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neg1nc - genericCapitalism is foundationally contradictory with environmental sustainability. The social crises of Imperialism and White supremacy sustain an unequal and unsustainable system. The aff’s green capitalism attempts to paper over this contradiction through regulatory tweaks, but you can’t save nature from capitalist development.Holleman 18 (Hannah, assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism, Yale University Press, 2018, )The colossal contradiction between the great possibilities of science and the grim reality of the political economy has plagued capitalism since its inception. This quotation from British soil scientists Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte captures the irrationality of a society with an increasingly sophisticated scientific understanding of ecological problems and, relative to the scale of their development, a decreasing ability to solve those problems in spite of the efforts of individuals, communities, governments, and businesses. 1 Imperialism, white supremacy, and racism are central to this contradiction. They lie at the heart of understanding the historical impotence of environmental politics that take the current political economic order for granted or defend it outright in the face of large-scale ecological crises.Rather than advocating decolonization, the redress of injustice, and a radically democratic, egalitarian alternative, such politics assume the possibility, desirability, and in some cases inevitability of a more ecologically friendly, sustainable, or green capitalism. The term green capitalism refers here to the broad swathe of environmental politics that take the political economic system of capitalism and its dominant institutions for granted and posit that the negative ecological impacts of exploitative economic activities can be addressed adequately by better state policies and regulation enforcement, adjustments to market and industry operations, improvements in science and the use of technology, increased knowledge and education, the work of environmental NGOs, and/or the voluntary actions of businesses and individuals. This is in spite of the fact that all historical evidence of capitalist development points in the opposite direction. The growing problem of soil erosion is an important case in point, which makes the dynamics of the system that prevent substantive change clear and concrete.Liberal environmental politics are reactionary doublespeak designed to move the political debate to the right and secure the interests of elites, against democratic control of the environment.Holleman 18 (Hannah, assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism, Yale University Press, 2018, )In 2012, Greenpeace’s chief policy advisor wrote, “Greens Can Build the New Capitalism.” 47 A writer for the Harvard Business Review agrees, describing environmental NGOs as part of the third leg of a balanced stool, the other two being the government and private industry. Their shared purpose, like FDR’s goal with the New Deal, is to “rescue capitalism from itself.” 48 But if the right to profit remains sacrosanct, what happens when ecological, social, and economic priorities inevitably collide? Without a reversal of the power imbalances capitalism imposes and maintains, who decides what the trade-offs will be, which priorities will win the day? Even with liberal reforms and the expansion of democracy, the capitalist class remains intact and in power. As they have always done, elites as a group will, at the end of the day, attempt to stop or reverse efforts that threaten to truly redress injustice and inequality, and to end ecologically damaging practices, because such measures endanger their wealth and position—their very existence as elitesMoreover, isn’t the Green New Deal aiming rather low in comparison to the extremist path down which the global power elite are leading the planet? In the 1930s, elites had to be convinced that massive social upheaval, even revolution, was on the table before the best provisions of the New Deal could pass Congress. What can we possibly achieve if we take the New Deal as our starting point? While important reforms were achieved in the New Deal era, especially due to the hard work of organizers and activists pushing the reformist agenda of FDR’s administration to the left, we must acknowledge the reality of an evergrowing ecological crisis—not only under conservative, but under liberal and “progressive” politics as usual—which all scientific projections show worsening absent more radical political action. As Naomi Klein puts it, “science is telling us all to revolt.” 49At the global level, rather than revolt, mainstream environmental organizations are following the wealthiest countries and most powerful industries in advocating the “Inclusive Green Economy” and “Inclusive Green Growth”—helping prettify a historically unfounded defense of capital-friendly approaches to environmentalism. The UN, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the African Development Bank, and the World Bank worked together in 2012–13 to provide the framework for initiatives under the heading “Green Growth.” 50 Many environmental organizations reject the worst aspects of these proposals. But in framing their own goals in terms of the Green Economy and Green New Deal, rather than explicitly rejecting green capitalism, they lend such initiatives credibility, or at least plausibility. This represents a major shift and problem. As law professor and social scientist Paddy Ireland writes, “It used to be the left who emphasized the limits to capitalism and the right who told us of its adaptability. Now, however, it is the right, believing themselves liberated from the credible threat of class struggle worldwide, who candidly stress the incompatibility of workers rights, [environmental regulations,] and welfare states with the elementary laws of capital (presented, of course, as ‘natural’), while the (erstwhile) left is reduced to insisting on the malleability and improvability of both capitalism and its corporations.” 51Language matters, especially when the world is facing an ecological crisis of unprecedented proportions, because words can either make the situation and the possible solutions starkly clear, or they can obfuscate and obscure both the present reality and the future possibilities, facilitating harmful ecological denial. Today the dominant language, even within the environmental movement, is infected by la langue de coton, or “woolen language”—a term used by scholars to describe the veiled doublespeak of capitalism that “has an answer to everything because it says nothing.” 52 Globally, agencies and organizations employ the langue de coton of capitalist environmental management in lieu of concrete actions to facilitate the transition of societies away from being lifedestroying oligopolies and toward becoming democracies operating within ecological limits.In this language, we are all “stakeholders,” with access to the “knowledge products” that international agencies like UNEP make available for us to use in “innovative partnerships.” To achieve sustainable development goals, they say, will require “overcoming sectoral and institutional boundaries” and “innovative partnership[s] to build synergies across silos of experience.” No mention is made of the need for social struggle or social change. The language of the Green Economy has all the “hallmarks of neoliberalism’s langue de coton,” which, as scholar of rhetoric and composition Nancy Welch explains, includes “presupposition and effacement, tautological vagueness, and a tangled mix of metaphors.” 53Vote neg to reject green capitalism. Radical anti-capitalist movements are key to overcoming the stasis in environmentalism – another new legal precedent or policy change won’t address the mass dispossession at the root of the environmental crisis. Holleman 18 (Hannah, assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism, Yale University Press, 2018, )We must realize, as Naomi Klein said in her Edward Said Lecture delivered in London in 2016 titled “Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World”:A culture that places so little value on black and brown lives that it is willing to let human beings disappear beneath the waves, or set themselves on fire in detention centres, will also be willing to let the countries where black and brown people live disappear beneath the waves, or desiccate in the arid heat. When that happens, theories of human hierarchy—that we must take care of our own first—will be marshalled to rationalise these monstrous decisions. We are making this rationalisation already, if only implicitly. Although climate change will ultimately be an existential threat to all of humanity, in the short term we know that it does discriminate, hitting the poor first and worst, whether they are abandoned on the rooftops of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina or whether they are among the 36 million who according to the UN are facing hunger due to drought in Southern and East Africa. 46Understanding that imperialism and the ethno-racial caste system it engenders are at the heart of our contemporary ecological and social crises points to the necessity of tackling the imperial system of capital head on.The mainstream environmental movement has been hamstrung by disorienting claims that capitalism can solve the ecological crisis, and by misplaced faith in the “good capitalists” who will transform the world with technology and green or fairly traded products, or in international climate agreements such as the one presented in Paris in 2015.Looking toward political and economic elites for salvation, and often relying on them for funding, significant segments of the movement are cut off from those with the greatest interest in transforming the system, the global working and dispossessed classes. This means they are not engaged in the arduous task of overcoming the historical divisions imposed by the racialized division of humanity and the rest of nature at the heart of the ecological rift of capitalism.To break out of this cycle of historical violence, achieve genuine justice, and heal the ecological rift, we must add to the three R’s of mainstream environmentalism—reduce, reuse, recycle—a more fundamental four: restitution (of lands and sovereignty, of power to the people), reparations (for slavery, stolen labor, genocide, and other past injustices), restoration (of earth systems), and revolution (moving away from capitalism).Environmentalists cannot continue to defend or make peace with the status quo, without expecting the same results this has engendered in the past, but on a larger scale with respect to ecological crises and human trauma. The importance of learning from our history cannot be overstated. Debates over solutions to global ecological crises like climate change, soil degradation, and water scarcity too often proceed as if we have no historical evidence to help us understand what works and what doesn’t work. The case of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, which, as I have shown, was one dramatic regional manifestation of a global social and ecological crisis generated by settler colonialism and imperialism, illustrates the enormous consequences of relying on imperial “politics as usual” to attempt a change in “business as usual.”Similar to the ineffective (from a social and ecological standpoint) climate conferences held for decades by the UN, world leaders and mainstream environmentalism could not ultimately prevent or resolve the crisis of soil erosion in the 1930s because of their commitment to maintaining the global social and economic status quo—the racialized class system in which we still live today. The Dust Bowl did not arise because there was a lack of awareness of the issue or the technical means to address it. Like dust-bowlification today, the ultimate source of the crisis was social, not technological, thus requiring massive social change to address. At the heart of the matter is that allowing the “accumulation of injustice” makes inevitable the “accumulation of catastrophe.” We must struggle within our movements, scientific communities, educational institutions, and broader policy worlds to transcend what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., saw as Western society’s “proneness to adjust to injustice” and break free from what Karl Marx called “the tradition of all the dead generations” that in times of change “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” 47 Our approach should be unapologetically radical—which simply means, from the Latin, that we must get to the root of things.2nc2nc - fwThe role of debate is selecting the best orientation towards activism and social change. Technocratic solutions to environmental issues are designed to elide the core issue of environmentalism: mass social struggle. Only our model recalibrates debate to disempower elites and addresses violence inherent in capitalist development.Holleman 18 (Hannah, assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and the Injustice of "Green" Capitalism, Yale University Press, 2018, )The Dust Bowl, and the way it is almost universally depicted in mainstream environmental discourse, including the academic literature, against the backdrop of frontier history, illustrates the persistence of American exceptionalism. Moreover, memories of westward expansion, including the Dust Bowl, like memories of the Boers’ trek in South Africa, are “whitened” so that the links between the ongoing social legacies of colonialism and ecological degradation are mostly obscured. 74All of this is related to problems in U.S. environmentalism and the academic environmental literature with the conceptualization of environmental crises and environmental justice. Environmental injustice often is viewed as the unequal distribution of outcomes of environmental harm. Colonized peoples are homogenized and described as one group of “stakeholders” in environmental conflicts. 75 Mainstream environmental organizations, those on the privileged side of the segregated environmental movement globally and more linked to power, are encouraged to diversify their staff and memberships and pay attention to issues of “justice.” 76 However, the deeper aspects of social domination required to maintain the economic, social, and environmental status quo frequently are denied, minimized, or simply ignored.Wider recognition of what Evelyn Nakano Glenn refers to as the “ongoing structure” of settler colonialism and imperialism would be a great advance in the mainstream environmental movement, the environmental social sciences, and also in Dust Bowl and frontier historiography. 77 It would keep alive the recognition of the original and ongoing injustices imposed, as well as their continuing effects.Addressing these issues among environmentalists (both activists and academics) requires moving beyond superficial approaches to historical changes associated with imperialism and capitalist development. Superficial treatments of this history too often allow activists and scholars “to safely put aside present responsibility for continued harm done by that past and questions of reparations, restitution, and reordering society” when discussing current, interrelated environmental and social problems and environmental justice. 78Shallow approaches to addressing racism, white supremacy, oppression of indigenous peoples, and other forms of social domination preclude the possibility of building a deeper solidarity across historical social divisions. This is critical as the future of environmentalism—whether it can play a part in creating a genuinely green and just world—will hinge on whether antiimperialist struggles for such solidarity are continuously fought and won, and whether we can move past ahistorical conceptions of ecological disaster that conceal the reality: massive ecological change is impossible without massive social change.The following chapter drives home this point by making absolutely clear that ecological crises are not resolved by increased scientific understanding, commonly held knowledge, sophisticated technological development, advance warnings, or a slew of proconservation elites attempting to tackle the problems. Rather, the historical record shows that there are mechanisms built into the capitalist system that prevent the incorporation of society’s knowledge into efforts that might truly address the pace and scale of ecological crises. These mechanisms clearly are still at work today. Without addressing the social drivers of crises directly—by taking on the system that produces crises and building solidarities that challenge permanently the social status quo—all the scientific knowledge and technological development in the world couldn’t prevent the global crisis of soil erosion that developed by the 1930s, any more than it has prevented its acceleration and expansion in subsequent decades. Our solutions to soil erosion and ecological crises in general must thus lie elsewhere.2nc – at: permCombining democratic governance with the aff’s technocratic approach to policymaking only provides legitimacy for a bankrupt neoliberal approach to water management Flannery 19 (Jane Clarke, PhD candidate at Queen's University Belfast, School of Natural and Built Environment; Wesley Flannery, PhD, Senior Lecturer, School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast; “The post-political nature of marine spatial planning and modalities for its re-politicisation”, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 1–14, 2019, doi:10.1080/1523908x.2019.1680276)***MSP = Marine Spatial Planning***2. MSP and the post-political conditionMSP is advanced as a sustainable governance approach that addresses spatial and temporal distributions of marine activities. MSP is framed as radically different from the sectoral management approach that preceded it. Whereas previous governance regimes were fragmented, sectoral and top-down, MSP is conceived as holistic, participatory and capable of addressing a range of concurrent issues, for example: implementing integrated ecosystem-based management; reducing negative cumulative impacts; enabling transboundary governance; facilitating the expansion of maritime economies; and fostering participation and reducing stakeholder conflict.Assessments of MSP in practice illustrate that there is a gap between how MSP is conceptualised and how it is implemented. In practice, MSP appears to repackage the status quo in empty participatory rhetoric (Flannery et al., 2016; Ritchie & Ellis, 2010; Smith & Jentoft, 2017), the development of weak objectives (Flannery & ? Cinnéide, 2012a; Sander, 2018) and the logic of technocratic governance (Smith & Jentoft, 2017). These evaluations question MSP’s capacity to address long-standing governance issues and the equitability of these processes (Flannery & ? Cinnéide, 2012b; Tafon et al., 2018). These assessments illustrate MSP’s failure to transform marine governance (Kelly, Ellis, & Flannery, 2018), and how it may do little more than provide a semblance of democratic legitimacy to neoliberal exploitation (Flannery et al., 2018).Many of MSP’s failings have been attributed to it being implemented through post-political governance (Flannery et al., 2016, 2018; Tafon, 2018). Post-political governance is highly deceptive as it facilitates the elimination of counter-hegemonic opinions and actions through participatory and technocratic processes (Swyngedouw, 2009). Post-political describes situations in which the political is colonised by politics (Mouffe, 2005). In other words, the post-political describes processes in which spaces of contest or struggle (the political), are overrun by unchallenged frameworks of free-market economics, technocratic management, and consensual procedures (politics) (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014). Contradictions to the neoliberal hegemony are ‘reduced to policy problems to be managed by experts and legitimated through participatory processes in which the scope of possible outcomes is narrowly defined in advance’ (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014, p. 6).Post-political governance disempowers stakeholders by replacing debate and dissensus with ‘consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management’ (Swyngedouw, 2009, p. 604). The public is viewed as a disruptive collective and is replaced by ‘enlightened’ technocrats (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014). Despite evidence that the established economic order Western, consumer-based societies is deeply unsustainable, the post-political conditions seek to minimise the threat of substantive structural change (Blühdorn, 2014). The post-political condition eliminates debate and dissensus by deploying depoliticising governance modalities, including: neoliberalism; choreographed participation; path dependency; technocraticmanagerialism; and the illusion of progressive change.2.1. NeoliberalismNeoliberalism acts as a modality of depoliticisation in two ways. First, neoliberalism frames policy issues so that the continuation of the neoliberal hegemony is viewed as the solution to all crises (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014). Proponents of neoliberalism seek to naturalise it as the only possible approach by structuring policy crises and responses so that they continue to produce neoliberal states, spaces and subjects. Neoliberalism depoliticises environmental planning by obscuring the possibility of alternative discourses or actions, and by hiding its insidious agenda within policy solutions (Haughton, Allmendinger, & Oosterlynck, 2013). Under the guise of regeneration, neoliberalism de-politicises public spaces to deliver mega-projects for private gain.Second, neoliberalism extinguishes the political aspects of democracy, which neoliberals see as being infused with unnecessary deliberation and as a delay to the significant work of production and gratification (Harvey, 2007). Neoliberalism does this by ensuring buy-in from selected partners, whilst also delegitimising the actions of those seeking to instigate counter-hegemonic practices. Those not seeking the transformation of the hegemony, who, instead, make their demands negotiable within already defined policy frameworks, are deemed legitimate participants in planning processes (Oosterlynck & Swyngedouw, 2010). Neoliberalism depoliticises planning by disarticulating local issues, as these are precluded from being legitimate critiques of governance practices (Oosterlynck & Swyngedouw, 2010). Neoliberalism forces communities to work with selected actors to secure sparse resources (e.g. local jobs), at the expense of political mobilisation. Rather than appear undemocratic, post-political governance hides this issue within choreographed participation.2.2. Choreographed participationChoreographed participation is deployed to legitimise undemocratic processes (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2012). Choreographed participation does this by engineering opportunities for engagement and dissent (Metzger, 2017). The post-political condition has emerged from the uncritical adoption of consensual decision making (Swyngedouw, 2009). While consensus is not an inherently undesirable outcome, it can be deployed as a mechanism of depoliticisation (Raco, 2014). The obsessive focus on consensus is used, perversely, to narrow participation to those who are amenable to the established hegemony and to castigate those who challenge it. Conflict and debate are depicted as disruptive processes with detrimental consequences for consensus; debate is unnecessary and disruptive voices may be removed (Mouffe, 2005). By eviscerating debate and dissensus from democratic processes, choreographed participation preserves neoliberal tendencies and steers agreement towards lowest common denominator objectives (Swyngedouw, 2009). Participants in these processes are paradoxically told they are being empowered, whilst their ability to influence outcomes are undermined in a drive to achieve ‘consensus’.Choreographed participation also removes the link between participation and validation by shifting the focus from input to output forms of legitimisation (Raco, 2014). Participation in post-political processes becomes less concerned with issues of democratic legitimacy and more concerned with co-opting dissenting stakeholders and empowering those that will deliver neoliberal outputs (Raco, 2014). Post-political planning focuses on producing outputs which further neoliberal agendas (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014). For example, during the Atlanta BeltLine project, planning agencies facilitated a growth-first approach by deploying a process that avoided adversarial politics, and defined what were appropriate planning outputs (e.g. gentrification opportunities) (Roy, 2015). Post-political planning processes are validated through output-centred legitimisation (e.g. number of jobs created) rather than input-centred legitimisation (e.g. procedural justice). The legitimacy of post-political planning processes becomes secondary to the legitimacy of its outputs. Choreographed participation is deployed to disempower stakeholders and replace them with selected policy partners and technocratic experts who are best able to turn neoliberal objectives into outputs (Raco, 2014).2.3. Technocratic-managerialismTechnocratic-managerialism depoliticises decision making by replacing public debate with collaboration amongst technocrats and framing environmental problems as arising from data and knowledge gaps. Technocratic managerialism aggrandises experts and data in decision making so that they become the focus of policy interventions, often leaving pressing issues unaddressed (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2009, 2011). For example, marine user conflict and negative cumulative impacts arising from increased ocean industrialisation are not to be resolved through de-growth strategies but, rather, by enhanced data collection and expert analysis.Technocratic-managerialism is positioned as capable of resolving, and therefore depoliticising, complex socio-environmental issues (Oosterlynck & Swyngedouw, 2010). GIS and data portals are used to reduce complex marine socio-ecological relationships to apolitical spatial interactions (Smith & Brennan, 2012) which, if conflictual, are fixable through the application of spatial planning expertise (Flannery et al., 2018). Although debate remains possible within these processes, it occurs within the limitations of elite consensus and the technocratic-managerial regime (Raco, 2014). The focus on technocratic-managerial solutions enables post-political planning to further ignore constructive debate and stakeholder knowledge (Dean, 2014), and to select policy actions from a narrow range of path-dependent options.2nc – impact – dust bowlThe impacts outweigh and turn the aff – global dust bowl-ification is an existential threatHolleman 18 (Hannah, assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College, “No Empires, No Dust Bowls Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History”, Jul 01, 2018, )As scholars of racial capitalism, colonialism, and white settler colonialism have shown, capitalist development depends on a racialized division of humanity. This process is mirrored in the racialized division of nature. Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster explain that the division of nature under capitalism is central to the system’s ecological rifts:Capital accumulation requires the continual expansion of the division of nature as well as the division of labor. The division of nature is no longer, however, a social division of nature, in which the earth’s different landscapes and species are utilized by human beings within a context that maintains the reproduction of nature itself. Instead, it is a detailed/alienated division of nature that breaks the circle of natural processes, creating ecological rifts. Nature is remade in such a way as to promote a single end: the accumulation of capital, irrespective of the lessons of rational science and conditions of sustainability.10The racialization of the division of nature was part and parcel of the new imperialism. Lands and people were identified as the natural property of white men, and modes of land tenure that differed from capitalist property relations (likewise identified with whiteness), as well as the people practicing them, were treated as backward and exploitable or expropriatable.At the heart of every major ecological crisis of capitalism has been the idea that (white) property owners, businessmen, and policy-makers can do with the land as they please in the name of profit, and assume access to land and resources further afield once they have destroyed the areas where they started. In the United States this attitude was summed up by Teddy Roosevelt, who remarked that in the view of the American settler, “when he exhausted the soil of his farm, he felt that his son could go West and take up another…. When the soil-wash from the farmer’s field choked the neighboring river, the only thought was to use the railway rather than the boats to move produce and supplies.”11By the 1930s, colonial soil scientists described the massive soil erosion problem then plaguing colonies and frontier regions around the world, including the U.S. Southern plains, as the result of the imperial “rape of the earth” of preceding decades.12 This ecological crisis, predicated on the attempted domination and decimation of entire cultures, involved a then-unprecedented level of destruction and erosion of the living soil complex upon which practically all terrestrial life depends. Lush and lovely prairies, woodlands, pampas, and forests were shorn of their protective layer and the landscape scraped bare to make way for the desolate monoculture of capitalist agriculture.By the end of the 1930s, tens of thousands of people had been displaced on the U.S. Southern plains and elsewhere, after decades of so many lives being mutilated or sacrificed on the altars of profit and white supremacy.13 One U.S. official called the Dust Bowl “the most spectacular mass sacrifice to strictly commercial mores in the history of mankind.”14 This disaster developed in spite of decades of warnings about the growing problem of soil erosion and broader land degradation across the colonial world, as well as its impact on communities losing their livelihoods. There was already a large body of knowledge about how to prevent erosion, as well as shared expertise across colonial contexts about how to remediate it, adequate technology, and many conservation-oriented elites working to address the growing ecological crises of the new imperialism. However, as with the ineffectual climate conferences held in recent decades by the United Nations, world leaders in the 1930s could not ultimately prevent or resolve the crisis of soil erosion because of their commitment to maintaining the global social and economic status quo—the racialized class system in which we still live. Like dust-bowlification today, the ultimate source of the crisis was social, not technological, and thus required social change to address. Prominent British colonial soil scientists Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte, authors of The Rape of the Earth, recognized even then that this refusal to disturb the status quo would make it impossible to truly address the global crisis of soil erosion:Where land-utilization practices are firmly established and have become the basis of the country’s economy, the adoption of a new land-utilization programme conforming to the limits imposed by the natural environment, may well involve a social and political revolution.Therein lies the supreme difficulty of applying effective erosion control. We now know fairly precisely what agricultural, pastoral, forest and engineering principles must be adopted to stop the earth from rotting away beneath our feet, but we cannot, or dare not, apply them forthwith on a scale commensurate with the gravity of the situation.15While in the United States New Deal agricultural programs addressed some of the technical problems of agriculture, and met some of the needs of down-and-out white settlers—the Tom Joads depicted in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath—the broader social conditions that allow for such destruction have remained in place. This is why, as I argue and illustrate in great detail in my forthcoming book, we now face even worse ecological crises than in the 1930s—a new global Dust Bowl.16The New Global Dust BowlAt the heart of the new Dust Bowl are land degradation, climate change, and freshwater scarcity. It is the result of increasingly extreme expropriation—in both scale and technique—of the land, of the planet’s hydrocarbon deposits, and of freshwater systems. Industrial agriculture has contributed significantly to each of these problems, as “heavy [fossil-fueled] tilling, multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability.”17 These practices have masked the effects of land degradation, especially in its most destructive form, the loss of soil to erosion. Because of the ongoing mining of the soil for profit, the earth has lost a third of its arable land to erosion and pollution since the 1970s. Plant and soil biologist Duncan Cameron has warned that “you think of the dust bowl of the 1930s in North America and then you realize we are moving towards that situation if we don’t do something.”18While soil erosion receives little attention in the media—perhaps because, as one scientist said, “soil isn’t sexy”—the problems caused by climate change are more widely covered.19 The earth’s warming climate is driving a shift in the global hydrological or water cycle that is essentially making wet places wetter and dry places drier—with awful ecological and social consequences. NASA’s Earth Observatory cites the alteration of the hydrological cycle as one of “the most serious Earth science and environmental policy issues confronting society.”20 According to World Bank economist Richard Damania, “when we look at any of the major impacts of climate change, they one way or another come through water…. So it will be no exaggeration to claim that climate change is really in fact about hydrological change.”21At the same time, freshwater resources are being degraded by pollution and over-tapped by unsustainable agricultural practices, which, in conjunction with climate change and inadequate infrastructure serving poorer areas, is reducing the availability of freshwater to life-threatening levels. A 2016 study published in Science Advances indicated that already, “about 66% [of the global population] (4.0 billion people) lives under severe water scarcity…at least 1 month of the year…. The number of people facing severe water scarcity for at least 4 to 6 months per year is 1.8 to 2.9 billion…. Half a billion people face severe water scarcity all year round.”22Scientists working at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and NOAA predict that in arid regions such as the U.S. Southwest, “the levels of aridity seen in the 1950s multiyear drought, or the 1930s Dust Bowl, [will] become the new climatology by mid-century: a perpetual drought.” The possibility of “perpetual drought” raises again the terrible specter of the Dust Bowl, but this time with no obvious way back, given the “locked-in” nature of climate change.23Such warnings by scientists indicate the severity of both current and expected crises, given that the Dust Bowl is considered by many as one of the more extreme humanmade ecological and social disasters in history. the trends However, we now confront the reality, given explained above, that dust-bowlification is an increasingly likely and ordinary threat in the face of climate change.24 That what is happening today is a direct continuation of the colonial past is illustrated in part by the great social distance between those making decisions and those most affected—and by the fact that one group of people may forcibly impose such destruction on others. As a recent report by Tamra Gilbertson for the Indigenous Environmental Network and Climate Justice Alliance stated:Communities especially impacted include the frontline communities of peoples living directly alongside fossil-fuel pollution and extraction overwhelmingly: Indigenous Peoples (IPs), Black, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander communities, working class, poor and peasant communities in the United States, Canada and around the world. These peoples are forced to sacrifice their lives, livelihoods and health for the sake of projects to extract and burn fossil fuels and dump the resulting toxic waste and…have been facing the reality of the climate crisis for decades. In climate disruption and extreme weather events, these communities and indigenous tribal nations are hit first and [worst].25However, there is no serious New Deal on the horizon for the poor and non-white world most impacted by socioecological crises in the new Dust Bowl era.26 Rather, international environmental politics, as represented by the most recent climate negotiations, have hung much of the world out to dry—or drown. Moreover, the very people suffering most under current conditions and forced to seek safety away from home are also scapegoated viciously by political and economic elites oozing racist anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment across Europe, Britain, North America, and beyond.2nc – impact – water warsWar is an inevitable part of the capital’s expanding treadmill of production. Allowing the accumulation cycle to control water allocation ensures water wars.Alvarez 16 (Camila Huerta Alvarez (2016), Assistant professor of sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, “Militarization and water: a cross-national analysis of militarism and freshwater withdrawals”, Environmental Sociology, 2:3, 298-305, DOI: 10.1080/23251042.2016.1201879)The current relationship between militarism and capitalism goes beyond the ‘military–industrial complex’ (Bonds 2016) where capitalist elites use military efforts to maintain capital accumulation and to secure natural resources from periphery countries (Bonds and Downey 2012; Downey, Bonds, and Clark 2010; Rice 2007; Foster 1994; Jorgenson and Clark 2009). The North/South divide among nations will only continue to grow as natural resources become more scarce: ‘Nations controlling key materials will be powerful; wars will be fought to ensure secure and privileged access to them. Because many of these key resources are concentrated in the nations of the Global South, wars will be fought on this terrain to control access to these resources’ (Hooks and Smith 2012, 69). As nations use military power in economic and domestic matters, military presence and infrastructural demands on natural resources grow stronger. Furthermore, military enforcements expand, similar to capital expansion, as nations compete for geopolitical power (Hooks and Smith 2005). The expansion of militaries around the world generates operations, personnel and equipment, all of which require high use of resources. Nations after World War II are increasingly dependent on using the military to reserve a global position; as a result, militaries have become an important structural driver to environmental impacts (Clark and Jorgenson 2012).Civilian and combat operations carried out by military forces influence water resources. The civilian affairs of the military involve peacekeeping and municipal operations. The combat aspect involves national security, arms and war operations. The civilian operations include engineering projects to ensure national defense, political control or international ‘peace’ operations. Examples of these include dams and other social infrastructure. Militaries carry out these operations as political or development missions within and between nations, whereas the combat operations involve events like international wars or the development of nuclear testing. In both instances, military impacts public and private business economies because the military itself is a huge consumer of environmental resources, such as energy and oil and creates an everlasting dependency on fossil fuels (Clark, Jorgenson, and Kentor 2010; Kentor, Jorgenson, and Kick 2012). The private sector benefits from previous infrastructural investments and research in advanced technologies from military weapons (Jorgenson, Clark, and Givens 2012).Information on military actions and water usage is limited compared to research on energy usage. However, we know water is necessary for almost all military aspects including large technologies. For instance, the military demands large amounts of water for chemical decontamination where chemical-related procedures need tens of thousands gallons of water to decontaminate people or military equipment (Mitchel 2007; Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force 2008). Military structures demand large amounts of water resources to fulfill combat operations on bases along with military troops. Military influences on water resources extend beyond large-scale combat operations to civilian issues such as water allocations and waterrelated conflicts. State and military factors play an important role in controlling water resources through multinational treaties of water allocation and governmental infrastructure. National security and stability are tied to water availability, yet, water resources are not equally distributed geographically. For instance, 40% of rivers are shared between nations (Cooley et al. 2012). Water allocation agreements are decided through international law and multinational treaties. Most water resources have ‘inter-basin transfer’ where water is transferred from another area (Islar and Boda 2014). As officials divert water resources between geographic regions, water is politicized by framing dams as a solution to water scarcity and overlooking the social drivers of water use (Islar and Boda 2014). Expensive mega projects transporting water supplies in many cases exacerbate water crises by destroying ecosystems. Armed forces are used against residents resisting dam construction and relocation (Cummings 1990; Fearnside 2006, 2008; Bosshard 2008, 2009). For instance, prior to the construction of the Merowe Dam in Sudan, residents who refused to relocate were shot by militias (Bosshard 2008). The military and state interact with these water resources and systems to secure economic growth. For example, international pressure from industries such as timber and rubber drive the need for infrastructural development of water systems in the Amazon Basin (Cummings 1990; Fearnside 2006, 2008). Additionally, the US Military supported American involvement in the creation of dams in India to secure irrigation projects (Shiva 2002). Here, the treadmill of destruction is working in conjuncture with the treadmill of production through coercive polity: ‘[f]irms often profit from war (sometimes scandalously so) and, in some instances, states wage war to protect commercial interest’ (Hooks and Smith 2004, 561). Mega water projects demonstrate how militarism and capitalism are dependent on each other in a relationship beyond the military–industrial complex where military efforts are used to secure opportunities for capital accumulation (Bonds 2016).Overall, the military influences water resources through combat and civilian operations including consuming large water resources for bases and personnel, participating in mega water infrastructural development and creating water intensive weapons. In these processes, military forces affect all types of freshwater sources from rivers to groundwater through withdrawal and pollution. By situating freshwater within the treadmill of destruction, we can understand the connections between militarization and environmental problems: (1) military infrastructure demands large amounts of water for technologies, bases and personnel; (2) military forces are used to enforce water allocation decisions. Thus, military powers are a structural driver of environmental impacts. In my analyses, I employ the treadmill of destruction theory to examine whether increased levels of militarism (i.e. in military spending and number of soldiers) are associated with increased freshwater withdrawals in nations. This paper continues the traditional methods of measuring social drivers of environmental impacts (see for instance York 2008; Jorgenson and Clark 2009; Clark, Jorgenson, and Kentor 2010; Lengefeld and Smith 2013). I also take into account the treadmill of production by including economic and modernization variables such as gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, urbanization and population.2nc – turns case – cwaCorporate power inherent in capitalism makes CWA regulation meaningless – the whole idea of NPDES permits is a waste of timeSteffy 16 (Kathryn M. Steffy, MA in Political Science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, “Neoliberalism, The Environmental Protection Agency, and the Chesapeake Bay”, MA Thesis from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, May 3, 2016, )ConclusionThe EPA is built upon a flawed foundation that is so heavily influenced by corporations that their policies cater to their interests rather than that of environmental interests. As neoliberal ideals afflicts environmentalism as a whole, neoliberal ideologies have been built into the EPA’s foundation since its origination under Nixon. The constant drive for profits within a neoliberal mindset has convinced policymakers and citizens alike that market-based approaches are fair and effective means to combatting social problems, like environmental harm. These approaches, however, still prioritize the social good of economic-wellbeing over that of other social goods and the protection of human rights to environmental health as a whole. Specific to the Clean Water Act, one of the EPA’s prized regulations, electing for NPEDS permits are not only environmentally dangerous but furthermore ineffective, especially with exemptions made pertaining to types of pollution from particularly powerful industries. Neoliberal approaches have driven policies like NPEDS permits to be viewed as socially acceptable, when these policies are actually, in practice, incapable of accomplishing any substantial environmental improvement that would equate to environmental sustainability. Chapter 3 will be hosting a case study surrounding the Clean Water Act’s success pertaining to the health of the Chesapeake Bay despite numerous fundamental flaws based in capitalism and neoliberal thought.2nc – turns case – biodiversityMultiple datasets prove dedev solves biodiversity but growth doesn’tSol 19 (Joeri Sol, Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Amsterdam, “Economics in the anthropocene: species extinction or steady state economics,” Ecological Economics, 165, 106392, 2019, doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.106392)Some of the findings pertaining to my Extinction rate measure should be interpreted with caution. For example, the estimate of a global extinction rate for the coming century of 759 times the background rate is derived from conservative assumptions and is sensitive to the chosen timespan.25 For this first attempt of translating IUCN listings into extinction rates, I considered it desirable to obtain a global estimate within the range of the most cited estimates (Pimm et al., 1995; Pimm et al., 2014). The exploration of the geographical distribution of Extinction rate illustrates that more than half of global terrestrial area surpasses the planetary boundary set for biodiversity loss beyond doubt, which is in line with Newbold et al. (2016) who use a different dataset and biodiversity loss measure. A promising way to obtain more realistic Extinction rate estimates is to take differences in species their lifespans into account (e.g. at the class or family level). Currently, my Extinction rate estimates are likely to be biased downward, especially so when a region has a large share of threatened species with short lifespans. However, this would only influence the across-country comparison if this bias is somehow correlated with population density or GDP per capita.My findings suggest that conservation efforts should prioritize regions with a strong expected growth in population and affluence, and especially where biodiversity is already under high pressure (since the estimated coefficients for Extinction rate are elasticities). While I do consider the regional variation in Extinction rate that I illustrate in this paper informative, I caution the reader to base conservation priorities solely on these rates. In terms of the library metaphor in Weitzman (1998)'s Noah's Ark problem, the expected extinction rates could be considered the state of a library, but not the number of books in the library (i.e., species richness) nor their distinctiveness (i.e., species' isolation on a phylogenetic tree).26 For maps of species richness and genetic diversity, see Grenyer et al. (2006) and Miraldo et al. (2016), respectively.27 Also closely related, Rodrigues et al. (2014) presents maps for changes in the Red List Index and dominant threats to endangered species.28The literature has identified land use change as the main driver of biodiversity loss (e.g. Dietz et al., 2007; Czech, 2008; Newbold et al., 2016), which could be remedied against by protecting sufficiently large habitats. Unfortunately, most nations still fail to meet the 2020 Aichi Biodiversity Targets for legally protected areas, set at 17 and 10% of land surface and territorial waters, respectively (CBD, 2010).29 Moreover, protected areas are biased towards locations where they prevent little land conversion (Joppa and Pfaff, 2009) and are often underfunded (Watson et al., 2014). However, it is unlikely that economic growth will help to close the gaps in conservation budgets, as I find little evidence in favor of an automatic EKC. More emphatically, the estimated shortfall of the global conservation budget seems rather modest: McCarthy et al. (2012, p. 4) find that: “the total required is less than 20% of annual global consumer spending on soft drinks.”5. ConclusionThe analysis of IUCN Red List assessments presented in this paper reveals that expected biodiversity loss is surpassing safe thresholds virtually everywhere and that species endangerment is increasing with population density and GDP per capita. This association between species endangerment and human activity is unlikely to be the result of the assessment process, suggesting that the conservation of nature would benefit from degrowth or the transition to a steady state economy.Serious action to preserve biodiversity, considered a moral obligation by many, requires institutional changes that go beyond the establishment of protected areas: for example, climate change is closely related to species extinction (Pounds et al., 2006; Frieler et al., 2013; IPBES, 2019), putting constraints on the collective consumption of fossil fuels (McGlade and Ekins, 2015). Victor (2008) explores policy mixes that enable the transition to a steady state economy and presents simulations of such a transition for Canada, showing that it allows for lower greenhouse gas emissions, less poverty, more leisure and fiscal balance. In short, economic policy in the Anthropocene should aim to improve carrying capacity rather than zealously chase economic growth.2nc – sustainability/turns case – waterCapitalist exploitation demolishes global water cycles and kills global ecosystemsClark 18 (Brett, associate professor of sociology and sustainability studies at the University of Utah; Stefano B. Longo, Assistant Professor specializing in Environmental Sociology at NC State; “Land–Sea Ecological Rifts”, Land–Sea Ecological Rifts, )Covering approximately 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, the World Ocean is “the largest ecosystem.”1 Today all areas of the ocean are affected by multiple anthropogenic effects—such as overfishing, pollution, and emission of greenhouse gases, causing warming seas as well as ocean acidification—and over 40 percent of the ocean is strongly affected by human actions. Furthermore, the magnitude of these impacts and the speed of the changes are far greater than previously understood.2 Biologist Judith S. Weis explains that “the most widespread and serious type of [marine] pollution worldwide is eutrophication due to excess nutrients.”3 The production and use of fertilizers, sewage/waste from humans and farm animals, combustion of fossil fuels, and storm water have all contributed to dramatic increases in the quantity of nutrients in waterways and oceans. Research in 2008 indicated that there were over 400 “dead zones,” areas of low oxygen, mostly near the mouths of rivers.4 Nutrient overloading thus presents a major challenge to maintaining healthy aquatic ecosystems.Nutrients are a basic source of nourishment that all organisms need to survive. Plants require at least eighteen elements to grow normally; of these, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are called macronutrients, because they are needed in larger quantities. While all essential nutrients exist in the biosphere, these three are the ones most commonly known to be deficient in commercial agricultural production systems. Beginning in the early twentieth century with the Haber-Bosch process, atmospheric nitrogen was converted into ammonia to create synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. The fixation of nitrogen, an energy-intensive process, made the nutrient far more widely available for use in agriculture. This in turn dramatically changed production systems, which no longer depended on legumes and manures to biologically supply nitrogen for other crops such as wheat, corn, and most vegetables.In the modern era, particularly since the Second World War, the increased production and use of fertilizers served to greatly expand food production and availability. Major macronutrients are routinely applied to soils in order to maintain and increase the growth of plant life on farms, as well as private and public landscapes such as golf courses, nurseries, parks, and residences. They are used to produce fruits, vegetables, and fibers for human and non-human consumption, expand areas of recreation, and beautify communities. However, like many aspects of modern production, given the larger social dynamics and determinants that shape socioecological relationships, these technological and economic developments have generated serious negative—often unforeseen—consequences. The wide expansion and increasing rates of nitrogen and phosphorus application have caused severe damage to aquatic systems in particular. Rivers, streams, lakes, bays (estuaries), and ocean systems have been inundated with nutrient runoff, which has had far-reaching effects.Here we examine the socioecological relationships and processes associated with the transfer of nutrients from terrestrial to marine systems. We employ a metabolic analysis to highlight the interchange of matter and energy within and between socioecological systems. In particular, we show how capitalist agrifood production contributes to distinct environmental problems, creating a metabolic rift in the soil nutrient cycle. We emphasize how the failure to mend nutrient cycles in agrifood systems has led to approaches that produce additional ruptures, such as those associated with nutrient overloading in marine systems. This analysis reveals the ways that the social relations of capitalist agriculture tend to produce interconnected ecological problems, such as those in terrestrial and aquatic systems. Further, we contend that these processes undermine the basic conditions of life on a wide-ranging scale. It is important to recognize that nutrient pollution of groundwater as well as surface waters has been a major concern since the rise of modern capitalist agriculture and the development of the global food regime.5 The failure to address the metabolic rupture in the soil nutrient cycle and the contradictions of capital are central to contemporary land-sea ecological rifts.2nc – sustainability – agriculture/financeFinancialization and unsustainable ag make global crisis inevitableTilzey 18 (Mark, Senior Research Fellow in Governance of Food and Farming Systems, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University, Political Ecology, Food regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience, “The Neoliberal Food regime in crisis” (Chapter 7), 197-225, )Until the turn of the new millennium, neoliberalism appeared to be carrying all before it, without serious contradiction for this regime of accumulation. The collapse of state communism and the opening up of China and other centres of super-cheap labour as manufacturing zones for Northern transnational corporations enabled the attack on labour in the imperium to be mitigated by the import of ‘cheaps’ from the global South. As we have seen, this served a crucial legitimation function as well as maintaining satisfactory consumption levels in the global North. Environmental contradictions of productivist agriculture, of manufacturing, and of energy production in the imperium could also be mitigated through shifting these activities to the periphery. As the first decade of the new millennium progressed, however, a variety of contradictions, in terms of capital accumulation, in terms of the supply of basic needs to the global majority (perhaps most notably food), and in terms of the biophysical fabric of the planet and resource supply (all the while representing contradictions of capital for the subaltern classes and extra-human nature), began to ‘come home to roost’ as mounting contradictions for capital, and for neoliberalism in particular.From the perspective of the ‘classes of labour’, the contradictions of neoliberalism are those of wage stagnation, increasing job insecurity, and increasing indebtedness (global North), and increasing poverty and hunger, lack of access to land and other basic necessities (food, water, shelter, healthcare) (global South). From the perspective of ‘ecology’, the contradictions are those of increased extraction of non-renewable resources, depletion of renewable resources, loss of biodiversity, and global climate change due to capital’s profligate consumption of fossil fuels. In short, from the biophysical perspective, this represents the generalized overconsumption of commodities to feed capital’s ‘treadmill of production’. From the perspective of capital, however, the contradictions for neoliberalism comprise, firstly, an under-consumption (over-accumulation) of commodities arising from competitive pressure to lower wages globally— capital, in other words, cannot sell the commodities that it needs to in order to survive by means of the treadmill of production. We can see clearly, therefore, that the aims of ecological sustainability and the aims of capitalist reproduction are diametrically opposed. Perversely, however, under-consumption leads to a further competitive downward spiral of labour shedding through automation, wage stagnation, and the search for ever-cheaper labour sources in order to lower prices so that market share can be retained. Meanwhile consumption, located largely in the global North, is sustained only by increasingly risky credit-lending and by never-ending product innovation and premature obsolescence. These dynamics can be explained only by reference to the ‘political’, Level 4, in our model, since they are essentially questions of class struggle in the authoritative domain.But while capital needs to produce and sell more and more commodities to infinity, this unavoidable impulse constitutes a looming and potentially fatal second contradiction for capital in terms of the necessarily finite supply of energy and raw materials required for their manufacture. With the major means of keeping the cost of commodities down, and available in abundance—fossil fuel—having now passed the point of peak supply, the future prospect is one of dwindling stocks, and secularly increasing cost, of these crucial energy sources. Since renewable energy, despite the claims of ‘green capitalists’, cannot generate the cheap, abundant, and continuously expanding supply of energy required to feed capital’s insatiable appetite, the demise of fossil fuel would appear to constitute an insuperable obstacle to capital’s reproduction, unless some equivalent substitute can be found. These are ‘ecological’ or Level 3 dynamics where the ‘political’ dynamics of capital are enabled or constrained by biophysical affordances. At the same time, environmental contradictions for capital as reflexive political response, usually at the level of the state, in terms of regulatory climate change mitigation, generates constraints on capital through tendential restrictions on fossil-fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This leads, in turn, to the search for, and implementation of, fossil-fuel ‘substitutes’ in the form of, inter alia, the ‘bio-economy’. Since the ‘bio-economy’ requires land, in contrast to the ‘subterranean forest’ of fossil fuel, this inevitably leads to conflicts with food production, particularly in the global South, generating further reflexive political resistance by subaltern classes. These dynamics comprise a dialectic between Level 3 and Level 4.The issue of land therefore assumes an importance in the current conjuncture that it appeared to have lost during the era of apparently limitless fossil-fuel production and consumption. Thus, as neoliberalism’s expansionary dynamic encounters the looming constraint represented by the exhaustion of the ‘subterranean forest’ of fossil fuel, so land, as in the pre-industrial era, again becomes the principal focus of contention as the basis for either the production of renewable energy, or for the production of food. And the contention is also focused on questions of ‘energy for whom?’ and ‘food for whom?’ Should energy and food be directed towards profligate consumption by the global minority in the North, or towards basic need satisfaction by the global majority in the South? In land, therefore, the different strands of the ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ contradictions of neoliberalism coalesce, culminating in strained social relations and struggles over land, between social classes within the global South, and between the global South and North. This is reflected in the revival of issues long eclipsed during the heyday of neoliberalism (and still largely eclipsed in the global North for the reasons earlier explained), such as land inequality, redistributive land reform, the organization of agriculture, its role in the social division of labour, and its relationship to non-agricultural sectors.Contradictions for?Neoliberalism in?GeneralAs we have seen, the crisis of the Keynesian regime of accumulation comprised a supply-side (under-accumulation) crisis, stimulating the turn to neoliberalism. The latter has, in turn, generated the current underconsumption (over-accumulation), or demand side crisis. These are ‘political’ or ‘internal’ contradictions, although enabled concurrently by ‘ecological’ or ‘external’ conditions of production. ‘Internal’ supply-side crisis tends to stimulate technological innovation and the exploitation of new and cheaper conditions of production to exert downward pressure on prices in order to sustain and enhance the rate of profit—hence the impulse towards globalization from the 1970s. The present conjuncture is characterized by the juxtaposition of demand-side crisis, due to the power of capital over labour (Level 4), with a supply-side crisis in the conditions of production, defined by increases in the cost of conditions of production, most particularly oil (Level 3), and the ramifications of political attempts to curb greenhouse gas emissions (together with knockon effects for fossil-fuel-based agriculture and consequent rise in the cost of food) (Level 3 and 4). The demand-side crisis is exacerbated by the supply-side crisis in the conditions of production, representing structural contradictions, compounded by the conjunctural tendency of monopoly finance capital to profit from speculation in newly de-regulated futures commodities such as food (Ghosh 2010; Isakson 2014). The result is a paradoxical situation in which financial surplus continues to increase even as the under-consumption crisis deepens, and the conditions of production exhibit a secular, if uneven, rise in cost. The current plethora of commodities on the market is the product of global competition to produce masses of products on the basis of low wages and ever-lower costs in the biophysical conditions of production (the ‘cheaps’ of labour power in capitalist production and the ‘zone of appropriation’ that lies behind this). There is a frantic race to introduce new commodities in order to sustain sales, such that supply has become divorced from demand, resulting in major imbalances between the two. The outcome is a frenzied search for consumers that encounters the insurmountable constraint of limits to absorption. This comprises the perennial dilemma for capitalism of seeking reductions in wage costs whilst simultaneously desiring expanded consumption. It also comprises the characteristic capitalist paradox of poverty, or lack of ability to pay, in the midst of abundance. The rise in global trade above production reinforces global competition, while productivity growth in excess of wage increases hinders the realization of the value of goods through sales. The short-term imbalances caused by over-accumulated capital, over-produced commodities, and asymmetrically exchanged goods between South and North are inscribed in the contradictions that culminated in the financial crisis of 2007/8. These imbalances take the form of two fundamental contradictions for neoliberalism in the sphere of demand and in the rate of profit. This means that these contradictions of neoliberalism take place in two spheres, namely, the realization of the value of commodities, and the valorization of capital.With respect to the crisis of realization, there are, as noted, severe imbalances between production and consumption. By reducing salaries and increasing unemployment and poverty, neoliberalism has eroded the purchasing power of the ‘classes of labour’ (of primary significance in the global North). This has created impediments to the realization of the value of commodities and has led, therefore, to a re-emergence of difficulties in realizing the surplus value that capitalists extract from their labour force. While the Fordist model included, as we have seen, a link between wage and productivity increases, the neoliberal model, by contrast, is premised on the prioritization of competition to reduce wage costs, thereby creating a widening gap between increases in production and purchasing power. The impacts of this have been most severe in the global South, as we have seen, where the labour force plays an insignificant role in global consumption but is vital in reducing costs of production. In addition to the removal of people, wholly or partially, from the land, the superexploitation of workers employed in capitalist production in the periphery is one of the main reasons for the food crisis that erupted almost simultaneously with the financial crisis. As we have seen, superexploitation is compounded by extractivism, founded on ‘accumulation by dispossession’. ‘Neoliberal capitalism has amputated the basic sources of subsistence for one-sixth of the global population’ (Katz 2015, 283).Significantly, however, these effects have been mitigated in the global North by a number of compensatory mechanisms which have been of benefit even for the ‘working classes’. However, the latter’s ability to purchase even luxury items, in addition to essentials, produced in the global South, is now linked not to improvements in income, but rather to debt. In other words, the realization crisis of neoliberalism has been kept within certain bounds through recourse to credit-lending, that is, to debt. This countervailing factor allowed purchasing power to be maintained despite wage stagnation, the creation of a ‘precariat’, and the spread of unemployment. Workers drew on credit relief, with this credit sustaining consumption levels until debt liabilities reached such a level that default became inevitable. Financial crisis, as we have seen, was the consequence. Clearly these structural proclivities have not been removed, so it seems only a matter of time before another financial crisis descends on the global North. (The financial crisis did not impact as severely on the global South simply because its workers are too poor for larger banks to consider lending to.)It should be evident, then, that consumption is based on a highly polarized distributive structure at the global level based on the imperium as main consumer, and the periphery as main producer. Thus, 80 per cent of the planet’s population engages in just 14 per cent of private consumption (Katz 2015). In other words, 20 per cent of the global population (overwhelmingly in the global North) consumes 76 per cent of commodities produced. This casts doubt on assertions by alter-globalists such as Hardt and Negri that Marxian class analysis based on the labour theory of value is dead, and that the ‘pain’ of neoliberalism is distributed equally among the ‘multitude’, whether North or South.With respect to the crisis of valorization, it is the case, as Marx foresaw, that the dynamic of accumulation increases the organic composition of capital, which, in turn, tends to reduce the rate of profit based on the surplus value extracted from the labour force. There are three indications that there has been an increase in the organic composition of capital under neoliberalism. Firstly, there were very significant increases in investment in Asian economies, particularly, most notably China, from the 1980s, which became the new ‘workshops of the world’. High rates of exploitation, particularly of semi-proletarian migrants from rural areas, made the average level of investment in China, particularly, extremely high in relative terms (see case study below). Secondly, despite increased rates of labour exploitation, there has been a uniform process of capitalization (the use of machinery in preference to labour) across all regions and sectors, North and South, associated with the activity of transnational capital. These capitals have sought to increase productivity, even in combination with super-cheap labour, by means of intense computerization of the production process. This has brought about a reduction in the surplus value created by living labour. Increasingly, there is little difference in productivity between labour in the global South and in the global North, but, despite this, wage differentials between the two remain huge. This is the key to super-exploitation in production in the South and the confinement of consumption to the global North. This phenomenon is known as ‘labour arbitrage’ (Smith 2016). Thirdly, the loss of jobs generated by capitalization has generated structural unemployment.These three processes—high foreign investment by transnational capital, the information revolution, and structural unemployment—have increased the organic composition of capital, resulting in a relative deterioration of the rate of profit. As in the case of the realization imbalances, declining valorization of capital has generated countervailing tendencies. The prevailing countervailing tendency is that identified as number two earlier—driving wages down below the reproductive cost of labour power through an increased rate of exploitation. This is the principle mechanism identified by Smith (2016) in his unification of Lenin’s theory of imperialism with Marx’s labour theory of value. Herein lies the essence of neoliberal imperialism in its authoritative dimension.Hitherto, these countervailing tendencies of a ‘political’ or ‘internal’ kind in the ‘zone of exploitation’ have been complemented by another, ‘ecological’ or ‘external’, tendency in the ‘zone of appropriation’—that is, a secular decline in the cost of raw materials. But the first decade of the new millennium began to witness a reversal of this countervailing tendency as the cost of the conditions of production exhibited an upward, if uneven, trend. Thus, neoliberalism’s ‘internal’ over-production crisis is compounded by an ‘external’ under-production crisis in the supply of the cheap and abundant energy and raw materials required to sustain the ever-enlarging scale of capital’s production and productivity.Contradictions for?the?Neoliberal Food RegimeThese relationships between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ contradictions of neoliberalism are exemplified particularly well by the food crisis of 2007/8. The ultimate, or structural, causes of the food crisis may be attributed to the basic accumulation dynamic of the class alliance of disarticulated capital described in the previous chapter, predicated, in the global South, upon a deepening process of primitive accumulation, engendering semi-proletarianization or proletarianization, and the superexploitation of labour. Alternatively, extractivism, through accumulation by dispossession, renders the expropriated work force surplus to requirements from capital’s perspective. Neoliberalizing agriculture has, through its symbiotic relationship with the disarticulated alliance, favoured and reinforced strongly skewed patterns of land distribution and production in much of the global South, particularly in Latin America and Asia, whereby agri-industrial producers, as a small minority, occupy much of the land and produce the bulk of export crops through the socio-naturally alienating techniques of market productivism (Kay 2006; Tilzey 2006; Weis 2007). As an outcome of such skewed land tenure structures, however, the majority of the rural population occupies insufficient land to meet its own food needs (the semi-proletarians), or has no access to land at all (the proletarians). Structurally, such populations therefore occupy a spectrum of class positions. These range from semi-proletarian, producing as much as they can on their small plots, usually for themselves and any surplus for the home market, and selling their labour on the large estates, or in the urban centres (see de Janvry 1981), to fully proletarian. Such ‘classes of labour’ comprise the growing numbers who now depend on the sale of their labour power for their own daily reproduction (Bernstein 2009). Such lack of adequate access to land, a direct consequence of class structures both supporting and supported by neoliberalism, therefore generates market dependence and vulnerability to price volatility.Following the era of developmentalism, the neoliberal food regime has been characterized by the prising open of Southern markets through the bilateral class interests of neoliberalism, and further exacerbated by reductions in, or elimination of, support for domestic agricultural production, and other entitlement structures, by structural adjustment policies. Structural adjustment policies created new opportunities for the South to become increasingly export-oriented (Petras and Veltmayer 2001), favouring the agro-export fractions of capital in supplying cheap food and facilitating downward pressure on global labour from the 1980s. This has entailed the marginalization of other, sub-hegemonic, capitalist class fractions in favour of the agri-food oligarchy. Bilateral neoliberalization has thus enabled reconstruction of a global food regime that bears certain similarities to the Imperial food regime of the late nineteenth century, to the extent that cheap food is again siphoned off from the periphery to the consumption hubs of the global North (Araghi 2009b).The consequence for growing numbers of rural producers in the global South has been increased poverty and an enforced process of semiproletarianization, or permanent rural–urban migration and consequent proletarianization. The consequence has been chronic levels of unemployment and under-employment throughout the burgeoning cities of the global South, together with their rural hinterlands (Davis 2006), leading to severe vulnerability and exposure to global market volatility, increasingly manipulated by the power of financialized transnational capital. The corollary is the displacement of local farming systems, the loss of associated biodiversity, and the general degradation of ecosystems and the biophysical resource base. As Araghi has noted, the [neoliberal] enclosure food regime, as the agrarian programme of a reenergized, re-globalizing capital, represents a reversal of the suspension of global value relations [of the state developmentalist era], with drastic consequences for the masses of agrarian direct producers who become redundant on a daily basis, and who are thrown out of collapsing national divisions of labour into the vortex of globalization as masses of surplus labour in motion. (2009b, 135).This neoliberal ‘enclosure’ food regime, comprising the symbiosis of transnationalized fractions of Northern agri-food capital with extroverted class fractions of the South, has entailed a systematic emasculation of the developmentalist state in much of the periphery. This has involved a concomitant dismantling of government credit and protection for nationally oriented agriculture, together with progressive abandonment of public structures to ensure appropriate domestic food distribution and availability of strategic food staple reserves (Moyo and Yeros 2005). Heavily indebted states, now confronted by increasingly volatile international markets in food commodities and dominated by re-energized agroexport fractions of capital, are unable, or unwilling, to counteract such volatility since they are themselves, due to imperialist rent, privatization and contraction of the tax base, constrained by internal and external fiscal deficits (Ghosh 2010). The consequence is that many states in the global South are today characterized by a triple crisis of increasing semiproletarianization or proletarianization, increased international price volatility for food staples, and decreased capacity, or willingness, to address the consequences of such enhanced vulnerability.The foregoing affords an ultimate explanation for the structural and immanent vulnerability of the majority of rural (and urban) poor to globalized market ‘forces’, and therefore to food crisis, through their sundering, wholly or partially, from the means of production, and through the consequent generation of market dependence. This constitutes an ‘internal’ (Level 4) contradiction of capital, although one that is inherently conjoined to the exploitation of ‘external’ socio-natural affordances in the generation of ecological surplus as a second structural, ‘external’ contradiction. This second contradiction arises both from the direct impacts of, and indirect and reflexive responses to, the ever-increasing metabolic rift between accumulation and the environmental conditions of production (Araghi 2009a). In this way, the increase in oil prices, and their consequences for global warming, led the ‘automobile-oil complex’, for example, to initiate investment of large sums of capital in the production of agro-fuels, especially in the production of sugar cane and maize for ethanol, and soybean, peanut, rapeseed, and oil palm for vegetable oil. This resulted in ‘an unmitigated attack by financial capital and transnational companies on Southern tropical agriculture’ (Stedile 2015, 37). This structural contradiction in the contraction of ‘ecological surplus’ through secular increase in the cost of fossil energy, combined with more conjunctural and reflexive responses by capital, to generate the causes of the food crisis in 2007/8. These Level 3 to Level 4 dynamics may be summarized as follows: (1) anthropogenic climate-change-induced declines in agricultural output, arising from the impacts of capital’s treadmill of production; (2) oil price rises, impacting upon agro-chemically based agriculture and leading to food price rises, as a result of impending peak oil, compounded by neoliberalism’s reluctance to invest in extractive infrastructure; (3) the diversion of land for the production of agro-fuels as a response to climate change and energy insecurity, again leading to food price rises as the area under food grains declines and, in the global South, peasant production is displaced by productivist, or extractivist, agro-fuel plantations.Another proximate, or conjunctural, cause of food crisis derived from one of the more specific impacts of global financialization as an internal contradiction—the deregulation of commodity futures markets (Ghosh 2010). The resultant trend towards greater market volatility in agri-food and fuel commodities was compounded by a further ramification of the financial crisis in the global North. Northern finance capital sought a more ‘secure’ home in peripheral economies through investment in fixed assets such as land, minerals, agricultural raw materials, water, agricultural production in addition to the control of renewable energy sources such as hydroelectric power and ethanol plants (Stedile 2015). This ‘internal’ contradiction has served further to reinforce agri-food productivism, or extractivism, in the global South, to marginalize subaltern classes, and to create immanent and actual conditions for food crisis.This analysis suggests, then, that both the ultimate, structural, and proximate, conjunctural, causes of food crisis arise from the dynamics of the neoliberalizing agri-food system within a disarticulating coreperiphery structure, and are linked intimately to the wider crisis of underconsumption in world accumulation. Thus, the newly disarticulating structure of transnationalized accumulation has facilitated downward pressure on labour costs and conditions of production, leading to underconsumption crisis and enhanced accumulation by neoliberal class fractions as financial surplus. This is the key ‘internal’ contradiction, as the generation of a huge reserve army of labour through primitive accumulation, and accumulation by dispossession, has kept wages low, leading to realization crisis. This is a crisis now increasingly both of and for capital, marking, at a minimum, a signal, and possibly also a developmental, crisis for neoliberalism. But while the cost of labour power has stayed down due to primitive accumulation and super-exploitation, counteracting increases in the cost of wage foods, selective and strategic conditions of production costs have risen progressively, basically through approaching/attained peak oil but also reflexive responses to global warming (agrofuels), manifest in steadily increasing energy and food prices. Thus, the first crisis is one of under-consumption through low wages; the second is through increasing costs in the conditions of production, representing an unusual and significant juxtaposition of demand-side crisis with supplyside crisis in the conditions of production.2nc – sustainability – climateOnly immediate transition solves Climate Change. The consensus of models prove tech is too slow and there’s no chance of decoupling. Kallis 19 (Jason Hickel, anthropologist at the London School of Economics and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Giorgos Kallis, ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, environmental scientist working on ecological economics and political ecology, formerly Marie Curie International Fellow at the Energy and Resources Group of the University of California at Berkeley, PhD in Environmental Policy and Planning from the University of the Aegean in Greece; “Is Green Growth Possible?”, New Political Economy, 1–18, 2019, doi:10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964)Carbon Emissions – Is Growth Compatible with the Paris Agreement?Unlike with resource use, there is a steady long-term trend toward relative decoupling of GDP from carbon emissions, and we know that absolute reductions in carbon emissions are possible to achieve. When it comes to climate change, however, the objective is not simply to reduce emissions (a matter of flows), but to keep total emissions from exceeding specific carbon budgets (a matter of stocks). For green growth theory, then, the question is not only whether we can achieve absolute decoupling and reduce emissions, but whether we can reduce emissions fast enough to stay within the carbon budgets for 1.5°C or 2°C, as per the Paris Agreement, while still continuing economic growth.A number of high-income countries have seen declining emissions in the twenty-first century, despite continued economic growth. Figure 4(a) shows declining emissions in the US and EU28, in both territorial and consumption-based terms, from 2006 to 2016 (i.e. absolute decoupling). However, emissions from the global South have continued upward, albeit at a slower rate than GDP (i.e. relative decoupling). China’s emissions declined slightly between 2014 and 2016 (a brief period of absolute decoupling), before growing again in 2017.On a global level, CO2 emissions have increased steadily, falling only during periods of economic recession (Figure 4(b)). Global emissions did level off in 2015 and 2016 while GDP continued to rise, prompting the International Energy Agency, a research arm of the OECD, to announce ‘Decoupling of global emissions and economic growth confirmed’ (IEA 2016), while media outlets celebrated ‘peak emissions’ (Meyer 2016). This news briefly came to constitute a key element of optimistic green growth narratives, until global emissions began to rise again in 2017 (1.6 per cent) and 2018 (2.7 per cent). Analysts attribute the temporary plateau to a shift in China away from coal and (mostly) toward oil and gas, and a shift in the US to natural gas.5 Once these shifts were complete, continued economic growth drove emissions up again.Overall, global carbon productivity has been slowing. World Bank data shows that carbon productivity (CO2 per 2010 $US GDP) improved steadily from 1960 to 2000, with decarbonisation happening at an average rate of 1.28 per cent per year (relative decoupling). However, from 2000 to 2014 there was no improvement in carbon productivity – in other words, not even relative decoupling has been achieved in the twenty-first century.6 High-income nations have done better, at least in terms of territorial emissions (the World Bank does not track consumption-based emissions), but even so progress has slowed, from an average rate of 1.91 percent per year from 1970 to 2000, down to 1.61 percent per year from 2000 to 2014.Existing trends are incompatible with the Paris Agreement targets. Business-as-usual is set to lead to 4.2°C of warming (2.5°C to 5.5°C) by 2100. Even with the Nationally Determined Contributions and Intended Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, global warming is still projected to reach 3.3°C (1.9°C to 4.4°C) – an improvement over the BAU scenario but still far exceeding the 1.5°C and 2°C thresholds.7 In order to keep warming below these thresholds, the world will have to make much more aggressive emissions reductions.The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) includes 116 mitigation scenarios that are consistent with Representative Concentration Pathway 2.6 (RCP2.6), which offers the best chances of staying below 2°C. All of these scenarios are green growth scenarios in that they stabilise global temperatures while global GDP continues to rise. Rising GDP is a built-in feature of the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSPs), which form the basis for the IPCC mitigation scenarios (Kuhnhenn 2018). AR5 warns, however, that these scenarios ‘typically involve temporary overshoot of atmospheric concentrations’ and ‘typically rely on the availability and widespread deployment of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)’ (2014, p. 23). Indeed, the vast majority scenarios for 2°C (101 of the 116) rely on BECCS to the point of achieving negative emissions.8 BECCS entails growing large tree plantations to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere, harvesting the biomass, burning it for energy, capturing the CO2 emissions at source and storing it underground. Relying on these ‘negative emissions technologies’ allows for a much larger carbon budget (about double the actual size) by assuming that we can successfully reduce global atmospheric carbon in the second half of the century.BECCS is highly controversial among climate scientists. It was first proposed by Obersteiner et al. (2001) and Keith (2001) at the turn of the century. IPCC modelling teams began including it in their scenarios from 2005, despite having no firm evidence of its feasibility. With the publication of AR5, BECCS was enshrined as a dominant assumption. Obersteiner has expressed alarm at the rapid uptake of his idea; he considers BECCS to be what he calls a ‘risk-management strategy’, or a ‘backstop technology’ in case climate feedback loops turn out to be worse than expected, and says the IPCC has ‘misused’ it by including it in regular scenarios to take pressure off of conventional mitigation pathways (i.e. emissions reductions) (Hickman 2016). In Keith’s (2001) initial formulation of the idea, he noted that while ‘measured use’ of biomass could help mitigate environmental problems, ‘large scale use of cropped biomass will not.’Anderson and Peters (2016) point out that the ‘allure’ of BECCS is due to the fact that it allows politicians to postpone the need for rapid emissions reductions: ‘BECCS licenses the ongoing combustion of fossil fuels while ostensibly fulfilling the Paris Commitments.’ There are a number of concerns. First, the viability of power generation with CCS has never been proven to be economically viable or scalable; it would require the construction of 15,000 facilities (Peters 2017). Second, the scale of biomass assumed in the AR5 scenarios would require plantations covering land two to three times the size of India, which raises questions about land availability, competition with food production, carbon neutrality, and biodiversity loss (Smith et al. 2016; Heck et al. 2018). Third, the necessary storage capacity may not exist (De Coninck and Benson 2014, Global CCS Institute 2015). Anderson and Peters conclude that ‘BECCS thus remains a highly speculative technology’ and that relying on it is therefore ‘an unjust and high stakes gamble’: if it is unsuccessful, ‘society will be locked into a high-temperature pathway.’ This conclusion is shared by a growing number of scientists (e.g. Fuss et al. 2014, Vaughan and Gough, 2016, Larkin et al. 2017, Van Vuuren et al. 2017), and by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (2018).It is not clear that we can justifiably rely on BECCS, an unproven technology, to underwrite green growth theory. If we accept this point, then we must return to asking whether it is possible to maintain growth without relying on BECCS to stay within the carbon budgets consistent with the Paris Agreement. Without BECCS, global emissions need to fall to net zero by 2050 for 1.5°C, or by 2075 for 2°C.9 This entails reductions of 6.8 per cent per year and 4 per cent per year, respectively (Figure 5). Theoretically, this can be accomplished with (a) a rapid shift to 100 per cent renewable energy to eliminate emissions from fossil fuel combustion (Jacobson and Delucchi 2011); plus (b) afforestation and soil regeneration to eliminate emissions from land use change; plus (c) a shift to alternative industrial processes to eliminate emissions from the production of cement, steel, and plastic. The question is, can all of this be accomplished quickly enough?Only 6 of the 116 scenarios for 2°C in AR5 exclude BECCS. These work by assuming ‘optimal full technology’ in all other areas, plus mass afforestation, and with high mitigation costs. These represent theoretically possible pathways, but without any empirical evidence as to their feasibility.Results of empirical studies are not promising. Schandl et al. (2016) model what might be achieved with aggressive mitigation policies, without relying on BECCS. Their high-efficiency scenario has a carbon price starting at $50 per ton (rising by 4 per cent per year to $236 by 2050) plus a doubling in the material efficiency of the economy due to technological innovations (improving from a historical average rate of 1.5 per cent per year up to 4.5 per cent). Schandl et al provide no evidence for the feasibility of the efficiency improvements that they assume. Even so, the result shows that with global growth of 3 per cent per year, annual emissions plateau to 2050 but do not decline. In this scenario, growth in energy demand outstrips the rate of decarbonisation, violating the carbon budgets for 1.5°C and 2°C.The International Renewable Energy Association (IRENA 2018) have modelled a scenario for continued GDP growth compatible with 2°C by relying on a rapid shift to renewable energy (consistent with Jacobson and Delucchi 2011). The scenario requires adding 12,200 GW of solar and wind capacity by 2050, with a dramatic increase in installation rates (2.3 to 4.6 times faster than the present).10 The scenario also requires that the energy intensity of the global economy falls by twothirds (by 2.8 per cent per year, double the historical rate), lowering energy demand in 2050 to slightly less than 2015 levels.11 This is feasible inasmuch as the transition to wind and solar itself improves energy efficiency (Jacobson and Delucchi 2011).12 Still, even this optimistic scenario accomplishes only 90 per cent of the necessary emissions reductions for 2°C (likely because it pays no attention to emissions from land use change and cement production). The model relies on negative emissions technology to cover most of the remainder.Van Vuuren et al. (2018) consider ‘alternative pathways’ for meeting the Paris Agreement targets without relying on widespread use of negative emissions technologies. They model rising GDP in accordance with SSP2. In addition to a carbon tax and other aggressive mitigation strategies, their optimistic scenario includes the following settings: global population peaks at 8.4 billion in 2050 and declines to 6.9 billion by 2100; meat consumption declines 80 per cent by 2050; all new cars and airplanes are efficient from 2025; the world shifts to the most efficient technologies for steel and cement production, etc. Even with these highly optimistic assumptions in place, they find that the pressures of continued growth drive emissions to exceed the carbon budgets for 1.5°C and 2°C, without negative emissions technologies.Another way to approach this question is by looking at projected rates of decoupling. If we assume global GDP continues to grow at 3 per cent per year (the average from 2010 to 2014), then decoupling must occur at a rate of 10.5 percent per year for 1.5°C, or 7.3 per cent per year for 2°C. If global GDP grows at 2.1 per cent per year (as PWC predicts), then decoupling must occur at 9.6 per cent per year for 1.5°C, or 6.4 per cent per year for 2°C. All of these targets are beyond what existing empirical models indicate is feasible. The Schandl et al model indicates that decoupling can happen by at most 3 percent per year under optimistic conditions. Other models arrive at similar conclusions. Before adopting BECCS assumptions, the IPCC (2000) projected decoupling of 3.3 percent per year in a global best-case scenario. The C-ROADS tool (developed by Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan) projects decoupling of at most 4 per cent per year under the most aggressive possible abatement policies: high subsidies for renewables and nuclear power, plus high taxes on oil, gas and coal. All of these results fall short of the decoupling rate that must be achieved if the global economy continues to grow at expected rates. Holz et al. (2018) find that if we rule out widespread use of negative emissions technologies, the required rate of decarbonisation for meeting the Paris Agreement is ‘well outside what is currently deemed achievable, based on historical evidence and standard modelling.’The challenge is even more difficult for rich nations. Anderson and Bows (2011) have modelled the emissions reductions necessary for achieving a 50 per cent chance of staying under 2°C (more relaxed than the two-thirds chance that the UNFCC calls for), without BECCS. They proceed from the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’, whereby rich nations (Annex-1 nations) make more aggressive emissions reductions than poor nations, owing to their greater historical responsibility for emissions and their greater capacity for managing the costs of transition. They assume that Non-Annex 1 nations defer peak emissions until 2025, and thereafter reduce emissions by 7 per cent per year. They acknowledge that these are extremely ambitious assumptions but consider them to be the most feasible compromise between practicality and equity. To stay within the remaining carbon budget, Annex 1 nations need to reduce emissions by 8–10 per cent per year, beginning in 2015. This model was developed with data up to 2010; as the remaining carbon budget is now smaller, Anderson estimates that Annex 1 nations need to reduce emissions by 12 per cent per year.13If we accept that Annex 1 nations need to achieve emissions reductions of 12 per cent per year, and if we assume that GDP growth in Annex 1 nations continues at 1.86 percent per year (the average from 2010 to 2014), then decoupling must occur at a rate of 15.8 per cent per year.14 For perspective, this is eight times faster than the historic rate of decoupling in Annex 1 nations (viz., 1.9 per cent per year from 1970 to 2013), and it is important to bear in mind that the rate of decoupling has generally slowed over this period.15 It also exceeds the decoupling rate implied by the average G20 Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement (viz., 3 per cent per year) by a factor of five.There is one empirical model that feasibly accomplishes emissions reductions consistent with the Paris Agreement, without relying on negative emissions technologies. Published by Grubler et al. (2018), it was included in the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C (2018) in response to growing critiques of the IPCC’s reliance on BECCS. The scenario, known as ‘Low Energy Demand’ (LED), accomplishes emissions reductions compatible with 1.5°C by reducing global energy demand by 40 per cent by 2050. In addition to decarbonisation and afforestation, the key feature of this scenario is that global material production and consumption declines significantly: ‘The aggregate total material output decreases by close to 20 per cent from today, one-third due to dematerialization, and twothirds due to improvements in material efficiency.’ Dematerialisation is accomplished by shifting away from private ownership of key commodities (like cars) towards sharing-based models. LED differentiates between the global North and South. Industrial activity declines by 42 per cent in the North and 12 per cent in the South. With efficiency improvements, this translates into industrial energy demand declining by 57 per cent in the North and 23 per cent in the South.The LED scenario projects continued GDP growth at just over 2 per cent per year, which would make it consistent with green growth theory. However, the empirical basis for this GDP trend is not robust. It is derived from the MESSAGE-Globium model, which calculates GDP from only two inputs: labour supply (population size and productivity) and energy. The low energy demand in the LED scenario does not affect growth because it is offset by efficiency improvements. As the model is insensitive to changes in material throughput, reductions in production and consumption do not affect output. The paper offers no evidence that GDP will continue to grow despite such reductions. Charlie Wilson, one of the paper’s authors, acknowledged that ‘we did not consider broader questions of GDP growth or degrowth, and we did not explicitly report relationships between our scenario and GDP outcomes for this reason.’ 16Conclusions and discussionThe empirical data demonstrate that while absolute decoupling of GDP from emissions is possible and is already happening in some regions, it is unlikely to happen fast enough to respect the carbon budgets for 1.5°C and 2°C against a background of continued economic growth. Growth increases energy demand, making the transition to renewable energy more difficult, and increases emissions from land use change and industrial processes. Models that do project green growth within the constraints of the Paris Agreement rely heavily on negative emissions technologies that are either unproven or dangerous at scale. Without these technologies, the rates of decarbonisation required for 1.5°C or 2°C are significantly steeper than extant models suggest is feasible even with aggressive mitigation policies.This conclusion changes somewhat if we adjust the baseline growth rate. All of the studies cited above project global GDP growth at 2–3 per cent per year. A lower rate of growth requires a lower rate of decarbonisation. A growth rate of 0 per cent requires decarbonisation of 6.8 per cent per year (for 1.5°C) and 4 per cent per year (for 2°C). There is no empirical evidence that 6.8 per cent can be achieved on a global scale, but 4 per cent is nearly within reach. In other words, it is empirically feasible to achieve green growth within a carbon budget for 2°C with the most aggressive possible mitigation policies if the growth rate is very close to zero and if mitigation starts immediately. This conclusion is in line with research by Schroder and Storm (2018), which finds that reducing emissions in line with the 2°C target is feasible (under optimistic assumptions) only if global economic growth is less than 0.45 per cent per year. This conclusion does not hold for 1.5°C, however; emissions reductions in line with 1.5°C are not empirically feasible except in a de-growth scenario.2nc – at: techAny tech revolution to save global agriculture causes mass social crisis and extinctionTilzey 18 (Mark, Senior Research Fellow in Governance of Food and Farming Systems, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University, Political Ecology, Food regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience, 2018)As a consequence, we may ask, perhaps rhetorically, whether the ‘modernization’ of agriculture in the South by capitalist means is possible or desirable? In an ‘optimistic’ (and therefore probably unrealistic) reformist scenario, we might hypothesize a strategy for the development of agriculture that attempts systematically to reproduce in the South the course of modern family agriculture in the North. We should recall, however, that the ‘efficiency’ of the agricultural family business typical of North America and Western Europe is due to its high capitalization, the product in turn of its predication on cheap fossil energy and agro-chemical inputs. Energetically, then, it is grossly inefficient, since fossil fuels and agro- chemical inputs have been substituted for human labour, animal traction, and organic manures. Ecologically it is inefficient (and unsustainable) because it relies on the perpetual simplification of agro-ecosystems (the suppression of all species other than the monocrop) to conform to the demands of mechanization and profit maximization. The only criterion on which this agriculture is ‘efficient’ is the ratio of human labour input to production output (productivity), the sole criterion of interest to capital since it is the sole source of profit. Mechanization and its energetic ‘inefficiencies’ also permit, of course, the generation and support of large non-agricultural populations, separated from their original means of production, on which capitalism depends. But the demise of energy and resource cheaps portends the commensurate demise of highly capitalized agriculture and the simultaneous feasibility of sustaining large non- agricultural populations and complex divisions of labour. Both highly capitalized agriculture and associated complex divisions of labour have been premised on the systematic discounting, through productivism, of ecological and energetic ‘costs’, the ‘unpaid debts’ of which are now being ‘called in’ in the form of climate change, soil exhaustion, water pollution and depletion, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, to say nothing of the social unsustainability and cultural deracination that accompanies the stripping of the countryside of its agrarian population. Nonetheless, were such a ‘farmer road’ to capitalist agriculture politically feasible, this strategy might entail the establishment of some 50 million farms across the global South, each awarded access to land through expropriation of the middle and lower peasantry. This would comprise the best land, of course, and were these farms to secure access to capital markets for capitalization, they could potentially supply the essentials that creditworthy urban consumers currently obtain from peasant agriculture. What, however, would become of the billions of ‘non- competitive’ peasant producers under this scenario? Were the ‘logic of the market’ permitted to take its course, these peasants would be further marginalized or eliminated, swelling the already overflowing ranks of the global Southern ‘labour reserve’, most of whom, despite precarity, currently contrive to feed themselves and provision their peers. No industrial development, even in the far-fetched hypothesis of high growth rates for three quarters of humanity, has the capacity to absorb even a third of this massive labour reserve. But, as we have seen, such a scenario represents, politically, an heroic assumption given the extremely selective process of industrialization, and industrialization ‘without jobs’, that is increasingly characteristic of contemporary capitalism. Chronic commodity oversupply and under-consumption render this ‘farmer road’ plus labour- absorbing industrialization scenario thoroughly utopian, politically. And ecologically and energetically it is equally utopian, even ignoring the far greater ecological fragility and irresilience of soils, water resources, and biodiversity in the global South by comparison to the more provident temperate environments of the North. We must conclude, therefore, that capitalism, whether Keynesian/Polanyian or neoliberal, cannot resolve the peasant question politically or ecologically. Indeed, the only prospects it can offer are a planet of slums, inhabited by a ‘surplus’ population of billions, and a world rendered increasingly uninhabitable ecologically for humans and non-humans alike. We have reached the point, therefore, where to open up a new field for the expansion of capital, entailing the ‘modernization of agricultural production’, would entail the destruction of entire societies and ecosystems, an ‘achievement’ sustainable only so long as cheap fossil fuels persisted. According to our ‘optimistic’, reformist scenario, this might entail the creation of 50 million new, ‘efficient’ producers (200 with their families) on the one hand, and some 3 billion excluded people on the other. Capitalism has thus entered the early phases of an epochal crisis whereby the logic of the system is not only incapable of ensuring the simple survival of humanity (even if this were ever the case), but is?also actively destroying the means of that long-term survival through ‘political’ marginalization and ‘ecological’ despoliation. 2nc – at: eco-modernist manifestothe eco-modernist manifesto is a bad sourceCaradonna 15 (Jeremy Cardonna, PhD in the history of scientific, environmental, and political thought and teach Environmental Studies and Human Dimensions of Climate Change at the University of Victoria; Iris Borowy, Shanghai University, College of Liberal Arts, Faculty Member; Tom Green; Peter A. Victor; Maurie Cohen; Andrew Gow; Anna Ignatyeva; Matthias Schmelzer; Philip Vergragt; Josefin Wangel; Jessica Dempsey; Robert Orzanna; Sylvia Lorek; Julian Axmann; Rob Duncan; Richard B. Norgaard; Halina S. Brown; Richard Heinberg; “A Call to Look Past An Ecomodernist Manifesto: A Degrowth Critique”, , 5/5/15)The manifesto, which does not include sources or references, is divided into seven sections (The Communist Manifesto, by contrast, had only four) that puts forth a vision of a future society, or a pathway to that society, that is driven by the creation of new technologies, as well as the “intensification” of human activities, that together would “decouple[e] human development from environmental impacts (7). xv In short, the manifesto rehashes the fantastical goal, long pursued by neoclassical economists, of separating out the apparently desirable stuff (morepeople, more affluence, more consumption) from the undesirable stuff (waste, pollution, environmental degradation, and declines in energy stocks). Key to the ecomodernist argument is the narrative of modernity, or in more technocratic language, “modernization.” The ecomodernists do not romanticize low-impact indigenous or pre-industrial societies, and do not seem to value anything about global societies that existed before, say, 1750, or those in the present that retain non-industrial practices. These people are simply and backwardly “undeveloped.”xvi At times, the manifesto reads like a chapter from a Herbert Spencer tract; the love, admiration, and faith in science and technology borders on the Victorian, and the mythos of Progress, so essential to industrialism since the 19th century, is bizarrely juxtaposed against more sober acknowledgements of humankind’s toll on the planet. Here’s one example of this rather saccharine metanarrative of Progress: “Personal, economic, and political liberties have spread worldwide and are today largely accepted as universal values. Modernization liberates women from traditional gender roles, increasing their control of their fertility. Historically large numbers of humans—both in percentage and in absolute terms—are free from insecurity, penury, and servitude” (8-9). The ecomodernists view the Industrial Revolution as a largely positive phase of human history that increased life expectancy, allowed for technologies that increased human wellbeing, produced modern medicine and the ability to more effectively fight disease, and created systems that mitigated the effects of natural disasters (8).One does not need a degrowth perspective to understand that this statement is highly questionable and that the effects of “modernization” have been more complex than this liberationist narrative would suggest. The “liberation” of women from “traditional gender roles” was due in large part to the work of twentiethcentury suffragettes and feminists, and had relatively little to do with industrialism in the narrow sense. (And what about women in the non-Western industrialized world?) It is important to acknowledge, moreover, that child labor and 16-hour days for adults fuelled the Industrial Revolution and were ended only by strike action taken by trade unions in the face of strong opposition by industrialists. In thesecases, technology and industrial production were the problem, for which collective, grass-roots action and resistance was the solution. Further, the idea that there are fewer people in “servitude” in 2015 than there were in the past is also a debatable point. New research sponsored by the United Nations suggests that over 20 million people are currently working as modern-day slaves. xviii xvii The total number of African slaves brought to the Americas by Europeans between 1500 and 1850 was 12 million, although many millions more died in waiting or in transit. At no single point, however, did the population of African (or aboriginal) slaves come close to 20 million. Slaves and subjugation certainly existed in other parts of the world, too, but the notion that servitude has declined in real numbers over time ultimately rests on the subjective interpretation on the word “servitude.” But the raw numbers are, here, beside the point. The point is that ecomodernism offers a peculiarly whitewashed and sugary interpretation of industrial modernism, and fails to acknowledge that the interrelated problems of overconsumption and environmental decline were not coincidental byproducts of those modern industrial processes. Industrial modernity has certainly brought numerous benefits to humankind, but it has come at a heavy toll, and one that jeopardizes the possibility of creating a sustainable society.The technology-will-save-us thesis of the ecomodernists merely restates the optimism of industrialists and many futurists going back two centuries or more, but also borrows from the technocratic school of thought within sustainability that is often associated with Amory Lovins.xx The ecomodernists paper over the highly destructive nature of modern technologies throughout the manifesto, or else exaggerate the benefits of emergent technologies, such as the dubious and largely untested systems for carbon capture and storage (24). “Given that humans are completely dependent on the living biosphere, how is it possible that people are doing so much damage to natural systems without doing more harm to themselves?”(9). It comes as news to us that humans are not doing harm to themselves. The World Health Organization reported recently that in 2012 around 7 million people died—that is, one in eight of total global deaths—“as a result of air pollution exposure,” the vast majority of which was emitted via “modern” technologies. xxiii xxi In the 1970s, Paul Ehrlich developed the metric I = PAT, in which the overall impact of a society is determined by the factors of population, affluence, and technology. xxii This metric was invented as a caution toward overly simplistic acceptance of technologies, but the ecomodernists set aside this concern (28) and assume that more technology is necessarily the solution. The Manifesto is silent on the topic of geoengineering, but one worries that the ecomodernists support this fraught and highly risky response to climate change.The ecomodernists scoff at the idea of “limits to growth,” arguing that technology will always find a way to overcome those limits. “Despite frequent assertions starting in the 1970s of fundamental ‘limits to growth,’ there is still remarkably little evidence that human populations and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical material resources in the foreseeable future” (9).xxiv Here is one of the first clues that the ecomodernists agree with George H. W. Bush that the limits to growth are, in the words of the former president, “contrary to human nature.”xxv Graham Turner, Ugo Bardi, and numerous others have shown through empirical research that many of the modeled scenarios, and the fundamental thesis, of the Club of Rome remain as relevant as ever—that is, that the human endeavor is bumping up against natural limits. xxvii xxviii But what additional evidence do the ecomodernists need to appreciate that the limits to growth are being reached?Richard Heinberg has demonstrated that the production of conventional oil, natural gas, and heavy oil all peaked around 2010, despite, but also due to, continued global reliance on fossil fuels, which still comprise over 80% of the world’s primary source of energy. The so-called Green Revolution and chemically intensive conventional farming has polluted many of the world’s waterways and lakes, and has caused a New Jersey-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In North America, the vast majority of the original humus content on arable land has been lost to agriculture and monocultures. There are 7 million tons of accumulated non-biodegradable plastic debris caught in the eastern and western gyres of the Pacific Ocean, and half of the fish biomass in the world’s oceans show traces of microplastic contamination.xxix Copper will be in short supply by as early as the 2030s, and a number of rare Earth minerals will not be far behind.xxx Perhaps the absolute limits to growth have not yet been reached, but mounting evidence suggests that they are not far off, and it behooves ecomodernists to consider that yet more growth might not be the answer. The history of industrialism to date suggests that more growth will be coupled with increasing environmental costs. xxxii xxxi It is also worth realizing that many once-thriving societies, from the Anasazi to the Maya, collapsed due to demographic, ecological, and social pressures. The limits to growth are real, even if their exact nature differs over time and space.Moreover, the ecomodernists’ disregard for ecology and natural systems is disturbingly anthropocentric. That is, they ignore or externalize the non-human casualties of growth. Even if technology and human ingenuity enabled miraculously the endless growth of “human populations and economic expansion”—why would we want this, again?—this Biggering would still generate manifold environmental impacts. The collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery in the 1980s and early 1990s is merely one example of ecological ruin that was facilitated by industrial technologies (refrigeration, new kinds of ships, new harvesting materiel, and so forth) and the na?ve contempt for natural limits. When the Canadian Federal Minister of Fisheries and Oceans declared a much-belated moratorium on the cod fishery in 1992, it brought to an end 500 years of intensive cod harvesting, destroyed many Canadian maritime communities, and put paid to the debate on natural limits. It is true that humanity survived the decline of the Northern cod, but does the precipitous decline of this fishery matter in the Story of Modern Progress?One of the central arguments of the Manifesto is that human-induced environmental impacts could one day become “decoupled” from economic growth. As noted, this has long been the fantasy of neoclassical economists, who want to have their cake and eat it, too. But rather than addressing the fundamental flaws of a growth-obsessed economy, the ecomodernists assume that economic growth is both necessary and possible in the long term and that, therefore, technology will have to do the work of decoupling. “Decoupling of human welfare from environmental impacts will require a sustained commitment to technological progress and the continuing evolution of social, economic, and political institutionsalongside those changes” (29). The authors argue that the relative environmental impact of humans has decreased in some domains, even though there has not been an absolute decoupling of these aggregated impacts (11). They cite as evidence the fact that many countries have reduced their carbon intensity over the past few decades, meaning that they get more economic bang for their energy buck (20), partly because of increases in energy efficiency. However, to hold aggregate ecological impact over time constant with growth, eco-efficiency would need to improve at the same rate as the economy grows, which places a heavy burden on engineers and inventors. More troublingly, the ecomodernists fail to address the deeper problem that absolute, aggregated impacts have continued to climb—the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere is increasing, the extinction of species chugs along at an alarming rate, the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production (HANPP) remains staggeringly high, and the world’s major ecosystems have only become more degraded since the middle of the last century. Moreover, there is no hint of the Jevons Paradox—the long-recognized enigma that increases in technological and energy efficiency almost always increase consumption, not decrease it, due to various rebound effects. But the more profound dilemma is that ecomodernism is still locked inside the business-as-usual, growth paradigm. It is certainly true that a growing global economy will mean greater impacts on the natural world and human health, which is why we question the necessity of this growth.Even the most anti-growth and pro-steady-state economists, from Herman Daly to Daniel O’Neil, argue that some parts of the world, namely Sub-Saharan Africa, could benefit from more economic growth. Many other parts of the planet would benefit from less growth, or in any case, will have to make do with a less busy economy. The point is that there needs to be a more critical and qualitative approach to growth, and one that jettisons GDP as a meaningful measure of economic well-being. But the ecomodernists seem to assume that all growth is good, in contradistinction to the degrowthists, who recognize that much of the growth in the developed world, with its high levels of material throughput and energy consumption, is “uneconomic” and leads to long-term costs and environmental impacts. In other words, growth backfires. Rather than leaving the developing world to play an impossible game of catch-up with levels of energy and material consumption in the developed world, what is needed is for the high-consumption countries to cease treating the present growth model as a limitless aspiration for others to follow.One of the most unfortunate results of this technophilism and Biggering-Is-Better attitude is the ecomodernists’ adoration of nuclear power. The environmental thinkers behind the Manifesto seem to have followed James Lovelock into the misguided belief that nuclear power is the only hope for humanity. xl Some passages rival H. G. Wells’ Anticipations (1901) in their gushing optimism in Scientific Progress. Consider the following:“Human civilization can flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion” (10). “Nuclear fission presents the only present-day zero-carbon technology with the demonstrated ability to meet most, if not all, of the energy demands of a modern economy.” (23) “We think it is counterproductive for nations like Germany and Japan, and states like California, to shutter nuclear power plants, recarbonize their energy sectors, and recouple their economies to fossil fuels and biomass.” (28)The reality is that nuclear power has never played a major role in meeting the world’s energy demands, despite the fact that it was touted throughout much of the middle and late twentieth century as a panacea for our energy woes. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), nuclear provides only 2 percent of the world’s energy, although the International Energy Association puts the number at 5.7 percent. xli These numbers are still well below those of renewables, which are pushing 15 percent of global energy consumption.Indeed, there are at least eight reasons that nuclear power should not be seen as a positive contribution from the standpoint of sustainable development, and it is worth dwelling on them in detail, since ecomodernism places so much emphasis on nuclear. First, nuclear power has never lived up to its expectations as a major energy source, especially when compared to its immense impacts and costs. Second, the building of nuclear power plants is hugely capital intensive, which seems to contradict the Manifesto’s call for “cheap, clean, dense, and abundant” energy sources (24). Third, nuclear power is a nonrenewable resource since uranium is finite, and some energy analysts project that low-cost and accessible stocks could become quite scarce by 2080. Fourth, most countries do not possess uranium deposits, and therefore nuclear power prevents many countries from achieving energy independence. Fifth, most countries do not currently have (or want, or could even consider) a nuclear power plant. As of 2013, only 31 countries had this capacity. Sixth, nuclear power and nuclear weapons are inherently linked since the ability to produce nuclear power also establishes the material basis and expertise for making nuclear weapons. It is not an energy source that creates the conditions for long-term peace, as we have learned recently, once again, in the standoff between Iran and the West. Seventh, nuclear waste is dangerously radioactive and essentially impossible to store safely in the long term, since the waste takes thousands of years to lose its radioactivity. The 440 or so nuclear power plants that function today generate enormous amounts of waste, much of which is still sitting on the grounds of the power plants, while some has been stored in caves or dumped in the ocean. Eighth, and finally, nuclear power plants are prone to catastrophic disasters—that is, environmental impacts—such as the ones that occurred in 1986 at Chernobyl, and in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan. Even with future breakthroughs in nuclear technology, the reality is that a nuclear power will always remain an ecologically reckless endeavor.As a result of these disasters, and these concerns, public confidence in nuclear power has waned considerably in most countries around the world, and some governments, such as in Germany, have begun phasing out their remaining facilities. As seen above, the ecomodernists do not like that citizens in Germany or Japan are questioning nuclear power. Yet this indignation is insensitive in the extreme. For starters, Japan is still coping with a major power plant calamity, and one that has led to much soul-searching over the future of energy in Japan. In Germany, the effects of the Chernobyl disaster were direct and impactful. In West Berlin, for instance, the prevalence of Down syndrome rose dramatically in the nine months following the incident, which blanketed much of Western Europe in radioactive fallout. It may very well be true, as the Manifesto notes, that nuclear power is a low-carbon technology (at least, in the direct production phases of the energy), but there are many other health and environmental impacts to consider, not to mention the political and economic ramifications of this technology. More nuclear power plants will almost inevitably mean more disasters and more longterm storage headaches. The ecomodernists seem particularly miffed that Germans want to “recarbonize” their economy, since reducing nuclear will, according to the Manifesto, require filling the void with coal (along with wind, biomass, and solar), although this, too, is a complicated matter. Renewable energy production has, so far, overcompensated for the decline in production in nuclear energy, and there is every indication that it could continue to do so. It is true that Germany, along with many other countries, is still powered in part by coal. But Germany, unlike national governments in Canada or the United States, has a long-term energy plan to wean itself from fossil fuels. Why abandon those gains in favor of nuclear power (a proven liability) and carbon capture and storage (which reinforces the fossil-fueled status quo)?Rather than ramping up on dangerous forms of energy production to meet increased economic activity, the world needs less (and also different) economic activity and a sustainable population, which could then create the possibility of powering the world via renewable resources. That is, degrowthists and ecomodernists agree that economic growth creates energy problems, but the two camps differ starkly in their response to this dilemma. For the ecomodernists, population and economic growth are taken as givens, and thus governments are forced into making difficult decisions about energy, including support for conventional, hard energies, from coal and gas to nuclear power. For degrowthists, population growth and continued economic expansion are seen as undesirable and essentially impossible in the medium term, and thus the solution is to live within biophysical limits, and reduce global energy demands to a level that could be safely met by renewables. To borrow a book title from Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society.The ecomodernists also assume that the increasing urbanization of the planet is fundamentally positive. Dehli now counts 25 million people. Beijing has over 21 million smog-chocked inhabitants. Mexico City, 20 million. Cities now occupy an astounding three percent of the Earth’s surface and house around four billion people (12), leading to historically unprecedented densities of human clusterings. While urban dwellers tend to have higher incomes and better access to societal services than their rural counterparts, looking only at the average number hides the deep inequalities within and across cities worldwide. A city such as Mumbai has stunning inequalities, human suffering, public health crises, slums, and dilapidated infrastructure. The relative affluence of urban dwellers comes at a cost for the environment. Cities are home to about half of the global population, but contribute about 80 percent of global GHG emissions. xlvii xlvi It is hard to see how yet more urbanization will necessarily increase human wellbeing, as the ecomodernists credulously contend. Economic growth has been accompanied by mounting income inequalities in urban areas and beyond. In contrast to the three decades of rapid growth following World War II, the little growth that has been squeezed out of the economic system in recent years has largely benefitted the richer strata of society, while cramming the world’s poor into densely packed cities, from China to Brazil. The bright and powerful vision of economic growth—to provide the material basis for a better life for all—bears little resemblance to the current prospects of only accumulating the wealth of the richest while destroying the environment and livelihoods of future generations and the poorest and most vulnerable today.Further, ecomodernism is patently condescending toward peasants, farmers, and those who support agrarian values. This Manifesto is not for Wendell Berry. The authors note that only two percent of Americans are today engaged in farming, whereas half the population lived and worked on farms in the 1880s (12)—a demographic shift, it should be noted, that was facilitated by access to cheap and abundant fossil fuels. The authors go so far as to say that humans need to be “liberated” from agricultural labor, as though the production of food were not an essential good in and of itself. This very westernized and industrialized snobbery toward agrarianism is redolent of Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s infamous and repugnant New York Times article, entitled “Two Cheers for Sweatshops,” which assumed that working in a wretched factory in industrial China was perforce a better fate than working in a rice paddy, as farmers in China have done for “forty centuries.” From the point of view of degrowth, a lower impact and less consumerist world will require an increase in farming (and gardening) and greater reconnections to the natural world. A sustainable global society will need more than two percent of the population engaged in food production. More generally, the Manifesto has literally nothing to say about the impacts of conventional farming, monoculture, pesticide-resistant insects, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and the increasing privatization of seeds and genetic material. It implicitly implies that the Green Revolution was an unqualified positive for humankind. The CEOs of Monsanto and Nestlé would no doubt endorse this manifesto.The issue of condescension toward indigenous cultures is particularly stark in the Manifesto. There is not a word about religion, spirituality, or indigenous ecological practices, even though the authors throw a bone to the “cultural preferences” for development (26). But the core assumption is that “development” has only one true trajectory, and that is to “modernize” along the lines of Western, industrialized countries. The conceit that technological modernity is Progress is hugely favorable to the development path of the Global North, but also quasi-imperialist in its assumption that the rest of the world needs to reproduce, in fast forward, the European and Neo-European Industrial Revolution. How is it simultaneously true that industrial modernity is both the problem and the solution? If the authors acknowledge, as they do, that industrialism has produced manifold negative impacts on the natural world, then why assume that yet more industrialism will magically reverse this trend? Furthermore, the ecomodernists do not seem to believe that the “developed” North has anything to learn from the “less developed” Global South. Is it possible that indigenous societies that lived sustainably for long periods of time might have important lessons to teach the rest of the world? The ecomodernists do not seem to think so.Finally, the Manifesto often uses misleading (if not downright false) language in making its case. The passages on deforestation are especially greenwashed. For instance, the ecomodernists claim that three quarters of deforestation occurred before the Industrial Revolution (16). This may be true, but as Williams (2002) has shown, this is not really saying much.xlix Anatomically modern homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years, and it has taken only 250 years to produce one quarter of all recorded deforestation. This fact does not strike us as particularly laudable, nor is it laudable that pollutive fossil fuels replaced forest resources as the world’s primary form of energy. Also, on page 13, the Manifesto manages to imply that there is currently “net reforestation” occurring on the globe, but since the text has no sources, it is hard to know the origin or particulars of this claim. The 2014 Millennium Development Report shows that a combination of afforestation and reforestation efforts has slowed deforestation rates, but that the world still suffered a net loss of forested land between 2000 and 2010 by many millions of hectares.l Certainly, the vast majority of those who study deforestation, including the World Wide Fund for Nature and the United Nations, contend unequivocally that deforestation is an ongoing concern. “For example, in the Amazon around 17 percent of the forest has been lost in the last 50 years.”li The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2005 Forest Resources Assessment paints a pretty bleak picture for the world’s tropical forests, and many of the temperate ones, too, noting that loss of woodland jeopardizes essential ecosystem services, a concept that never appears in the Manifesto. lii2nc – alt – movementsEnvironmental politics from the marginalized and dispossessed solve better – movements are rising now which promote sustainable development and alleviate the capitalism’s metabolic riftBurkett 17 (Paul, professor of economics at Indiana State University, Terre Haute; “An Eco-Revolutionary Tipping Point?” Monthly Review, May 1, 2017, )As a class in itself, i.e., in its objective social relationship to its conditions of existence, the proletariat has always been environmental. This class originates in the forcible separation of the direct producers from the land and other conditions of production, and their conversion into wage-labourers who must submit to exploitation by capital in order to gain access to necessary material means for their survival and development as human beings. From its beginning, the proletariat is alienated from both nature and its own labor, as the productive interchanges between people and nature are converted into means of competitive profit-making. The proletariat’s struggle for a decent life has always been a struggle in and against unhealthy conditions both inside and outside the workplace, at home and at work—a struggle for a healthier connection with nature as a condition of human development. The climate crisis sheds new light on the different phases in this struggle, and their lessons for today.The destruction of machines by workers as a struggle tactic has often been treated patronisingly by economic historians. In light of the development of fossil capital and global warming, however, it can be seen as an initial battle in the struggle to de-fossilise production and create a more sustainable energy system. According to Malm, the sabotaging of steam engines was a key tactic in the explosion of worker unrest in British industry leading up to the General Strike of 1842 (a key episode in the Chartist movement). Efforts by workers to “pull the plug” on fossil capital were often coordinated with work stoppages by coal miners that interrupted the flow of fuel to the factories. As Malm describes it, the general strike of 1842 invented a formula for a new era: the working class could impose its will on capital by closing the spigots of the fossil economy…idle engines and inactive mines were seals of proletarian power. Such collective bargaining by rioting against the fossil economy was driven largely by the hatred labourers felt for the unhealthy conditions that coal-burning and coal-mining created in both their workplaces and their neighbourhoods. There was evidently plenty of steam demonology in the minds of British workers in the 1840s, as workers came to associate the rise of steam with the rise of temperatures and the impoverished atmosphere in the mills. At home, workers were bedevilled by…the smoke, the acid rain, the sulphurous fog [which] literally killed off flora and fauna, sights of trees and birds and even the sun itself. Conditions in and near coal mines were often worse. In short, British industrial workers were not just struggling for higher wages. This was also a revolt against the palpable deterioration of the immediate environment caused by the concentration of wage labourers in certain places where coal was burnt or extracted. In this rebellion, there was a clear if somewhat less tangible…perception of alienation from the environment, as nature decayed and receded from the lives of working people. In this sense, it was a “protoenvironmentalist” movement.Neoliberalism and biospheric crises, including climate change, are now creating a similar convergence of economic and environmental struggles around the world. As John Bellamy Foster observes, with objective forces…progressively erasing previous distinctions between workplace exploitation and environmental degradation, there have arisen wider alliances of oppressed groups around degraded material conditions. This broadening of working-class struggles into environmental struggles facilitates the forging of diverse community alliances…of gender, race, class, indigenous, and environmental movements. We are seeing, in short, the rise of a globalised environmental proletariat as a conscious class for itself, i.e., as a worker-community formation with a new ecological sociability, embracing a vision of human production in its most fundamental sense as the metabolism of nature and society.Here, Klein notes that the multiple socio-economic and environmental crises generated by neoliberal fossil-fuelled capitalism increasingly sharpen certain key questions concerning the values that will inform and shape economic and political institutions worldwide. Should nature be seen primarily as a source of use values that can be profitably extracted for production and consumption, or instead as a necessary co-evolutionary partner in a process of sustainable human development—as a life value rather than a purely economic value? Similarly, should the restructuring and renewal of energy supplies be geared toward maintaining business as usual, or instead treated as a project enhancing democratic worker-community control over production and the whole system of material provisioning? Is it right to treat science and education as means for business and its human inputs to remain productive and “get along,” or should they instead be converted into convivial tools for the creation of human beings and institutions that embrace basic life values such as empathy, nurture, sustainability, creativity, and self-management on individual, workplace, and community levels? Why do even unions at times still see a conflict between jobs and environmental sustainability, as in the AFL-CIO’s endorsement of the Dakota Access Pipeline (despite opposition by several individual unions), when it has been clear for some time now that many more jobs can be created per dollar with renewable energy and energy conservation investments than with new fossil-capital installations? What is the value of a fracking or pipeline job if it hastens destruction of the planet for our children, grandchildren, and other species?Currently the leading edge in the fight against fossil capital is occupied by struggles of indigenous peoples against new mining and pipeline installations encroaching on their lands. As Klein and Angus together show, however, these defensive struggles have a great potential for triggering a broad coalescence of anti-neoliberal and anti-MFC interests into a majority-based ecological socialist movement. The ecological and communitarian values brought to the table by indigenous land and water protectors (and their green allies) are beginning to make productive contact with newer varieties of feminism and with the values of economic democracy, and of municipal, cooperative, and union power, championed by more “traditional” proletarians. Cross-sector political synergies are being enhanced by efforts of indigenous communities to defend and reinvigorate their communal property systems using modern decentralised energy and agricultural technologies. (The much-maligned base-superstructure model still works here.) Meanwhile, in and around urban centres, municipal power and public transit advocates, cooperatives, farmers’ markets, urban gardeners, and other worker-community groups are constructing new circuits of sustainable material provisioning—often informed by indigenous life-values. Even battles against school privatisation and budget cutbacks, and for communitybased health care alternatives, can be seen as part of this developing pro-ecological coalition. Solidarity among people, and between people and the earth (with all its inhabitants), and the search for sustainable modes of good living (placing use value ahead of exchange value), seem to be the ideological glues holding the emergent eco-proletarian coalition together.This new popular upsurge, and its reconstruction of the planet’s productive base, have already begun to approach ecorevolutionary “tipping points” in some parts of the world—and not a minute too soon. Deteriorating environmental conditions, and the neoliberal-capitalist dispossession and impoverishment of working people and communities, are calling forth neofascist solutions (Trump, Le Pen, and others). “Socialism or barbarism” has both a traditional and a brand-new meaning now in the age of planetary crisis.2nc – alt – community water managementDemocratic community management of water resources is mutually exclusive with top-down neoliberal responses and solves the aff betterFuente-Carrasco 19 (Mario Enrique Fuente-Carrasco, Research Professor at the Universidad de la Sierra Juárez de Oaxaca, Mexico; David Barkin, Research Scholar at the Institute for Sustainable Prosperity and Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City; Ricardo Clark-Tapia, BA from Universidad de la Sierra Juárez de Oaxaca, Mexico; “Governance from below and environmental justice: Community water management from the perspective of social metabolism”, Ecological Economics, 160, 52–61. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.01.022)6. ConclusionsMexico today enjoys an extraordinary diversity of grassroots proposals for confronting the problems of its many social groups, heavily impacted by globalization and neoliberal economic policies. In this article, we explored just one line of action: the response of communities in a mountainous region in Oaxaca that reorganized their water management system in response to the perceived threat of declining availability.By examining the social process of community governance (comunalidad), shaped by indigenous narratives and praxis, we point to ways in which a new model of society is emerging (Esteva, 2014).11 Faced with insufficient water supplies, the community case study we described decided to restrict consumption in line with its commitment to environmental justice and convivial austerity, assuring adequate supplies to all members. The collective deliberations that preceded the changes reflected an explicit internalization of the need to reconfigure the social metabolism to conform to the changing conditions in their watershed. These processes are similar to the ones formulated by Gual and Norgaard (2010) on ecological and social systems coevolution.The cultural context of this analysis demonstrated the profound commitment to conserving and enhancing the community's natural patrimony without succumbing to the continuing overtures by the national government and international agencies for the group to participate in programs of conventional urban services; these services involve using greater volumes of water for consumption and social organization. The collective process of deliberation that led to the dramatic transformation with regard to the social organization of water use is not only of academic interest, but also of ethical and political importance. It offers a stark contrast to the technical solutions offered by the neoliberal governance model; for example, in 2018 the President decreed the lifting of a ban on using water reserves in more than 50% of the national territory, opening the possibility of granting concessions for its use in privately controlled energy and mining projects).12The advance towards constructing a balance between societies and their ecosystems that is at the core of the social metabolism framework highlights the importance of the bottom-up model of governance inherent in the praxis of comunalidad. The research project from which this article emerged is based on a dual dialogue: one that is transdisciplinary between academics (biology, ecology, economy, sociology) and another that is intercultural, engaging communal stakeholders (Fuente et al., 2018).Comunalidad is a dynamic process of evolving governance mechanisms. The autonomous spaces generated by this cosmovision require continuing renegotiation, within the community and with the state and the marketplace. The case studies of water management in 15 indigenous communities offer a particularly poignant example: being an essential element for life, and for social cohesion, in many settings, the availability of water is threatened by the profitability of diverting supplies for ecotourism or bottled water, both of which are impoverishing other communities. This is the challenge foreseen by Illich in “Tools for Conviviality.”This analysis explains that the underlying tenets of “EE from below” are elegantly achieved with the internalization of a sustainable model of social metabolism implemented within the governance structure of comunalidad. This democratic system is assuring improvements in their quality of life (social justice) within the biophysical limits imposed by their ecosystem.2nc – alt – modellingA transition is possible and necessary – consensus of models of social change and a range of expert ecological economists agreeCostanza 17 (Robert Costanza, PhD, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Gar Alperovitz, The Democracy Collaborative and Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland; Herman Daly, PhD, Emeritus, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland; Joshua Farley, Department of Community Development and Applied Economics, and Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont; Carol Franco, PhD, Woods Hole Research Centre; Tim Jackson, PhD, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP); Ida Kubiszewski, PhD, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University; Juliet Schor, PhD, Department of Sociology , Boston College; and Peter Victor, PhD, Faculty of Environmental Studies , York University; “Building a Sustainable and Desirable Economy-in-Society-in-Nature”, From Green Economy Reader: Lectures in Ecological Economics and Sustainability, Edited by Stanislav Shmelev, 2017, Springer)Getting back to the original intention of this section, we can ask: Have there ever been non-growing economies that have been sustainable? Actually, this question needs to be turned around, since for the vast majority of human history, economies have grown at very low to zero rates. If anything, from an historical perspective, it is the phenomenal rate of growth of recent economies that is the anomaly. However, we also know that many historical societies have collapsed (Costanza et al. 2007a; Diamond 2005) and many of them were not what we would call “desirable.” On the other hand, there were a few successful historical cases in which decline did not occur, including the following (Diamond 2005 ; Weiss H, Bradley 2001):? Tikopia Islanders have maintained a sustainable food supply and non-increasing population with a bottom-up social organization.? New Guinea features a silviculture system more than 7000 years old with an extremely democratic, bottom-up decision-making structure.? Japan’s top-down forest and population policies in the Tokugawa-era arose as a response to an environmental and population crisis, bringing an era of stable population, peace, and prosperity.Understanding the history of how humans have interacted with the rest of nature can help clarify the options for managing our increasingly interconnected global system. However, we know from history that non-growing societies are feasible. We also know that sustainable societies are possible. As we learn more about the details of historical societies’ interaction with the rest of nature, we can use that knowledge to help design a better, more sustainable, and desirable future.16.5.2 Small-Scale Examples There are many small-scale examples of sustainable communities that can serve as models. Many groups and communities around the world are involved in building a new economic vision and testing solutions. There are far too many to list all, but here are a few examples:? Transition town movement () ? Global EcoVillage Network (gen.) ? Co-Housing Network () ? Wiser Earth () ? Sustainable Cities International () ? Center for a New American Dream () ? Democracy Collaborative (munity-wealth .org) ? Portland, Oregon, Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (portlandonline. com/bps/) All of these examples embody the vision, worldview, and policies we have elaborated to some extent. Their experiments collectively provide evidence that the policies are feasible at a smaller scale. The challenge is to scale up some of these models to society as a whole. The problem is that we live in a globalized world and it is diffi cult to generate larger scale examples that are independent enough from the world to actually try something signifi cantly different. In a sense, we need a total “regime shift” to a new system (Beddoe et al. 2009 ) and that often requires at least a partial collapse of the existing order.Nevertheless, even though the world is still largely enmeshed in the conventional economic paradigm, several cities , states, regions, and countries are further along the path we outline than others. Examples include Portland, Oregon; Stockholm and Malm?, Sweden; London, U.K.; the states of Vermont, Washington, and Oregon in the U.S.; Germany , Sweden, Iceland , Denmark , Costa Rica, Bhutan; and many others.One way to look at this transition is shown in Fig. 16.9 , which plots the percent change in ecological footprint by country (an indicator of change in material and energy throughput ) against per-capita fair share of the ecological footprint relative to global bio-capacity (an indicator of the scale of the economy, with 1 indicating “optimal” scale) (O'Neill DW in press). This divides the graph into four quadrants, with the center of the graph representing countries that are closest to steady state. In the upper right quadrant are countries whose ecological footprint is increasing and is above their optimal scale. This is “undesirable growth.” In the upper left quadrant are countries that are still above their optimal scale but whose ecological footprint is decreasing. This is “desirable degrowth.” Likewise, countries that are below their optimal scale are either experiencing “undesirable degrowth” if their ecological footprint is decreasing or “desirable growth ” if their footprint is increasing.The policies we have recommended in this report would drive countries toward the center of this graph. Depending on the country, this could involve either growth or degrowth of material and energy throughput and the scale of the economy, accompanied by an improvement in human well-being broadly defined. The transition to the world we envision will be a process of directed cultural evolution (Beddoe et al. 2009 ). To direct this process, we need to generate, communicate, and broadly discuss more smaller-scale experiments that embody the vision and policies we have articulated. However, a third line of evidence for the feasibility of our vision is based on simulating how these societies might work. 16.5.3 Modeling Studies There are several integrated modeling studies that provide evidence that a sustainable, non-growing economy is both feasible and desirable. Below we briefly describe three of them. 16.5.3.1 World3 7The World3 model has been the subject of three influential books, beginning with The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972), continuing with Beyond the Limits (Meadows et al. 1992) and ending with the recent, 30-year update (Meadows et al. 2004 ). World3 is a globally aggregated systems dynamics model broken into five sectors: population, capital, agriculture, nonrenewable resources , and persistent pollution, and containing 16 state variables (i.e., population, capital, pollution, and arable land ), 100 variables total, and 80 fixed parameters (Meadows et al. 1972). Because of the influence of the original book (several million copies were sold), this model has been the topic of intense scrutiny, debate, misunderstanding, and, one could argue, willful misinformation over the years. One interesting bit of misinformation that has been persistently circulating is the idea that the model’s “predictions” have been proven totally wrong by subsequent events (Economist 1997). In fact, the model’s standard run scenario, made in 1972, fits the data so far very well (Turner 2008). The model’s forecasts of collapse under certain scenarios did not start to occur until well past the year 2000. The true tests of this model’s forecasts will arrive in the coming decades.World3 has been criticized on methodological grounds (Cole et al. 1973 ). The most often cited difficulties are that it does not include prices explicitly, that it assumes resources are ultimately limited, and that it does not present estimates of the statistical uncertainty of its parameters. In fact, World3 is a viable and effective method to reveal the implications of the primary assumptions about the nature of the world that went into it. That is all that can be claimed for any model. These assumptions, or “pre-analytic visions,” need to be made clear and placed in direct comparison with the corresponding assumptions of the alternatives, in this case the “unlimited growth model.” As Meadows and colleagues have repeatedly pointed out, the essential difference in pre-analytic visions centers around the existence and role of limits: thermodynamic limits, natural resource limits, pollution absorption limits, population carrying capacity limits, and most importantly, the limits of our understanding about where these limits are and how they influence the system (Meadows et al. 1992 ; Meadows et al. 2004 ). The alternative unlimited growth model assumes there are no limits that cannot be overcome by continued technological progress, while the limited growth model assumes that there are limits, based on thermodynamic first principles, observations of natural ecosystems , and understanding of basic planetary boundaries (Rockstr?m et al. 2009 ). Ultimately, we do not know which pre-analytic vision is correct (they are, after all, assumptions), so we have to consider the relative costs of being wrong in each case (Costanza 2000b ; Costanza et al. 2000 ). Finally, while the discussions of World3 often point to the limited vs. unlimited growth assumptions as a key difference from conventional economic models, they do not take the opportunity to look at the relative costs and benefits of being right or wrong in those assumptions. If one does this, one can easily see that the cost of assuming no limits and being wrong is the collapse scenarios shown by World3, while the cost of assuming limits and being wrong is only mildly constrained growth (Boumans et al. 2002 , #485).16.5.3.2 GumboThe Global Unified Metamodel of the BiOsphere (GUMBO) (Boumans et al. 2002 ) was developed by a working group at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, California. Its goal was to simulate the integrated earth system and assess the dynamics and values of ecosystem services. It is a “metamodel” in that it represents a synthesis and a simplification of several existing dynamic global models in both the natural and social sciences at an intermediate level of complexity. GUMBO is the first global model to include the dynamic feedbacks among human technology, economic production and welfare, and ecosystem goods and services within the dynamic earth system. GUMBO includes five distinct modules or “spheres”: the atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and anthroposphere. The earth’s surface is further divided into 11 biomes or ecosystem types, which encompass the entire surface area of the planet: open ocean , coastal ocean, forests , grasslands, wetlands, lakes/rivers, deserts, tundra, ice/rock, croplands, and urban. The relative areas of each biome change in response to urban and rural population growth , gross world product (GWP), and changes in global temperature. Among the spheres and biomes, there are exchanges of energy, carbon, nutrients, water , and mineral matter. In GUMBO, ecosystem services are aggregated to seven major types, while ecosystem goods are aggregated into four major types. Ecosystem services, in contrast to ecosystem goods, cannot accumulate or be used at a specified rate of depletion. Ecosystem services include soil formation, gas regulation, climate regulation, nutrient cycling, disturbance regulation, recreation and culture, and waste assimilation. Ecosystem goods include water, harvested organic matter, mined ores, and extracted fossil fuel. These 11 goods and services represent the output from natural capital, which combines with built capital, human capital, and social capital to produce economic goods and services and social welfare. The model calculates the marginal product of ecosystem services in both the production and welfare functions as estimates of the shadow prices of each service. Historical calibrations from 1900 to 2000 for 14 key variables for which quantitative time series data were available produced an average R 2 of 0.922. A range of future scenarios to the year 2100 representing different assumptions about future technological change, investment strategies, and other factors have been simulated. The scenarios include a base case (using the “best fit” values of the model parameters over the historical period) and four initial alternative scenarios. These four alternatives are the result of two variations (a technologically optimistic set and a skeptical set) concerning assumptions about key parameters in the model, arrayed against two variations (a technologically optimistic and a skeptical set) of policy settings concerning the rates of investment in the four types of capital (natural, social, human, and built). They correspond to the four scenarios laid out by Costanza (2000b) and are very similar to the four scenarios used in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA 2005 ). Like World3, GUMBO can produce scenarios of global steady state or overshoot and decline. Achieving a steady state is possible with investment and population priorities similar to the ones outlined in the previous sections of this report, indicating that the policies are internally consistent. 16.5.3.3 LowGrow 8More recently, the “LowGrow” model of the Canadian economy has been used to describe the possibility of constructing an economy that is not growing in GDP terms but that is stable, with high employment, low carbon emissions, and high quality of life (Victor and Rosenbluth 2007 ; Victor 2008 ). LowGrow was explicitly constructed as a fairly conventional macroeconomic model calibrated for the Canadian economy, with added features to simulate the effects on natural and social capital. shows the simplified structure of LowGrow. Aggregate (macro) demand is determined in the normal way as the sum of consumption expenditure (C), investment expenditure (I), government expenditure (G), and the difference between exports (X) and imports (I.) Their sum total is GDP measured as expenditure. There are separate equations for each of these components in the model, estimated with Canadian data from about 1981 to 2005, depending on the variable. Production in the economy is estimated by a Cobb-Douglas production function in which macro supply is a function of employed labor (L) and employed capital (K). The time variable (t) represents changes in productivity from improvements in technology, labor skills, and organization. The production function is shown as macro supply at the bottom of. It estimates the labor (L) and employed capital (K) required to produce GDP allowing for changes in productivity over time. There is a second important link between aggregate demand and the production function. Investment expenditures (net of depreciation), which are part of aggregate demand, add to the economy’s stock of capital, increasing its productive capacity. Also, capital and labor become more productive over time. It follows that, other things equal, without an increase in aggregate demand these increases in capital and productivity reduce employment. Economic growth (i.e., increases in GDP) is needed to prevent unemployment rising as capacity and productivity increase. Population is determined exogenously in LowGrow, which offers a choice of three projections from Statistics Canada. Population is also one of the variables that determines consumption expenditures in the economy. The labor force is estimated in LowGrow as a function of GDP and population. There is no monetary sector in LowGrow. For simplicity it is assumed that the Bank of Canada, Canada’s central bank, regulates the money supply to keep inflation at or near the target level of 2 % per year. LowGrow includes an exogenously set rate of interest that remains unchanged throughout each run of the model. A higher cost of borrowing discourages investment , which reduces aggregate demand. It also raises the cost to the government of servicing its debt (Fig. 16.10 ). The price level is not included as a variable in LowGrow, although the model warns of inflationary pressures when the rate of unemployment falls below 4 % (effectively full employment in Canada). LowGrow includes features that are particularly relevant for exploring a low/no- growth economy. LowGrow includes emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, a carbon tax, a forestry sub-model, and provision for redistributing incomes. It measures poverty using the UN’s Human Poverty Index (i.e., HPI-2 for selected OECD countries). LowGrow allows additional funds to be spent on health care and on programs for reducing adult illiteracy (both included in HPI-2) and estimates their impacts on longevity and adult literacy with equations from the literature. Implications of changes in the level of government expenditures can be simulated in LowGrow through a variety of fiscal policies , including an annual percentage change in government expenditure that can vary over time, and a balanced budget. LowGrow keeps track of the overall fiscal position of all three levels of government combined (federal, provincial, and municipal) by calculating total revenues and expenditures and estimating debt repayment based on the historical record. As the level of government indebtedness declines, the rates of taxes on personal incomes and profi ts in LowGrow are reduced endogenously, broadly consistent with government policy in Canada. In LowGrow, as in the economy that it represents, economic growth is driven by net investment (which adds to productive assets), growth in the labor force, increases in productivity, growth in the net trade balance, growth in government expenditures, and growth in population. Low- and no- growth scenarios can be examined by reducing the rates of increase in each of these factors singly or in combination. Economic growth is desired not only for what it offers in terms of increased living standards but also out of fear of what might happen if a modern economy deliberately tried to wean itself off growth . Such fears are well-founded. Modern economies and their public, private, and not-for- profit institutions, as well as individual citizens, have come to rely on growth . They expect it, they plan for it, they believe in it. Several scenarios have been run with LowGrow to look at the feasibility of a low- or no- growth economy. Adjusting to life without economic growth could be a wrenching experience and a lot could go wrong, as shown in Fig. 16.11 . In this scenario, zero growth in GDP and GDP per capita is achieved around 2030 by eliminating growth in government expenditures, productivity, and population, and achieving zero net investment and net trade balance over a period of years starting in 2010. GDP per capita rises slightly until all the factors contributing to growth are extinguished and then drops back to the same level as at the start of 2005. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate literally goes off the chart, causing a dramatic rise in poverty . The debt-to-GDP ratio also rises to untenable heights, largely because of the massive increase in income support paid to the rising number of unemployed. Certainly, the human misery entailed in such a scenario is to be avoided if at all possible (Fig. 16.11 ). However, a wide range of low- and no- growth scenarios can be examined with LowGrow. Some are not much better than the no- growth disaster just described, but others offer more promise. One such promising scenario is shown in Fig. 16.12. Compared with the business as usual scenario, GDP per capita grows more slowly, leveling off around 2028, at which time the rate of unemployment is 5.7 %. The unemployment rate continues to decline to 4.0 % by 2035. By 2020 the poverty index declines from 10.7 to an internationally unprecedented level of 4.9, where it remains, and the debt-to-GDP ratio declines to about 30 % and is maintained at that level to 2035. Greenhouse gas emissions are 31 % lower at the start of 2035 than 2005 and 41 % lower than their high point in 2010. These results are obtained by slower growth in government expenditures, net investment , and productivity; a positive net trade balance; cessation of growth in population; a reduced workweek; a revenue-neutral carbon tax; and increased government expenditure on anti-poverty programs, adult literacy programs, and health care. The contrast between the no- growth disaster (Fig. 16.11 ) and the sustainable and desirable no- growth scenario (Fig. 16.12 ) is striking and naturally raises questions about what makes the difference. The no- growth disaster scenario is based on a systematic elimination of all of the factors represented in LowGrow that contribute to growth without any compensating adjustments. The better no/low- growth scenario results from a wide range of policy measures, some more controversial than others, that would be required to transform the business as usual scenario into the kind of scenario illustrated in Fig. 16.12 . In summary, these policy measures include: ? Investment: reduced net investment , a shift from investment in private to public goods through changes in taxation and expenditures. ? Labor force: stabilization through changing age structure of the population and population stabilization. ? Population: stabilization through changes to immigration policy. ? Poverty: trickle down replaced with focused anti- poverty programs that address the social determinants of illness and provide more direct income support. ? Technological change: slower, more discriminating, and preventative rather than end-of-pipe, through technology assessment and changes in the education of scientists and engineers. ? Government expenditures: a declining rate of increase. ? Trade : a stable, positive net trade balance (and diversification of markets). ? Workweek: shorter and with more leisure, through changes in compensation, work organization and standard working hours, and active market labor policies . ? Greenhouse gases: a revenue neutral carbon tax. To complement these policies : ? Consumption: more public goods and fewer positional (status) goods, through changes in taxation and marketing. ? Environment and resources: limits on throughput and use of space through better land use planning and habitat protection and ecological fiscal reform . ? Localization: fiscal and trade policies to strengthen local economies.These are precisely the policies that we have elaborated in the previous sections of this report. No model results can be taken as definitive, since models are only as good as the assumptions that go into them. But what World3, GUMBO, and LowGrow have provided is some evidence for the consistency and feasibility of these policies, taken together, to produce an economy that is not growing in GDP terms, but that is sustainable and desirable. 16.6 Conclusions The world is at a critical turning point. This turning will not come overnight, however. In fact we are probably already in the middle of it. It will take decades. But it is a time of real choices: (1) we can attempt to continue business as usual, pursuing the conventional economic growth paradigm that has dominated economic policy since the end of World War II; (2) we can pursue an environmentally sensitive version of this model and attempt to achieve “ green growth ”; or (3) we can pursue a more radical departure from the mainstream that does not consider growth to be the real goal at all, but rather sustainable human well-being, acknowledging uncertainty and the complexity of understanding, creating, and sustaining well-being (Table 16.1 ). This report has described option 3, which entails a change in worldview, vision, and goals that would have far-reaching implications and will demand a substantial departure from business as usual. However, we believe it is the only option that is both sustainable and desirable on our finite planet. In this report we have sketched a vision of what this “ ecological economics” option might look like and how we could get there. We believe that this option can provide full employment and a high quality of life for everyone into the indefinite future while staying within the safe environmental operating space for humanity on earth. Developed countries have a special responsibility for achieving those goals. To get there, we need to stabilize population; more equitably share resources , income, and work; invest in the natural and social capital commons; reform the financial system to better reflect real assets and liabilities; create better measures of progress ; reform tax systems to tax “bads” rather than goods; promote technological innovations that support well-being rather than growth ; establish “strong democracy,” and create a culture of well-being rather than consumption. In other words, a complete makeover. These policies are mutually supportive and the resulting system is feasible. It is not merely a utopian fantasy. In fact, it is as usual that is the utopian fantasy. We will have to create something different and better or risk collapse into something far worse. 2nc – alt – agricultureMovements solve sustainable agricultureTilzey 18 (Mark, Senior Research Fellow in Governance of Food and Farming Systems, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University, Political Ecology, Food regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience, 2018)Agro-ecological systems, by contrast, are predicated upon much higher inputs of human labour, such that the demise of fossil fuels carries with it the imperative to re-ruralize society, re-populate the countryside, break down functional and spatial dichotomies between city and countryside, and work with, rather than against, ecological processes. Together, agro- ecology and food sovereignty have the capacity both to feed the world sustainably (Badgley et?al. 2007; Tittonell 2014) and provide appropriate livelihoods for the great majority as peasants, now re-united with the means of production through conferral of land sovereignty on devolved community authorities. If the widespread adoption agro-ecology and food sovereignty depend upon such a final resolution, then this, in turn, must rest upon reclaiming the land from the classes of the disarticulated alliance and from neo-developmentalism, in other words, through claims of land sovereignty and the redistribution of rights in land. And land sovereignty, in its turn, can realistically come about only through a process of reclaiming the nation (Moyo and Yeros 2011), in which new assertions of national sovereignty utilize the key jurisdictional authority of the state to transform class relations away from state centricity to the benefit of the semi-proletarian, landless, and indigenous majority. As Amin (2015, 30) suggests, ‘a land tenure reform conceived from the perspective of the creation of a real, efficient and democratic alternative supported by prosperous peasant family production must define the role of the state (principal inalienable owner) and the institutions and mechanisms of administering access to land and the means of production.’ This social relational transformation, re-asserting the political authority of community (commons) as solidarity, or moral, economy, and subverting the institutional separation of the ‘economy’ and ‘polity’ of the modern state, finally removes the market (capitalism) as essential mediator between people and their means of livelihood. This suggests that the state, through a ‘dual powers’ strategy, can be a critical target to steer social relations in progressive directions towards agro-ecologically based food and land sovereignty. The political obstacles to such social relational transformation are, needless to say, daunting. We have stressed capitalism’s remarkable power to co-opt opposition and to turn crises to its advantage, spawning further ‘varieties’ of capitalism. Nonetheless, as McKeon (2015, 3) has noted ‘this time it may be different. Boundless hunger for profits is running up against the finite resources of the planet.’ It may well be, therefore, that, as the socially mediated ecological contradictions of and for these variegated capitalisms persist, grow, and coalesce, strategic relational responses will gradually turn the tide of history in favour of agro-ecology and food sovereignty.2nc – at: warWars are necessary for the expansion of capital – new ground for accumulation is cleared through conquest – every recent war provesAdams 02 (Dr. David Adams, former UNESCO Director of the Unit for the International Year for the Culture of Peace, former Professor of Psychology (for 23 years) at Wesleyan University, specialist on the brain mechanisms of aggressive behavior and the evolution of war, “Chapter 8: The Root Causes of War,” The American Peace Movements, p. 22-28,?)To take a scientific attitude about war and peace, we must carry the causal analysis a step further. If peace movements are caused by wars and war threats, then we must ask, what are the causes of these wars, both in the short term and in the long term? Before analyzing the causes of wars, it is necessary to dismiss a false analysis that has been popularized in recent years, the myth that war is caused by a "war instinct." The best biological and anthropological data indicate that there is no such thing as a war instinct despite the attempt of the mass media and educational systems to perpetuate this myth. Instead, "the same species that invented war is capable of inventing peace" (note 15). Since there are several kinds of war, it is likely that there are several different kinds of causes for war. There are two kinds of war in which the United States has not been engaged for over two centuries. The first are wars of national liberation such as the American Revolution or today's revolutions in Nicaragua and South Africa being waged by the Sandinistas and the African National Congress. The second are wars of revolution in which the previous ruling class is thrown out and replaced by another. In the British and French Revolutions of earlier eras the feudal land-owners were overthrown by the newly rising capitalist class. In the revolutions of this century in Russia, China, Cuba, etc. the capitalists, in turn, were overthrown by forces representing the working class and landless farmers. The six wars and threats of war that have caused American peace movements in this century have been wars of imperial conquest, inter-imperialist rivalry, and capitalist-socialist rivalry. What are the root causes of these wars in the short term? For the following analysis, I will rely upon some of America's best economic historians (note 16). The Spanish-American and Philippine Wars of 1898, according to historian Walter LaFeber, were inevitable military results of a new foreign policy devoted to obtaining markets overseas for American products. The new foreign policy was the response to a profound depression that began in 1893 with unemployment soaring to almost 20 percent. Farm and industrial output piled up without a market because American workers, being unemployed, had no money to buy them. Secretary of State Gresham "concluded that foreign markets would provide in large measure the cure for the depression." To obtain such markets, the U.S. went into competition with the other imperialist empires such as Britain and Spain. The U.S. intervened with a naval force to help overthrow the government of Hawaii in 1893, intervened diplomatically in Nicaragua in 1894, threatened war with England over Venezuela in 1895, and eventually went to war with Spain in 1898 and invaded the Philippines in 1898. To quote from the title of LaFeber's book, the U.S. established a "new empire." American intervention in World War I again rescued the economy from a depression. In 1914 and 1915, as war between the European imperialist powers broke out, American unemployment was rising towards ten percent and industrial goods were piling up without a market. One industrial market was expanding, however, the market for weapons in Europe. The historian Charles Tansill concludes that "it was the rapid growth of the munitions trade which rescued America from this serious economic situation." And since the sales went to Britain and France, it committed the U.S. to their side in the war. Finance capital was equally involved: "the large banking interests were deeply interested in the World War because of wide opportunities for large profits." When bank loans to Britain and France of half a billion dollars went through in 1915, "the business depression, that had so worried the Administration in the spring of 1915, suddenly vanished, and 'boom times' prevailed." Of course, German imperialism did not stand idly by while the U.S. profited from arms shipments and loans to their enemies in the war. German submarine warfare against these shipments finally provoked American involvement in the War. The rise of fascism in Europe was the direct result of still another cyclical depression, the Great Depression that gripped the entire capitalist world in the Thirties. In his recent book on the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, David Abraham has documented how major capitalists turned to Hitler to fill the vacuum of political leadership when the economy collapsed. In part, the absence of political leadership "with the collapse of the export economy at the end of 1931...drove German industry to foster or accept a Bonapartist solution to the political crisis and an imperialist solution to the economic crisis. The "Bonapartist solution", as Abraham calls it, was found in Hitler's Nazi Party. As he says, "By mid-1932, the vast majority of industrialists wanted to see Nazi participation in the government." For these industrialists, "an anti-Marxist, imperialist program was the least common denominator on which they could all agree, and the Nazis seemed capable of providing the mass base for such a program." The appeasement of Hitler's promise to smash the communists and socialists at home and to destroy the Soviet Union abroad expressed a new cause of capitalist war. Up until that time, inter-imperialist wars were simply the response to economic contradictions at home and capitalist competition abroad. In part, World War II was yet another inter-imperialist war. But now a new cause of war was emerging alongside of the old. The rise of socialism was a direct threat to the entire capitalist world. In addition to glutted domestic markets and competition for foreign markets, the capitalists now had to face the additional problem that the overall foreign market itself was shrinking. Thus, they tended to support each other in the face of a common enemy. After World War II, there was a particularly sharp shrinkage in the "free world" for capitalist exploitation as socialism and national liberation triumphed through much of the world. The U.S. and its allies responded by demanding that the socialist countries open their doors to investment by capitalism. According to historian William Appleman Williams, "It was the decision of the United States to employ its new and awesome power in keeping with the traditional Open Door Policy which crystallized the cold war." As Williams explains, "the policy of the open door, like all imperial policies, created and spurred onward a dynamic opposition." Diplomatic and military confrontation between the U.S. and USSR were used to justify the Cold War and establishment of NATO, but the underlying issues were economic. As pointed out by historians Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, "The question of foreign economic policy was not the containment of Communism, but rather more directly the extension and expansion of American capitalism according to its new economic power and needs." In addition to the new problem of shrinking world markets, there remained the problem of cyclical depressions. Although unemployment was not bad in 1946 because industry was producing to meet the accumulated needs of the war-deprived American people, the specter of another depression was very much a factor in the Cold War. As the Kolkos point out, "The deeply etched memory of the decade-long depression of 1929 hung over all American plans for the postwar era....In extending its power throughout the globe the United States hoped to save itself as well from a return of the misery of prewar experience." The Vietnam War was a continuation of the Cold War, as the United States tried to prevent further shrinkage of the world capitalist economic system. The U.S. had already fought a similar war in Korea. In his chapter, "The U.S. in Vietnam, 1944-66: Origins and Objectives," Gabriel Kolko calls the intervention of the United States in Vietnam, "the most important single embodiment of the power and purposes of American foreign policy since the Second World War." Elsewhere in his book, Kolko goes into detail about the economic basis of American imperialism: access to raw materials, access to markets for American products, and investment opportunities for American capital. The Vietnam War, he explains, was not a conspiracy or simply a military decision. It was the natural result of "American power and interest in the modern world." Finally we come to the question of what has caused the massive escalation of the arms buildup under Presidents Carter and Reagan (and more recently under Bush, father and son). To some extent, it is a response to the old problem of cyclical depressions. Since World War II, each recession has been deeper than the last, until by 1981 unemployment reached double digits for the first time since the Thirties. Government spending was needed to put people back to work. Would the government spend the money for military weapons or for civilian needs? A long line of Presidential candidates, standing for the military solution, have been supported in their campaigns by the military-industrial complex against other candidates who were unable to wage a serious campaign for civilian spending instead of military spending. The growing power of the military-industrial complex is a new and especially dangerous addition to the economic causes of war. It reflects an economic crisis that goes even deeper than those of the past. In addition to the cyclical depressions and the shrinkage of foreign markets, there is a new imbalance in the entire structure of capitalism. There is an enormous increase in financial speculation and short-term profit schemes. The military-industrial complex has risen to become the dominant sector of the American economy because through the aid of state subsidies it generates the greatest short-term profits. Never mind if the U.S. government goes into debt to banks and other financial institutions in order to pay for military spending. The world of financial speculation does not worry about tomorrow. Not only does this "military spending solution" endanger the security of the planet, but it also increases the risk of a major financial collapse and subsequent depression. To summarize, we may point to the following causes of American wars over the past century: 1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor colonial and neo-colonial countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the "free world" - i.e. the part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial speculation and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. In the 1985 edition of this book the argument was made that the socialist countries were escaping from the economic causation of war. In comparison to the capitalist countries, they did not have the same dynamic of over-production and cyclical depression, with periods of enhanced structural unemployment. As for exploitation and imperialism, despite the frequent reference in the American media to "Soviet imperialism," the direction of the flow of wealth was the opposite of what holds true under capitalist imperialism. Instead of the rich nations extracting wealth from the poor ones, which is the case, for example between the U.S. and Latin America, the net flow of wealth proceeded from the Soviet Union towards the other socialist countries in order to bring them towards an eventually even level of development. According to an authoritative source associated with the U.S. military-industrial complex, the net outflow from the Soviet Union amounted to over forty billion dollars a year in the mid-1980's. In one crucial respect, however, the 1985 analysis was incorrect. It failed to take account of the military-industrial complex that had grown to be the most powerful force of the Soviet economy, a mirror image of its equivalent in the West. The importance of this was brought home to those of us who attended a briefing on economic conversion from military to civilian production that was held at the United Nations on November 1, 1990, a critical time for Gorbachev's program of Perestroika in the Soviet Union. The speaker, Ednan Ageev, was the head of the Division of International Security Issues at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was asked by the Gorbachev administration to find out the extent to which the Soviet economy was being used for military production. Naturally, he went to the Minister of Defense, where he was told that this information was secret. Secret even to Gorbachev. In conversation, Ageev estimated that 85-90% of Soviet scientific researchers were in the military sector. That seems high until you realize that the Soviet's were matching U.S. military research, development and production on the basis of a Gross National Product only half as large. Since about 40% of U.S. research and development was tied to the military at that time, it would make sense that the Soviets would have had to double the U.S. percentage in order to keep pace. How could the Gorbachev administration convert their economy from military to civilian production if they could not even get a list of defense industries? Keeping this in mind, along with the enormous militarization of the Soviet economy, it is not so surprising that the Soviet economy collapsed, and with it the entire political superstructure. The origins of the Soviet military-industrial complex can be traced back to the Russian revolution which instituted what Lenin, at one point, called "war communism". He warned that war communism could not succeed in the long run and that instead of a top-down militarized economy, a socialist economy needed to be structured as a "cooperative of cooperatives." But war communism was entrenched during the Stalin years, carried out of necessity to an extreme during the Second World War, and then perpetuated by the Cold War. The economic causation of the war system is not new. It originated long before capitalism and socialism. From its beginnings in ancient Mesopotamia, the state was always associated with war, both to capture slaves abroad and to keep them under control at home. As states grew more powerful, war became the means to build empires and to acquire and rule colonies. In fact, the economic causation of war probably extends back even further into ancient prehistory. From the best analysis I know, that of Mel and Carol Ember, using the methods of cross-cultural anthropology, it would seem that war functioned as a means to survive periodic but unpredictable food shortages caused by natural disasters. Apparently, tribes that could make war most effectively could survive natural disasters better than others by successfully raiding the food supplies of their neighbors. While particular wars can be analyzed, as we have done above, in terms of immediate, short-term causes, there is a need to understand the war system itself, which is as old as human history. Particular wars are the tip of a much deeper iceberg. Beneath war, there has developed a culture of war that is entwined with it in a complex web of causation. On the one hand, the culture of war is produced and reinforced by each war, and, on the other hand, the culture of war provides the basis on which succeeding wars are prepared and carried out. The culture of war is a set of beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that consists of enemy images, authoritarian social structure, training and arming for violence, exploitation of man and nature, secrecy and male domination. Without an enemy, without a social structure where people will follow orders, without the preparation of soldiers and weapons, without the control of information, both propaganda and secrecy, no war can be carried out. The culture of war has been so prevalent in history that we take it for granted, as if it were human nature. However, anthropologists point to cultures that are nowhere near as immersed in the culture of war, and it is the opinion of the best scientists that a culture of peace is possible. Peace movements have not given enough attention to the internal use of the culture of war. The culture of war has two faces, one facing outward and the other inward. Foreign wars are accompanied by authoritarian rule inside the warring countries. Even when there is no war threat, armies (or national guards) are kept ready not just for use against foreign enemies, but also against those defined as the enemy within: striking workers, movements of the unemployed, prisoners, indigenous peoples, just as in an earlier time they were used against slave rebellions. As documented in my 1995 article in the Journal of Peace Research (Internal Military Interventions in the United States) the U.S. Army and National Guard have been used an average of 18 times a year, involving an average of 12,000 troops for the past 120 years, mostly against actions and revolts by workers and the unemployed. During periods of external war, the internal wars are usually intensified and accompanied by large scale spying, deportations and witch hunts. It would appear that we have once again entered such a period in the U.S. We are hardly alone in this matter. Needless to say, the culture of war was highly developed to stifle dissent in the Soviet Union by Stalin and his successors of "war communism." The internal culture of war needs to be analyzed and resisted everywhere. For example, readers living in France should question the role of the CRS. The internal use of the culture of war is no less economically motivated than external wars. The socialists at the beginning of the 20th Century recognized it as "class war," carried out in order to maintain the domination of the rich and powerful over the poor and exploited. Not by accident, it has often been socialists and communists who are the first to be targeted by the internal culture of war in capitalist countries. And they, in turn, have often made the most powerful critique of the culture of war and have played a leading role in peace movements for that reason. Their historical role for peace was considerably compromised, however, by the "war communism" of the Soviet Union. With its demise, however, there is now an opportunity for socialists and communists to return to their earlier leadership against war, both internal and external, and to insist that a true socialism can only flourish on the basis of a culture of peace. In considering future prospects for the American Peace Movements, I shall begin with trends from the past and then consider different factors for the future? First, let us look back over the economic factors and movements of the previous century to see if the trends are likely to continue. 1. Wars are likely to continue because, for the most part, their economic causes remain as strong as ever: 1) cyclical crises of overproduction and unemployment, 2) exploitation of poor colonial and neo-colonial countries by rich imperialist countries, 3) economic rivalry for foreign markets and investment areas by imperialist powers, 4) the attempt to stop the shrinkage of the "free world" - i.e. the part of the world that is free for capitalist investment and exploitation, and 5) financial speculation and short-term profit making of the military-industrial complex. The fourth factor is not as prominent since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but there is still evidence of this factor at work: for example, the attempted overthrow of the government of Venezuela in spring, 2002, was apparently linked to its developing ties with socialist Cuba, especially in terms of its oil resources. Although the coup d'etat failed, there was a risk of plunging Venezuela into warfare, especially considering the increasingly internationalized war next door in Colombia. Although the "war against terrorism" in Afghanistan, Philippines, etc. and the associated military buildup is usually justified as revenge for the attacks of September 11, there seems little doubt that there are economic motives involved as well, including the control of oil resources from Central Asia as a supplement to those of the Middle East. At the same time, the massive expansion of the military-industrial complex in the U.S. appears at some level to be intended as an increase in government spending to hedge against declining non-military production, unemployment and financial crises in the stock markets. 2. The American peace movements have been reactive in the past, developing in response to specific wars or threats of war, and then disappearing when the war is over or the threat is perceived to have decreased. In fact, this observation at the macro level is mirrored by an observation that I have made previously at a micro level: participants in peace movements have been motivated to an important degree by anger against the injustice of war. This dynamic seems likely to continue. Governments, worried about the reactive potential of peace movements may attempt to engage in very brief wars, just as the U.S. government cut short the 1991 Gulf War after several weeks to avoid an escalating peace movement. In the future, peace movements need to be broadened by linkages to other issues and by international solidarity and unity; otherwise they risk being only temporary influences on the course of history, growing in response to particular wars and then disappearing again afterwards. The world needs a sustained opposition to the entire culture of war, not just to particular wars. To be fully successful, the future peace movement needs to be positive as well as negative. It needs to be for a culture of peace at the same time as it is against the culture of war. This requires that activists in the future peace movement develop a shared vision of the future towards which the movement can aspire. I have found evidence, presented in the recent revision of my book Psychology for Peace Activists (note 17), that such a shared, positive vision is now becoming possible, and, as a result, human consciousness can take on a new and powerful dimension in this particular moment of history.The Imperial drive in capital is the single largest cause of violence in the modern world – any other conclusion is racist abstraction cooked up to devalue anyone resisting immiserationPersaud 19 (Randolph B. Persaud, American University; Narendran Kumarakulasingam, University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Built Environment and Development Studies, Development Studies, Durban; “Violence and ordering of the Third World: an introduction”, Third World Quarterly, 40:2, 199-206, 2019, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2019.1578646)IntroductionViolence has been a definitive and structurally constitutive factor in the contact between the rest and the West. This has been the case from the very early period of conquest, through the long centuries of colonisation and occupation, and very much so since independence, much of it plagued by imperialism and new constructions such as ‘humanitarian intervention’. This violence has taken multiple forms, ranging from the everyday rituals of extracting submission for labour exploitation, to outright, total war. These regimes of violence include but are not limited to everyday disciplinary punishment to maintain ‘order’ (especially in slavery and indentureship), massacres (Morant Bay, Jamaica – 1865, Wounded Knee – 1890, Amritsar – 1919, No Gun Ri – 1950, My Lai – 1968, Haditha, Iraq – 2005), saturation bombing of peoples and landscapes (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), genocide (Belgian Congo, German South West Africa) and near extermination (indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, the Americas and Australia).Astoundingly, hegemonic discourses of international relations (IR) have been silent about this.1 This silence is neither passive nor innocent, but a form of active forgetting resulting from the discipline’s ‘fetishization of abstraction’.2 Moreover, Susan Buck-Morss’ contention that well-established disciplines tend to consolidate their borders by expelling ‘counterevidence’3 is an apt way of describing established IR’s relationship with the problems under consideration here. Violence in, and against, the Third World is generally treated either as purely internal and cultural, or as a dimension of a larger narrative of historical progress, this latter in the Hegelian sense of the dialectic of History. The task of ‘dissenters and insurgents’4 is not to merely prosecute what we see as the methodological negligence of hegemonic IR, but to embark on the necessary and unremitting work of finding, and showing, the violent and profoundly racialised interconnectedness of the West and its Others. Some of the critiques of hegemonic IR have also, and already, been applied to some branches of Marxian/ World Systems Theory,5 neo-Gramscian theory6 and Foucauldian security studies.7Two important moves are necessary for challenging this silencing. The first calls for a major methodological shift in the production of knowledges, a shift from the positivist and nomothetic to the grounded and historical. Or, as Siba Grovogui puts it, we need to go beyond ‘racial clichés and oversimplified notions of culture’.8 The second challenge is for scholars to investigate, describe and situate violence in the making and reproduction of forms of state/societies and successive world orders. This special issue takes up this task by examining violence in and against the Third World in various forms/modalities and in different historical situations as well as their interconnectedness.Colonial acts of physical destruction and the expropriation of resources during conquest constitute what Achille Mbembe calls ‘founding violence’.9 This founding violence was not simply an effect of racialised ideologies or of great power geopolitical contestations but, instead, worked to ‘create the space over which it was exercised’.10 This founding violence did not work in isolation but in turn enabled a host of regimes and infrastructures of rights for the coloniser and the denial of the same for the colonised. The second form of violence was constitutive in ‘authorizing authority’,11 that is to say, in embedding frameworks of legitimation needed to exercise the hierarchy of rights (and privileges) associated with what Anibal Quijano12 has called the coloniality of power. Thirdly, and as a continuation of the second form, Mbembe sees violence as techniques of reproduction, through the construction of cultural ‘imaginaries. This form of violence is banal ‘crystallized, through a gradual accumulation of numerous acts and rituals’.13If the colony is a place constituted by manifold forms of violence, these forms of violence continue to operate in Third World societies after new flags were raised. Apropos the postcolony, Mbembe notes: ‘Through the harshness of the exactions required, the redeployment of constraints and the new forms of subjection imposed on the most deprived segments of the population, this form of government forces features belonging to the realm of warfare and features proper to the conduct of civil policy to co-exist in a single dynamic’.14 At the same time, the postcolony does not exist in isolation but is also externally shaped by the imperatives of powerful states underwritten by the coloniality of power.15 Thus, there is a need to trace the specific modalities of violence and the precise ways in which they continue to structure global capitalism and world order.16Violence, we realise, is a contested and complicated concept that is most often used to connote the unauthorised or unsanctioned use of force.17 Most commonly, it has been linked to naturalised or cultural conditions of aberrance and pathology. The papers in this volume do not subscribe to a singular understanding of violence but seek to historicise it by focusing on varying historical and contemporary instances such as anti-Black violence in contemporary USA, US conquest of the Philippines, the Global War on Terror, contemporary aerial bombardment of Yemen, counter-insurgency in India, gang violence in Central America and the war on drugs in Latin America. By so doing, they allow us to see the workings of various political, economic and psychological forces and disciplines (legal, religious) in the making and governance of Third World states and societies. It is our hope that this will spur closer examination of the multiple and massive material and other forms of devastation unleashed by colonialism and post-independence anisation of the volumeAlexander Barder makes the argument that world orders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were constituted as a global racial imaginary. Instead of focusing on state to state interactions within the inter-state system, Barder shows how the world could be made ‘intelligible’ by examining the ways in which civilizational factors influenced, and often directly pushed, economic policies and geo-strategic calculations. Social Darwinism and the associated cultural fall-out from eugenic science were pervasive to the point of common sense. The global racial imaginary found articulate expression in writers such as Robert Knox, Charles Hamilton Smith, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Charles Henry Pearson, Franklin Giddings, Lester Ward, Benjamin Kidd and Madison Grant. Barder goes beneath the surface of inertstate relations and shows how racial ideology profoundly infected strategic thinking and, ultimately, war itself.In order to examine the impact of religion on First World–Third World interactions, Christopher Rhodes makes a heretofore unidentified connection between two truisms concerning European colonialism: the differing reputations for violence and brutality earned by British, French and German colonial states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the notion that European Christian actors – The Catholic Church, various Protestant denominations and movements, and missionary societies – significantly influenced colonial policies. Rhodes’ work draws upon different strands of the political economy of religion literature. In doing so, he takes seriously the impact that differences in religious doctrine – in this case, whether Christian evangelisation is meant to convert nonbelievers as individuals or to transform non-Christian societies on a macro level – have on religious actors’ preferences and strategies. Second, Rhodes identifies how a specific set of political outcomes, the level, nature and variability of organised violence conducted by Western States against the Others, are determined by the interaction between religious organisations’ doctrinally-based preferences and the mechanisms by which these organisations influence states to carry out actions consistent with these religious goals. During instances of high influence by Christian actors over colonial states and prevailing ideas of individual-level evangelisation, a situation that was significantly more characteristic of British colonialism than its French or German counterparts, colonial violence is relatively constrained.Drawn in by critical attempts grappling with the excesses of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), Narendran Kumarakulasingam wonders about the efficacy of theorising violence as horror. Closely attending to the idea of horrorism proposed by the acclaimed philosopher Adriana Cavarero, he underscores horror’s emergence as a response to the events of September 11, 2001. His critique attempts to re-centre colonial violence as the rightful starting point for a discussion on violence as horror, and to not only indicate why the erasure of colonial violence is present in both mainstream and critical discourse, but also to understand why this tendency is so pervasive. Doing so leads him to argue that critical productions of horror end up producing a homecoming for the West, rather than illuminating the traumatic impact of the GWOT. Given this, he wonders if what is needed is not so much increasingly sophisticated modes of critical theorisation but rather the courage on the part of the West to submit itself to honest self-examination in the colonial mirror.The profound impact of race on international relations is also explored by Randolph B. Persaud. His analysis is focused on the entry of the US into the business of empire. Although he agrees that economic and geopolitical factors influenced American foreign policy towards Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he insists that civilizational factors, and specifically a world-view based on race, were deeply embedded in many of the strategic thinkers. Accordingly, he examines the US conquest of the Philippines as an extension of Manifest Destiny, and the execution of notions of duty by America to teach the art of governance to the ‘uncivilised’. The period also coincides with a dramatic expansion of the US navy, and Persaud links this to the ‘civilizing mission’ by arguing that questions of American security (much less survival) were not the driving force.By looking at the murders of two American teenagers – Trayvon Martin and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki – during the Obama presidency, Sankaran Krishna highlights the racism that structures both the foreign and domestic policies of the US. Racialised violence against brown and black ‘terrorists’ abroad complements a racist carceral state within the US that prejudges blacks and other minorities to be inherently criminal and unworthy of life. This structural racism has historically been rendered as marginal, not constitutive, of the US through discourses of American exceptionalism and a creedal narrative that sees it as moving towards ‘a more perfect union’ over time. Obama had to subscribe to both these discourses of exceptionalism and the American creed in order to emerge as a viable Presidential candidate. Yet his subscription to these narratives also ensured that his Presidency would only continue and deepen American racism at home and abroad rather than change it in any consequential manner.Jeff Bachman draws on the literature on genocide in his analysis of massive aerial bombardments of Yemen by a Coalition of Saudi Arabia and Gulf states, and backed by the US and UK. The consequences of the war have been immense, not only in terms of the number of deaths, but also the sheer violent inhumanity that is visited on the Yemeni population on a daily basis. In many ways, the carnage in Yemen belies claims that the days of traditional warfare are over. While Bachman’s claims about genocide are grounded in numerous factors within the extant understanding of genocide, he argues that a more holistic approach is needed. Drawing on the Yemen Data Project, he found that two-thirds of 16,749 air attacks between 26 March 2015 and 25 March 2018 were on non-military targets, and that many of these were synchronised attacks against targets that are physical, economic and cultural. The concept of synchronised attacks as developed by R. Lemkin allows for ‘process-oriented conception of genocide’, an approach that facilitates a more comprehensive view of systematically organised violence.18There is a sense in which sanctions are a more diplomatic and humane strategy of coercing a state to comply with the wishes of the ‘international community’ or alternatively, and more critically, as a dastardly set of punishments to elicit submission. Georgis and Gewarges take the second of these perspectives, much so because of the extraordinary suffering and Iraqi lives lost due to the sanctions sponsored, imposed and forcefully enforced by the US, UK and France (albeit under the rubric of the ‘international community’). The hundreds of thousands of lives lost – people killed – were in fact widely criticised by UN officials and many in the West, but it was also masked by the all-too-familiar media construction of a supposedly greater evil, in this case reduced to a single person, a sign, namely Saddam Hussein. Georgis and Gerwarges wrench the sanctions out from the rhetoric of ‘peace and democracy’, and locate it on the masked but intended target – the Iraqi people, Iraqi bodies. They show that sanctions are indeed violence by other means.The coloniality of power, meaning the continuity of the colonial imaginaries (economic, political, cultural) is amplified by Swati Parashar’s article which focuses on the Maoist insurrectional activities in India and the responses by the state apparatus after independence. Parashar connects the architecture of the old colonial state with the current state practices. She demonstrates that the actions of the current Naxalite Maoists are consistent with a centuries-old tradition of peasant revolts. Going beyond the Maoists, Parashar links uprisings by the structurally marginalised Dalits and Adivasis to a tradition of resistance dating back to the specific policies (such as the Forest Act of 1878) put in place by the British Raj. And then, in ‘most cases the draconian colonial era laws and regulations against the tribal societies were further strengthened by the postcolonial Indian state, such as by excluding the bona fide forest communities from forest administration’.19As most critical international relations scholars note, it is important to understand that the domestic and the global are deeply connected, and specifically that forms of state are partially configured through downward pressure from the inter-state system on the one hand, and pressure from below within the domestic political economy on the other. Moreover, the tight separation of economy, security and culture is only a rough guide of convenience. Horace Bartilow’s article falls squarely within this critical political economy tradition. He investigates the ways in which foreign aid and the war on drugs in Latin America are linked to the expansion of capital. State sovereignty, far from being compromised, is actually a conduit for complicated flows of Overseas Development Aid and transnational capital. Thus, foreign aid in the form of counter-narcotic assistance becomes a precursor to foreign direct investment, and for greater embedding of neoliberal forms of economic governance. Bartilow explains the ways in which this anti-narcotic development model has impinged on the rights of indigenous peoples, and the violent confrontations that have emerged on account of determined resistance. Of immense importance here is what Bartilow frames as the ‘privatization of terror’Drawing insights from Marxist and feminist scholarship on work, María José Méndez approaches violence as labour – as violence work – to provide a fuller account of how violence not only destroys but produces livelihoods and social worlds. Méndez uses the notion of violence work to show how banks, state agents of various ranks, inhabitants of marginalised neighbourhoods, etc. derive income and wealth from the extortion economy that gang violence sustains in the Northern Triangle of Central America. Moreover, Méndez argues that the participation of transnational gangs in violent modes of extraction mirrors modes of state wealth accumulation that flourished during the US-sponsored counterinsurgency period in Central America. The complex political-economic entanglements of gang violence that Méndez’s research bears light on provide an important counterpoint to the dominant view of transnational gang violence as a threat to state and world order. In addition to reframing gang violence, Méndez problematises research agendas that foreground the deviations of non-state armed groups and that fail to situate non-state violence within broader landscapes of income and wealth production.The failure to historicise massive physical and psychological devastation is not an accidental oversight but shaped by ideological and political conditions. Emily Mitamura’s concept of abridgement deployed in the context of representations of the Cambodian genocide, shows how the silencing of geopolitical forces and the unthinkability of revolution in Cambodia coalesce to make what happened intelligible as an auto genocide. Knowledge of America’s bombings, its war on Vietnam as well as support of the Khmer Rouge are expunged from the historical record thereby creating the conditions of possibility for the narrativisation of genocide as a form of primitive slaughter lacking any political objective. Consequently, Cambodia becomes yet another instance of violence, sans history and politics; a place where dark-skinned bodies brutalise each other.W. Andy Knight employs a broadened concept of security that spans from outright violence, much of it related to the narco-economy, to vulnerabilities caused by hurricanes, earthquakes and the weakness of Caribbean economies. While it is true that some Caribbean countries have greater political and economic security compared to many other developing countries, it is still the case that the structural economic weakness must be reckoned with. Guyana, Haiti and Jamaica have long been vulnerable to the vicissitudes of commodity prices, a fact directly linked to their colonial past and to the invasive roles of International Financial Institutions (IFIs) – especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). While Knight is concerned with many of the proximate effects of insecurities and vulnerabilities, he also adumbrates the more structural and cultural sources that have generated the same. In that vein, it is important to recognise that North American recreational (and addictive) drug-consumption is a leading cause of violence in the Caribbean. The drug-habits of the north, combined with the flow of guns from the US down into Latin America and the Caribbean, must be taken for what they are – threats to livelihoods and lives to the region.ConclusionThese efforts to historicise violence show that it is no longer possible to think of violence in and against the Third World in terms of transition or interruption. Two years ago, Persaud organised a set of panels at the annual convention of the International Studies Association (ISA) inviting contributors to take seriously the materiality of devastation unleashed against the peoples of the Third World. This special issue, arising from those panels, directs us to be attentive to the linkages between visible and invisible forms of violence and the ways in which these connections form an ecology, rather than continuum, of violence. To trace this ecology is to reveal the bloody attempts at governing the international.Mbembe’s call to get back to the more material aspects of historical capitalism and violence, or ‘war capitalism’ in the language of Beckert,20 comes at an especially propitious moment in the liberal discourses and historiographies of violence. Of recent, there has been a growing body of literature suggesting that violence, and especially deaths due to war, is on the decline.21 In this vein, Pinker has argued not only has violence declined but that ‘[t] hough imperial conquest and rule can … be brutal, they do reduce endemic violence among the conquered’.22 Our volume shows that such findings of ‘decline’ are only possible through a platform of abstractionism that restricts violence and silences its articulation with various forms of racialities. 23 In the current conjuncture of the global war of terror, the world is again divided between the ‘saved and the dammed’. This time it is neatly aligning with a new geo-civilizational cartography, perhaps best expressed in Mamdani’s acute observation that, in effect, what we have is a world divided between ‘good Muslims, bad Muslims’, where the good Muslims are on the side of the White West, and the rest are a clear and present danger.242nc – at: human natureThis argument is profoundly Eurocentric and disregards thousands of years of human economic organizationPaulson 17 (Susan Paulson, Professor of Latin American Studies, “Degrowth: culture, power and change,” Special Section of the Journal of Political Ecology, 24: 425-666, 2017)Such dynamics of power change the question of "how do we humans change?" to "how do we change humans?" In countries around the world, longitudinal data show abrupt upswings in behavioral trends ranging from fuel consumption to obesity and use of credit, signaling that some powerful forces have been at work changing modes of being human, and changing them at precipitous speed. With US data from late 20th century, economist Juliet Schor (1993, 1999) charts remarkably steep average increases in hours worked for pay, in material goods consumed, and in personal debt. She also points to legislation, policies and advertisements that interacted to impel adoption of personal habits that would be instrumental to the exponential growth curve emblematic of these times.Despite astounding transformations in human practice and perception in recent decades, actors who are privileged by today's status quo—and even many who are exploited or marginalized—protest that it is neither ethical nor feasible to try to change human behavior or attitudes: "You're never going to convince people to produce and consume less!" Degrowth is vehemently denounced as ecofascism: ideologically-driven imposition that would force unwilling victims to sacrifice their God-given freedoms and to betray innate self-interests. Growth, in contrast, is perceived as apolitical and impartial; modern markets, in particular, appear as timeless mechanisms through which all humans freely organize livelihoods and establish value. Polanyi (1944) showed they are anything but. The commodification of labor and nature, together with the colonization of human habits and worldviews by market-relations and money-value, are historical exceptions brutally imposed in 18th and 19th century England by efforts to "mold human nature" for industrial growth. Moving to late 20th century, David Harvey (2007) and others have exposed the formidable political incursions enacted to force expansion of "free" market relations—together with characteristic forms of unequal exchange—into the most isolated parts of the world and the most intimate realms of human intercourse. A stubborn blindness to these and other historical facts is enabled by certain architectural features of Western language, science and philosophy. Hierarchical binaries of white over non-white, man over woman, human over other nature are engraved in the world in ways that make it difficult to question the mechanisms of unequal exchange and accumulation built into current markets. As the nature-culture binary classifies thinking humans as superior to instinct-driven beasts, it also suppresses attempts to change certain aspects of human life by cementing them as unassailable "natural instincts." Today, the conviction that human biology is responsible for an insatiable drive to increase production and consumption is fostered by powerful cultural and scientific narratives. Featured myths include the innately rational Homo economicus maximizing utility for individual gain; an inherent human propensity to truck and barter avowed by Adam Smith; and that "selfish gene" that makes each of us crave control over resources and strive to take more than our share, condemning to tragedy any attempts at commons management.Even climate change is portrayed as a result of human evolution! Teleological narratives surrounding the Anthropocene are encouraged by scholars such as Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill (2007: 614) who write: "the first use of fire by our bipedal ancestors, belonging to the genus Homo erectus, occurred a couple of million years ago." And "The mastery of fire by our ancestors provided humankind with a powerful monopolistic tool unavailable to other species, that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene" (for astute critique, see Malm and Hornborg 2014: 65). Antonio Gramsci (1971) taught us to beware the power of cultural constructs that make the status quo appear natural and inevitable. He also noted that historical crises can destabilize that power, opening transformative possibilities. To debunk laissez faire myths impervious to factual contestation, Erik Swyngedouw (2015) and others call for (re)politicization of economic and ecological conversations. Horizons for change can also be opened by learning from diverse socionatural worlds. Against contemporary beliefs that human survival depends on growth, archeological and ethnographic evidence demonstrates that diverse hunter-gatherer-fisher populations characterized by extremely low societal metabolism and little or no market activity have thrived and adapted throughout all 200,000 years of modern human life. Even in the present age, meticulous measurements have documented remarkably low societal metabolism of groups ranging from Andaman Islanders (Singh and Haas 2012) to !Kung San (Lee 1968, 1979).12If Homo sapiens is hard wired for growth, why did per capita ecological footprints increase so late in the game? And so unevenly across human populations? Evidence points to gradual expansion among some groups starting 10,000 years ago with the emergence of agriculture and cities, followed by steeper increases beginning several hundred years ago with European colonial expansion and industrialization. It is not until the twentieth century, however, that a supercharged boom of material and economic growth combined with exponential increase in world population to provoke a tectonic shift in which human activities "rapidly changed from merely influencing the global environment in some ways to dominating it in many ways" (Steffen et al. 2007: 614). Scientists assessing climatic, biological and geochemical signatures of human activity in sediments and ice cores have come to consensus on marking a new epoch, beginning in the mid– 20th century, as "the Anthropocene" (Waters et al. 2016).Putting these extraordinary recent changes into deeper historical and broader cultural context reveals the absurdity of claims that ancient evolutionary traits inexorably led Homo sapiens to destroy earth systems. It also challenges the misleading message—as widespread as it is dangerous—that this new era was provoked by humanity as a whole (the Anthropos), rather than by one group acting in and through a historically specific system of culture and power. Scholars fighting for a more accurate characterization insist that the era be called the "Eurocene" or the "Capitalocene" (e.g. Moore 2016).Cross-cultural and historical studies published in this Section and elsewhere reveal glimpses of worlds not driven by the kind of expansionism that has recently impacted the earth's geology, oceans and atmosphere. Our appreciation of these low-impact lifeways is sometimes reproached as promoting a devolution to so-called "primitive" or "third world" conditions. Looking forward, however, awareness of many possible modes of existence—with myriad sources of richness and pleasure—widens horizons for building unprecedented futures. It does so by liberating us from the fiction that human behaviors currently instrumental to growth are biologically determined universals.However, there is something about human biology that is relevant to this conversation. Species interacting in the earth's ecosystems display an amazing array of characteristics evolved to meet their needs and to assure their descendants' survival: spotted salamanders use solar power, Atlantic wolf fish manufacture antifreeze, and African dung beetles navigate by the Milky Way; cacti grow spines to defend their juicy stems, while nettles puncture predators to inject poison into tiny wounds. Compared to other creatures, individual humans do not shine as particularly strong, quick or tough, not to mention spikey or poisonous.What is unique to Homo sapiens is a biophysical capacity for symbolic thought and communication that enables groups of humans to collaboratively develop systems of culture and power that survive the individual organism, and that shape the production of new generations of humans, their habits and their habitats. These uniquely human systems take the form of languages, religions, economies, sciences, kinship and gender systems, among others. Communities around the world are already managing and adapting these most fundamental common resources in ways that can support equitable and pleasurable degrowth. links2nc – link – market focus Market focus is a key way for capital to expand into new areas of social lifeDempsey and Suarez 16 (Dempsey, J., Department of Geography, University of British Columbia; Suarez, D. C., Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, University of California, Berkeley, (2016). Arrested Development? The Promises and Paradoxes of “Selling Nature to Save It.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 106(3), 653–671. doi:10.1080/24694452.2016.1140018)For critical scholars writing about this trend, making biodiversity conservation investable is a part not only of securing the capital needed to “save nature” but also about finding new sites for capital accumulation (see, e.g., McAfee 1999; Igoe and Brockington 2007; B€uscher 2009; Brockington and Duffy 2010; Igoe, Neves, and Brockington 2010; MacDonald 2010; Arsel and B€uscher 2012; B€uscher et al. 2012; Sullivan 2013, 2014; Fletcher, Dressler, and B€uscher 2014). Analysts building from this tradition interpret the rise of market rhetoric among practitioners as reflective of a broadly “neoliberal” repurposing of conservation around the logic of capital, which as B€uscher et al. (2012) write, “shifts the focus from how nature is used in and through the expansion of capitalism, to how nature is conserved in and through the expansion of capitalism” (B€uscher et al. 2012, 4, italics added).Some of the work in this area links to Harvey’s theorization of spatial fixes but in an environmental register, explaining market solutions as a “fix” to capital’s “constant need ... to expand its reach into new spheres of accumulation” (Arsel and B€uscher 2012, 57; see also Brockington and Duffy 2010; B€uscher, Dressler, and Fletcher 2014). This line of reasoning emphasizes the role that new environmental markets—in this case, structured around the management of biodiversity conservation—play in transforming nature into an “ecological” fix for capitalist crises of accumulation (Castree 2008). The proliferation of market-driven conservation strategies and tradable environmental commodities is understood (again drawing on Harvey) as a new but “similar and spectacularly productive” (Sullivan 2013, 210) wave of accumulation by dispossession (see also B€uscher 2009; Brockington and Duffy 2010; Igoe, Neves, and Brockington 2010; MacDonald 2010; Arsel and B€uscher 2012).Scholars such as Smith (2007), Sullivan (2010), and Robertson (2012) write about these processes as intensifying “the commodification of life itself” (Sullivan 2010, 210) as new aspects of nature become sites of accumulation. Smith (2007) interprets the emergence of carbon trading schemes and other ecosystem service markets as signaling not only capital’s pursuit of new ways to accumulate but a means of subsuming biological processes to capital (Smith draws from Boyd, Prudham, and Schurman [2001] to interpret these developments, along with biotechnology, as indicative of a shift from formal to real subsumption of nature). Robertson (2012) extends Smith’s (2007) argument, interpreting the contemporary moment—characterized in particular by the commodification of ecosystem services—as the inauguration of a new social world comparable to the transformation by which individual human labors become social labor under capitalism: a fundamental break from the past, heralding new forms of accumulative processes that generate profits not only off of nature’s goods but its services.These narratives of neoliberal conservation ascribe to capital a growing appetite for new sites to invest, make money, and generate profit through biodiversity. Concurrently, mainstream conservation dialogues express increasing acceptance that there is no alternative to modernizing around a notional “green economy”—that this ideological and institutional realignment of environmental governance around capital represents a necessary and pragmatic approach to addressing ongoing ecological devastation. But to what extent and in what ways is capital seizing on the investment opportunities being presented to it in conservation—is capital biting? What is the scale and scope of Nature, Inc. (Fletcher, Dressler, and B€uscher 2014)? Is it rapidly ascending at “ever increasing velocity” (B€uscher 2014, 200) or just limping along? Is it performing as expected by both the boosters and critical analysts? We contend that a significant part of what is at stake in such analyses—both for mainstream conservation dialogues and for the critical scholarship—is the social production of neoliberal conservation and its mantra of “biodiversity as business opportunity” as a fait accompli: conservation as usual yielding inexorably to business as future. To the contrary, we argue that such visions remain unrealized in the present and therefore unsettled in the future.2nc – link – environmental lawLiberal environmental activism is coopted by the state and secures the interest of capital accumulation – the legal system must be an adversary, not a tool.Pulido 16 (Laura Pulido, Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California; Ellen Kohl, Assistant professor of Environmental Studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland; Nicole-Marie Cotton, Independent Scholar; “State Regulation and Environmental Justice: The Need for Strategy Reassessment.” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 27(2), 2016, 12–31. doi:10.1080/10455752.2016.1146782)We have argued that through its reliance on the state the EJ movement has not been successful at improving the environmental quality of vulnerable populations. Exide Technologies illustrates the inability and/or refusal of diverse parts of the state to enforce existing laws. The many reasons for this include a lack of awareness, the judiciary’s willingness to strike deals, and the local regulatory agency’s failure and/or unwillingness to close the facility when it did not comply with regulations. In the second case, a predominantly Black community in Gainesville Georgia has not been able to secure a clean environment for decades. Here, no laws are being broken. Rather, there is an absence of meaningful regulation and enforcement, especially concerning small emitters. The local state consistently tells activists that its hands are tied and that nothing can be done, when in reality, the inaction reflects a lack of political will. Though certainly there is room for enhanced regulatory science and policy practices, especially around cumulative exposure (Sadd et al. 2011), it should be clear that the problem is primarily one of politics.The question we are left with is “why?” Why have these communities and the larger EJ movement been unable to extract meaningful protection from the state? Part of the challenge in answering this question is the diversity of the EJ movement, the myriad challenges individual communities face, and the various measures of success within and outside the movement. Despite this diversity, we feel there are important overarching themes. The first point to stress is the extent to which vulnerable communities, in this case communities of color, are essential to the functioning of racial capitalism. Racial capitalism is a distinct interpretation of capitalism that acknowledges race as a structuring logic (Robinson [1983] 2000). Racism, as a material and ideological system that produces differential meaning and value, is harnessed by capital in order to exploit the differences that racism creates. In this case, devalued communities, places, and people serve as pollution “sinks,” that enable firms to accumulate more surplus than would otherwise be possible (see also Faber 2008, ch. 1).We must bear this fundamental truth in mind when considering how the EJ movement has imagined the state and approached it. There is no doubt that activists understand that they are essential to racial capitalism, even if they do not express it in those terms. But they seem to believe that the state will actually protect them. Accordingly, they approach the state with a great deal of faith and hope. This is especially the case in California with its many Latina/o politicians. Hope and faith are not the only emotions that accompany interactions with the state, however. There is also distrust, disappointment, and desperation. In the case of the NFC, who have worked with EPA Region 4 for over 25 years and seen little change in the community, they still feel that the EPA is the only option, even if they are pessimistic that such efforts will actually result in meaningful change. The fact that activists continually turn to the state and see it as the only option suggests the hegemony of the state in terms of creating social change: activists cannot readily identify paths outside of the framework offered by the state. It is important here to recall the deep connections between the CRM and the EJ movement. While Swyngedouw and Heynen (2003) have argued that the EJ movement is a fundamentally liberal project, we believe that the movement includes a diversity of political orientations, including some quite radical and some more conservative (Carter 2016). Yet, there is no denying that the movement’s dominant strand is liberal. Indeed, Pellow and Brulle (2005) have advocated for a critical EJ studies. As a primarily liberal movement, EJ seeks to address the most problematic aspects of capitalism and racial domination, without necessarily challenging capitalism or the state’s efforts to protect it. Perhaps EJ is following the path of many other social movements, splintering between more liberal and radical factions. Liberal groups will continue to work with the state, while the latter confronts it, perhaps through alliances with anarchist and/or anti-capitalist formations, with environmentalists from the Global South, or with counterhegemonic identity movements, such as Black Lives Matter.Using conventional strategies, especially relying on the state in this neoliberal era, will not produce conditions that compel polluters to stop. The state is not about to eliminate the necessary “sinks” that communities of color provide, for fear of both capital flight and the wrath of conservatives. Instead, the state gives lip-service to EJ but in fact does little to change the materiality of disproportionate pollution patterns. In the case of Exide, it was only after the story had been publicized for years by the Los Angeles Times that the facility was finally closed down. The inability of regulators to control Exide became a joke, and the legitimacy of state and local regulators was threatened.3 And recall, Exide decided to close instead of facing criminal charges.What is needed on the part of the EJ movement is a fundamental rethinking of its attitude towards the state. Instead of seeing the state as a helpmate or partner, it needs to see the state as an adversary and directly challenge it. While the early EJ movement did this, over the decades it has been increasingly co-opted by the state and lost much of its oppositional content. It can regain its radical position by not only challenging the state, but refusing to participate in regulatory charades. The EJ movement should take a page from Black Lives Matter. It’s not about being respectable, acknowledged, and included. It’s about raising hell for both polluters and the agencies that protect them. Given the planetary crisis we are facing, we need a radicalized EJ movement more than ever.Legal approaches to combatting environmental law are pointless – zero data supports their long term efficacy, only distract from social activism necessary to solve biosphere collapseMcKie 17 (Ruth E. McKie, PhD Student and Research Assistant at the Department of social sciences at Northumbria University. Paul B. Stretesky, Professor in the Department of Social Sciences as Northumbria University. Michael J. Lynch, Professor of Criminology and associate faculty in the Patel school of Global Sustainability at the University of South Florida. Michael A Long, Senior lecturer in the department of social sciences at Northumbria University. Forging a Socio-Legal Approach to Environmental Harms: Global Perspectives, “Green Criminology and the Prevention of Ecological Destruction” (Chapter 3), 2017, Routledge)As noted, the general approach to environmental enforcement is based on the idea of deterrence (Ehrlich, I996). General deterrence reasoning suggests that environmental crime can be reduced because punishment lowers the probability that others will engage in environmental crime. That is, the environmental offender is punished to demonstrate what will happen to those who may contemplate environmental crime (Zimring and Hawkins, I973). Specific deterrence is aimed at the offender and punishment is supposed to prevent future offending. Of course, general and specific deterrence are based on the idea that environmental offenders are rational actors and that their offenses will likely be discovered in a reasonable period of time and then result in a punishment that is proportional to the benefit derived from the crime. Some criminologists - including green criminologists - suggest that corporations can be deterred (Simpson el 01., 20l3). Moreover, empirical studies that examine the perceptions of managers working in production plants suggest that environmental performance is primarily determined by the government's signals that environmental laws will be enforced (Delmas and 'l'of'l"e|, 2008; Doonan, Lanoie, and Iaplante, 2005; May, 2005). These deterrent effects, however, must be examined in the context of environmental sustainability. For instance, given the current global economy, can tough enforcement protect the planet? We doubt it. That is, the system of global capital demands ever-expanding levels of production (Schnaiberg, I980). Thus, capitalists must increase production to accumulate profit and survive. As a result, when it comes to the environment, capitalism has no limits (Magdoff and Foster, 20] l). The increasing rate of ecological withdrawals and additions is evidence of this interaction between the economy and ecology. Moreover, this treadmill of production (Schnaibcrg, I980) is unsustainable in the long run. As evidence of this problem, scientists have created an "ecological footprint" to measure how much of the earth’s resources humans consume (see Wackernagel and Rees, 1997). In the aggregate, the footprint suggests that today we consume more resources (approximately 1.5 times more quickly) than the earth's ecosystems can produce. That means we must use some of the earth's capital to live. It also means that the earth's ecosystems produce less than they did before, and that life on earth is not sustainable. This economic behavior pushes us closer to important planetary boundaries that, if crossed, mean that the earth (and therefore humans living on earth) may not survive [see Rockstrom at al., 2009). Punishing offenders will do little to alter the long-term trends in withdrawals and additions that are harming the biosphere since these trends are largely determined by global economics. Thus, the strong enforcement of environmental laws may deter environmental crime within the limits of capitalism, but in the long run this regulatory behavior does little to encourage sustainability. Additional support for this position is given in Figure 3.l which documents the recent trend in criminal enforcement in the United States by the Department of Justice between the years of 1995 and 2012.While criminal enforcement declines slightly during this time, the overall level of chemical releases (i.e. "toxic releases") that is tracked by the US. govemment fluctuates considerably. Moreover, carbon dioxide emissions - thought to influence climate change - continue to remain well above the sustainable level and do not decrease significantly over time (Solomon el al. 2009). In short, in the case of the United States it does not appear that there is much improvement in the types of emissions that matter as a result of the criminal enforcement of environmental laws. Deterrence does not promote better environmental performance on a grand scale. Many criminologists would, of course, be quick to counter that toxic releases and carbon emissions listed in Figure 3.l are not the specific releases being targeted by criminal enforcement, and that is exactly our point. These are the releases that should be criminalized according to scientific evidence that they are harming the planet as they are pushing us toward planetary boundaries that, if crossed, threaten the earth's biosphere (Rockstrom (I 411., 2009). Therefore, a green criminological approach recommends using scientific evidence such as the ecological footprint to advance environmental enforcement. Moreover, it allows environmental enforcement to move beyond traditional methods of deterrence, and rather recommend re-evaluating production and consumption practices that threaten the earth's biosphere.aff2ac – frameworkCritique as an end devolves into absolute relativism and impedes action.Miller 17 (Ryuko and Charlotte, Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia AND Department of English, University of North Carolina at Charlotte “RE-EXAMINING AND RE-ENVISIONING CRITICALITY IN LANGUAGE STUDIES: THEORIES AND PRAXIS,” Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 0:1–29, 2017)Third, although critical perspectives seem to have gained legitimacy in our field, their influence on institutional policies and practices is minimal. Even when progressive educational policies are created, they may have little transformative effect due to a persistent neoliberal emphasis on particular types of competence (see Alford and Kettle in this issue). At the same time, the neoliberal emphasis on competence wears the new clothes of freedom and equality—progressive values fought for decades ago to end the formal domination of colonialism, slavery, and patriarchy (Wagner, 2016), but which now rationalize individual choice and economic success in capitalist society as the path to freedom and equality. In fact, we currently observe greater economic disparities and social problems in schools and other locations. This raises the following question: Has the increased recognition of critical language studies led to any concrete social change? The answer is probably no. Hence, the fourth problem has to do with the ways in which we disseminate critical discourse and exercise praxis. As discussed previously, institutional expectations and competitions compel scholars to publish and present their ideas only within their academic bubble. Many of us rarely write to a nonprofessional general audience, participate in policymaking, or engage in activism. Scholars, including us in writing this article, often attempt to examine, understand, and theorize the world without acting to transform it. Unless we narrow the gap between theory and practice, we will continue to see a kind of progress only in our academic bubble but not in the “real world.” As Collins (2012) advocated, intellectual activism should involve both speaking the truth to power—confronting the powerful in the dominant language—and speaking the truth to people—communicating ideas with undergraduates and people in the community in accessible ways. Praxis in the Neoliberal and Post World We have explored several dominant conceptual threads that have informed critical language studies, many of which have been critiqued by other threads within the critical tradition. This diversity reflects a diffused critical approach, as Ryuko’s story shows. Although this diversity and diffusion may be viewed as a kind of progress, they also point to the potential for problematic complicity with neoliberal values. In fact, the post theories, with their valorization of multiplicity, fluidity, and hybridity, are also complicit with neoliberal multiculturalism (Kubota, 2016). In order for critical language studies to maintain its critical edge, it needs to exercise praxis with hyper selfreflexivity (Kapoor, 2004) and focus on result-oriented strategic action (Kumaravadivelu, 2016). All of us, regardless of our backgrounds, must critically reflect on our privilege, exercise vigilance against our complicity with neoliberal power, and develop the capacity to cross individual identity borders with responsibility and humility (Vandrick, 2009). In the post era, diluted versions of critical/ post perspectives have garnered broader recognition in academe. In popular discourse, posttruth anti-intellectualism prevails. The core of critical language studies, thus, should maintain its potency by continuing to expose and critique injustices, critically understand power and inequalities, and exercise engaged praxis for establishing societal and individual wellbeing. In continuing to promote criticality with heightened praxis, we must be vigilant about normativity and dogmatism. For example, as discussed previously, a postmodern view of truth as discursive representations runs the risk of supporting absolute relativism, leading teachers and students to an impasse when confronting historical revisionism (e.g., “the Holocaust never happened”) or denial of global warming (Luke, 2013). Conversely, dogmatically denouncing injustices and imposing justice-oriented views could silence students instead of inviting them to become ethical citizens (Kubota, 2014; Pessoa & Urzêda Freitas, 2012). Praxis must be exercised with humility and contextual sensitivity.2ac – permPerm do both. The aff’s regulatory, institutional analysis is the best middle ground which balances the contradictions in capital to ensure social and environmental sustainability.The aff’s intellectual project bridges the gap between the techno-optimists idealism and reality by testing policy solutions That is the best way to manage the contradictions in capital to minimize environmental damageGibbs 9 (David, Emeritus Professor of Human Geography at The University of Hull, “Prospects for an Environmental Economic Geography: Linking Ecological Modernization and Regulationist Approaches,” Economic Geography, 82(2), 2009, 193–215. doi:10.1111/j.1944-8287.2006.tb00296.x)The basic assumption underlying this article is that existing modes of economic development and organization are not sustainable because of their environmental consequences. Given this assumption, there is a need, at the very least, to ameliorate these consequences and, more profoundly, to shift industrial society to a more ecologically rational organization. To date, work from the perspective of ecological modernization has gone furthest in trying to conceptualize how the latter may occur and the political program that may follow from it. A small number of geographers have (implicitly and explicitly) adopted elements of ecological modernization in their own work, yet there are a number of problems with ecological modernization, particularly that it provides little sense of how the desired institutional and cultural changes will come about or the power relations that are involved. Instead, it “assumes that existing institutions and structures can internalise environmental problems through efficiency, restructuring and creativity” (Hobson 2003, 152), although recent work by Mol (2002, 103) recognized that “while various developments point towards an institutionalization of the environment in the economic domain, there is no fundamental reason or principle preventing the stagnation or reversal of this process of ongoing institutionalisation.” Exactly how the proposed transformation (or reversal) to (or from) ecological modernity will take place, over what time scale, and by which agency still remains unclear (Low 2002).In contrast, work from a regulationist perspective has been stronger on conceptualizing the relationships between institutional forms and practices and the struggles and competing interests that make up a mode of social regulation. It is here that work by economic geographers offers useful insights into the potential for greater ecological rationality in economic development. Thus, an advantage of regulation theory is that it “offers no guarantees that a successor regime will happen along, just as it rejects the idea that new ‘institutional fixes’ are the result either of spontaneous forces or political fiat” (Peck 2000, 67). Rather, a variety of regulatory discourses have been proposed, from state intervention to freemarket environmentalism, all of which claim to be the most effective way of dealing with environmental degradation (Gandy 1997). Taking a regulationist approach, I suggest, is different from either ecological modernization or work on TEPs, in which the motivation for the necessary technological and institutional changes seems to come from a rational recognition of the need for change or a paradigmatic shift, especially with regard to innovation (Hayter 2004). The cross-fertilization of ecological modernization with economic geography approaches, with their emphasis upon the role of social relations, can therefore improve our understanding of the link between economic processes and environmental outcomes (Bridge 2002).Hence, the benefits of drawing upon a regulationist approach for those who are concerned with advancing an ecological modernization agenda are that it makes clear the nondeterministic nature of post-Fordism and that the future form of the economy is open to shaping and debate. It emphasizes the need to consider both economic and social processes as an integrated whole and indicates that sustainable development will need to be promoted at a variety of levels and scales. Thus “capitalism may have inviolable laws but is has a plurality of logics, some of which may be more accordant with a sustainable mode of production than others” (Drummond and Marsden 1995, 56). Such political economy approaches can provide a theoretical vantage point from which to view the kinds of current, on-the-ground initiatives that have been examined in ecological modernization and, in practical terms, could contribute to devising appropriate policy outcomes. In theoretical terms, reinterpreting environmental problems through a combination of the two approaches will involve an investigation of the creation of the institutional basis of sustainable economies or the form of the mode of social regulation that is associated with ecological modernization and to examine whether such developments can cohere to resolve the crisis of capitalism that stems from environmental problems. Thus, a regulationist approach is helpful in exploring the ways in which contradictions emerge among economic growth, environmental protection, and social equity. At the same time, using ecological modernization approaches helps to link the grand and high-level abstractions of regulationist approaches to the concrete outcomes and contingencies of everyday life. Focusing upon the political and social processes that are involved in struggles over economy-environment-equity issues is central to any future understanding of how ecological modernization can be advanced, both theoretically and through policy prescription. Such an interlinked approach will enable us to focus upon the contradictions that emerge in relation to economy-environment relations and the challenges that emerge from the failure of existing practices and institutions to address problems that arise at the interface of environmental protection, economic growth, and social equity (Gibbs and Krueger 2004).2ac – at: environmental law linkEnvironmental regulation is necessary to force companies to internalize pollution costs – particularly true for the Clean Water ActHolm-Hansen 12 (Kristen L. Holm-Hansen, J.D. candidate, Notre Dame Law School, “‘A Stream Would Rise From the Earth, and Water the Whole Face of the Ground’: The Ethical Necessity for Wetlands Protection Post-Rapanos,” 2012, 26 ND J. L. Ethics & Pub Pol'y 621, 631-639)While elections are rarely won or lost on environmental issues, creating and voting on environmental policy is an important part of every modern legislative session. With the United States facing population growth, the effects of recent environmental disasters, and an ever-growing reliance on consumerism and and technology, environmentalism is an increasingly important political issue. Industry regulation by the federal government is necessary to ensure a healthy environment for future generations, as well as to protect natural spaces and other species. Absent environmental regulation, landowners and companies would have unfettered discretion in matters such as pollution discharge and land use, leaving the environment in an extremely vulnerable position. In a capitalistic society, without the deterrent effect of the federal government's power to prosecute and impose fines for breaches of environmental regulation, companies have little incentive to internalize the cost of pollution control. As a result, important ecosystems have been threatened by decades of lax regulations and overtly pro-business administrations, necessitating significant regulatory changes. [*622] Whether acknowledged or not, ethical concerns are implicit in every piece of environmental regulation. When the government determines that there is a need for something such as pollution control and implements a new policy, it is inherently supporting at least one value of environmentalism. The ethical theories that drive the modern environmental movement, and subsequently public policy, illuminate the need for additional regulations. Today, one of America's most threatened landscapes is the wetlands that are vital to the overall health of the country's hydrologic system, water quality, and biodiversity. In recent years, despite the efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers ("Army Corps") and the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA"), wetlands protection has been threatened by two Supreme Court decisions interpreting the Clean Water Act: United States v. Rapanos and Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Before these holdings, the Army Corps had jurisdiction over most wetlands through permit issuance, and the EPA had regulatory authority. After almost thirty-four years of protection, many of the nation's wetlands are now vulnerable to development and destruction as a result of these recent decisions. [*623] In exploring this topic, Part I of this Note surveys several leading theories of environmental ethics including deep ecology, Christian environmental ethics, and conservationism that help frame today's public policy debates regarding environmental regulation. Part II of this Note describes the current state of wetlands protection in the United States by examining a series of court decisions on wetlands protection under the Clean Water Act. Finally, in Part III of this Note, I argue that ethical concerns necessitate both the implementation of a legislative solution restoring the Clean Water Act to its full protective capacity and also show the need for increased environmental regulation generally in the United States. I."For No One Can Lay a Foundation Other Than the One That Has Been Laid:" Environmental Ethics in the United States The Bible begins with the Book of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. God tells the couple that they will now have to fend for themselves in the wilderness: Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return. For centuries, humans struggled simply to live by avoiding such dangers as wild animals, droughts, and floods. It was humanity versus the environment, a daily battle to survive and continue the existence of the human race. While natural disasters still devastate populations across the world, humanity now faces an even deadlier opponent - ourselves. With the development of technology came the advent of pollution and environmental degradation, exacerbating poverty in some regions, and threatening human health across the planet. [*624] Out of the uncertainty of humanity's continued existence and the threat to Earth's many ecosystems came various theories of environmental ethics. In the United States, environmental issues came to the forefront of public policy in the latter half of the twentieth century. Environmental ethics has fueled political debates, provided policymakers with a framework for conceptualizing solutions, and has helped shape the federal government's implementation of regulatory policies. Many philosophers wrote from a theological perspective, using religious teachings to promote conservation, while others incorporated concepts such as natural rights and humanism into environmentalism. Although religious-based ethics may initially seem at odds with environmentalism and conservation efforts (due to an emphasis on the value of non-human life), philosophers and theologians have put forth compelling arguments for the necessity of environmental protection. Larry Rasmussen argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition can use nature as a foundation for morality because God's greatness is expressed through the natural world, and its observation can lead to knowledge of God. Rasmussen seeks to overcome the anthropocentrism [*625] of Judaism and Christianity through a comparative study of religions that reveals a "convergence of 'eco'-value" that supports a Judeo-Christian environmental ethic that calls for the protection of nature through restraint and innovation. Another prominent theory of Judeo-Christian environmental ethics is the concept of stewardship. Stewardship is defined as "the conducting, supervising, or managing of something; especially: the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care." In Genesis there are two references to this concept. In Genesis 1:26-28, God gives dominion to humanity over the earth, and in Genesis 2:4-24, God asks Adam to take care of the Garden of Eden. Stewardship calls for the conservation [*626] of resources and the protection of non-human life that can be accomplished through environmental regulation. As humanity was entrusted with the care of the planet, the natural environment must be taken care of responsibly and managed in a way so as to preserve what God has given. Applying a Judeo-Christian ethical framework to the ecological problems that plague our country illuminates the necessity for environmental regulation that can be accomplished through the legislative system. Other prominent and historically influential theories of environmental ethics include deep ecology, conservationism, ecofeminism, and preservationism. Arne Naess developed deep ecology in the 1970s in response to environmental crises occurring across the nation. Perhaps inspired by Kantian philosophy, Naess touted the goal of deep ecology as recognizing that humans are not the only species which can be thought to be an end-in-themselves; rather, all living things are ends-in-themselves. Naess's philosophy identified several precepts that, if followed, will enable humans to live according to the deep ecology [*627] ideal. These hypotheses include precepts such as "self-realization for all living beings" and "no exploitation." Underlying the deep ecology philosophy is the notion that a human (the "Self") cannot be separated from the rest of the world; therefore, all living and non-living beings are part of the "Self." This belief necessitates opposition to development that potentially harms non-human life and destroys biodiversity. Like deep ecology, ecofeminism was introduced to the United States as a philosophy in the 1970s; however, rather than just identifying the need for an egalitarian relationship between humans and other life, the theory finds that the historical subordination of women has also contributed to the environmental crisis and must be remedied. Philosophers such as Carolyn Merchant have identified the defeminization of nature and the androcentrism of American society as the root of today's environmental problems. In another variation of ecofeminism, philosophers have argued that the exploitation of nature actually leads to the subordination of women and minorities. In either case, the solution to environmental degradation is egalitarianism among all sexes, all life forms and ecosystems, and all races. Although deep ecology and ecofeminism were certainly influential theories in the 1970s (and in a certain respect continue to be so today), the mainstream, present-day environmentalist schools of thought are more analogous to the preservationist and conservationist movements of the early 19th century. These ethical theories, in contrast to the philosophies previously discussed, are inherently anthropocentric. Rather than focusing on the intrinsic value of non-human (and even individual human) life, these theories advance environmentalism as a means to secure the future well-being of humanity. The [*628] preservationist movement can be traced to John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, whose goal was to keep "natural spaces" natural by protecting certain land from human modification. The modern-day preservationist movement can still be seen in non-governmental organizations like the Audubon Society, whose goals include the preservation of natural spaces. Preservationists wish to protect places like natural parks because the existence of such spaces is inherently good for humanity. The existence of the natural areas, not the use of the areas, is the intended end. On the other hand, conservationism is based on utilitarian principles that hold that conservation is good for society as a whole. The value of the land (or the conserved resources), however, is not based upon its aesthetic and/or inherent value as touted by the preservationists; rather, it is based on its usefulness for bettering humanity. Modern-day conservationists argue for regulatory policies in order to ensure people's happiness now by allowing them to enjoy nature through activities like hunting and hiking, as well as for the health and pleasure of future generations. [*629] Philosophers, theologians, and scientists have argued for various forms of environmental protection throughout the past few decades (for various reasons); however, the path to change is not through these disciplines, but rather must come from the federal government and the judicial system. While theorists may persuade some Americans to change their behavior, without governmental regulation, the market system will continue to ignore environmental issues at the expense of future human generations and other living species. The government must take proactive steps toward improved environmental regulation in order to safeguard the country's future. Applying the preceding philosophical arguments to the current legal and environmental controversy regarding isolated wetlands protection in the United States shows the ethical necessity for governmental regulation. II."I Brought You into a Plentiful Land:" Wetlands Protection in the United States Through the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, various judicial decisions, and state laws, the states and the federal government have begun the process of [*630] remedying environmental degradation and preventing future harms. Federal and state regulations aim to ensure that the future health of humans will be protected through the conservation and protection of natural resources. These laws implicitly recognize the importance of stewardship and humanity's role as manager and protector. Unfortunately, however, the current state of environmental regulation leaves much to be desired, and legislative purpose does not often align with ideas about the inherent value of nature and non-human species. One of the most important areas of environmental law in the United States is water regulation. Clean water is not just necessary for a healthy human population, it is also vital for the well-being of every ecosystem and thus must be regulated. In addition to ensuring that water is uncontaminated, the goals of water regulation should include guaranteeing that there will be enough [*631] water to support human life and a healthy environment. Water's "divine significance" is recognized in Catholicism as well as throughout the Bible. Thus, the concept of stewardship necessarily includes water protection.2ac – sustainabilityThe economy is sustainable and regulating capitalism is key – market mechanisms facilitate necessary breakthroughs in techBosch 19 (Stephan Bosch, PhD, Institute of Geography, University of Augsburg; Matthias Schmidt, PhD, Institute of Geography, Chair for Human Geography, University of Augsburg; “Is the post-fossil era necessarily post-capitalistic? – The robustness and capabilities of green capitalism”, Ecological Economics, 161, 270–279. doi:10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.04.001)6. ConclusionIn this paper, we argued that capitalism is not only much more robust than presumed by its critics, but moreover features promising capabilities with regard to solving the environmental crisis.At the beginning, we elucidated that capitalism is able to prevail even given the end of fossil energy carriers and to maintain its productivity also within a regenerative energy system. Innovative concepts of storage, direct current transmission, and smart grids play a core role herein. Moreover, we were able to show that crisis is an essential element of the capitalist social order, with critical situations even being able to provide the necessary preconditions for the economy's transformation towards sustainability. Innovation is an essential ingredient of this process. We argued that precisely the preconditions given in competitive capitalism generate innovations. Therefore, in our view, the decisive social advantage of a competition-oriented capitalist system is this: as expressed by Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction, it offers maximum incentive for entrepreneurial initiatives. According to the theory of economic development, this incentive cannot be given within the socialist markets or degrowth-oriented societies favoured, but not more specifically detailed, by Harris (2013) and Kallis (2011). Yet this stimulus is crucial as it is accompanied by greater innovational strength, thus providing more auspicious preconditions for groundbreaking innovations, e.g. regarding aspects of technology, education, vocational training, research, social infrastructure, medicine, and nature protection (Schumpeter, 1994; Iversen, 2005; Wangler, 2013). However, we again want to point out the numerous social problems of the deployment of renewable energies (e.g. Aitken, 2010), especially concerning large-scale infrastructure projects (e.g. Avila, 2018).In the context of competitive capitalism as described by Schumpeter, the promising capabilities of green capitalism were presented in detail. Nevertheless, the predominant criticism of capitalism scarcely assumes the Schumpeterian concept of ‘creative destruction’. Rather, it focuses on a much later stage of evolution of the economic system, in which the socio-economic disparities as a result of economic, but also of other factors have manifested themselves distinctly and with great complexity (cf. trustified capitalism). The pure criticism of capitalism thus seems to us to be too superficial as an explanatory model, which relies on arguments that disregard precisely those fertile approaches to surmounting the energetic and environmental crisis that presently arise from numerous processes of creative destruction. The cradle-to-cradle approach illustrated above is only one example of a concept that, by means of innovation, abandons the old and establishes the new. Yet we also think that competition and the market alone will not suffice to concertedly solve the global environmental crisis. This calls for political action that, by creating suitable institutional frame conditions, succeeds in pooling society's forces with regard to the ecological questions of our time, thus specifically promoting innovation.We demonstrated that the usefulness of state measures always also depends on the respective specific national and economic context. An objection to capitalist social orders in general disregards this diversity of contexts and is at risk of overlooking important determinants of crisis management. The decisive difference in the various capitalist systems' innovative strength lies in the degree to which the cooperation of the major market players – state, enterprises, science, and civil society – is institutionalised. This implies that a central part falls to the state in embedding the actions of the most important players into appropriate institutional structures. Only thereby will it be possible to shoulder the heavy load of material, costs, work, and coordination required for the energy system's transformation. A non-committal state runs the risk of failing this task. E.g., Solomon and Krishna (2011) showed that the intended transformation of the energy system in the USA after the oil crisis was unsuccessful due to the lack of suitable preconditions for innovation in niche markets. Moreover, ?etkovi? and Buzogány (2016) found that in liberal manifestations of capitalism, the deficiency of political and institutional instruments inhibits the necessary orchestration of activities on the part of state, industry, and financial sector.In sum, even though fossil fuels and the capitalist system based upon them have given rise to the environmental crisis, surmounting the crisis does not necessarily call for surmounting market-based approaches; rather, market economies based on regenerative energy systems that are competition-oriented and guided by state measures may develop great ecological and socio-economic effectivity.Growth is sustainableBrook, et al, 15 (Barry, professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania, John Asafu-Adjaye, University of Queensland, Linus Blomqvist, Breakthrough Institute, Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation, Ruth DeFries, Columbia Univeristy, Erle Ellis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Christopher Foreman, University of Maryland School of Public Policy, David Keith, Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Martin Lewis, Stanford University, Mark Lynas, Cornell University, Ted Nordhaus, Breakthrough Institute, Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Colorado, Boulder, Rachel Pritzker, Pritzker Innovation Fund, Joyashree Roy, Jadavpur University, Mark Sagoff, George Mason University, Michael Shellenberger, Breakthrough Institute, Robert Stone, Filmmaker, and Peter Teague, Breakthrough Institute, “AN ECOMODERNIST MANIFESTO,” )Intensifying many human activities — particularly farming, energy extraction, forestry, and settlement — so that they use less land and interfere less with the natural world is the key to decoupling human development from environmental impacts. These socioeconomic and technological processes are central to economic modernization and environmental protection. Together they allow people to mitigate climate change, to spare nature, and to alleviate global poverty. Although we have to date written separately, our views are increasingly discussed as a whole. We call ourselves ecopragmatists and ecomodernists. We offer this statement to affirm and to clarify our views and to describe our vision for putting humankind’s extraordinary powers in the service of creating a good Anthropocene. 1. Humanity has flourished over the past two centuries. Average life expectancy has increased from 30 to 70 years, resulting in a large and growing population able to live in many different environments. Humanity has made extraordinary progress in reducing the incidence and impacts of infectious diseases, and it has become more resilient to extreme weather and other natural disasters. Violence in all forms has declined significantly and is probably at the lowest per capita level ever experienced by the human species, the horrors of the 20th century and present-day terrorism notwithstanding. Globally, human beings have moved from autocratic government toward liberal democracy characterized by the rule of law and increased freedom. Personal, economic, and political liberties have spread worldwide and are today largely accepted as universal values. Modernization liberates women from traditional gender roles, increasing their control of their fertility. Historically large numbers of humans — both in percentage and in absolute terms — are free from insecurity, penury, and servitude. At the same time, human flourishing has taken a serious toll on natural, nonhuman environments and wildlife. Humans use about half of the planet’s ice-free land, mostly for pasture, crops, and production forestry. Of the land once covered by forests, 20 percent has been converted to human use. Populations of many mammals, amphibians, and birds have declined by more than 50 percent in the past 40 years alone. More than 100 species from those groups went extinct in the 20th century, and about 785 since 1500. As we write, only four northern white rhinos are confirmed to exist. Given that humans are completely dependent on the living biosphere, how is it possible that people are doing so much damage to natural systems without doing more harm to themselves? The role that technology plays in reducing humanity’s dependence on nature explains this paradox. Human technologies, from those that first enabled agriculture to replace hunting and gathering, to those that drive today’s globalized economy, have made humans less reliant upon the many ecosystems that once provided their only sustenance, even as those same ecosystems have often been left deeply damaged. Despite frequent assertions starting in the 1970s of fundamental “limits to growth,” there is still remarkably little evidence that human population and economic expansion will outstrip the capacity to grow food or procure critical material resources in the foreseeable future. To the degree to which there are fixed physical boundaries to human consumption, they are so theoretical as to be functionally irrelevant. The amount of solar radiation that hits the Earth, for instance, is ultimately finite but represents no meaningful constraint upon human endeavors. Human civilization can flourish for centuries and millennia on energy delivered from a closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle, or from hydrogen-deuterium fusion. With proper management, humans are at no risk of lacking sufficient agricultural land for food. Given plentiful land and unlimited energy, substitutes for other material inputs to human well-being can easily be found if those inputs become scarce or expensive. There remain, however, serious long-term environmental threats to human well-being, such as anthropogenic climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, and ocean acidification. While these risks are difficult to quantify, the evidence is clear today that they could cause significant risk of catastrophic impacts on societies and ecosystems. Even gradual, non-catastrophic outcomes associated with these threats are likely to result in significant human and economic costs as well as rising ecological losses. Much of the world’s population still suffers from more-immediate local environmental health risks. Indoor and outdoor air pollution continue to bring premature death and illness to millions annually. Water pollution and water-borne illness due to pollution and degradation of watersheds cause similar suffering. 2. Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a range of long-term trends are today driving significant decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts. Decoupling occurs in both relative and absolute terms. Relative decoupling means that human environmental impacts rise at a slower rate than overall economic growth. Thus, for each unit of economic output, less environmental impact (e.g., deforestation, defaunation, pollution) results. Overall impacts may still increase, just at a slower rate than would otherwise be the case. Absolute decoupling occurs when total environmental impacts — impacts in the aggregate — peak and begin to decline, even as the economy continues to grow. Decoupling can be driven by both technological and demographic trends and usually results from a combination of the two. The growth rate of the human population has already peaked. Today’s population growth rate is one percent per year, down from its high point of 2.1 percent in the 1970s. Fertility rates in countries containing more than half of the global population are now below replacement level. Population growth today is primarily driven by longer life spans and lower infant mortality, not by rising fertility rates. Given current trends, it is very possible that the size of the human population will peak this century and then start to decline. Trends in population are inextricably linked to other demographic and economic dynamics. For the first time in human history, over half the global population lives in cities. By 2050, 70 percent are expected to dwell in cities, a number that could rise to 80 percent or more by the century’s end. Cities are characterized by both dense populations and low fertility rates. Cities occupy just 1 to 3 percent of the Earth’s surface and yet are home to nearly four billion people. As such, cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts. The growth of cities along with the economic and ecological benefits that come with them are inseparable from improvements in agricultural productivity. As agriculture has become more land and labor efficient, rural populations have left the countryside for the cities. Roughly half the US population worked the land in 1880. Today, less than 2 percent does. As human lives have been liberated from hard agricultural labor, enormous human resources have been freed up for other endeavors. Cities, as people know them today, could not exist without radical changes in farming. In contrast, modernization is not possible in a subsistence agrarian economy. These improvements have resulted not only in lower labor requirements per unit of agricultural output but also in lower land requirements. This is not a new trend: rising harvest yields have for millennia reduced the amount of land required to feed the average person. The average per-capita use of land today is vastly lower than it was 5,000 years ago, despite the fact that modern people enjoy a far richer diet. Thanks to technological improvements in agriculture, during the half-century starting in the mid-1960s, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed for the average person declined by one-half. Agricultural intensification, along with the move away from the use of wood as fuel, has allowed many parts of the world to experience net reforestation. About 80 percent of New England is today forested, compared with about 50 percent at the end of the 19th century. Over the past 20 years, the amount of land dedicated to production forest worldwide declined by 50 million hectares, an area the size of France. The “forest transition” from net deforestation to net reforestation seems to be as resilient a feature of development as the demographic transition that reduces human birth rates as poverty declines. Human use of many other resources is similarly peaking. The amount of water needed for the average diet has declined by nearly 25 percent over the past half-century. Nitrogen pollution continues to cause eutrophication and large dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico. While the total amount of nitrogen pollution is rising, the amount used per unit of production has declined significantly in developed nations. Indeed, in contradiction to the often-expressed fear of infinite growth colliding with a finite planet, demand for many material goods may be saturating as societies grow wealthier. Meat consumption, for instance, has peaked in many wealthy nations and has shifted away from beef toward protein sources that are less land intensive. As demand for material goods is met, developed economies see higher levels of spending directed to materially less-intensive service and knowledge sectors, which account for an increasing share of economic activity. This dynamic might be even more pronounced in today’s developing economies, which may benefit from being late adopters of resource-efficient technologies. Taken together, these trends mean that the total human impact on the environment, including land-use change, overexploitation, and pollution, can peak and decline this century. By understanding and promoting these emergent processes, humans have the opportunity to re-wild and re-green the Earth — even as developing countries achieve modern living standards, and material poverty ends. 3. The processes of decoupling described above challenge the idea that early human societies lived more lightly on the land than do modern societies. Insofar as past societies had less impact upon the environment, it was because those societies supported vastly smaller populations. In fact, early human populations with much less advanced technologies had far larger individual land footprints than societies have today. Consider that a population of no more than one or two million North Americans hunted most of the continent’s large mammals into extinction in the late Pleistocene, while burning and clearing forests across the continent in the process. Extensive human transformations of the environment continued throughout the Holocene period: as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution. The technologies that humankind’s ancestors used to meet their needs supported much lower living standards with much higher per-capita impacts on the environment. Absent a massive human die-off, any large-scale attempt at recoupling human societies to nature using these technologies would result in an unmitigated ecological and human disaster. Ecosystems around the world are threatened today because people over-rely on them: people who depend on firewood and charcoal for fuel cut down and degrade forests; people who eat bush meat for food hunt mammal species to local extirpation. Whether it’s a local indigenous community or a foreign corporation that benefits, it is the continued dependence of humans on natural environments that is the problem for the conservation of nature. Conversely, modern technologies, by using natural ecosystem flows and services more efficiently, offer a real chance of reducing the totality of human impacts on the biosphere. To embrace these technologies is to find paths to a good Anthropocene. The modernization processes that have increasingly liberated humanity from nature are, of course, double-edged, since they have also degraded the natural environment. Fossil fuels, mechanization and manufacturing, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, electrification and modern transportation and communication technologies, have made larger human populations and greater consumption possible in the first place. Had technologies not improved since the Dark Ages, no doubt the human population would not have grown much either. It is also true that large, increasingly affluent urban populations have placed greater demands upon ecosystems in distant places –– the extraction of natural resources has been globalized. But those same technologies have also made it possible for people to secure food, shelter, heat, light, and mobility through means that are vastly more resource- and land-efficient than at any previous time in human history. Decoupling human well-being from the destruction of nature requires the conscious acceleration of emergent decoupling processes. In some cases, the objective is the development of technological substitutes. Reducing deforestation and indoor air pollution requires the substitution of wood and charcoal with modern energy. In other cases, humanity’s goal should be to use resources more productively. For example, increasing agricultural yields can reduce the conversion of forests and grasslands to farms. Humans should seek to liberate the environment from the economy. Urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination are all processes with a demonstrated potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species. Suburbanization, low-yield farming, and many forms of renewable energy production, in contrast, generally require more land and resources and leave less room for nature. These patterns suggest that humans are as likely to spare nature because it is not needed to meet their needs as they are to spare it for explicit aesthetic and spiritual reasons. The parts of the planet that people have not yet profoundly transformed have mostly been spared because they have not yet found an economic use for them — mountains, deserts, boreal forests, and other “marginal” lands. Decoupling raises the possibility that societies might achieve peak human impact without intruding much further on relatively untouched areas. Nature unused is nature spared. 4. Plentiful access to modern energy is an essential prerequisite for human development and for decoupling development from nature. The availability of inexpensive energy allows poor people around the world to stop using forests for fuel. It allows humans to grow more food on less land, thanks to energy-heavy inputs such as fertilizer and tractors. Energy allows humans to recycle waste water and desalinate sea water in order to spare rivers and aquifers. It allows humans to cheaply recycle metal and plastic rather than to mine and refine these minerals. Looking forward, modern energy may allow the capture of carbon from the atmosphere to reduce the accumulated carbon that drives global warming. However, for at least the past three centuries, rising energy production globally has been matched by rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. Nations have also been slowly decarbonizing — that is, reducing the carbon intensity of their economies — over that same time period. But they have not been doing so at a rate consistent with keeping cumulative carbon emissions low enough to reliably stay below the international target of less than 2 degrees Centigrade of global warming. Significant climate mitigation, therefore, will require that humans rapidly accelerate existing processes of decarbonization. There remains much confusion, however, as to how this might be accomplished. In developing countries, rising energy consumption is tightly correlated with rising incomes and improving living standards. Although the use of many other material resource inputs such as nitrogen, timber, and land are beginning to peak, the centrality of energy in human development and its many uses as a substitute for material and human resources suggest that energy consumption will continue to rise through much if not all of the 21st century. For that reason, any conflict between climate mitigation and the continuing development process through which billions of people around the world are achieving modern living standards will continue to be resolved resoundingly in favor of the latter. Climate change and other global ecological challenges are not the most important immediate concerns for the majority of the world's people. Nor should they be. A new coal-fired power station in Bangladesh may bring air pollution and rising carbon dioxide emissions but will also save lives. For millions living without light and forced to burn dung to cook their food, electricity and modern fuels, no matter the source, offer a pathway to a better life, even as they also bring new environmental challenges. Meaningful climate mitigation is fundamentally a technological challenge. By this we mean that even dramatic limits to per capita global consumption would be insufficient to achieve significant climate mitigation. Absent profound technological change there is no credible path to meaningful climate mitigation. While advocates differ in the particular mix of technologies they favor, we are aware of no quantified climate mitigation scenario in which technological change is not responsible for the vast majority of emissions cuts. The specific technological paths that people might take toward climate mitigation remain deeply contested. Theoretical scenarios for climate mitigation typically reflect their creators’ technological preferences and analytical assumptions while all too often failing to account for the cost, rate, and scale at which low-carbon energy technologies can be deployed. The history of energy transitions, however, suggests that there have been consistent patterns associated with the ways that societies move toward cleaner sources of energy. Substituting higher-quality (i.e., less carbon-intensive, higher-density) fuels for lower-quality (i.e., more carbon-intensive, lower-density) ones is how virtually all societies have decarbonized, and points the way toward accelerated decarbonization in the future. Transitioning to a world powered by zero-carbon energy sources will require energy technologies that are power dense and capable of scaling to many tens of terawatts to power a growing human economy. Most forms of renewable energy are, unfortunately, incapable of doing so. The scale of land use and other environmental impacts necessary to power the world on biofuels or many other renewables are such that we doubt they provide a sound pathway to a zero-carbon low-footprint future. High-efficiency solar cells produced from earth-abundant materials are an exception and have the potential to provide many tens of terawatts on a few percent of the Earth’s surface. Present-day solar technologies will require substantial innovation to meet this standard and the development of cheap energy storage technologies that are capable of dealing with highly variable energy generation at large scales. Nuclear fission today represents the only present-day zero-carbon technology with the demonstrated ability to meet most, if not all, of the energy demands of a modern economy. However, a variety of social, economic, and institutional challenges make deployment of present-day nuclear technologies at scales necessary to achieve significant climate mitigation unlikely. A new generation of nuclear technologies that are safer and cheaper will likely be necessary for nuclear energy to meet its full potential as a critical climate mitigation technology. In the long run, next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature. If the history of energy transitions is any guide, however, that transition will take time. During that transition, other energy technologies can provide important social and environmental benefits. Hydroelectric dams, for example, may be a cheap source of low-carbon power for poor nations even though their land and water footprint is relatively large. Fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage can likewise provide substantial environmental benefits over current fossil or biomass energies. The ethical and pragmatic path toward a just and sustainable global energy economy requires that human beings transition as rapidly as possible to energy sources that are cheap, clean, dense, and abundant. Such a path will require sustained public support for the development and deployment of clean energy technologies, both within nations and between them, though international collaboration and competition, and within a broader framework for global modernization and development. 5. We write this document out of deep love and emotional connection to the natural world. By appreciating, exploring, seeking to understand, and cultivating nature, many people get outside themselves. They connect with their deep evolutionary history. Even when people never experience these wild natures directly, they affirm their existence as important for their psychological and spiritual well-being. Humans will always materially depend on nature to some degree. Even if a fully synthetic world were possible, many of us might still choose to continue to live more coupled with nature than human sustenance and technologies require. What decoupling offers is the possibility that humanity’s material dependence upon nature might be less destructive. The case for a more active, conscious, and accelerated decoupling to spare nature draws more on spiritual or aesthetic than on material or utilitarian arguments. Current and future generations could survive and prosper materially on a planet with much less biodiversity and wild nature. But this is not a world we want nor, if humans embrace decoupling processes, need to accept. What we are here calling nature, or even wild nature, encompasses landscapes, seascapes, biomes and ecosystems that have, in more cases than not, been regularly altered by human influences over centuries and millennia. Conservation science, and the concepts of biodiversity, complexity, and indigeneity are useful, but alone cannot determine which landscapes to preserve, or how. In most cases, there is no single baseline prior to human modification to which nature might be returned. For example, efforts to restore landscapes to more closely resemble earlier states (“indigeneity”) may involve removing recently arrived species (“invasives”) and thus require a net reduction in local biodiversity. In other circumstances, communities may decide to sacrifice indigeneity for novelty and biodiversity. Explicit efforts to preserve landscapes for their non-utilitarian value are inevitably anthropogenic choices. For this reason, all conservation efforts are fundamentally anthropogenic. The setting aside of wild nature is no less a human choice, in service of human preferences, than bulldozing it. Humans will save wild places and landscapes by convincing our fellow citizens that these places, and the creatures that occupy them, are worth protecting. People may choose to have some services — like water purification and flood protection — provided for by natural systems, such as forested watersheds, reefs, marshes, and wetlands, even if those natural systems are more expensive than simply building water treatment plants, seawalls, and levees. There will be no one-size-fits-all solution. Environments will be shaped by different local, historical, and cultural preferences. While we believe that agricultural intensification for land-sparing is key to protecting wild nature, we recognize that many communities will continue to opt for land-sharing, seeking to conserve wildlife within agricultural landscapes, for example, rather than allowing it to revert to wild nature in the form of grasslands, scrub, and forests. Where decoupling reduces pressure on landscapes and ecosystems to meet basic human needs, landowners, communities, and governments still must decide to what aesthetic or economic purpose they wish to dedicate those lands. Accelerated decoupling alone will not be enough to ensure more wild nature. There must still be a conservation politics and a wilderness movement to demand more wild nature for aesthetic and spiritual reasons. Along with decoupling humankind’s material needs from nature, establishing an enduring commitment to preserve wilderness, biodiversity, and a mosaic of beautiful landscapes will require a deeper emotional connection to them. 6. We affirm the need and human capacity for accelerated, active, and conscious decoupling. Technological progress is not inevitable. Decoupling environmental impacts from economic outputs is not simply a function of market-driven innovation and efficient response to scarcity. The long arc of human transformation of natural environments through technologies began well before there existed anything resembling a market or a price signal. Thanks to rising demand, scarcity, inspiration, and serendipity, humans have remade the world for millennia. Technological solutions to environmental problems must also be considered within a broader social, economic, and political context. We think it is counterproductive for nations like Germany and Japan, and states like California, to shutter nuclear power plants, recarbonize their energy sectors, and recouple their economies to fossil fuels and biomass. However, such examples underscore clearly that technological choices will not be determined by remote international bodies but rather by national and local institutions and cultures. Too often, modernization is conflated, both by its defenders and critics, with capitalism, corporate power, and laissez-faire economic policies. We reject such reductions. What we refer to when we speak of modernization is the long-term evolution of social, economic, political, and technological arrangements in human societies toward vastly improved material well-being, public health, resource productivity, economic integration, shared infrastructure, and personal freedom. Modernization has liberated ever more people from lives of poverty and hard agricultural labor, women from chattel status, children and ethnic minorities from oppression, and societies from capricious and arbitrary governance. Greater resource productivity associated with modern socio-technological systems has allowed human societies to meet human needs with fewer resource inputs and less impact on the environment. More-productive economies are wealthier economies, capable of better meeting human needs while committing more of their economic surplus to non-economic amenities, including better human health, greater human freedom and opportunity, arts, culture, and the conservation of nature. Modernizing processes are far from complete, even in advanced developed economies. Material consumption has only just begun to peak in the wealthiest societies. Decoupling of human welfare from environmental impacts will require a sustained commitment to technological progress and the continuing evolution of social, economic, and political institutions alongside those changes. Accelerated technological progress will require the active, assertive, and aggressive participation of private sector entrepreneurs, markets, civil society, and the state. While we reject the planning fallacy of the 1950s, we continue to embrace a strong public role in addressing environmental problems and accelerating technological innovation, including research to develop better technologies, subsidies, and other measures to help bring them to market, and regulations to mitigate environmental hazards. And international collaboration on technological innovation and technology transfer is essential in the areas of agriculture and energy. 2ac – alt failsMovements failEpstein 14 (Barbara, author, former Professor Emerita in the Humanities Division @ UC Santa Cruz, “Prospects for a Resurgence of the U.S. Left”, Tikkun, Volume 29, Number 2, Spring 2014, Project Muse)The United States has no coherent, effective Left. Over the last four decades, since the movements of the sixties and seventies went into decline, the problem of the degradation of the environment has reached a level that threatens the existence of humans and other species on the planet. The neoliberal form of capitalism that has taken hold globally has caused the gap between the wealth and power of those at the top and the rest of us to widen dramatically, undermining the quality of life of the majority and threatening the public arena itself. Despite the depth of the economic crisis of 2008, there is no substantial movement for the abandonment of neoliberalism, the regulation of industry, or the creation of a more egalitarian economy. The environmental movement has grown, but not to the point of having the capacity to reverse environmental degradation. There are undoubtedly more people and projects devoted to economic and social justice—and to environmental sustainability—than there were in the sixties and seventies. The problem has to do with collective impact. No movements of the Left have emerged capable of making a real difference in the conditions that we face. Why is this? And what can be done about it?? A Fatalistic Approach to Gradual Crises? The weakness of the Left is partly due to the fact that these problems have come upon us gradually, allowing us to accommodate ourselves to them. The widening of the gap in wealth and power has been for the most part incremental; it is only in retrospect that one can see how dramatic the effect has been. The same is true of the working day, which has been lengthened, for most people, bit by bit, but at no point by enough to lead to a widespread revolt. Something similar could be said about the environment. Environmental crises for the most part take place somewhere other than where one lives. Such crises are increasingly severe and increasingly common, and there is widespread awareness that at some point in the future we are all likely to be directly affected. But a future crisis does not have the mobilizing capacity of a crisis that confronts one in the present. Most people, including those who are aware of the depths of these problems, go about their business, doing what they—we—have always done, though with increasing apprehension about the future.? “The environmental movement has grown, but not to the point of having the capacity to reverse environmental degradation,” Epstein writes. Environmental activists march in Detroit to protest its air-polluting incinerator.? “The environmental movement has grown, but not to the point of having the capacity to reverse environmental degradation,” Epstein writes. Environmental activists march in Detroit to protest its air-polluting incinerator.? A widespread sense that nothing can be done is probably an even more significant obstacle to effective, collective action than the gradual character of these changes. Mobilization against a system, an institution, or a ruling elite is most likely to take place when it seems not only oppressive but also outmoded, on the way out, or at least on the defensive. The Civil Rights Movement had existed since World War II but gained momentum in the late fifties and early sixties, when the international aspirations of the United States made racism at home a serious embarrassment. Feminism likewise took hold on a mass basis when the entry of women into the labor force on a large scale placed patriarchal authority in question and gave women the leverage to demand equality. Movements for change are most likely to take hold when change seems possible, when there are levers that can be grasped, as when oppressive institutions seem ready to collapse or are widely seen as illegitimate. It helps when some of those in positions of power agree that the existing system is not working and support change. The depression of the 1930s affected the corporate class as well as the rest of society, though not nearly as badly; fear of a continuing downward economic spiral led some among the elite to agree that changes of some sort were necessary. In the wake of 2008, while most people have suffered economic reverses, corporate profits have more than recovered. Neoliberal capitalism is thriving, at least if measured by corporate profits.? The Left is weakened by its deep generational divide and by the fact that “white leftists tend to know little about movements of the Left among people of color,” Epstein writes. Here, members of a Latina immigrant organization participate in a May Day rally in San Francisco.? Click for larger view? The Left is weakened by its deep generational divide and by the fact that “white leftists tend to know little about movements of the Left among people of color,” Epstein writes. Here, members of a Latina immigrant organization participate in a May Day rally in San Francisco.? This is not to argue that movements of the Left take shape and grow only when conditions are propitious. Left-led resistance movements formed in the major ghettos of German-occupied Central and Eastern Europe, despite the fact that the deaths of those involved seemed the most likely outcome. Slave revolts took place in the West Indies and the American South under similar circumstances. But when circumstances are difficult, oppositional movements are most likely to take hold when there are stable organizations that provide a sustained, reliable framework for action, and when such movements have compelling goals and a clear conception of how to achieve these goals—that is, a strategic perspective. The current U.S. Left has none of these.? Fragmentation and Generational Divides? The major organizations of the Left that once provided the framework for ongoing collective action and strategic discussion either no longer exist or have atrophied. There are large numbers of progressive nonprofits but few organizations that those who want to make a difference, but lack special skills or expertise, can join and work with. Among young people, leftist activist projects thrive, but they tend to come and go. The most stable and influential institutions of the Left are its media outlets: published and online journals, radio stations, a few left-wing presses, and books with a left-wing perspective published by mainstream presses. The central role of media leads to a Left that is defined more by what people read and what opinions they hold than by their associations or their practical activity.? We have a fragmented Left held together by a vague commitment to a more just, egalitarian, and sustainable world, but in practical terms lacking a common focus or basis for coordinated action. The fragmented and fluid character of the Left reflects the fragmentation and fluidity of contemporary society: there is probably no going back to the structured and stable organizations of the past (the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, or even the Students for a Democratic Society) consisting of members who were likely to remain active and engaged for many years. But a Left based on individuals with leftist views and a plethora of frequently ephemeral projects has little ability to consider its collective direction and less influence than its numbers would warrant.? The Left is weakened especially by the deep divide between the older generation, veterans of the movements of the sixties and seventies, now in their sixties or older, and the younger generation, in their early forties or younger. The outlook and vocabulary of the older generation, shaped for the most part by perspectives ranging from Marxism to social democracy, tends to clash with the outlook of the younger generation, among whom anarchism has been a major influence. The result is little contact and less cooperation between activists of the two generations. In addition, white leftists tend to know little about (and have little contact with) movements of the Left among people of color. And the sector of the Left that consists largely of professionals and intellectuals has little contact with the labor Left.? The most promising sector of the U.S. Left is the arena of youth activism that tilts toward anarchism and that was at the center of the Occupy movement. Activists in this arena share an opposition to all forms of oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, and others), a dislike of hierarchy and a deep suspicion of the state, a vision of an egalitarian, cooperative, and decentralized society, and a desire to model that society in their political practice. Many would include an explicit opposition to capitalism.? The Occupy movement was shaped by the idealism, energy, and commitment of a politics influenced by what some call anarchism and others call anti-authoritarianism. Occupy’s protest against the consolidation of wealth and power among the few plus the utopian quality of Occupy communities led to explosive growth of the movement and massive public support. But when police closed the encampments, the movement, as a mass movement, soon collapsed. Valuable organizing projects spun off, but these are quite different from Occupy. One may criticize Occupy activists for not having given much thought to what form the movement would take after the inevitable police closures. But the episodic, fleeting character of Occupy is shared by movements around the world: an incident sets off protest over long-standing grievances, protest mushrooms into a mass movement, the protest is repressed, and the movement collapses, having altered public discourse but leaving no organization or institution capable of bringing about social change. This is the weakness of the ascendant form of leftist or protest politics that emphasizes spontaneity and avoids organizational forms able to last.2ac – collapse badCollapse turns all their impacts Monbiot 9 (George, columnist for The Guardian, has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), Oxford Brookes (planning), and East London (environmental science), August 17, 2009, “Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?,” online: )The interesting question, and the one that probably divides us, is this: to what extent should we welcome the likely collapse of industrial civilisation? Or more precisely: to what extent do we believe that some good may come of it? I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I'm sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement. Here are three observations: 1 Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom learn from others' mistakes. From the first observation, this follows: even if you are hardened to the fate of humans, you can surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost all others. However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the biosphere. We will continue to do so until there is so little left that even Homo sapiens can no longer survive. This is the ecological destiny of a species possessed of outstanding intelligence, opposable thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit almost every possible resource – in the absence of political restraint.2ac – human natureAlt is impossible – human natureRees 14 (William E, PhD, FRSC UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, ecological economist Professor Emeritus and former director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning, “Avoiding Collapse,” ) In theory, opting for this alternative should not be a difficult choice for Homo sapiens . Would an osten - sibly intelligent, forward-thinking, morally conscious, compassionate species continue to defend an economic system that wrecks its planetary home, exacerbates inequality, undermines social cohesion, generates greater net costs than benefits and ultimately threatens to lead to systemic collapse? Remarkably, the answer so far seems to be “yes.” There are simply no strong voices for caution among contemporary leaders and certainly no political constituencies for degrowth. There is no nascent plan for a World Assembly for Mutual Survival. Humanity’s unique capacities for collective intelligence, rational analysis and planning ahead for the common good play no major role in the political arena, particularly when they challenge conventional myths, corporate values and monied elites. On present evidence, there is little possibility that anything like the proposals outlined above will be implemented in time for a smooth transition to sustainability. Daly was right: “evidentally, things still have to get much worse before we will muster the courage and clarity to try to make them better.” 61 We are our own worst enemy. People are naturally both short-sighted and optimistic and thus discount the future; we generally react emotionally/instinctively to things that threaten our social status or political/economic power; those most vested in the status quo therefore vigorously resist significant change; corruption and greed (all but sanctioned by contemporary morality) over - shadow the public interest. Mindless dedication to entrenched beliefs is a particularly powerful blinder to otherwise obvious truths. History shows that the resultant “Woodenheadedness...plays a remarkably large role in gov - ernment. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions (i.e. ideology) while ignoring any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.” 62 Neuroscientists have long recognized the general phenomenon, but the means by which people become so deeply committed to particular concepts has only recently been revealed. In the course of individual development, repeated social, cultural and sensory experiences actually trace a semi-permanent record in the individual’s synaptic circuitry — cultural norms, beliefs and values can acquire a physical presence in the brain. Once entrenched, these neural structures alter the individual’s perception of subsequent experiences. People tend to seek out situations, people and information that reinforce their neural “presets.” Conversely, “when faced with information that does not agree with their internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret, or forget that information.” 632ac – markets goodMarket regulations are key to protecting the environment.Pirie 16 (Madsen, Fmr. Professor of Philosophy @ Hillsdale College in Michigan, MA in History from Edinburgh, PhD in Philosophy from St. Andrews, Economics MPhil in Land Economy from Cambridge. "The market and the environment," October 23, 2016. )The reality is that it is not markets which have failed to protect the environment, but the absence of markets. And while it is possible that markets fail from time to time, it is government failure which is far more frequent and far more damaging. When government tries to substitute its own rule for that of the market, the result is nearly always vastly inferior to that which markets achieve in similar circumstances. Occasionally its rule is disastrous. The tragedy which government controls inflicted in the Socialist countries was not confined to their economies, but to the whole lives of their citizens. Even the environment, for whose support state controls are called upon, suffered more acutely wherever the state’s rule was supreme. In a market situation people conserve valuable resources to control the costs of what they produce. They make trade-offs, they turn to substitutes. They commit capital to develop alternative supplies, and they act in such a way as will protect the value of that investment. Many of the cases of alleged “market failure” are simply cases where there is no market at all, and where none of these behavioural responses are called into play. There are four simple principles which illustrate why the solution to environmental problems is often to be gained by introducing markets, not by abolishing them, and by making them work efficiently, rather than by replacing them. While the four principles in question may not be self evidently true, they have the support of the overwhelming weight of argument and evidence. The first of these principles tells us that: 1. “It is in everyone’s interest to abuse common property.” What is meant by this is simply that if there is communally held property for whose use no price is charged, it is in everyone’s interest to use as much as possible. While a farmer will take good care to control the rate at which his livestock crop his own pasture, there is no such inhibition regarding any common land. On the contrary, it is in each individual’s interest to put the extra sheep or the extra pig onto such land. This is because the benefits derived from such activity accrue to the individual, whereas the costs are borne collectively. Some environmentalists, especially those who were recently Socialists, draw the wrong message from this. If they accept the principle at all, they derive from it the idea that people must be forced somehow to put collective and community values ahead of their own interest, and act in ways which run counter not only to market economics, but to human inclinations. A more rational response would be to assign property values and prices to that which is communally owned, so that market forces will begin to control its use. It was when the prairies were fenced that the land began to acquire value which made it worthwhile for owners to protect it, to improve it, to irrigate it and to conserve it. The open ranges, accessible to all, were conserved by none. A celebrated example in environmental terms concerns the fate of the African elephant. In Kenya, its absolute protection has failed to prevent its numbers diminishing to the point of extinction. Elephants damage the crops and the fences of farmers, and have no value within the law to anyone. To poachers they have a value, and thus society finds itself in a losing battle against poachers investing in modern weapons and equipment. It is not in the interests of farmers or villagers to protect either the elephants or their habitat. The fact that it might be in the interests of mankind does not necessarily impress people struggling to live. In other parts of Africa, notably in Zimbabwe, Botswana and Lesotho, elephants have value. Villagers are allowed to exploit them commercially. They are allowed to sell elephant products, and to permit hunters to kill them. Elephants become precious resources under these circumstances. Villagers will protect their habitat because hunting brings in more dollars than farming would. The local population guards against poachers trying to steal their assets. Hunting is carefully controlled so as not to prejudice the breeding population. Only the expendable ones can be killed. The result is that elephant numbers in these countries have increased even as those in Kenya have declined. Elephants prosper when they are part of the economy, not when they are excluded from it. No-one gives enough effort to protecting the elephant as common property in Kenya; they do to protect their individual property further South. Ironically, the world ban on the ivory trade diminishes the value of elephants, and therefore the effort which will be extended to conserve them. The first principle distils the lesson learned by the tragedy of the Commons. One has only to look at the common areas of public housing estates to see it demonstrated each day. Private property is protected; public property is abused. If environmental resources can have property rights in them assigned to individuals and groups, those individuals and groups will have an economic reason to protect and preserve them. This suggests that nature reserves and national parks might be better protected if the ownership or lease on them were to be assigned to specific groups. Conservation societies might be handed such areas to exploit sensitively, and to finance their conservation by such activity. Those who campaign for animal rights are sometimes distressed to see that those who hunt animals for pleasure are often the best protectors both of the animals and of their habitat. It is the elephant hunters in Zimbabwe who provide the resources to make conservation worthwhile. It is the fishermen in Scotland who make the conservation of the rivers and the fish stocks into an economic activity. It is the grouse shooters who finance the preservation of the moorlands and the protection of a vulnerable species. The pattern is repeated in many places: the hunter has an interest in preserving the habitat of his prey, and is ready to pay for the privilege of joining the chase. Some environmentalists recognize this fact and embrace the hunter as the friend both of the environment and of the species which are hunted. The message is the same: that controlled exploitation which allows play to individual incentives will succeed where exhortations to protect communal property have failed. The second principle which supports the case for market based environmentalism is this: 2. People will always do more willingly that which coincides with their own interest. There are three important ways to motivate people. They can be summarized as exhortation, sticks and carrots. Exhortation means telling people what they ought to do and trying to persuade them to do it. It tends to be ineffective. People try to cheat on it when they are not being observed. They prefer to follow their own interests, even though they are fully aware of what they “ought” to do. The pressure of social disapproval is not strong enough, particularly when it does not come from their own peer group but from what is perceived of as a self-appointed elite. People can be motivated to change their behaviour by punishment or by the threat of it, but they do not like it. The prospect of heavy fines or imprisonment will persuade people to change their behaviour, but people are reluctant to vote this upon themselves in a democratic society, and legislators who follow this route are at risk. It only works if the chances of apprehension are high. If people can break the law covertly with impunity, a certain percentage will do so. In practice this means that where punishment is used to coerce social behaviour, it must be accompanied by improved surveillance and law enforcement. This can make it even more unpopular, as well as very expensive. The imposition of fines upon polluters might work, but the fines have to be approved by the legislature, and the polluters have to be caught. In practice the coercive use of law to protect the environment can involve a panoply of bureaucrats and inspectors to implement the policy, and can impose huge burdens on legitimate businesses as they seek to comply with the minutiae of the regulatory rule. The price is so high that legislators think twice before stepping out along that road. The punishment route also leads to social divisions, as some elements in society attempt to impose laws upon others to restrict their freedom and to punish them. The use of incentives (“carrots” as opposed to “sticks”) is more popular and more effective. By offering tangible individual rewards attached to social goals, people can be motivated to feel that the communal aim is also in their own interest. People in Britain were told that the public would willingly pay more for a cleaner environment. Indeed, they told pollsters the same. Yet the consumption of unleaded petrol remained at near zero until the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson, exempted it from a tax increase on leaded petrol. When it became 10 pence cheaper per gallon, sales took off to the point where it soon dominated the market. The individual interest had been made to coincide with the social goal. This suggests that instead of concentrating upon an attempt to ban activities which are perceived to be unfriendly to the environment, we should be concentrating on the provision of incentives for those activities which are friendlier. Market economists have developed a range of mechanisms through which this can be achieved. Instead of mandating the emission of each polluter by law, for example, the local government can set the maximum pollution it will accept, and sell permits up to that level. The cost of the permits makes it worthwhile for manufacturers to develop low emission processes which will need less permits. More efficient firms can sell their unused permits to other producers. On a more general note, non market controls tend to be “process driven,” meaning that producers are required by law to adopt a declared technology, such as catalytic converters, to achieve cleaner emissions. There is little incentive for innovation or the cost saving that efficient inventions can bring. Market based controls will usually be “result driven,” and specify not the technology, but the end result required. It is then left to manufacturers to devise cleverer, cheaper, and more efficient ways of achieving those goals. In the “result driven” system, people are given the incentive to produce new ways of cleaning the environment; in the “process driven” version they are not. The consequence of this second principle is that it is more efficient (and more popular) to achieve a cleaner environment by use of differential taxes, financial incentives and tradable permits than it is by restrictive laws and punishments. When the city of Seattle began charging its residents for garbage collection by volume, instead of at a flat rate, they responded by halving the amount of garbage they put out. It became in their interest to dispense with over-packaged products, to use material efficiently, to compact their trash and to recycle. The result was a much lower use of the local landfill sites. The third of the indicative principles tells us that: 3. If things cost money, people will try to use them efficiently. If something is free, there is no inhibition on the unlimited or wasteful use of it. If forest lands are free, slash and burn is an economic practice. When the land and the trees have to be paid for, there is an incentive to use them wisely. Similarly, when energy is ridiculously cheap people will squander it. If they have to pay a full economic price for it they will try to economize. In this context it is significant that energy use per head went down over the decade of the 1980s. So did the energy used in each unit of production. The price rises at the beginning of the decade almost certainly played a bigger role in this behaviour than did any desire to conserve following environmental messages. When shortages hit, as they occasionally do because of political upheavals or newly discovered uses, there are always pleas for government subsidies, price controls or rationing. None of these is effective. The best solution is to let prices rise, making it efficient for people to develop new ways of using less of the scarce resources. Sometimes it will become economic to develop new supplies, sometimes to develop substitutes, sometimes to use the scarce resource more efficiently. In 1973 it took 140 lbs of aluminium to make 1,000 drink cans. Now it takes 36 lbs. The reason for the difference is that the price of aluminium makes it worth saving, and worth investing in the innovative technology which can achieve that end. There are now greater reserves of copper than there were then; this has come about because the price of copper made it worthwhile to develop fibre optic technology to replace copper wires. With less use now anticipated for the copper, the supplies will last longer. Environmentalists, led by Paul Erlich and others, painted a gloom filled picture of resources running out. In fact the operations of the market have prevented that. Price rises have led to the development of new sources and the use of cheaper and more plentiful substitutes. Of the major threatened resources pointed to by Erlich, the price in real terms has gone down since his prediction, indicating that supplies are relatively more plentiful. A celebrated wager offered by Paul Simon to this effect resulted in Erlich paying out a decade later. To encourage conservation we should be attempting to have resources priced at genuine market levels, rather than supported by price controls or subsidies. We should further attempt to affix realistic prices to some resources which have in the past been allocated too cheaply. Once the costs of resources are fully assigned, users will have an incentive to be more efficient in their use of them. The fourth principle which demonstrates the validity of markets as an aid to the environment is perhaps more contentious, but is no less true for that. It is that: 4. Problems are not created by growth and high technology. They can be solved by growth and high technology. There is an element of Puritanism about some modern environmentalists. They urge us to live more simply and claim that the planet cannot afford any more economic growth. We should all make do with less, we are told, and learn to moderate our ambitions instead of trying to achieve them. There is a primitive appeal to this. Few persons in modern times have not occasionally felt how much simpler life would be if we all lived around campfires and ate berries. The fast pace of today’s life makes a world without cars and skyscrapers seem to be a peaceful world without problems. Indeed, increasing numbers seek a holiday in the wilderness, backpacking along remote trails, or canoeing along virgin rivers. It is the allure of the lotos eaters, who opt out of life’s problems to lie on a beach and daydream. It might be all right for a holiday, but to do it permanently is to opt out of our humanity. The simple life has other problems, and lacks many of the resources to solve them. It is something of a middle class affectation to gaze out from a centrally heated balcony, secure in the comforts of advanced medicine, and say how nice it would be if we all lived more simply once again. This overlooks the fact that it would involve a return to the disease, poverty and degrading toil which characterized that past. Poor people throughout the world do not share that illusion. They seek improvement for themselves and their families, and a betterment of the conditions of life. In any case, the simple life is not exactly eco-friendly. Human beings throughout their several million year history have caused mass animal extinctions wherever they have appeared, and whenever technological advance has made them more efficient. Nor is it necessarily true that the modern world pollutes more. The internal combustion engine exudes a great deal of dirt, but so did the horses it replaced. They fouled our cities with unhealthy excrement in thousands of tons, and the removal of dead horse bodies in their thousands was a significant health hazard. Primitive industries often pollute more than advanced ones. The coal powered industrial revolution blackened our cities and the air of their inhabitants. Both the air above London and the water that flows through it are cleaner than they were at the beginning of the century; so are its streets. It was the relatively backward and low technology industries of the Socialist world which caused most of Europe’s pollution problems. As economies advance and grow, they not only develop the technology for a cleaner environment; they develop the wealth which can pay for it. In the advanced economies now we demand a cleaner and safer environment than our grandparents could afford or achieve. The amount of dirty coal we burn is fast diminishing. New and cleaner sources of energy are replacing old and dirtier ones. Synthetic products are replacing the scarce resources on which our predecessors depended. Economic growth creates the affluence which sets us sufficiently far above the survival line to contemplate luxuries such as a cleaner and more pleasant environment. It is the rich countries of the West which will have to provide the technology and the wealth to clean up some of the environmental problems created by the poorer countries of the East. Cleaning the environment is a significant growth industry in itself, already estimated at more than $200 billion per year. It is more advanced processes which offer us clean production, not the simpler and dirtier methods of former eras. Our automobile engines are cleaner, they use less fossil fuel, and they consist of more recyclable parts than their forerunners. When they are powered by electricity or hydrogen fuel cells they will be even more environmentally efficient. Our power stations emit less pollution than their predecessors. Our manufactured products use less scarce resources and more synthetic substitutes. We produce more food per acre than ever before from our farmland, and therefore we need less of it. All of these positive steps are the products of growth and technology. That growth and that technology are being applied to the solution of our problems; it is not the problems which the absence of the growth and technology would avoid, but the solutions. These four principles illustrate why markets are not the cause of environmental problems, nor the enemy of a clean and unpolluted world. On the contrary, they can give people a direct interest in a cleaner and safer world, and can motivate them to bring it about far more surely and more swiftly than any amount of pious sentiment which exhorts them to act against what they perceive to be their own interest. Markets succeed in motivating people because they work with the grain of human nature, not against it.2ac – warCapitalism solves war on a massive scale – it creates lock-in mechanisms that bind countries together and economically dampens conflict – robust studies Dafoe 14 (Allan Dafoe & Nina Kelsey; assistant professor in political science at Yale & research associate in international economics at Berkeley; Journal of Peace Research, “Observing the capitalist peace: Examining market-mediated signaling and other mechanisms,” )Countries with liberal political and economic systems rarely use military force against each other. This anomalous peace has been most prominently attributed to the ‘democratic peace’ – the apparent tendency for democratic countries to avoid militarized conflict with each other (Maoz & Russett, 1993; Ray, 1995; Dafoe, Oneal & Russett, 2013).More recently, however, scholars have proposed that the liberal peace could be partly (Russett & Oneal, 2001) or primarily (Gartzke, 2007; but see Dafoe, 2011) attributed to liberal economic factors, such as commercial and financial interdependence. In particular, Erik Gartzke, Quan Li & Charles Boehmer (2001), henceforth referred to as GLB, have demonstrated that measures of capital openness have a substantial and statistically significant association with peaceful dyadic relations. Gartzke (2007) confirms that this association is robust to a large variety of model specifications. To explain this correlation, GLB propose that countries with open capital markets are more able to credibly signal their resolve through the bearing of greater economic costs prior to the outbreak of militarized conflict. This explanation is novel and plausible, and resonates with the rationalist view of asymmetric information as a cause of conflict (Fearon, 1995). Moreover, it implies clear testable predictions on evidential domains different from those examined by GLB. In this article we exploit this opportunity by constructing a confirmatory test of GLB’s theory of market-mediated signaling. We first develop an innovative quantitative case selection technique to identify crucial cases where the mechanism of market-mediated signaling should be most easily observed. Specifically, we employ quantitative data and the statistical models used to support the theory we are probing to create an impartial and transparentmeans of selecting cases in which the theory – as specified by the theory’s creators –makes its most confident predictions.We implement three different case selection rules to select cases that optimize on two criteria: (1) maximizing the inferential leverage of our cases, and (2) minimizing selection bias. We examine these cases for a necessary implication of market-mediated signaling: that key participants drew a connection between conflictual events and adverse market movements. Such an inference is a necessary step in the process by which market-mediated costs can signal resolve. For evidence of this we examine news media, government documents, memoirs, historical works, and other sources. We additionally examine other sources, such as market data, for evidence that economic costs were caused by escalatory events. Based on this analysis, we assess the evidence for GLB’s theory of market mediated costly signaling. Our article then considers a more complex heterogeneous effects version of market-mediated signaling in which unspecified scope conditions are required for the mechanism to operate. Our design has the feature of selecting cases in which scope conditions are most likely to be absent. This allows us to perform an exploratory analysis of these cases, looking for possible scope conditions. We also consider alternative potential mechanisms. Our cases are reviewed in more detail in the online appendix.1 To summarize our results, our confirmatory test finds that while market-mediated signaling may be operative in the most serious disputes, it was largely absent in the less serious disputes that characterize most of the sample of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). This suggests either that other mechanisms account for the correlation between capital openness and peace, or that the scope conditions for market-mediated signaling are restrictive. Of the signals that we observed, strategic market-mediated signals were relatively more important than automatic market-mediated signals in the most serious conflicts. We identify a number of potential scope conditions, such as that (1) the conflict must be driven by bargaining failure arising from uncertainty and (2) the economic costs need to escalate gradually and need to be substantial, but less than the expected military costs of conflict. Finally, there were a number of other explanations that seemed present in the cases we examined and could account for the capitalist peace: capital openness is associated with greater anticipated economic costs of conflict; capital openness leads third parties to have a greater stake in the conflict and therefore be more willing to intervene; a dyadic acceptance of the status quo could promote both peace and capital openness; and countries seeking to institutionalize a regional peace might instrumentally harness the pacifying effects of liberal markets. The correlation: Open capital markets and peace The empirical puzzle at the core of this article is the significant and robust correlation noted by GLB between high levels of capital openness in both members of a dyad and the infrequent incidence of militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and wars between the members of this dyad (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). The index of capital openness (CAPOPEN) is intended to capture the ‘difficulty states face in seeking to impose restrictions on capital flows (the degree of lost policy autonomy due to globalization)’ (Gartzke & Li, 2003: 575). CAPOPEN is constructed from data drawn from the widely used IMF’s Annual Reports on Exchange Arrangements and Exchange Controls; it is a combination of eight binary variables that measure different types of government restrictions on capital and currency flow (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 407). The measure of CAPOPEN starts in 1966 and is defined for many countries (increasingly more over time). Most of the countries that do not have a measure of CAPOPEN are communist.2 GLB implement this variable in a dyadic framework by creating a new variable, CAPOPENL, which is the smaller of the two dyadic values of CAPOPEN. This operationalization is sometimes referred to as the ‘weak-link’ specification since the functional form is consonant with a model of war in which the ‘weakest link’ in a dyad determines the probability of war. CAPOPENL has a negative monotonic association with the incidence of MIDs, fatal MIDs, and wars (see Figure 1).3 The strength of the estimated empirical association between peace and CAPOPENL, using a modified version of the dataset and model from Gartzke (2007), is comparable to that between peace and, respectively, joint democracy, log of distance, or the GDP of a contiguous dyad (Gartzke, 2007: 179; Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 412). In summary, CAPOPENL seems to be an important and robust correlate of peace. The question of why specifically this correlation exists, however, remains to be answered. The mechanism: Market-mediated signaling? Gartzke, Li & Boehmer (2001) argue that the classic liberal account for the pacific effect of economic interdependence – that interdependence increases the expected costs of war – is not consistent with the bargaining theory of war (see also Morrow, 1999). GLB argue that ‘conventional descriptions of interdependence see war as less likely because states face additional opportunity costs for fighting. The problem with such an account is that it ignores incentives to capitalize on an opponent’s reticence to fight’ (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001: 400.)4 Instead, GLB (see also Gartzke, 2003; Gartzke & Li, 2003) argue that financial interdependence could promote peace by facilitating the sending of costly signals. As the probability of militarized conflict increases, states incur a variety of automatic and strategically imposed economic costs as a consequence of escalation toward conflict. Those states that persist in a dispute despite these costs will reveal their willingness to tolerate them, and hence signal resolve. The greater the degree of economic interdependence, the more a resolved country could demonstrate its willingness to suffer costs ex ante to militarized conflict. Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s mechanism implies a commonly perceived costly signal before militarized conflict breaks out or escalates: if market-mediated signaling is to account for the correlation between CAPOPENL and the absence of MIDs, then visible market-mediated costs should occur prior to or during periods of real or potential conflict (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). Thus, the proposed mechanism should leave many visible footprints in the historical record. This theory predicts that these visible signals must arise in any escalating conflict, involving countries with high capital openness, in which this mechanism is operative Clarifying the signaling mechanism Gartzke, Li & Boehmer’s signaling mechanism is mostly conceptualized on an abstract, game-theoretic level (Gartzke, Li & Boehmer, 2001). In order to elucidate the types of observations that could inform this theory’s validity, we discuss with greater specificity the possible ways in which such signaling might occur. A conceptual classification of costly signals The term signaling connotes an intentional communicative act by one party directed towards another. Because the term signaling thus suggests a willful act, and a signal of resolve is only credible if it is costly, scholars have sometimes concluded that states involved in bargaining under incomplete information could advance their interests by imposing costs on themselves and thereby signaling their resolve (e.g. Lektzian & Sprecher, 2007). However, the game-theoretic concept of signaling refers more generally to any situation in which an actor’s behavior reveals information about her private information. In fact, states frequently adopt sanctions with low costs to themselves and high costs to their rivals because doing so is often a rational bargaining tactic on other grounds: they are trying to coerce their rival to concede the issue. Bargaining encounters of this type can be conceptualized as a type of war-of-attrition game in which each actor attempts to coerce the other through the imposition of escalating costs. Such encounters also provide the opportunity for signaling: when states resist the costs imposed by their rivals, they ‘signal’ their resolve. If at some point one party perceives the conflict to have become too costly and steps back, that party ‘signals’ a lack of resolve. Thus, this kind of signaling arises as a by-product of another’s coercive attempts. In other words, costly signals come in two forms: self-inflicted (information about a leader arising from a leader’s intentional or incidental infliction of costs on himself) or imposed (information about a leader that arises from a leader’s response to a rival’s imposition of costs). Additionally, costs may arise as an automatic byproduct of escalation towards military conflict or may be a tool of statecraft that is strategically employed during a conflict. The automatic mechanism stipulates that as the probability of conflict increases, various economic assets will lose value due to the risk of conflict and investor flight. However, the occurrence of these costs may also be intentional outcomes of specific escalatory decisions of the states, as in the case of deliberate sanctions; in this case they are strategic. Finally, at a practical level, we identify three different potential kinds of economic costs of militarized conflict that may be mediated by open capital markets: capital costs from political risk, monetary coercion, and business sanctions. T1ar – sustainabilityCausality for every sustainability warrant and impact is backward.Westerg?rd 18 (Rune, Founder, Board member, Partner, Citec Group, Nordic Logistic Center Vaasa, Institute of Technology, Tekniska institutet, Vaasa, One Planet Is Enough, “Chapter 7 Real and Imagined Threats”, 2018)Threatening reports about our ability to create disasters and even exterminate ourselves are not a new idea. A standard example is the British national economist Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century, who predicted that population growth would come to a halt because of starvation.Malthus calculated that the available food in the world couldn’t feed more than one billion people. He extrapolated the development from a still picture of his own time and couldn’t fathom that food production would increase tremendously thanks to new knowledge and technology.Our present food production is sufficient for seven times as many. Malthus didn’t pay attention to the fact that we live in a continuously changing civilisation, and the same kind of miscalculations are still made today.There are people who have even achieved the status of media superstars by presenting various dystopias and catastrophe scenarios. As early as 1968, Professor Paul Erlichs at Stanford University published the bestseller The Population Bomb, where he predicted that an imminent population explosion would result in hundreds of millions of deaths by starvation in the 1970s and 80s. Basically, he made the same mistake as Malthus, i.e. he treated knowledge and technology as if they were static phenomena.The most widely read environment report in the world, State of the World, was a loud whistle-blower when it was first published in the early 1980s. The Swedish version, Tillst?ndet i v?rlden, was published yearly from 1984 and some years into the 2000s by the Worldwatch Institute Norden; I still have some of the early issues left. This report contains many valuable observations and suggestions, but also several basic analytical mistakes. In other words, it acts as an eye-opener, but it suffers from being tainted by political ideology.Its main weakness is that it doesn’t take the intrinsic driving forces of progress into account.State of the World was translated into most major languages and is, as already mentioned, the world’s most widely read environmental report. It has affected us all, directly or indirectly, through school and media. Even if the Swedish version I refer to was written some years ago, it is still worthy of discussion, firstly because it maintains an appearance of scientific validity, and secondly because it has served as a trendsetter for the general ideology which has been adopted by many later books and reports on the subject at hand. It still lives on as an engraved pattern in our conception of the world.In the report we can, for instance, read the following:A world where human desires and needs are fulfilled without the destruction of natural systems demands an entirely new economic order, founded on the insight that a high consumption level, population growth, and poverty are the powers behind the devastation of the environment.The rich have to reduce their consumption of resources so that the poor can increase their standard of living.The global economy simply works against the attempts to reduce poverty and protect the environment.We stubbornly insist to regard economic growth as synonymous with development, even though it makes the poor even poorer.Even if we up to this point have mainly described the environment revolution in economic terms, it is, in its most fundamental meaning, a social revolution: to change our values.Massive threat scenarios are still presented, for instance in the British scientist Tim Jackson’s book Prosperity Without Growth from 2009, which is one of the most widely read and frequently quoted works in this area. Tim Jackson, who is an economist and professor in sustainable development, explains how we humans are indulging in a ruthless pursuit of new-fangled gadgets in a consumption society running at full speed towards its doom.He also claims that material things in themselves cannot help us to flourish; on the contrary, they may even restrain our welfare. In other words, we cannot build our hopes that the economy, technology or science can help us to escape from the trap of Anthropocene, which has brought us to the brink of an ecological disaster.There are hundreds on books on this theme, and they all agree that the general state of the world is pure misery; everything is getting worse, the resources are being depleted, and that man will soon have destroyed the entire planet. The apparent reason for this, of course, is due to the consumption culture and the present financial system—which exposes man as a greedy, ruthless and ultimately weak creature.This attitude may serve a purpose as an eye-opener. But it is not very credible, and it may even be counterproductive. Of course, we can see a lot of problems ahead of us; but to solve them, we need the correct diagnostics instead of dubious doomsday prophesies.Focus: The ProblemSince the focus of attention is so profoundly fixated on the problems in the climate and environmental debate, the progress already made—and the opportunities at hand—are often overshadowed. The example below will help to illustrate this point:In the year 2014, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three scientists who had invented blue light emitting diodes—a technology that has made high-bright and energy-efficient LED lighting possible. As lighting accounts for 20% of the world’s total electrical consumption, this invention has the potential to radically reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.In an interview made by the major Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter, one of the prize winners, Hiroshi Amano, says the following about energy-efficient, inexpensive and high-bright LED lights: “They are now being used all over the world. Even children in the developing countries can use this lighting to read books and study in the evenings. This makes me very very happy”.Shortly after this announcement, the news headlines declared that LED lighting was a threat to the environment. This statement was based on a report showing that LED lighting could be hazardous to flies and moths, which in turn might disturb the eco system.This is a typical example of how progress pessimists and, not least the media, think and act. In this case, they focused on a potential problem associated with LED lighting, and ignored the tremendous possibilities that the new technology offered to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases and thus spare the eco system (not to mention all the other advantages).Books and reports of the kind mentioned above tell us repeatedly about disasters, threats, problems, collapses and famines. On the other hand, they are notoriously silent about the great improvements actually made—the reduction of extreme poverty (not only as a percentage but also in absolute numbers), longer lifespans, dramatic global progress in education and healthcare, etc.The lack of positive media coverage on the environment means that many people believe that too little is being done, which is quite understandable considering the one-sided nature of the information they are presented with. Alarmist reporting almost always reminds me of pirates: they are unreliable and half their vision is blocked by their eye patches.It is vital that the media not only one-sidedly focus on the misery without presenting the progress made and suggesting constructive courses of action. The quality of our decisions in all respects depends on our knowledge, insight and attitude.Real and Imagined ThreatsMany people are convinced that the climate and environmental problems are growing. It is certainly true that our planet has its limitations, but many of the predictions from alarmist literature have been proven false.In the 1980s, the forest dieback was a frequently discussed subject. To quote the well-known German news magazine Der Spiegel, an “ecological Hiroshima” was imminent. Most experts at the time claimed that a wide-spread forest death seemed unavoidable. Additionally, the general mood of impending doom was augmented by the threat of a nuclear disaster during the cold war. I remember the pessimistic discussions among friends and how frequently the gloomy reports appeared in Swedish and Finnish television. The future of humankind appeared to be depressingly bleak.But the forest dieback never happened.On the contrary, the forest area has been constantly expanding in Europe, even during the entire period when the forest was believed to be dying. Today, only two thirds of the yearly accretion in Europe are cut down, according to the Natural Resource Institute in Finland.There are different opinions as to why the large-scale forest dieback didn’t occur. One theory is that the researchers’ evidence and conclusions had been incomplete and too hasty; the forest was actually never in danger. Others suggest that the emission limitations implemented prevented the disaster.My point is that the environmental catastrophe did not happen.Some other environmental problems, exaggerated or not, that have concerned us during the last decades have also disappeared from the immediate agenda: overpopulation, DDT, the ozone hole, heavy metals, lead poisoning, soot particles, the waste mountain, and the acidification of our lakes. Unfortunately, some environmental problems, like soot particles and waste, still remain in some areas, especially in poorer countries, where there are other, even worse problems that have yet to be resolved.The conclusion is, however, that we and our society in most cases have handled threatening situations quite well. When alarming symptoms are noted, scientists and other experts are summoned, and we act according to their diagnoses. It is no big deal that the diagnoses are sometimes wrong, as long as the side effects are not too severe. The main thing is that we do our best to avoid disasters, and on the whole, humankind has succeeded rather well this far.As individuals, we react very differently to various kinds of threats. The closer and more tangible the threat is, the more violent are the reactions—while distant and invisible symptoms, like the depletion of the ozone layer, concern us less. In the latter cases, we have to trust the scientists’ and later the politicians’ reactions. Does this mean that disasters are avoided thanks to war headlines, threats, and anxiety? I don’t think that this is the most important explanation; rather, it is factual and science-based information that produces effective results. But if exaggerated threat scenarios and reports of misery are needed to inspire the necessary political opinion, acquire research funding and create behavioural changes, we will have to live with that.The most important thing to remember in this context is that the actions shouldn’t cause more harm than the original problem itself. The risk with exaggerated threat and misery reporting is that it may inspire an over-reaction based on misleading diagnoses, or the opposite—a paralysing feeling of helplessness. It is necessary to take threats against the climate and the environment seriously, but not to a degree where our ability to reason and act is blocked by fear or anxiety.Many environmental debaters claim that the fall of the Inca and Roman empires were caused by the same causes that are now threatening our present civilisation—a short-sighted over-exploitation and rape of nature. Easter Island is another popular example. However, in my opinion it is both worthless and irresponsible to judge the world situation of today by copying the outcome of earlier cultural endeavours in history. The inhabitants of the Inca empire and Easter Island didn’t have anything even remotely comparable with the organisations, technology, medicine or general knowledge of today.It would be like comparing a case of appendicitis in the past to a case today. In pre-modern times, it was a fatal condition. In this day and age, it is cured by a simple routine operation.Today, humankind is conscious of the climate changes and other ecological challenges. And we also have the knowledge and resources needed to act.Facts, Propaganda and Hidden MessagesDuring all the years I have followed the development of technology and society, I have repeatedly observed how a mishmash of serious research, political propaganda, and the hidden agendas of individuals have been distributed more or less randomly by the media. There are of course many different kinds of alarmism— everything from well-founded research reports to exaggerated prophesies of doom. It is far from simple to separate the wheat from the chaff.The actions taken against ozone depletion, lead emissions and the toxic chemical, dioxin, are all examples of how research has shown the way to successful results. Today, greenhouse gas emissions top the list of issues deserving our gravest attention, as it is a global phenomenon—just as the depletion of the ozone layer once was.There are also a considerable number of local environmental problems, such as drought, air pollution, forest depletion and overfishing. All of these are real threats that have to be acted upon, even though they are not global.However, I am always disturbed when a single global environmental issue is bundled with an assortment of several local issues, rather like a simplified trademark advertisement for the negative consequences of civilisation. This makes the information abstract and inaccurate, ignoring the fact that different locales require different solutions.Fear and alarmism are natural reactions that once protected us when we were living at the mercy of nature—they are evolutionary relics from our life in the savanna. Today, the same properties can be significant drawbacks.The transition from a primitive, animal-like state to the society we have today must, on the whole, be counted as a great success. But many people regard the same world as over-exploited, depleted, unjust, war-ridden and balancing on the brink of destruction. How can people living in the same epoch have so entirely different views of the world?In the sustainability debate, there is one faction dealing with the natural resources and ecosystems, and another focusing on the redistribution of wealth. There is even a third faction discussing a minimalistic lifestyle; for example, downshifting, with less work and less material welfare.When all these ingredients are mixed without discretion, the result is an anxiety soup that many have choked on. In a situation like that, we cannot expect any constructive initiatives to materialise. Instead, it would be far better to explore, research and discuss each dimension separately.What Is the Real State of the Planet?It is easy to generalise and say that we over-exploit the planet’s resources and pollute the world with our waste. But how many care to examine these statements in detail and ask exactly which resources are over-exploited?? Are fish becoming extinct? It is true that overfishing occurs in many places, which is, of course, unsustainable. However, this is not an unavoidable threat to the world’s total food resources. Fortunately, there are several examples of fish stocks that have either recovered or started to replenish once the fishing effort has been eased.? Is the air being poisoned? Many are convinced that the air we breathe is becoming dirtier all the time. But that isn’t true, at least not in the Western world. From the year 1990, emissions of sulphur dioxide have been reduced by 80%, nitrogen oxides by 44%, volatile organic substances by 55%, and carbon monoxide by 62%. Despite these dramatic improvements, 64% of Europeans believe that pollution is increasing.? Are the forests dying? It is a general belief that the forests in the developed countries are dwindling. But that isn’t true; on the contrary, the wooded areas are expanding. However, the forests are decreasing in the poor countries, where forestry and farming are still major sources of income, as they once were in the industrialised countries.? Are we drowning in waste? There are many who believe that we are surrounded by constantly growing mountains of waste. In the developed countries, the truth is that increasing amounts of waste are being recycled and the landfills are decreasing.? Will there be enough phosphorus? Phosphorus is an important nutrient in farming, extracted from phosphate ore. Many scientists fear that the finite natural resource of phosphate ore will become depleted in the future, which may jeopardise the world’s food supply. But there are already working solutions for this problem, such as by reclaiming phosphorus through digestion residues and sewage sludge. There are also technological solutions for the chemical extraction of phosphorus from polluted water—the remediation of lakes and rainwater by removing phosphorus is already a common procedure. Here we achieve a win-win situation—phosphorus is collected while preventing the eutrophication of lakes.? Will there be enough energy to go around? A common statement is that the earth’s population is too large, and that we consume too much energy with respect to the climate. This is one of those issues where we have to think in terms of symptoms, diagnoses, and medication. The symptoms are there for all to see: climate change.On the other hand, the diagnosis that we consume too much energy is wrong. The correct diagnosis is that we are not using the right technology; i.e. energy efficient power production without harmful emissions. Consequently, the correct statement would be that we consume energy that is produced by technologies that are harmful to the climate. The difference in wording is important. As the first diagnosis is “too high energy consumption”, the remedy will be to use a different medication than a diagnosis based on “the wrong technology”.Alarmist reporting can inspire bad decisions if the statements aren’t systematically reviewed and evaluated. It can also be misguiding to express environmental threats in general terms. Actions must be based on precise specific symptoms with corresponding diagnoses. If the doctor discovers that the patient is lame and suffers from a high fever, it doesn’t help to predict imminent death. Maybe the lameness and the fever have different causes altogether! A successful cure would probably include two different diagnoses with separate medications.Several recent surveys of the general conception of the world have been made— one is Project Ignorance by Gapminder and Novus in Sweden. One of the questions asked was whether CO2 emissions per capita and year had increased or decreased in the world during the last 40 years. The surveyed group was large and representative in order to give a fairly accurate picture of the common opinion.No less than 90% believed that CO2 emissions had increased. The truth is that they haven’t increased at all.It is important that decision makers on all levels learn how to see the wood from the trees. Decisions based on false preconditions can halt technological development, and thus also the development of the economy, welfare, and a healthier environment.The flow of innovations in the climate and environmental areas is accelerating rapidly. This can be seen in the number of improvements that have occurred in recent years, which can be counted in the thousands. Such improvements have to be weighted on the same scale as the problems in this area. That is not to say the problems should be ignored—they need to be acted upon. But they should not be allowed to occupy our brains to the extent that our power to act is paralysed.Is the Notion of Sustainable Technology-Driven Growth Over-Optimistic?The development of a technological society has always been questioned. In the 19th century, critics claimed that the technological revolution would create poverty. In the 1970s, it was generally believed that the forest dieback would cause a disaster. In the 1980s, the acidification of lakes and throwaway mentality of society were regarded as manifestations of the devastating properties of growth and industrialisation. Today, many fear the environmental effects of air travel and the production of electronic devices.There are people who seriously wish to halt economic growth and wind back the clock to the society of the 1960s. They recall this time period as small-scaled and down-to-earth, stress-free and idyllic. But they tend to forget that the refrigerators of that time required 90% more electricity than today, and that our teeth were repaired with mercury fillings instead of plastic. There were no X-ray CT scanners and no medicines against ulcers.In addition, there were many more people living without electricity. There was also more widespread malnutrition, a higher infant mortality, and, in fact, more wars. Cars were fuelled by leaded petrol, and sulphur emissions were 90% higher than today. The acidification of lakes, as well as polluted streams and fields, were serious concerns.1ar – sustainability – climateStudies go aff – decoupling emissions from growth solvesPao 18 (Hsiao-Tien Pao, PhD, Department of Management Science, National Chiao Tung University; Chun-Chih Chen, PhD, Department of Management Science, National Chiao Tung University; “Decoupling strategies: CO emissions, energy resources, and economic growth in 2 the Group of Twenty”, Journal of Cleaner Production, September 2018, DOI: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.09.190) *Brackets added which provide the full version of each of these abbreviations: Hydro = hydropower; CKC = carbon kuznets curve; Ren = new renewable energy consumption; FF = fossil fuels energy consumption; 3Es = environment, energy, and economy, Nuc = nuclear energy consumption, TCE = total clean energy consumption, EG = economic growthThis study selects the G20 as a representative sample of global economic development to assess the CKC [carbon Kuznets curve], the 3Es dynamics, substitutability between Ren [new renewable energy consumption]/Hydro [hydropower] /Nuc [nuclear energy consumption] and FF [fossil fuels energy consumption], and thus to propose decoupling strategies for sustainable development. We extend the literature on the emission-growth nexus in the case of G20 to the 3Es dynamics by examining the rule of Ren [new renewable energy consumption]/Hydro [hydropower] /Nuc [nuclear energy consumption] and FF [fossil fuels energy consumption]. The descriptive statistical analysis suggests the absolute decoupling effect seems to have occurred with the drop in related environmental pressure and the continuation of economic growth. Within a panel EEO model framework, the per capita TCE [total clean energy consumption] /FF [fossil fuels energy consumption] elasticity of demand for carbon emissions is -0.021/1.04. The existence of the CKC [carbon kuznets curve] is consistent with the results of the descriptive statistical analysis. The results of panel VECM models support the Hydroled and Nuc-led growth hypotheses and the feedback hypothesis between EG [economic growth] and Ren [new renewable energy consumption]/FF and suggest the potential substitutability/symbiosis between Ren/Hydro and FF as evidenced by the negative/positive bidirectional causal relationship between them. Also, note that the use of nuclear energy is a key means of dealing with carbon emissions as evidenced by the positive unidirectional causal relationship running from emissions to Nuc [nuclear energy consumption]. Based on the growing global awareness of environmental protection, these interdependencies between 3Es are not surprising. That provides the main directions of each in the design of energy and energy conservation policies to ensure a diversified, sustainable energy consumption mix and a decoupling of environmental pressure from EG [economic growth]. Policymakers can introduce a wide range of complementary strategies for renewable energy and nuclear energy to improve energy efficiency and safety, reduce CO2 intensity, maintain stable economic growth, and implement the 2030 sustainable development agenda, thus lead the world to absolute decoupling. Absolute decoupling is the only way to achieve a truly sustainable future.Only modernization can solve warmingPollin 18 (Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, “De-Growth vs A Green New Deal”, New Left Review, 112, July/Aug 2018, )Problems with degrowthAs I emphasized at the outset, degrowth proponents have made valuable contributions in addressing many of the untenable features of economic growth. But on the specific issue of climate change, degrowth does not provide anything like a viable stabilization framework. Consider some very simple arithmetic. Following the ipcc, we know that global co2 emissions need to fall from their current level of 32 billion tons to 20 billion tons within twenty years. If we assume that, following a degrowth agenda, global gdp contracts by 10 per cent over the next two decades, that would entail a reduction of global gdp four times greater than during the 2007–09 financial crisis and Great Recession. In terms of co2 emissions, the net effect of this 10 percent gdp contraction, considered on its own, would be to push emissions down by precisely 10 percent—that is, from 32 to 29 billion tons. It would not come close to bringing emissions down to 20 billion tons by 2040.Clearly then, even under a degrowth scenario, the overwhelming factor pushing emissions down will not be a contraction of overall gdp but massive growth in energy efficiency and clean renewable-energy investments—which, for accounting purposes, will contribute towards increasing gdp—along with similarly dramatic cuts in fossil-fuel production and consumption, which will register as reducing gdp. Moreover, the immediate effect of any global gdp contraction would be huge job losses and declining living standards for working people and the poor. During the Great Recession, global unemployment rose by over 30 million. I have not seen a convincing argument from a degrowth advocate as to how we could avoid a severe rise in mass unemployment if gdp were to fall by twice as much.These fundamental problems with degrowth are illustrated by the case of Japan, which has been a slow-growing economy for a generation now, even while maintaining high per capita incomes. Herman Daly himself describes Japan as being ‘halfway to becoming a steady-state economy already, whether they call it that or not.’footnote22 Daly is referring to the fact that, between 1996 and 2015, gdp growth in Japan averaged an anemic 0.7 per cent per year. This compares with an average Japanese growth rate of 4.8 per cent per year for the 30-year period 1966 to 1995. Nevertheless, as of 2017, Japan remained in the ranks of the large, upper-income economies, with average gdp per capita at about $40,000. Yet despite the fact that Japan has been close to a no-growth economy for twenty years, its co2 emissions remain among the highest in the world, at 9.5 tons per capita. This is 40 per cent below the figure for the United States, but it is four times higher than the average global level of 2.5 tons per capita that must be achieved if global emissions are to drop by 40 per cent by 2040. Moreover, Japan’s per capita emissions have not fallen at all since the mid-1990s. The reason is straightforward: as of 2015, 92 per cent of Japan’s total energy consumption comes from burning oil, coal and natural gas.Thus, despite ‘being halfway to becoming a steady-state economy’, Japan has accomplished virtually nothing in advancing a viable climate-stabilization path. The only way it will make progress is to replace its existing, predominantly fossil-fuel energy system with a clean-energy infrastructure. At present, hydro power supplies 5 per cent of Japan’s total energy needs, and other renewable sources only 3 per cent. Overall then, like all large economies—whether they are growing rapidly or not at all—Japan needs to embrace the Green New Deal.1ar – sustainability – financeFinancialization is stabilizing – speculation socializes and lessens the impact to risk.Konings 18 (Martijn, Professor of Political Economy and Social Theory, Associate Dean (International), “A CRITIQUE OF THE CRITIQUE OF FINANCE”, , February 7, 2018)If there is one theme that unites the various critiques of contemporary finance, it is the emphasis on its speculative character. Financial growth is said to be driven not by the logic of efficient markets, but rather by irrational sentiment, “animal spirits” that do not respect fundamental values.Emphasizing the role of volatility in contemporary capitalism (evident at the time of writing, as the stock market is experiencing a downturn) is important as an antidote to notions of market efficiency and equilibrium. But it is a mistake to think that it provides a sufficient basis for effective critique. Predictions regarding the limits or collapse of neoliberal finance have simply not enjoyed a good track record. Over and over, the contemporary financial system has proven capable of sustaining higher levels of speculative activity than anticipated. This has certainly been true of the past decade. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason is my attempt to make sense of this—that is, to understand what might be wrong or missing in the existing heterodox critique of speculation, and to advance a more accurate understanding of the role of uncertainty, risk, and speculation in contemporary capitalism.At the heart of the critique of speculation we find a distinction between real and fictitious forms of value. Although “essentialist” (or “foundationalist”) modes of explanation have been under fire across the social sciences for several decades now, when it comes to the critique of finance they have had considerable staying-power: without a notion of real value, it often seems, we lose any objective standard against which to assess the speculative gyrations of capitalist markets.At the heart of the critique of speculation we find a distinction between real and fictitious forms of value.Capital and Time asks what kind of critical theory we might develop if we bracket the anxious attachment to a notion of fundamental value. To that end, it turns to the work of economist Hyman Minsky. Although Minsky has been popularized precisely as a critic of speculation, he in fact insisted that almost all value judgments and investments were to some degree speculative—their success or failure would be determined in an unknown future. For him, the key economic question is how order emerges in a world that offers no guarantees, how more or less stable standards and norms arise amidst uncertainty.Of course, the “endogenous” origin of financial standards is a well-rehearsed theme in heterodox economics—indeed, it is a staple of the “post-Keynesian” literature that claims Minsky’s legacy. But such perspectives have never been able to break with the idea that financial stability is at its core dependent on external interventions that suppress speculative impulses. For Minsky, however, this is to miss the point about endogeneity. To his mind, there was no clear dividing line between financial practices and their governance: central banks and other public authorities are no more able to see into the future and to transcend uncertainty than private investors are.Minsky was therefore highly skeptical about official claims of discretionary precision management: financial governance is always embroiled in the very risk logic that it is charged with managing. That also means that financial policy can appear quite ordinary, even banal: at the heart of capitalist financial management is a logic of backstopping and bailout that responds to the possibility that the failure of an institution may take down wider financial structures.Financial governance is always embroiled in the very risk logic that it is charged with managing.The stability of the post-New Deal financial system is often attributed to the Glass-Steagall separation of the stock market and commercial banking. But Minsky tended to view Glass-Steagall as one of several measures to direct bank credit away from the stock market towards other, no less speculative ends, notably consumer and mortgage financing. To his mind, the stability of the post-war period derived rather from the creation of an extensive financial safety net (which included, for instance, deposit insurance, which removed the rationale behind bank runs) that served to socialize risk.This institutional arrangement turned out to have a significant drawback: a pattern of chronic inflation emerged that, by the late 1970s, was widely perceived as a major problem. Minsky’s lack of faith in the possibility of cleanly staged external interventions led him to feel that that there was no real way out of this predicament. Monetarist doctrines, ascendant during the 1970s under the influence of Milton Friedman, relied on exactly the belief in an arbitrarily defined monetary standard that Minsky rejected as na?ve. Muddling through, it seemed, was the price of avoiding another financial crash and depression.The Volcker shock of 1979 changed this dynamic in a way that Minsky had not foreseen but that is comprehensible when seen through the lens he provided us with. Paul Volcker looked to monetarism not as a means to enforce an external limit or standard on the financial system, but as a politically expedient way to break with accommodating policies and to proactively engage the endogenous dynamics of finance. The consequences of the Volcker shock were predictable (which is exactly why the Federal Reserve had been reluctant to pursue similar policies in previous years): inflation gave way to instability and crisis. Inflation was conquered as jobs were lost and wages stagnated. And, far from money being returned to its neutral exchange function, opportunities for speculation multiplied.The American state was never going to sit idly by as the financial system returned to dynamics of boom and bust: when instability took the form of systemic threats, authorities would bail out the institutions that had overextended themselves. Of course, Volcker would not have been able to predict the specific features of the too-big-to-fail regime as it emerged during the 1980s and evolved subsequently; but the very point of the neoliberal turn in financial management that he had overseen was to create a context where risk could be socialized in ways that were more selective and therefore did not entail generalized inflation.The inflation of asset values that has been such a marked feature of the past four decades has always been premised centrally on the willingness of authorities to view the “moral hazard” of the too-big-to-fail logic as a policy instrument—even if they may have decried it officially as a regrettable corruption of market principles. Spectacular bailouts, mundane policies to protect the key nodes of the payment systems, the “Greenspan put”, the different iterations of quantitative easing—these are all variations on that basic too-important-to-fail logic.Existing critical perspectives tend to view crisis and the need for bank bailouts as manifesting the essential incoherence of neoliberal finance, its lack of solid foundations and the irrationality of speculation. Capital and Time breaks with such moralistic assessments. The way deepening inequality and the speculative growth of asset values continue to feed off each other is troubling for any number of reasons, but there is nothing inherently “unsustainable” about it—the process does not have a natural or objective limit.At this point in time, the critique of speculation does little more than lend credibility to official discourses that present crises as preventable and bailouts as one-off, never-to-be-repeated interventions. In that way, it prevents us from critically relating to a neoliberal reality that has been shaped to its core by the speculative exploitation of risk and uncertainty, and in which regressive risk socialization serves as the everyday logic of financial governance.1ar – collapse badALL alternatives to democratic capitalism collapse into fascism – that fails and turns every neg impact Meltzer 9 (Allan Meltzer, Professor of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Business, Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, First Recipient of the AEI Irving Kristol Award, and Chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory Commission, March 12, 2009, “Why Capitalism?” 2008-2009 Bradley Lecture Series, )Alternatives to Capitalism Critics of capitalism emphasize their dislike of greed and self-interest. They talk a great deal about social justice and fairness, but they do not propose an acceptable alternative to achieve their ends. The alternatives that have been tried are types of Socialism or Communism or other types of authoritarian rule. Anti-capitalist proposals suffer from two crippling drawbacks. First, they ignore the Kantian principle about human imperfection. Second, they ignore individual differences. In place of individual choice under capitalism, they substitute rigid direction done to achieve some proclaimed end such as equality, fairness, or justice. These ends are not precise and, most important, individuals differ about what is fair and just. In practice, the rulers' choices are enforced, often using fear, terror, prison, or other punishment. The history of the twentieth century illustrates how enforcement of promised ends became the justification for deplorable means. And the ends were not realized. Transferring resource allocation decisions to government bureaus does not eliminate crime, greed, self-dealing, conflict of interest, and corruption. Experience tells us these problems remain. The form may change, but as Kant recognized, the problems continue. Ludwig von Mises recognized in the 1920s that fixing prices and planning resource use omitted an essential part of the allocation problem. Capitalism allocates by letting relative prices adjust to equal the tradeoffs expressed by buyers' demands. Fixing prices eliminates the possibility of efficient allocation and replaces consumer choice with official decisions. Some gain, but others lose; the losers want to make choices other than those that are dictated to them. Not all Socialist societies have been brutal. In the nineteenth century, followers of Robert Owen, the Amana people, and many others chose a Socialist system. Israeli pioneers chose a collectivist system, the kibbutz. None of these arrangements produced sustainable growth. None survived. All faced the problem of imposing allocative decisions that satisfied the decision-making group, sometimes a majority, often not. Capitalism recognizes that where individual wants differ, the market responds to the mass; minorities are free to develop their favored outcome. Walk down the aisles of a modern supermarket. There are products that satisfy many different tastes or beliefs. Theodor Adorno was a leading critic of postwar capitalism as it developed in his native Germany, in Europe, and in the United States. He found the popular culture vulgar, and he distrusted the workers' choices. He wanted a Socialism that he hoped would uphold the values he shared with other intellectuals. Capitalism, he said, valued work too highly and true leisure too little. He disliked jazz, so he was not opposed to Hitler's ban in the 1930s. But Adorno offered no way of achieving the culture he desired other than to impose his tastes on others and ban all choices he disliked. This appealed to people who shared his view. Many preferred American pop culture whenever they had the right to choose. Capitalism permits choices and the freedom to make them. Some radio stations play jazz, some offer opera and symphonies, and many play pop music. Under capitalism, advertisers choose what they sponsor, and they sponsor programs that people choose to hear or watch. Under Socialism, the public watches and hears what someone chooses for them. The public had little choice. In Western Europe change did not come until boats outside territorial limits offered choice. The Templeton Foundation recently ran an advertisement reporting the answers several prominent intellectuals gave to the question: "Does the free market corrode moral character?" Several respondents recognized that free markets operate within a political system, a legal framework, and the rule of law. The slave trade and slavery became illegal in the nineteenth century. Before this a majority enslaved a minority. This is a major blot on the morality of democratic choice that public opinion and the law eventually removed. In the United States those who benefitted did not abandon slave owning until forced by a war. Most respondents to the Templeton question took a mixed stand. The philosopher John Gray recognized that greed and envy are driving forces under capitalism, but they often produce growth and raise living standards so that many benefit. But greed leads to outcomes like Enron and WorldCom that critics take as a characteristic of the system rather than as a characteristic of some individuals that remains under Socialism. Michael Walzer recognized that political activity also corrodes moral character, but he claimed it was regulated more effectively. One of the respondents discussed whether capitalism was more or less likely to foster or sustain moral abuses than other social arrangements. Bernard-Henri Levy maintained that alternatives to the market such as fascism and Communism were far worse. None of the respondents mentioned Kant's view that mankind includes a range of individuals who differ in their moral character. Institutional and social arrangements like democracy and capitalism influence the moral choices individuals make or reject. No democratic capitalist country produced any crimes comparable to the murders committed by Hitler's Germany, Mao's China, or Lenin and Stalin's Soviet Union. As Lord Acton warned, concentrated power corrupts officials. Some use concentrated power to impose their will. Some allow their comrades to act as tyrants. Others proclaim that ends such as equality justify force to control opposition. Communism proclaimed a vision of equality that it never approached. It was unattainable because individuals differ about what is good. And what is good to them and for them is not the same as what is socially desirable to critics of capitalism. Kant's principle warns that utopian visions are unattainable. Capitalism does not offer a vision of perfection and harmony. Democratic capitalism combines freedom, opportunity, growth, and progress with restrictions on less desirable behavior. It creates societies that treat men and women as they are, not as in some utopian vision. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper showed why utopian visions become totalitarian. All deviations from the utopian ideal must be prevented. The Enrons, WorldComs, and others of that kind show that dishonest individuals rise along with honest individuals. Those who use these examples to criticize capitalism do not use the same standard to criticize all governments as failed arrangements when a Watergate or bribery is uncovered. Nor do they criticize government when politicians promise but do not produce or achieve. We live after twenty-five to forty years of talk about energy, education, healthcare, and drugs. Governments promise and propose, but little if any progress is visible on these issues. 1ar – alt failstransition failsArias-Maldonado 13 (Manuel Arias-Maldonado is a political theorist focusing on environmental politics writ large, PhD in Political Science, lecturer in political science @ the University of Malaga, He has researched at Keele University, Oxford University, and the University of Siena, “The Limits to Post-Growth,” ECPR General Conference, Bordeaux, Section: Environmental Politics Panel: Post-growth Politic, 4-7 September 2013, ) Moreover, an adaptation to climate change base d on the idea of well-being cannot succeed without economic growth. Can we really “manage without gr owth” (Victor 2008)? Tackling climate change and adapting to it is costly . In this sense, neither a program for ruralisation nor the low energy proposals aimed to scale back society into a network of self-suffici ent communities are realistic (see Trainer 2010). Rich societies are better equipped to assimilate climate change impacts than poor ones. As Nordhaus and Shellenberg note, environmentalism has always seen the economy as the cause rather than as the solution to ecological problems (Nordhaus and Shel lenberg 2007). But, as a historic perspective shows, we can only be green while being rich. Of course, neither the curre nt understanding of economic growth nor the actual measurement of GDP should be exempt of criticism or amendment – changes can and ought to be made in order to reflect the environmental cost of economic activities. Yet the temptati on to design people’s well- being in a particular or detailed way shoul d be avoided. It is rather a set of objective conditions of living under which subjective life-plans can be individually pursued th at should be linked to climate change adaptation and hence to sustainability. For those c onditions, which can be gene rally equated with the standards of current advanced societies, to be met, economic growth will remain necessary and desirable. On the other hand, there is the issue of popular con sent and democratic legitimacy. As Berners Lee and Duncan (2013: 119) admit, the lack of economic growth can be very problematic, and the public may as well reject significant changes in their way of life. An additional problem with the post-growth paradigm has to do with the role of the market and the relationship between planning and innovation. This is a co mplex subject that cannot be dealt with here as it should, but a few remarks are in order. Leaving all ot her considerations aside, it does not seem contentious to affirm that innovation – technological, social, econom ic – is needed for tackling climate change. And that means that the market is needed to test and find new solutions for socioeconomic and environmental problems. For all the controversies that, predictably, surround it, fracking would be a perfect example of that. In this respect, post-growth proponents are bot h vague and unrealistic. On th e one hand, they tend to make grand statements with which a general agreement is easy, but behind which no clear direction is to be found. Thus Tim Jackson: “The point is not to reject novelty and embrace tradition. Rather it is to seek a proper balance between these vital dimensions of what it means to be human” (Jackson 2009: 203). What does that exactly mean? It is hard to say. On his part, John Barry (2012) sees economic growth, as well as innovation, as something that is not to be abandon ed outright, but as a process to be “consciously and politically regulated”. Moreover: “A republican political economy is one in whic h satisfying consumer preferences or achieving maximum economic growth, is less important than ensuring that these objectives are subject to political deliberation and decision, and do not undermine the non-economic objectives related to distinctly” (Barry 2012: 239). Thus a more practicable alternative, together with a more motivational approach, must replace “apocalyptic negativity” if behavioural change is to succeed (Schmidt 2005, Anderson 2010: 979). An obvious reason for that is that most of the people still want to live well, something that a world based on communities or even bioregions does not seem to provide. In post-grow th proposals, people are expected to undergo some kind of transfiguration in which they forget their current selves and become cooperative, eco-friendly, altruistic people that give up their current standard s of living and embrace sufficiency. Both collectively and personally: a post-growth environmentalism cannot suppress things such as individual aspiration, opportunity and choice, without losing ground among the public. Instead, it has to build upon them. Whereas sustainability makes change necessary , wellbeing makes it desirable (Porritt 2005: xv). This demands a reconsideration of the traditional green att itude to economic growth, since growth, albeit one of a corrected character, is indispensable to sustainability: a stagnant societ y is an absurd dream. In short, sustainability must invoke a conception of the good life, instead of being presen ted as the only way out of a desperate situation. It may sound frivolous, but sustainability must be cool if it is to gain the citizens consent. A further reason to abandon the rhetoric of doom is that, as the gloominess of the prognosis is questionable, so is any eco-political theory predicated on it (Hayw ood 2004: 7). The very idea that socionatural relations stand now in a critical situation can actually be questioned. That is why reframing climate change – freeing it from the rhetoric of doom and radical change and incorporating it into a narrative of social refinement – is a better alternative than vindicating a uncertain transition to nowhere. ................
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