90 percent of them underwent large-scale violence every year.15 Fast forward to the modern era: according to one author, the total number of wars in the world has never been so low for at least six centuries.16 International war within the ‘‘central system’’ of states, which had been common since the late 15th century, declined fast after 1945, and reached unprecedented lows after 1990.17 Would this be an effect of shorter but deadlier conflicts? Actually, war has become more intense, but also less deadly. To be sure, relative mortality due to war in the period 1914—1945 reached, in Europe, a peak not even rivaled by the Thirty Years War (1618—1648).18 But the global and long-term trend is positive. The 8th century An Lushan rebellion led to the disappearance of perhaps two-thirds of the population of the Chinese empire.19 Until the mid-17th century, it was not exceptional for a society to lose a third of its population during a conflict.20 In the two world wars, very few countries (Serbia, Poland) lost more than 15 percent of their population. The trend has accelerated since then: the average number of battle-related deaths per conflict has dramatically receded.21 An oft-quoted affirmation that civilians are now the main victims of conflict has been thoroughly debunked.22 In fact, total mortality due to war since 1945 has diminished (likewise, in the past three decades, for the number of indirect deaths in wartime).23 What Has Gone Right? Multiple Explanations War is a complex, multi-causal, and multi-faceted phenomenon, and many different factors have played a role in its decline. The absence of major power conflict since 1945 has been a focus of study for political scientists for some time already. Authors such as John Lewis Gaddis have emphasized the structure of the international system, the geographical distance between the main contenders, and most importantly the role of nuclear deterrence.24 The latter also decreased the chances of war between non-major powers.25 Yet all major schools of international relations realism, liberalism, idealism, constructivism may have to be called upon to explain the overall decline of warfare. Since 1945, an international society based on norms and institutions has steadily developed. Mediations, courts and tribunals, international and regional organizations, peacekeeping, and interventions have multiplied. Peacekeeping, for instance, reduces the chances of a relapse of a civil war by 80 percent.26 ‘‘Conciliation rituals,’’ which emphasize peace over justice, do the same thing and go a long way toward terminating long internal conflicts.27 Wars of conquest have been delegitimized: a UN member has never been wiped off the map by force. (South Vietnam, absorbed by force by the North in 1975, had only observer status at the UN.) Notwithstanding the complex history of Tibet, or controversies about Kashmir, Palestine, and Western Sahara, or the stalemate in Cyprus, there is today no such thing as an occupied country that is, a state recognized as independent by the international community having fully lost its sovereignty to an occupant since 1945. As Professor John Mueller puts it, ‘‘the prohibition against territorial aggression has been astoundingly successful.’’28 When Iraq annexed Kuwait, it triggered the formation of the biggest international coalition ever formed, and the coalition won. Additionally, there is, since the 1970s, the growing relative importance of trade in national economies, which not only increases the opportunity cost of conflict, but also enhances mutual relations and understanding, which in turn facilitates negotiation and reduces strategic errors. Once derided, the idea of ‘‘gentle commerce’’ has been rejuvenated.29 The higher the volume of bilateral trade between two countries, the lower the risk of armed conflict between them.30 Mueller has called this the ‘‘Hollandization’’ of international society.31 Authors have also pointed to the phenomenon of ‘‘war fatigue’’ following the 1914—1945 orgy of destruction. The proportion of international disputes (whether or not they lead to armed conflict) to the total number of states has been slowly declining since World War II, returning to a mid-19th century level.32 More than a century ago, Polish writer Jean de Bloch claimed that war would become obsolete because of its increasing destructiveness. A few years later, British author Norman Angell suggested that wars of conquest would no longer pay because of their costs. They have been mocked for decades but they may end up having the last laugh.33 The decolonization process and the end of the Cold War also contributed to the decline of several forms of conflict. The diminution of extrastate conflicts can be explained by the end of the decolonization process, a painful and bloody one, which was by and large completed by 1980. The steady decrease in the number of civil wars since 1989 has many causes, but about one-fifth of this decline is due to the end of the East—West conflict, which fueled financially and ideologically many regional and low-level wars.34 Also, the decolonization process often left ungoverned vast territories which became, temporarily, ripe for predation. Since 1990, many ‘‘national questions’’ have been solved through the creation of new states by independence (Namibia), breakup (Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Serbia, Sudan), or unification (Germany, Yemen). This has reduced the number of civil wars but also of international conflicts: there is a reverse correlation between the number of states and the risk of international war.35 No nuke war: Unipolarity, disparity between military power, and MAD all check.John Glenn 2010 is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Southampton University. The flawed logic of a MAD man****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In a recent issue of this journal, Campbell Craig put forward an amended version of Preponderance theory seeking to explain why US unipolar predominance has turned out to be not simply a ‘moment’ and as such represents ‘a serious anomaly for neorealist theory’.8 This anomaly, Craig contends, is no mere ‘blip’ but signals the decline of the neo-realist paradigm and its replacement by William Wohlforth and Stephen Brooks’ Preponderance theory, although their explanation of contemporary state behaviour continues to be rooted in Realist arguments concerning the balance of power.9 In so doing, they identify three causal factors that together explain why unipolarity is likely to persist.10 The first factor is the US’ geographical position. Separated by vast oceans, the ‘potential security threat’ posed by the US is thus reduced. Second, the vast disparity in material capabilities between the US and potential rivals is so large that any attempt to catch up will prove too costly and will end in failure. This dominance is not simply confined to the military sphere but covers a wide spectrum of capabilities including its economy, technological level; and demography. Moreover, even if a rival power thought it could potentially balance militarily against the US’ actual manifest power, it would think again once US latent power is factored in.11 Even though the US is the predominant military power, it has had to tap only a small proportion of its resources to do so, therefore, its potential for military expansion far exceeds any potential rival, thus acting as a further inhibitor on other states’ ambitions. If a coalition of states attempted to balance in concert, Brooks and Wohlforth contend that they would come up against the well known difficulty, especially in today’s high-tech military environment, of coordinating their policies while the US would retain its advantage of being a single unitary state. Finally, the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union left states with the fait accompli of a unipolar world. Unlike other periods of history in which other powers could begin to balance against an emerging hegemon and successfully stymie its attempts at predominance, at the end of 1991, states were confronted by a colossus bestriding the world and little could be done to alter this fact on the ground.12 Craig contributes to this theory by adding a fourth factor – the revolutionary effect of nuclear weapons on state behaviour. Following Waltz, Craig argues that thermonuclear weapons are ‘the greatest of all unit-level changes in modern history and perhaps all history’.13 The guarantee of mutually assured destruction (MAD), should nuclear weapon states with a second strike capability go to war, has radically reduced the probability of such states actually engaging in large scale war against each other. Because deterrence depends on fear, argues Waltz, to ‘create fear, nuclear weapons are the best possible means’.14 It is argued that nuclear weapon states will be prevented from engaging in such an exchange because of the risk of unleashing total destruction upon themselves. Moreover, such weapons make nuclear wars fought for gains meaningless because the guaranteed levels of losses on all sides far outweigh any potential gains. Waltz therefore concludes that to fight nuclear wars ‘is impossible and that to launch an offensive that might prompt nuclear retaliation is obvious folly’.OFFTopicalitySpace-Based Solar PowerSBSP = functional components – collector, converter, antenna, rectennaAnil 9 (Thorat Ashwini Anil, Prof. Katariya S. S., Department of Electronics Engineering, Amrutvahini College Of Engineering, Sangamner, Second International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering, “Solar Power Satellite,” 12-18-09, IOSR Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Space-based solar power essentially consists of three functional units:A. A Solar energy collector to convert the solar energy into DC (Direct current) electricity.B. A DC to Microwave converter.C. Large antenna array to beam the Microwave power to the ground.D. A means of receiving power on earth, for example via microwave antennas (Rectenna).The space-based portion will be in a freefall, vacuum environment and will not need to support itself against gravity other than relatively weak tidal stresses.Space-based solar power is collecting solar power from satellites in spaceAtul, 2015, <Electronics and Telecommunication Dept.,Shri Shankaracharya Institute of Professional Management and Technology, Raipur, INDIA,>, Anveshi>, IOSR Journal of Environmental Science, Toxicology and Food Technology, A Study on Space-based Solar Power System, p. Space-based solar power (SBSP) is the concept of collecting solar power in space (using an "SPS", that is, a "solar-power satellite") for use on Earth. It has been in research since the early 1970s. SBSP would differ from current solar collection methods in that the means used to collect energy would reside on an orbiting satellite instead of on Earth's surface. Some projected benefits of such a system are a higher collection rate and a longer collection period due to the lack of a diffusing atmosphere and night time in space.Space-based solar power is used in official sources – refers to the same thing as Space Solar Power and Solar Power Satellites, has three components – solar panels, power transmission, and rectifying antennasCSBSP No Date (Citizens for Space Based Solar Power, )****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Let me start by clarifying some terminology. All of the following terms refer to the same concept. Space Based Solar Power (SBSP), Space Solar Power (SSP) and Solar Power Satellite (SPS) are all used interchangeably although Space Solar Power (SSP) is the most common term used. This website uses Space Based Solar Power, as it was the term used in the most recent National Space Security Office study.There are three fundamental elements to space-based solar power.The first element consists of large solar panels in space near the Earth. These solar panels could be up to several square miles in size, depending on the capacity required. They would be placed in one of several orbits, including Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Geo synchronous (or stationary) Orbit (GEO), or even Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO). Eventually, a constellation of satellites would be required. Another location for the space-based solar panels would be on the surface of the Moon. Wherever they are placed, these solar panels would continuously collect massive amounts of electromagnetic (light) energy, since solar radiation is eight times more intense in space than on the ground and they would not be subject to the day-night cycles of the Earth’s revolution or impeded by varying weather conditions. These solar panels would most likely employ photovoltaics (PV) similar to current ground-based solar panel technology for conversion of light to electricity, although other conversion methods have also been considered.The second element consists of the wireless power transmission (WPT) from the solar power satellite to the surface of the Earth. Electromagnetic energy would be beamed wirelessly back to earth at frequencies most efficient to carry energy through the atmosphere. These frequencies would most likely be in the microwave range, although the beam would be similar in intensity to 1/6 that of noon sunlight.The third element consists of the rectifying antennas (rectennas) which would receive the wireless power transmission from the solar power satellites and convert it to alternating current power that would be connected directly into the existing electrical power distribution grid as a source of baseload power. This power could also be used to manufacture synthetic hydrocarbon fuels (synfuels) in a liquid form or even to be used as low-intensity broadcast power beamed directly to consumers.SPSSBSP includes SPSFaiyetole 2018 [Ayodele Adekunle Faiyetole, EarthSpace, Lagos, Nigeria; The Federal University of Technology, Potentialities of Space-Based Systems for Monitoring Climate Policies and Mitigation of Climate Process Drivers, Astropolitics, 16:1, 28-48, DOI: 10.1080/14777622.2018.1436329 accessed 8/22/19]jap****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Alternatively, as proposed by Glaser, 7 solar energy can be collected directly in space and beamed to Earth. A prominent theory for achieving SBSP is through the deployment of solar power satellites (SPS) or sun towers (ST). According to White, 8 SPS could be placed in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) to ensure fixed antenna geometry. 9 Solar radiation can be collected and concentrated using amplifying mirrors, which beam the energy to Earth via wireless or laser technology. A receiving ground system would then intercept the solar energy and provide distribution. STs are tethered arrays of solar concentrators in low Earth orbit (LEO) channeling solar energy to an elec- tromagnetic transmitter that beams the energy as microwaves to Earth for collection by passive arrays of PV cells. 10 New concepts include SPS-Alpha, SPS-Omega, modular symmetrical concentrators, and multi-rotary joints. 11Broad ConceptSpace-Based Solar power collects energy from the sun and transmits it to the Earth’s SurfaceJenkins 9 (Lyle M., “Issues in development of space-based solar power,” 2009 IEEE Aerospace conference, 3-14-9, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Space-Based Solar Power - (SBSP) is a concept that has considerable potential to provide clean renewable energy. Increased population coupled with reduced natural resources represent a challenge to national and world security. The SBSP concept is to collect energy from the Sun in Earth orbit. The electrical energy is converted to microwave frequency for transmission to the surface of the Earth. There it is converted back in to electricity for use. Possible usages are base-load power, fuel conversion or direct delivery to consumers in isolated locations. The available potential of solar energy is greater than energy in petroleum reserves. The primary issue is defining the path to development of SBSP capability. A critical parameter is the cost of delivery of components to orbit. There are a variety of concepts with the potential to reduce cost of payload in orbit. It is important to make a commitment to the development of a capability with cost efficiency as the prime objective. Current technology supports viability of the SBSP. A government-supported proof of concept demonstration would focus initial efforts. There are a number of ideas to be described that fit the demonstration objectives. Analysis of SBSP has defined certain key questions. Can the SBSP system be designed to be environmentally safe? Can clear targets for economic viability in markets of interest be identified? Are there technical development goals and a roadmap for reducing risk? Selection of design trades could enable the best options. The government is expected to take the lead in initial action. The transition to commercial application requires a defined vision. This goal needs to be funded with a focus on development of this solution to energy security.Unilat CPA2: UnilatUS doesn’t have the capability to produce SBSP aloneLyle M. Jenkins, retired from NASA after 38 years of systems engineering activity. Major projects included Apollo and Space Shuttle., March 2009, "Issues in development of space-based solar power," IEEE, , 8-19-2019, -PGR****NCC’19 Novice Packet****At present, the United States has very limited capabilities to build large structures, very large aperture antennas or very high power systems in orbit. The capability to control and maneuver these systems in space must be developed and demonstrated. Presently, the ability to translate large mass between Earth orbits will be required for deployment SBSP. Eventually, the capability for in?space manufacturing and construction or in?situ space resource utilization may be developed, but at this point it is a challenge that should not be incorporated into the program. One critical item to be demonstrated is capability for beamed power and application to propulsion of large space systems.Unilateral efforts can never solve warming—international cooperation is keyWeissmann 12 (Jordan, senior associate editor at The Atlantic, “Why the U.S. Alone Can’t Stop Climate Change (in 2 Graphs),” 11/20/12, Accessed: 8/19/19) -JD****NCC’19 Novice Packet****But here's a reminder, courtesy of a recent World Resources Institute report on coal consumption, that whatever the U.S. does to deal with climate change, our efforts will be for naught unless they're part of a global effort. Coal-fired power plants are the top contributor to worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, and the future of coal will not be decided, by and large, in the United States, which consumed about 13 percent of the worldwide total in 2010. Instead, it's in the hands of China, which burned up 46 percent of it. China is also responsible for almost 40 percent of all the new coal-fired power plant capacity that's been planned across the planet. Beijing says it wants to cap its total consumption at about 3.9 billion tons by 2015, though some analysts expect it to reach around 4.2 billion -- a 27 percent leap from where it is today. Meanwhile, India is also readying to install huge quantities of coal power capacity. Unless something can be done to limit usage in these developing giants, their growth is going to eclipse any reasonable U.S. carbon reductions. This isn't an excuse for inaction here at home. If anything, taking steps to curb greenhouse gasses domestically would be a demonstration of good faith should the world's leaders ever try to hash out a new climate treaty. And without that sort of international cooperation, we're all sunk.?Unilateral US action fails at solving climate changeJames 09 (Sallie James is a director of development at the Cato Institute. 9-9-2009, "A Harsh Climate for Trade: How Climate Change Proposals Threaten Global Commerce," Cato Institute, DOA 8/19/2019 AAS) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****The upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change has led to calls for the United States to adopt a climate change abatement program in advance. In an effort to minimize adverse effects on certain domestic industries from higher energy costs, however, proponents of a cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions have loaded up their proposal with giveaways, loopholes, and barriers to imports from nations with less stringent emission caps. These trade measures are likely to be ineffective at best and harmful to U.S. interests at worst. First, the key targets of the proposed import barriers, India and China, are relatively minor sources of imports of energyintensive goods. Most carbon-intensive imports to the United States come from other developed countries that have stricter emissions controls than the United States and will therefore likely escape import penalties. Second, and more fundamentally, the trade provisions may be counterproductive. Global trade rules allow import barriers to protect the environment under certain conditions, some of which the main climate change bill appears to contradict. A trade dispute and possible retaliation is not in anyone’s interest, especially in a global downturn. Even if the United States was able to avoid formal dispute settlement proceedings, copycat regulations in other countries may be designed in a manner unfavorable to U.S. interests. To the extent that global warming is a real problem warranting action, it needs to be addressed globally rather than through unilateral efforts. Antagonizing trade partners through probably illegal trade measures will undermine efforts to secure global cooperation on climate change. A freer, more prosperous economy is a more auspicious path to ensuring a more rapid spread of environmental technology and the global consensus needed to combat climate change.NO unilatPeter Glaser 2008 (Dr. Peter Glaser, editor of the Journal of Solar Energy, served on major committees for NASA and the National Academy of Sciences, and was president of the International Solar Energy Society. {MCT})****NCC’19 Novice Packet****GlAser: Since it would be such a huge undertaking, I think it would be best accomplished at an international level, perhaps even managed by the United Nations. Each country could contribute their best effort, and then each country would reap the benefit of cheap and plentiful power from the sun. We could utilize the knowledge of all the nations that have been researching spacebased solar power. If only one country has the satellites, the international community will worry that the technology will be misused. With every nation taking part in the planning, building, and operation of the system, there would be inherent transparency, oversight, and equality. There would be no secrets, and no country would be left in the dark. On the other hand, if one nation decides to build the system, all hell may break loose. There would be distrust and a huge shift in the balance of power. Any nation with such a system would not only have an advantage in space, but they would have economic and military advantages on the ground as well. And there are many countries taking the idea of solar power from space much more seriously that we are in the United States. I would prefer to see a network of power satellites built by an international effort. n A leGendAry cAreer A native of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Peter Glaser became a U.S. citizen US unilat fails---coop k2 accessing space real estateDavenport 19 (Christian, Washington Post reporter, “Another front in the tensions between the U.S. and China: Space,” 7/26/19, accessed 8/19/19, , CP) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****Fifty years after the United States proved its dominance of space by beating the Soviet Union to landing humans on the moon, the country is confronting the cosmic ambitions of another superpower: China. China didn’t launch an astronaut into space until 2003 — more than 40 years after the United States and the Soviet Union did. It has since developed its space program at a torrid pace, even as the United States has become dependent on Russia to maintain a presence on the International Space Station. NASA hasn’t sent another soul to the lunar surface since 1972. But earlier this year, China made history when it became the first nation to land an uncrewed spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a feat it hailed as opening “a new chapter in humanity’s exploration of the moon.” NASA and its contractors are still struggling to build a spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to space, eight years after the last space shuttle landed at the Kennedy Space Center. Meanwhile, China has developed a monster rocket and last year launched more rockets than any other country on Earth, though none with people on board. And while NASA is working to determine the future of the aging International Space Station, China is planning to launch a station of its own within the next few years. China plans to send another spacecraft to the moon this year. It also has set its sights on the same remote swath of lunar real estate the United States is rushing to reach: the moon’s south pole, where water from ice could prove not only life sustaining, but might also provide the ingredients — hydrogen and oxygen — for propellant to send rockets to other destinations. Though barren, gray and lifeless, it offers a key steppingstone to deeper space exploration and enormous prestige to whoever gets there first. The United States and China aren’t the only countries eyeing the lunar south pole. On Monday, India launched its Chandrayaan spacecraft on mission there. If successful, India would become the fourth country, after the U.S., the former Soviet Union and China to soft land a spacecraft on the lunar surface. The United States has noticed China’s ambitions, which have touched off a debate over how to respond and what China’s intentions really are at a time when space is seen as a critical warfighting domain. The Trump administration and hawkish conservatives have cast the competition as a power struggle with enormous consequences — the moon as the cosmic equivalent of the South China Sea, where China has expanded a military presence that is of concern to the Pentagon. Earlier this year, the White House announced NASA would dramatically speed up its own mission to return to the moon, initially planned for 2028, but now, at the direction of Vice President Pence, moved up to 2024. “Make no mistake about it: We’re in a space race today, just as we were in the 1960s, and the stakes are even higher,” he said in a speech in March calling for the shortened timeline. China’s landing on the far side of the moon “revealed their ambition to seize the lunar strategic high ground and become the world’s preeminent spacefaring nation,” he said. U.S. officials fear the Chinese advance in space. “Looking at Chinese behavior in other shared domains — the South China Sea, cyberspace — they’ve given us pause for concern,” Scott Pace, the executive secretary of the National Space Council, said in an interview. “And so looking out in space, it’s hard to imagine that they will behave any better than they’d behaved in other areas where they felt that their national interests are at stake.” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who proposed a moon base during his presidential bid in 2012, said China is “going to rapidly become the only country that can compete with us for the moon and Mars.” “They want to prove they are our technological superior,” he said. If China can get “to the south pole before we do, there’s a very real possibility we will find it impossible to operate there.” China has demonstrated growing military capabilities in space. In 2007, it took out a dead weather satellite with a missile, putting the United States and others on notice that the national security satellites they have in orbit — used for missile defense, precision-guided munitions and spying — were vulnerable. “China views space as the soft underbelly of the U.S. military,” said Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But he and others think it is wrong to assume China’s activities in space put it and the United States in a warlike race for a single goal. Rather, some analysts said, the countries are engaged in a long-term power competition for national pride and technological development. China’s rover is a “science experiment,” said Bleddyn Bowen, a professor of international relations who focuses on space at the University of Leicester. “It’s not a Dr. Evil laser.” The notion that the United States has to stake its claim in space or else “we’re going to lose to China” is “absurd,” said Brian Weeden, the director of program planning at the Secure World Foundation, a think tank that focuses on space. He added that some are “trying to prop up the China threat as rationale for their own policy goals.” Instead of competing in space, many think the United States should partner with China on civil space exploration and science missions, as it does with Russia, another potential adversary. That was made more difficult in 2011, with the passage of a provision written by former U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) that requires NASA to get congressional approval before partnering with China, as well as having the FBI certify that the cooperation would not jeopardize national security. Wolf’s intent was to keep China from stealing secrets and technology, but it hasn’t slowed China’s progress, officials said. “Our policy of excluding China from human spaceflight and exploration missions to the moon and beyond has not slowed its rise as a space power,” Harrison said during a hearing earlier this year of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “Worse, it may create an incentive for China to build an alternative coalition for space exploration that could undermine our traditional leadership role in this arena.” From the Apollo lunar landings on, no other country has matched NASA’s space record. It has sent probes to every planet in the solar system. It has landed robots on Mars eight times. Last month, it announced it would fly a car-sized quadcopter to Saturn’s moon, Titan, which scientists think could yield clues to life on other planets. But NASA has lost some of the prestige and swagger it had 50 years ago during the Apollo era, when the agency was the envy of the world, an inspiration and the embodiment of the American can-do ethos. No humans have returned to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. Since the space shuttle was retired eight years ago, NASA has not had the ability to fly astronauts anywhere. Instead, it pays Russia for rides to the space station at a cost of more than $80 million a seat. In 2014, NASA awarded contracts, worth $6.8 billion combined, to Boeing and SpaceX for the development of spacecraft that could once again fly humans to space from U.S. soil. Both companies have suffered setbacks and delays, including SpaceX’s Dragon capsule exploding during a test. It’s also not clear whether either will be able to fly people this year. China has faced problems as well. In 2017, its new rocket, the Long March 5, suffered a failure shortly after liftoff. There are also reports that it has suffered more recent setbacks, delaying its more ambitious missions. China also does not have the heritage in space that the United States has built up over years. Still, “from a standing start in 2000, they’ve come an enormous way, and with a great deal of speed,” said Mark Albrecht, who served as the executive secretary of the National Space Council under President George H.W. Bush. And unlike the United States, which under different presidential administrations has directed NASA to shoot for the moon, then Mars, then the moon again, China has remained steadfast about its goals and what it wants to achieve. Sending a rover to the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from Earth was a giant leap for the Chinese program. Landing there is made extraordinarily difficult because controllers on Earth can’t communicate with the spacecraft with a direct radio signal, a problem the Chinese overcame with a relay satellite. China is planning another mission to the lunar surface later this year that would bring back rock samples. It eventually wants to build a base at the lunar south pole for the same reason NASA does: water. There is ice in the craters at the pole and near continuous sunlight that could be used for solar power. The water can be used not only for sustaining life, but its components, hydrogen and oxygen, can also be used as rocket propellant, making the moon a “gas station in space,” as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has called it. That, in turn, would allow for exploration deeper into the solar system. Ross has pushed to cut regulations to allow the space economy to “ignite steady economic growth in the industry,” which he said could reach $1 trillion by 2040. The quest for resources and the possible economic benefits of space — though many think they are years or decades away — has also motivated the Chinese, analysts said. The Chinese have “woken up to the possibility that space is not just for exploration, but can tremendously benefit the economic development and national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” said Namrata Goswami, an author and analyst who studies China’s space program. “This is due to the fact that scientists point out trillions of dollars of resources to be had in space, including the lunar surface and asteroids. This is serious business for China.” In 2014, China for the first time allowed non-state-owned companies to launch rockets, she said, as part of a push to harness the innovation of the private sector and to help it compete in the way companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have helped to push NASA. And on Thursday iSpace said it became the first private Chinese company to launch a rocket to orbit. “China has watched keenly and with respect the success of U.S. space entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk of SpaceX and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin,” she said. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.) China’s plan to assemble its own space station comes as the United States debates what to do with the International Space Station, which is showing its age. Last year, the White House announced a plan to cut off direct funding for the station by 2025 and to turn over portions of it to the commercial sector. That plan has not yet materialized, and there are efforts in Congress to extend the life of the station. But the future of the station, and the United States’s role in low Earth orbit, is uncertain. “We don’t want to abandon low Earth orbit to, say, a Chinese station,” Pace, of the National Space Council, said. “We want to continue human presence and experimentation in low Earth orbit. We’re not going to build another million-pound facility, as station is. So what are we going to do? Going forward we’d like to keep the partnership together, and after the space station. But what does that look like?” Some fear a future where the ascendant Chinese space program becomes the only alternative. “The optics could be really bad if the International Space Station is coming back into the atmosphere in a ball of flames while the Chinese are putting theirs up there,” Weeden said. “That could be a huge problem politically.”A2: Leadership Net BenefitChinese leadership in space is the squo – only US coming to the table for cooperation promotes US soft leadership in spaceYang 18 (Adam, The Diplomat, 3-17-2018, How Should the US Engage China in Space?, Diplomat, accessed: 8-14-2019, //ng) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****In the space arena, China is not anywhere close to rearranging an entire judicial system around its views; however, it actively participates in international space organizations and introduces measures that could limit the ability for the United States to project force. Through the United Nations, China and Russia have twice (2008 and 2014) proposed the legally binding Treaty of Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space and of the Threat or Use of Force Against Outer Space Objects (PPWT). The primary U.S. objections to the treaty were that it did not include verification mechanisms, only applied to space-based weapons, and did not include ground based ASAT weapons – a primary counterspace capability China is advancing. Fourth, policymakers could also examine China’s maritime cooperation initiatives to envision potential space cooperation. China’s counterpiracy operation in the Gulf of Aden has slowly emerged as a valuable mechanism to improve U.S.-China cooperation as seen through the counterpiracy exercises of December 2014. On a grander scale in June 2017, China laid out an ambitious vision for cooperation in relation to the “Maritime Silk Road” as part of its larger Belt and Road Initiative. This plan envisions the establishment of cooperative principles, environmental norms, maritime security, and “collaborative governance” to achieve mutual prosperity. If one believes in China’s sincerity, working cooperatively across these lines could greatly reduce security tensions and set conditions for long-term mutual gain. Subsequently, China is pursuing international cooperation in space – not only for security and economic reasons, but also to bolster the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party to domestic and international audiences. The European Space Administration (ESA) has already expressed desires to cooperate with China on human space flight and the use of its future space station. China especially values its relationship with ESA due to the opportunities to trade and transfer technologies denied by the United States. China and Russia have also agreed to cooperate on human space flight and deep space exploration. Though these initiatives are not on the scale of a Maritime Silk Road, they do offer U.S. policymakers opportunities to work with a rising space power for positive ends. Finally, the United States should pay attention to China’s diplomatic and engagement efforts with other nations. Contrary to the cooperative tenets for a Maritime Silk Road, in 2016, China convinced Cambodia to block an Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) joint statement that recognized The Hague’s arbitration ruling on the South China Sea dispute in favor of the Philippines. In June 2017, Vietnam resisted China’s demands to vacate an oil venture within its EEZ, but eventually capitulated when China threatened to use force. The most concerning aspect for Vietnam was an atypical silence from its neighbors – particularly from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore. Apparently, China’s political and economic leverage over these nations prevented them from publicly sympathizing with Vietnam or rebuking China’s actions. Seemingly, when pressed, China uses soft and hard power tactics bilaterally to dislodge multilateral initiatives that counter it interests. Could China disrupt the U.S.-European alliance as it did with ASEAN unity? At this stage, Chinese-European cooperation in space seems well intentioned. Nevertheless, U.S. policymakers should consider whether China’s growing space relations with Europe, Russia, or any other space power could complicate U.S. interests in other areas. As China strengthens its partnerships, its ability to shape laws, institutions and the strategic preferences of others increase as well. Conclusion The United States sits at an important period to develop a comprehensive space strategy that addresses China’s growing influence. U.S. cooperation with the Soviets in space during the Cold War was not due to a desire for true cooperation, but a means to manage a potential crisis related to the management of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. The United States could develop a similar mechanism for limited engagement with China to send positive signals and reduce misperceptions. China’s activities in space have already intersected with U.S. interests and will only increase in frequency and intensity over time. In the end, for the United States to compete and lead in the space domain, it must engage new players and shape the contours of the game. If Washington is worried about how China will play the game, it can always look in the maritime arena for strategic clues.Plan solves the net benefit – cooperation is necessary to get the tech off the ground but ensures US leadershipHsu 10 – PhD in EngineeringFeng, PhD in Engineering, Former head of the NASA GSFC risk management function, and was the GSFC lead on the NASA-MIT joint project for risk-informed decision-making support on key NASA programs, has over 90 publications and is coauthor of two books and co-chair of several technical committees, 12-2010, “Harnessing the Sun: Embarking on Humanity's Next Giant Leap,” Online Journal of Space Communication, ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****An major effort led by the U.S. - similar to the 1960s Apollo Project to put a man on the moon - with broad participation from the international community may be what is needed to create, implement and operate a commercial scale SPS system. Please remember, an inherent feature of Solar Power Satellites is their location in earth orbit outside the borders of any individual nation. Their energy will be delivered back to the earth by way of wireless power transmission. WPT applications must be compatible with other uses of the radio frequency spectrum in the affected orbital space. SPS infrastructures must also be launched and delivered into space. International involvement of governments is mandatory for coordinating global treaties and agreements, frequency assignments, satellite locations, space traffic control and other features of space operations to prevent international confrontations. It is imperative that a multi-governmental organization or entity be put in place. For the U.S. - or any single nation - to implement a full-scale SPS project alone will be extremely difficult, if not inconceivable, due to the many political, regulatory and technological reasons stated. However, it is equally important that there be a lead nation providing the necessary leadership in such a complex and interdependent international effort. The various project elements involving multiple government and industry partnerships must be clearly defined. The United States is a logical leader in this area because of the breadth of its technology infrastructure and capability, as well as the magnitude of financial resources available in its industry and financial community. Building, launching and operating a system of Solar Power Satellites in space orbit is going to be a technology and engineering endeavor requiring great human effort and ingenuity. If we can go to the Moon and achieve the splitting of atoms, we can also overcome the inefficiency problems of solar-electric conversion, and we can achieve affordable access to space. We can make Solar Power Satellites a cost competitive source of energy for all of humanity.Plan’s cooperative policy ensures US leadership on tech developmentFeng Hsu, Ph.D. and Ken Cox, Ph.D. 2009 NASA GSFC Sr. Fellow, Aerospace Technology Working Group and Founder & Director Aerospace Technology Working Group, respectively. “Sustainable Space Exploration and Space Development ??? A Unified Strategic Vision” Aerospace Technology Working group. ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****So while some might argue that RLV or SBSP are too expensive or too difficult to realize, we must not forget that what makes a nation and its people thrive and prosper are not what they do for easy or short-term gain, but what they accomplish that others dare not do or cannot do. How many of history’s great endeavors have brought profound benefits to humanity across the economic, scientific and social fronts? It is precisely such an opportunity that lies before us today. Hence, we recommend the new paradigm of a strategic vision for space development (VSD) be considered by the new administration, consisting of the following key strategic elements, as a roadmap for propelling America and humanity’s outward expansion into space-based economic and commercial frontiers: 1. Set the goal of a low-cost, reliable space transportation infrastructure development within the Earth-moon system as the highest priority to be implemented by the proposed new Department of Space. The U.S. should build strong support and invite global participation from the entire international community. In this effort to achieve the proposed VSD, the U.S. and its international partners In this effort to achieve the proposed VSD, the U.S. and its international partners should focus heavily on the development of RLVs, such as crew & cargo transport and launch vehicle systems with top-level requirements of low-cost, low system complexity, and aircraft-like reliability, maintainability and operability. 3. We should develop and establish an international Fuel-Depot and Orbital Staging or Service point (station) in the LEO environment to support and service commercial space-transportation traffic, including space tourism, Lunar and Earth orbital transfers, and commercial satellite services. 4. We should also promote and support the establishment and construction of spaceport infrastructure in several strategic locations within the U.S. and around the globe, which will meet the emerging demand for increased commercial launch and spacetransport economic activities. 5. We must develop enabling space infrastructure observation and tracking capabilities for planetary defense. In particular, develop ground and orbital systems, in close collaboration with international partners, for monitoring, tracking and deflecting asteroids, comets, and other cosmic objects in near-Earth orbit, which threaten the safety of our home planet. And we must invest in projects with multiple benefits such as space-based solar power (SBSP) research and development, which would be developed by first funding a series of space-to-space or space-to-Earth SBSP demonstration projects. Technology demonstrations, such as wireless power transmission (WPT), highefficiency microwave beam generation and control, system safety and reliability, onorbit robotic assembly technology, and deployment of large-scale orbital solar structures would also be advisable to help reduce risks, thus triggering large-scale investments by private industries. The upside potential, if successful, would ultimately lead to the capacity to harness solar energy from space to alleviate Earth’s dependence on fossil fuels, thereby addressing global climate-change concerns. Kritik AnswersEnergy Debates GoodAcademic debate over energy technology in the face of environmental destruction is critical to shape the direction of change and create a public consciousness shift---action now is keyCrist 4 (Eileen, Professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology, “Against the social construction of nature and wilderness”, Environmental Ethics 26;1, p 13-6, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****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"[32]—is, to borrow a legendary one-liner, striving to interpret the world at an hour that is pressingly calling us to change it.Warming DAWarming is unique because it actually causes extinction ---- critical theory concerned with social justice must account for solutions to the climateKim Q. Hall 14, Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Affiliate of Women's Studies and Sustainable Development, Appalachian State University, 2014, “No Failure: Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures,” Radical Philosophy Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, p. 203-225 ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****While it is not my intention to contribute to the crisis mentality critiqued by Braidotti, the urgency of climate change cannot be overstated; it is one of the most serious problems facing us today. Industrialization marked the beginning of unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The reliance on fossil fuels that fueled industrialization and, as John D’Emilio64 observes, migrations to cities that created the context for the emergence of gay and lesbian identities in Western countries, continues to support the consumption habits of wealthy elites and has fundamentally altered the climate of the planet in ways that threaten the welfare and existence of humans and other species.One consequence of anthropogenic climate change is the unprecedented melting of glaciers. As James Bagost documents in the film Chasing Ice and his book Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers,65 glaciers are melting at such a dramatic rate that they are likely to disappear in the not-too-distant future, some perhaps in the lifetime of the present generation. As a result of documentation conducted by his EIS (Extreme Ice Survey) project, Bagost asserts that Glacier Park in the U.S. will likely have to be renamed Glacierless Park and “the Arctic Ocean is likely to be ice free” by 2030.66 One might ask, “How and why does ice matter?” Glaciers play a crucial role in regulating the Earth’s climate and providing drinking water.67 While some melting always has occurred during warmer months, glaciers are melting at such a dramatic rate that most are receding without return. Glacial melting, ocean acidification, and other impacts of climate change are already contributing to food shortages, water availability, species extinction, sea level rise, increased storm intensity, drought, and violent conflicts in the world. Because greenhouse gases can linger in the atmosphere for thirty years or more before their effects are realized, we are already committed to a certain level of climate change in the future, even if wealthy nations decide tomorrow to completely stop fossil fuel consumption.68Poor people are the most harmed by anthropogenic climate change and the least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases are produced by consumption of fossil fuels, which is an indicator of affluence. The United States is the largest per capita consumer of fossil fuels, and thus it produces the largest per capita emission of greenhouse gases. Given the unpredictable but severe and long-term consequences of anthropogenic climate change, some believe the term “climate chaos” is a more apt characterization of the problem.69 Climate chaos has developed in a context of global inequality, and it exacerbates inequality.Climate chaos raises many questions about global injustice, questions with which any radical queer crip feminist critique must be concerned. And despite my appreciation for much of the queer battle cry of “No future,” one concern I think we cannot overlook, in the context of climate chaos and global injustice, is the question of what it means, as we ponder the relationship between queerness and the future, to be responsive to the futures that present action and inaction bring into existence. Of course, the harms of climate chaos are already disproportionately experienced by women, people of color, and disabled and poor people.According to a World Health Organization estimate in 2005, climate change-related events contribute to 150,000 human deaths each year.70 In addition, given that some greenhouse gases can remain in the atmosphere for between thirty and one thousand years, it is clear that climate changerelated harms experienced in the present are the result of past emissions.71 Furthermore, given the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels, the harmful effects of the greater amount of greenhouse gas emissions at present will be experienced by human and nonhuman beings in the future. Thus, while present generations may not be directly harmed by current greenhouse gas emissions,72 future generations will be.Individual Action FailsPublic advocacy is key---individual action fails and trades off with institutional solutionsCAG 10—Climate Change Communication Advisory Group. Dr Adam Corner School of Psychology, Cardiff University - Dr Tom Crompton Change Strategist, WWF-UK - Scott Davidson Programme Manager, Global Action Plan - Richard Hawkins Senior Researcher, Public Interest Research Centre - Professor Tim Kasser, Psychology department, Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, USA. - Dr Renee Lertzman, Center for Sustainable Processes & Practices, Portland State University, US. - Peter Lipman, Policy Director, Sustrans. - Dr Irene Lorenzoni, Centre for Environmental Risk, University of East Anglia. - George Marshall, Founding Director, Climate Outreach , Information Network - Dr Ciaran Mundy, Director, Transition Bristol - Dr Saffron O’Neil, Department of Resource Management and Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia. - Professor Nick Pidgeon, Director, Understanding Risk Research Group, School of Psychology, Cardiff University. - Dr Anna Rabinovich, School of Psychology, University of Exeter - Rosemary Randall, Founder and director of Cambridge Carbon Footprint - Dr Lorraine Whitmarsh, School of Psychology, Cardiff University & Visiting Fellow at the, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. (Communicating climate change to mass public audience, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****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 non-governmental 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. ? Seven Principles? 1. Move Beyond Social Marketing? We believe that too little attention is paid to the understanding that psychologists bring to strategies for motivating change, whilst undue faith is often placed in the application of marketing strategies to ‘sell’ behavioural changes. Unfortunately, in the context of ambitious pro-environmental behaviour, such strategies seem unlikely to motivate systemic behavioural change.? Social marketing is an effective way of achieving a particular behavioural goal – dozens of practical examples in the field of health behaviour attest to this. Social marketing is really more of a framework for designing behaviour change programmes than a behaviour change programme - it offers a method of maximising the success of a specific behavioural goal. Darnton (2008) has described social marketing as ‘explicitly transtheoretical’, while Hastings (2007), in a recent overview of social marketing, claimed that there is no theory of social marketing. Rather, it is a ‘what works’ philosophy, based on previous experience of similar campaigns and programmes. Social marketing is flexible enough to be applied to a range of different social domains, and this is undoubtedly a fundamental part of its appeal.? However, social marketing’s 'what works' status also means that it is agnostic about the longer term, theoretical merits of different behaviour change strategies, or the cultural values that specific campaigns serve to strengthen. Social marketing dictates that the most effective strategy should be chosen, where effective means ‘most likely to achieve an immediate behavioural goal’. ? This means that elements of a behaviour change strategy designed according to the principles of social marketing may conflict with other, broader goals. What if the most effective way of promoting pro-environmental behaviour ‘A’ was to pursue a strategy that was detrimental to the achievement of long term pro-environmental strategy ‘Z’? The principles of social marketing have no capacity to resolve this conflict – they are limited to maximising the success of the immediate behavioural programme. This is not a flaw of social marketing – it was designed to provide tools to address specific behavioural problems on a piecemeal basis. But it is an important limitation, and one that has significant implications if social marketing techniques are used to promote systemic behavioural change and public engagement on an issue like climate change. ? 2. Be honest and forthright about the probable impacts of climate change, and the scale of the challenge we confront in avoiding these. But avoid deliberate attempts to provoke fear or guilt. ? There is no merit in ‘dumbing down’ the scientific evidence that the impacts of climate change are likely to be severe, and that some of these impacts are now almost certainly unavoidable. Accepting the impacts of climate change will be an important stage in motivating behavioural responses aimed at mitigating the problem. However, deliberate attempts to instil fear or guilt carry considerable risk. ? Studies on fear appeals confirm the potential for fear to change attitudes or verbal expressions of concern, but often not actions or behaviour (Ruiter et al., 2001). The impact of fear appeals is context - and audience - specific; for example, for those who do not yet realise the potentially ‘scary’ aspects of climate change, people need to first experience themselves as vulnerable to the risks in some way in order to feel moved or affected (Das et al, 2003; Hoog et al, 2005). As people move towards contemplating action, fear appeals can help form a behavioural intent, providing an impetus or spark to ‘move’ from; however such appeals must be coupled with constructive information and support to reduce the sense of danger (Moser, 2007). The danger is that fear can also be disempowering – producing feelings of helplessness, remoteness and lack of control (O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, 2009). Fear is likely to trigger ‘barriers to engagement’, such as denial2 (Stoll-Kleemann et al., 2001; Weber, 2006; Moser and Dilling, 2007; Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole & Whitmarsh, 2007). The location of fear in a message is also relevant; it works better when placed first for those who are inclined to follow the advice, but better second for those who aren't (Bier, 2001).? Similarly, studies have shown that guilt can play a role in motivating people to take action but can also function to stimulate defensive mechanisms against the perceived threat or challenge to one’s sense of identity (as a good, moral person). In the latter case, behaviours may be left untouched (whether driving a SUV or taking a flight) as one defends against any feelings of guilt or complicity through deployment of a range of justifications for the behaviour (Ferguson & Branscombe, 2010). ? Overall, there is a need for emotionally balanced representations of the issues at hand. This will involve acknowledging the ‘affective reality’ of the situation, e.g. “We know this is scary and overwhelming, but many of us feel this way and we are doing something about it”.? 3. Be honest and forthright about the impacts of mitigating and adapting to climate change for current lifestyles, and the ‘loss’ - as well as the benefits - that these will entail. Narratives that focus exclusively on the ‘up-side’ of climate solutions are likely to be unconvincing. While narratives about the future impacts of climate change may highlight the loss of much that we currently hold to be dear, narratives about climate solutions frequently ignore the question of loss. If the two are not addressed concurrently, fear of loss may be ‘split off’ and projected into the future, where it is all too easily denied. This can be dangerous, because accepting loss is an important step towards working through the associated emotions, and emerging with the energy and creativity to respond positively to the new situation (Randall, 2009). However, there are plenty of benefits (besides the financial ones) of a low-carbon lifestyle e.g., health, community/social interaction - including the ‘intrinsic' goals mentioned below. It is important to be honest about both the losses and the benefits that may be associated with lifestyle change, and not to seek to separate out one from the other.? 3a. Avoid emphasis upon painless, easy steps. ? Be honest about the limitations of voluntary private-sphere behavioural change, and the need for ambitious new policy interventions that incentivise such changes, or that regulate for them. People know that the scope they have, as individuals, to help meet the challenge of climate change is extremely limited. For many people, it is perfectly sensible to continue to adopt high-carbon lifestyle choices whilst simultaneously being supportive of government interventions that would make these choices more difficult for everyone. ? The adoption of small-scale private sphere behavioural changes is sometimes assumed to lead people to adopt ever more difficult (and potentially significant) behavioural changes. The empirical evidence for this ‘foot-in-thedoor’ effect is highly equivocal. Some studies detect such an effect; others studies have found the reverse effect (whereby people tend to ‘rest on their laurels’ having adopted a few simple behavioural changes - Thogersen and Crompton, 2009). Where attention is drawn to simple and painless privatesphere behavioural changes, these should be urged in pursuit of a set of intrinsic goals (that is, as a response to people’s understanding about the contribution that such behavioural change may make to benefiting their friends and family, their community, the wider world, or in contributing to their growth and development as individuals) rather than as a means to achieve social status or greater financial success. Adopting behaviour in pursuit of intrinsic goals is more likely to lead to ‘spillover’ into other sustainable behaviours (De Young, 2000; Thogersen and Crompton, 2009).? People aren’t stupid: they know that if there are wholesale changes in the global climate underway, these will not be reversed merely through checking their tyre pressures or switching their TV off standby. An emphasis upon simple and painless steps suppresses debate about those necessary responses that are less palatable – that will cost people money, or that will infringe on cherished freedoms (such as to fly). Recognising this will be a key step in accepting the reality of loss of aspects of our current lifestyles, and in beginning to work through the powerful emotions that this will engender (Randall, 2009). ? 3b. Avoid over-emphasis on the economic opportunities that mitigating, and adapting to, climate change may provide. ? There will, undoubtedly, be economic benefits to be accrued through investment in new technologies, but there will also be instances where the economic imperative and the climate change adaptation or mitigation imperative diverge, and periods of economic uncertainty for many people as some sectors contract. It seems inevitable that some interventions will have negative economic impacts (Stern, 2007).? Undue emphasis upon economic imperatives serves to reinforce the dominance, in society, of a set of extrinsic goals (focussed, for example, on financial benefit). A large body of empirical research demonstrates that these extrinsic goals are antagonistic to the emergence of pro-social and proenvironmental concern (Crompton and Kasser, 2009).? 3c. Avoid emphasis upon the opportunities of ‘green consumerism’ as a response to climate change.? As mentioned above (3b), a large body of research points to the antagonism between goals directed towards the acquisition of material objects and the emergence of pro-environmental and pro-social concern (Crompton and Kasser, 2009). Campaigns to ‘buy green’ may be effective in driving up sales of particular products, but in conveying the impression that climate change can be addressed by ‘buying the right things’, they risk undermining more difficult and systemic changes. A recent study found that people in an experiment who purchased ‘green’ products acted less altruistically on subsequent tasks (Mazar & Zhong, 2010) – suggesting that small ethical acts may act as a ‘moral offset’ and licence undesirable behaviours in other domains. This does not mean that private-sphere behaviour changes will always lead to a reduction in subsequent pro-environmental behaviour, but it does suggest that the reasons used to motivate these changes are critically important. Better is to emphasise that ‘every little helps a little’ – but that these changes are only the beginning of a process that must also incorporate more ambitious private-sphere change and significant collective action at a political level.? 4. Empathise with the emotional responses that will be engendered by a forthright presentation of the probable impacts of climate change. ? Belief in climate change and support for low-carbon policies will remain fragile unless people are emotionally engaged. We should expect people to be sad or angry, to feel guilt or shame, to yearn for that which is lost or to search for more comforting answers (Randall, 2009). Providing support and empathy in working through the painful emotions of 'grief' for a society that must undergo changes is a prerequisite for subsequent adaptation to new circumstances.? Without such support and empathy, it is more likely that people will begin to deploy a range of maladaptive ‘coping strategies’, such as denial of personal responsibility, blaming others, or becoming apathetic (Lertzman, 2008). An audience should not be admonished for deploying such strategies – this would in itself be threatening, and could therefore harden resistance to positive behaviour change (Miller and Rolnick, 2002). The key is not to dismiss people who exhibit maladaptive coping strategies, but to understand how they can be made more adaptive. People who feel socially supported will be more likely to adopt adaptive emotional responses - so facilitating social support for proenvironmental behaviour is crucial.? 5. Promote pro-environmental social norms and harness the power of social networks? One way of bridging the gap between private-sphere behaviour changes and collective action is the promotion of pro-environmental social norms. Pictures and videos of ordinary people (‘like me’) engaging in significant proenvironmental actions are a simple and effective way of generating a sense of social normality around pro-environmental behaviour (Schultz, Nolan, Cialdini, Goldstein and Griskevicius, 2007). There are different reasons that people adopt social norms, and encouraging people to adopt a positive norm simply to ‘conform’, to avoid a feeling of guilt, or for fear of not ‘fitting in’ is likely to produce a relatively shallow level of motivation for behaviour change. Where social norms can be combined with ‘intrinsic’ motivations (e.g. a sense of social belonging), they are likely to be more effective and persistent.? Too often, environmental communications are directed to the individual as a single unit in the larger social system of consumption and political engagement. This can make the problems feel too overwhelming, and evoke unmanageable levels of anxiety. Through the enhanced awareness of what other people are doing, a strong sense of collective purpose can be engendered. One factor that is likely to influence whether adaptive or maladaptive coping strategies are selected in response to fear about climate change is whether people feel supported by a social network – that is, whether a sense of ‘sustainable citizenship’ is fostered. The efficacy of groupbased programmes at promoting pro-environmental behaviour change has been demonstrated on numerous occasions – and participants in these projects consistently point to a sense of mutual learning and support as a key reason for making and maintaining changes in behaviour (Nye and Burgess, 2008). There are few influences more powerful than an individual’s social network. Networks are instrumental not just in terms of providing social support, but also by creating specific content of social identity – defining what it means to be “us”. If environmental norms are incorporated at this level (become defining for the group) they can result in significant behavioural change (also reinforced through peer pressure).? Of course, for the majority of people, this is unlikely to be a network that has climate change at its core. But social networks – Trade Unions, Rugby Clubs, Mother & Toddler groups – still perform a critical role in spreading change through society. Encouraging and supporting pre-existing social networks to take ownership of climate change (rather than approach it as a problem for ‘green groups’) is a critical task. As well as representing a crucial bridge between individuals and broader society, peer-to-peer learning circumnavigates many of the problems associated with more ‘top down’ models of communication – not least that government representatives are perceived as untrustworthy (Poortinga & Pidgeon, 2003). Peer-to-peer learning is more easily achieved in group-based dialogue than in designing public information films: But public information films can nonetheless help to establish social norms around community-based responses to the challenges of climate change, through clear visual portrayals of people engaging collectively in the pro-environmental behaviour.? The discourse should be shifted increasingly from ‘you’ to ‘we’ and from ‘I’ to ‘us’. This is starting to take place in emerging forms of community-based activism, such as the Transition Movement and Cambridge Carbon Footprint’s ‘Carbon Conversations’ model – both of which recognize the power of groups to help support and maintain lifestyle and identity changes. A nationwide climate change engagement project using a group-based behaviour change model with members of Trade Union networks is currently underway, led by the Climate Outreach and Information Network. These projects represent a method of climate change communication and engagement radically different to that typically pursued by the government – and may offer a set of approaches that can go beyond the limited reach of social marketing techniques.? One potential risk with appeals based on social norms is that they often contain a hidden message. So, for example, a campaign that focuses on the fact that too many people take internal flights actually contains two messages – that taking internal flights is bad for the environment, and that lots of people are taking internal flights. This second message can give those who do not currently engage in that behaviour a perverse incentive to do so, and campaigns to promote behaviour change should be very careful to avoid this. The key is to ensure that information about what is happening (termed descriptive norms), does not overshadow information about what should be happening (termed injunctive norms). ? 6. Think about the language you use, but don’t rely on language alone? A number of recent publications have highlighted the results of focus group research and talk-back tests in order to ‘get the language right’ (Topos Partnership, 2009; Western Strategies & Lake Research Partners, 2009), culminating in a series of suggestions for framing climate-change communications. For example, these two studies led to the suggestions that communicators should use the term ‘global warming’ or ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’, respectively, rather than ‘climate change’. Other research has identified systematic differences in the way that people interpret the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’, with ‘global warming’ perceived as more emotionally engaging than ‘climate change’ (Whitmarsh, 2009).? Whilst ‘getting the language right’ is important, it can only play a small part in a communication strategy. More important than the language deployed (i.e. ‘conceptual frames') are what have been referred to by some cognitive linguists as 'deep frames'. Conceptual framing refers to catchy slogans and clever spin (which may or may not be honest). At a deeper level, framing refers to forging the connections between a debate or public policy and a set of deeper values or principles. Conceptual framing (crafting particular messages focussing on particular issues) cannot work unless these messages resonate with a set of long-term deep frames.? Policy proposals which may at the surface level seem similar (perhaps they both set out to achieve a reduction in environmental pollution) may differ importantly in terms of their deep framing. For example, putting a financial value on an endangered species, and building an economic case for their conservation ‘commodifies’ them, and makes them equivalent (at the level of deep frames) to other assets of the same value (a hotel chain, perhaps). This is a very different frame to one that attempts to achieve the same conservation goals through the ascription of intrinsic value to such species – as something that should be protected in its own right. Embedding particular deep frames requires concerted effort (Lakoff, 2009), but is the beginning of a process that can build a broad, coherent cross-departmental response to climate change from government.? 7. Encourage public demonstrations of frustration at the limited pace of government action? Private-sphere behavioural change is not enough, and may even at times become a diversion from the more important process of bringing political pressure to bear on policy-makers. The importance of public demonstrations of frustration at both the lack of political progress on climate change and the barriers presented by vested interests is widely recognised – including by government itself. Climate change communications, including government communication campaigns, should work to normalise public displays of frustration with the slow pace of political change. Ockwell et al (2009) argued that communications can play a role in fostering demand for - as well as acceptance of - policy change. Climate change communication could (and should) be used to encourage people to demonstrate (for example through public demonstrations) about how they would like structural barriers to behavioural/societal change to be removed.Warming Reps GoodOur heuristic overcomes disbelief and mobilizes public responsesRomm 12 (Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the 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.″ In 2009, Rolling Stone put Romm #88 on its list of 100 “people who are reinventing America.” Time named him a “Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” Romm was acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997, where he oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon technology. He is a Senior Fellow at American Progress and holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT., 2/26/2012, “Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate”, ) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****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, including the vast literature on advertising and marketing, could 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 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-as-usual 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.” 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.Apocalypticism is key---it motivates more activism than apathy in the context of warmingVeldman 12 – Ph.D. candidate in religion at the University of Florida(Robin Globus, “Narrating the Environmental Apocalypse: How Imagining the End Facilitates Moral Reasoning Among Environmental Activists”, Ethics & the Environment, Volume 17, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 1-23, dml) ****NCC’19 Novice Packet****As we saw in the introduction, critics often argue that apocalyptic rhetoric induces feelings of hopelessness or fatalism. While it certainly does for some people, in this section I will present evidence that apocalypticism also often goes hand in hand with activism. 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 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) “are the segment most engaged in the issue of global warming. They are very convinced it is happening, humancaused, 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 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.Climate scenario analysis key – alternative is climate denialism that guarantees extinctionAhmed 19****NCC’19 Novice Packet****A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30 years. The paper argues that the potentially “extremely serious outcomes” of climate-related security threats are often far more probable than conventionally assumed, but almost impossible to quantify because they “fall outside the human experience of the last thousand years.” On our current trajectory, the report warns, “planetary and human systems [are] reaching a ‘point of no return’ by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order.” The only way to avoid the risks of this scenario is what the report describes as “akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization”—but this time focused on rapidly building out a zero-emissions industrial system to set in train the restoration of a safe climate. The scenario warns that our current trajectory will likely lock in at least 3 degrees Celsius (C) of global heating, which in turn could trigger further amplifying feedbacks unleashing further warming. This would drive the accelerating collapse of key ecosystems “including coral reef systems, the Amazon rainforest and in the Arctic.” The results would be devastating. Some one billion people would be forced to attempt to relocate from unlivable conditions, and two billion would face scarcity of water supplies. Agriculture would collapse in the sub-tropics, and food production would suffer dramatically worldwide. The internal cohesion of nation-states like the US and China would unravel. “Even for 2°C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and in high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model with a high likelihood of human civilization coming to an end,” the report notes. The new policy briefing is written by David Spratt, Breakthrough’s research director and Ian Dunlop, a former senior executive of Royal Dutch Shell who previously chaired the Australian Coal Association. Read More: Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Imminent Demise In the briefing’s foreword, retired Admiral Chris Barrie—Chief of the Australian Defence Force from 1998 to 2002 and former Deputy Chief of the Australian Navy—commends the paper for laying “bare the unvarnished truth about the desperate situation humans, and our planet, are in, painting a disturbing picture of the real possibility that human life on Earth may be on the way to extinction, in the most horrible way.” Barrie now works for the Climate Change Institute at Australian National University, Canberra. Spratt told Motherboard that a key reason the risks are not understood is that “much knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative. Because the risks are now existential, a new approach to climate and security risk assessment is required using scenario analysis.” Last October, Motherboard reported on scientific evidence that the UN’s summary report for government policymakers on climate change—whose findings were widely recognized as “devastating”—were in fact too optimistic. While the Breakthrough scenario sets out some of the more ‘high end’ risk possibilities, it is often not possible to meaningfully quantify their probabilities. As a result, the authors emphasize that conventional risk approaches tend to downplay worst-case scenarios despite their plausibility. Spratt and Dunlop’s 2050 scenario illustrates how easy it could be to end up in an accelerating runaway climate scenario which would lead to a largely uninhabitable planet within just a few decades. “A high-end 2050 scenario finds a world in social breakdown and outright chaos,” said Spratt. “But a short window of opportunity exists for an emergency, global mobilization of resources, in which the logistical and planning experiences of the national security sector could play a valuable role.” ................
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