Verbatim Mac - The Debate Intensive
Elections DA1NC UQBiden is leading now, but victory isn’t certainTodd 7/10 ([Chuck, Mark Murray, Carrie Dann, Melissa Holzberg, reporters for NBC News) “Trump could still bounce back, but it looks less likely than ever.” NBC News. July 10, 2020. ] MNIf you’re a Republican, there are two possibilities for what happens between now and November, given the rough poll numbers and gloomy overall political environment.One, President Trump will inevitably claw his way back into contention, rallying Republicans who don’t want to lose power and softening Joe Biden’s support — a la what happened in the weeks after that disastrous “Access Hollywood” video in 2016.Or two, the numbers will either stay the same or even get worse for the GOP — since Trump is now the incumbent, not the challenger, amid a pandemic that has now killed almost 135,000 Americans and brought the U.S. unemployment rate into the double digits.It’s that second scenario that should scare the heck out of GOP strategists: What if a majority of the electorate already has given up on Trump, like what happened to George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina and Iraq, or Jimmy Carter after the Iran-hostage crisis?“As one strategist who has been doing extensive focus group work with suburban voters tells us, ‘they are mostly done with Trump,’” the Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter?wrote earlier this week.Even the GOP messaging isn’t breaking through. A?Monmouth pollout this week found that 77 percent of American adults believe the phrase “defund the police” means to change the way police departments operate — not eliminate them entirely, as Team Trump has been messaging.And here are the latest poll numbers out this morning: 67 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus and race relations, per an?ABC/Ipsos survey.If the 2020 presidential contest doesn’t end up changing, we may look back at the last two months — Trump suggesting ingesting bleach; the president holding the Bible at St. John’s church; the Tulsa rally; and the spike in cases in Arizona, Florida and Texas — as being the beginning of the end of this race.Biden is leading now, but it’s close – Enten 7/13 [(Harry, Senior Writer and Analysis, CNN Politics) “Forecast: The race between Biden and Trump is within the true margin of error” CNN. July 13, 2020. ] MNThere is little doubt that former Vice President Joe Biden is?ahead in the polls right now. He regularly posts double-digit advantages nationally and is ahead in the key swing states. If the election were held today, Biden would almost certainly be elected president.?But the election is not being held today. It's being held in a little less than four months. That's a lot of time.?And given the size of Biden's lead (clear, but not a blowout), the race can definitely shift enough to characterize this race to be within the?true margin of error.?To be clear, I don't mean that Biden and Trump have similar chances of winning -- far from it. Biden is clearly the favorite.?What I mean is that people often don't realize what odds actually mean. Something may not have a likely chance of occurring, but it's quite conceivable that it does happen.?Whenever you see a poll published, you'll see the result comes with?a margin of error. The margin of error essentially means that for a given population, 95% of the time a poll's result will come within the margin of error of the true value. There's a 2.5% (1 out of 40) chance a result will fall outside the margin of error on the low side, and a 2.5% (1 out of 40) chance a result will fall outside the margin of error on the high side.?It's not shocking at all to receive a poll result back that's outside the margin of error. It's even less surprising when a poll comes in within the margin of error of the other results, though at the high or low end of the polling results published.?Borrowing from this margin-of-error concept, there's literally no reputable forecast I know of that suggests that Biden's advantage is outside that 95% confidence interval when projecting forward to November.?You can see how a race can change from this point forward by looking at history.?Earlier?this month, I examined the 13 elections featuring incumbent presidents since 1940. I noted that in two of the 13 presidential contests, the difference between where the national polls were at this point and the eventual margin was greater than 10 points.?That's more than the current margin between Biden and Trump. Two out of 13 times is well more than 2.5%. One of 13 times is plenty more than that.?If you were to expand to?contests without incumbents, you will find even more examples of big swings. I wrote about the 1988 election a few weeks ago. The difference between the polls at this point and the election result (Republican George H.W. Bush by 8 points) and the polls in mid-July (Democrat Michael Dukakis by 5 points) was double digits.?This historical study doesn't even take into account that Trump likely has a better shot of winning the Electoral College than the popular vote.Importantly, you can look at a lot of different odds makers and reach conclusions similar to mine.The?betting markets, which I believe are overestimating Trump's chances, give him about a 2-out-of-5 (40%) chance of winning a second term. (It should be noted that betting markets gave Bob Dole a similar chance of winning?in 1996,?when he faced a deficit similar to Trump's now. Dole lost.)Jack Kersting's?forecast, which I've cited before, puts Trump's chance of winning at about 1-in-6 (just north of 15%).?There's also?the Economist forecast, which gives Trump about a 1-in-10 (around 10%) chance of winning.There are clearly differences among these odds. The similarity across all of them is that Biden is ahead, though not by enough to have a lead that can be considered anywhere close to being outside the true margin of error.The worst result for Trump is having about a 1-in-10 chance. His shot would need to be below 1-in-40 to be considered outside the true margin of error.?Indeed, we still have a lot of events and potential game changers ahead of us.?There are the conventions, which sometimes (though not recently) have?really shaken?things up historically.?We have an economy that seems to be more?prone to shocks?than usual, which could shift voter opinions.?Additionally, the coronavirus pandemic is bad right now, but there's no real way of knowing how things will be when voters are casting their ballots. Perhaps the case rate will be lower. Maybe there will be better treatments. We just don't know.?Speaking of the coronavirus, it feels like this campaign isn't even really underway. Usually, a presidential campaign is the main news story by this point. But with the pandemic and the protests against police brutality, it's been the number three story over the last month.?The campaign will eventually become the number one story. With a compressed time frame, we may see bigger jumps later in the campaign than we're used to in modern campaigns.?The bottom line is that unless the economy totally falls apart or Biden starts leading by closer to 20 points than 10 points, this election will never be anywhere close to being safely in his corner at this early juncture.Biden leads now, but Trump has a chance of re-electionStrauss 6/24 [(Daniel, Senior Political reporter for Guardian US.) “Trump is in a precarious position for re-election – but he still has a chance.” The Guardian. June 24, 2020. ] TDIIf Donald Trump wins the 2020 election and returns to the White House it won’t be by a landslide. And if he’s going to win at all he will need the US economy to rebound, to see suburban voters swing back in his direction, and overwhelm voters with a sense of optimism about another term under Trump.That’s the verdict of about a dozen Republican veteran political strategists and operatives spoken to by the Guardian. Those priorities underscore the precarious situation the US president finds himself in. Most national and statewide polls show the former vice-president Joe Biden leading Trump, often by comfortable margins.The numerous challenges of 2020 have hit the president hard. He has struggled to offer consistent leadership on the coronavirus and been lambasted for mishandling a pandemic that has killed more than 120,000 Americans. The resulting economic crisis has seen more than 40 million people make unemployment claims. He’s also received severe criticism in responding to protests over the death of George Floyd, an African American man who died in police custody, and suffered the usual political scandals, such as a roasting by former top adviser John Bolton.None of that, though, means Trump has no chance of re-election, these strategists said.Contrary to the polls and the tumbling economic indicators,?some Republicans?across the country have shown a strong sense of optimism that the conditions are ripe for a repeat of Trump’s surprise victory in 2016.Iran Link - Plan = PopularThe plan is popular – Americans dislike sanctions and blame Trump for tensions with IranTelhami 1/3 [( Shibley, Shibley Telhami is professor of government and politics and director of the Critical Issues Poll at the University of Maryland, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is co-author of?The Peace Puzzle: America’s Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011,?and of a forthcoming sequel on the Obama and Trump presidencies.) “The U.S. Public Still Doesn’t Want War With Iran” : FP insider, 1/3/20, ] LBA September 2019?University of Maryland poll?of a nationally representative sample of 3,016 respondents shows the trouble Trump faces with U.S. public opinion as the crisis with Iran escalates. There are three main takeaways: Three-quarters of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, say that war with Iran would be unwarranted; the public mostly blames the Trump administration for heightened tensions with Iran and disapproves of Trump’s Iran policy; and Americans are deeply divided in assessing Trump’s goals in Iran.Overwhelmingly, the U.S. public does not believe that U.S. interests warrant war with Iran. Only about one-fifth of respondents say that their country “should be prepared to go to war” to achieve its goals with Iran, while three-quarters say that U.S. goals do not warrant it. Among Republicans, only 34 percent say that war should be on the table to protect U.S. interests.Even more worrying for Trump, roughly half the poll was conducted before the Sept. 14 militant attacks on Saudi oil fields, which the United States pinned on Iran, and half was conducted after, providing an unusual window into public reaction. The attack had no impact on U.S. public attitudes, with three-quarters continuing to say the war option is unwarranted. And there’s reason to believe that the recent attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and the killing of Suleimani would have the same result.An October University of Maryland poll probed four different possible explanations for the crisis with Iran: the nature of the Iranian regime; the war in Yemen; the U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal; and the U.S. imposition of new sanctions on Iran, including on its oil exports. The importance of each was probed separately, after which respondents were asked to rank these factors. The least popular options were the war in Yemen, which 5 percent blamed, and the nature of the Iranian regime, which 22 percent blamed. A greater 69 percent fault Trump administration policy, either his decision to withdraw from the Iran deal (35 percent) or the imposition of new sanctions (34 percent). Notably, 60 percent of Republicans attributed the crisis to Trump administration actions.Disapproval of Trump’s Iran policy rose from 51 percent before the attack on the Saudi oil fields to 57 percent after. One might expect a similar public reaction after the latest news events, given the public’s aversion to war and apparent belief that early Trump policies are behind the escalation in the Persian Gulf.In assessing the possible goals of Trump administration Iran policy, 30 percent (53 percent of Republicans) say the aim is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. A similar 28 percent (45 percent of Democrats) say the aim is undoing former U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy; 9 percent say Trump just wants to “look tough” at home; and 7 percent each say it’s either to please Middle East allies or to change Iranian behavior.The fact that the goal Republicans most cite for Trump’s Iran policy is preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons could spell trouble ahead for the president, since Iran has been accelerating its nuclear program in recent months and is likely to move faster after Suleimani’s killing.This polling suggests that an escalation between the United States and Iran that follows the killing of Suleimani will test Trump’s approval among the U.S. public. Of course, the president has demonstrated a superior ability to control the narrative, especially among his supporters. He’ll surely be able to encourage some rallying around the flag. But the public’s weariness of war is real—as are the costs in American blood that conflict with Iran would entail—and Trump’s early actions in withdrawing from the Iran deal and tightening sanctions on Iran are seen by both Democrats and Republicans to be the real culprit in poor relations between the two countries. And the more Trump’s policies are seen as dragging the United States toward confrontation with Iran, the more public opposition he’ll face.The plan is popular – Senators break ranks for Sanctions Vogel 2019 {( Kenneth, Based in The Times's Washington bureau, Ken Vogel covers the confluence of money, politics and influence. He has covered politics and government at all levels.) “Republicans Break Ranks Over Move to Lift Sanctions on Russian Oligarch’s Firms”: The New York Times, 1/15/19, ] LBWASHINGTON — A group of 11 Republican senators broke ranks with their leadership and the administration on Tuesday to side with Democrats in a showdown over sanctions on Russia, underscoring the political sensitivity of the issue amid questions about President Trump’s relationship with Moscow.The Republicans voted with Democrats seeking to keep sanctions in place on companies controlled by an influential Russian oligarch with connections to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.The 11 Republican votes allowed Senate Democrats to advance a measure that would reverse a?decision last month by the Treasury Department to lift sanctions?that it imposed last year on companies controlled by the oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, including the aluminum giant Rusal.NOKO Link – Plan = PopularThe plan is popular – Americans want diplomacy Fuchs 19 [(Michael Fuchs - senior fellow at the center for American process. Special adviser to the secretary of state for strategic dialogues from 2011 to 2013) “The Time is Right for a Deal With North Korea” Center for American Process. 6/10/19] LMPublic opinion also supports diplomacy with North Korea. When North Korea was regularly testing missiles in 2017, for example, the American people were inundated with news about how North Korean weapons could now reach the United States, and concerns were high. Since diplomatic efforts began, however, North Korea as an issue has become less of a concern to Americans. Although 83 percent of Americans see North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons as a critical threat, between the beginning of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, the percentage of Americans who listed North Korea as the greatest enemy of the United States dropped from 51 percent to 14 percent.5?Once diplomacy began in 2018, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 71 percent of Americans supported diplomacy with North Korea.6Cuba Link – Plan PopularPlan popular – Americans want a hardline stance Phippen 17 [(J. Weston Phippen - staff writer for The Atlantic) “Trumps Cuba Policy Reversal” The Atlantic. 6-16-2017] LMPresident Trump announced Friday a drastic change in the U.S.-Cuba relationship, swapping a policy of cultural exchange to bring about democratic ideals for something closer to the embargo-style policies from past decades. Speaking in Miami’s Little Havana district, Trump said he plans to cut off income to the Castro regime, with the hopes of bringing about free elections, by once again limiting tourism and trade to the island.Reversing U.S.-Cuba policy was a campaign promise of Trump’s—one that has grown increasingly unpopular with the majority of Republican voters—but one that White House officials said Trump planned to keep. "Effective immediately,” Trump told the crowd, “I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba.”Internal LinkTrump’s second term would cause irreversible climate change Starr 4/19 [(Paul Starr - professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University) “Trump’s second term” The Atlantic. May 2019 Issue of the Atlantic.] LM This is one of those moments. After four years as president, Trump will have made at least two Supreme Court appointments, signed into law tax cuts, and rolled back federal regulation of the environment and the economy. Whatever you think of these actions, many of them can probably be offset or entirely undone in the future. The effects of a full eight years of Trump will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to undo.Three areas—climate change, the risk of a renewed global arms race, and control of the Supreme Court—illustrate the historic significance of the 2020 election. The first two problems will become much harder to address as time goes on. The third one stands to remake our constitutional democracy and undermine the capacity for future change.In short,?the?biggest difference between electing Trump in 2016 and reelecting Trump in 2020 would be irreversibility. Climate policy is now the most obvious example. For a long time, even many of the people who acknowledged the reality of climate change thought of it as a slow process that did not demand immediate action. But today, amid extreme weather events and worsening scientific forecasts, the costs of our delay are clearly mounting, as are the associated dangers. To have a chance at?keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius—the objective of the Paris climate agreement—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2030, CO2 emissions must drop some 45 percent from 2010 levels. Instead of declining, however, they are rising.In his first term, Trump has announced plans to cancel existing climate reforms, such as higher fuel-efficiency standards and limits on emissions from new coal-fired power plants, and he has pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. His reelection would put off a national commitment to decarbonization until at least the second half of the 2020s, while encouraging other countries to do nothing as well. And change that is delayed becomes more economically and politically difficult. According to the Global Carbon Project, if decarbonization had begun globally in 2000, an emissions reduction of about 2 percent a year would have been sufficient to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Now it will need to be approximately 5 percent a year. If we wait another decade, it will be about 9 percent. In the United States, the economic disruption and popular resistance sure to arise from such an abrupt transition may be more than our political system can bear. No one knows, moreover, when the world might hit irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would likely doom us to a catastrophic sea-level rise. ImpactWe have a limited window to address warming – action must be taken now to prevent extinction and massive global sufferingSimms 17 [(Andrew Simms, Andrew Simms is an author, analyst and campaigner. His books include The New Economics, Tescopoly, Ecological Debt, and Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to prosperity. his new book We Want More Than This will be published in 2017 by Little Brown. He co-founded the New Weather Institute, is a research associate at the Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex, and a fellow of the New Economics Foundation.) "‘A cat in hell’s chance’ – why we’re losing the battle to keep global warming below 2C", 19 Jan 2017 ] SJDIIt all seemed so simple in 2008. All we had was financial collapse, a cripplingly high oil price and global crop failures due to extreme weather events. In addition, my climate scientist colleague Dr Viki Johnson and I worked out that we had about 100 months before it would no longer be “likely” that global average surface temperatures could be held below a 2C rise, compared with pre-industrial times. What’s so special about 2C? The simple answer is that it is a target that could be politically agreed on the international stage. It was first suggested in 1975 by the environmental economist William Nordhaus as an upper threshold beyond which we would arrive at a climate unrecognisable to humans. In 1990, the Stockholm Environment Institute recommended 2C as the maximum that should be tolerated, but noted: “Temperature increases beyond 1C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.” To date, temperatures have risen by almost 1C since 1880. The effects of this warming are already being observed in melting ice, ocean levels rising, worse heat waves and other extreme weather events. There are negative impacts on farming, the disruption of plant and animal species on land and in the sea, extinctions, the disturbance of water supplies and food production and increased vulnerability, especially among people in poverty in low-income countries. But effects are global. So 2C was never seen as necessarily safe, just a guardrail between dangerous and very dangerous change. To get a sense of what a 2C shift can do, just look in Earth’s rear-view mirror. When the planet was 2C colder than during the industrial revolution, we were in the grip of an ice age and a mile-thick North American ice sheet reached as far south as New York. The same warming again will intensify and accelerate human-driven changes already under way and has been described by James Hansen, one of the first scientists to call global attention to climate change, as a “prescription for long-term disaster”, including an ice-free Arctic. Nevertheless, in 1996, a European Council of environment ministers, that included a young Angela Merkel, adopted 2C as a target for the EU. International negotiators agreed the same in 2010 in Cancun. It was a commitment repeated in the Paris Climate Accord of 2015 where, pushed by a new group of countries called the Climate Vulnerable Forum, ambitions went one step further, agreeing to hold temperature rises to “well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C”. Is it still likely that we will stay below even 2C? In the 100 months since August 2008, I have been writing a climate-change diary for the Guardian to raise questions and monitor progress, or the lack of it, on climate action. To see how well we have fared, I asked a number of leading climate scientists and analysts for their views. The responses were as bracing as a bath in a pool of glacial meltwater. Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has an important place in the history of climate-change research. Hansen was its director from 1981 until 2013. Donald Trump is set to strip the institute of funding for climate research. Its current director, Dr Gavin Schmidt, is categoric that we are no longer likely to stay below 2C. “The inertia in the system (oceans, economies, technologies, people) is substantial and … so far the efforts are not commensurate with the goal,” he says. Sabine Fuss, of Germany’s Mercator Research Institute, on Global Commons and Climate Change says emissions are currently “not aligned” with the 2C target and will need to “come down more quickly”. Joanna Haigh, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment, thinks there is “no chance whatsoever at current levels of carbon emissions”, and her Grantham Institute colleague, Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, is not “confident” that temperature rises can be held below 2C. Prof Andrew Watkinson of the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia thinks it “unlikely” and Prof John Shepherd, a physicist at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, calls it “not very likely at all”. Stuart Haszeldine of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh says we have “very little chance”, and Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestly International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds calls it, “on the fanciful edge of plausible”. Glen Peters, senior researcher at Norway’s leading climate change centre, Cicero, is unambiguous, saying: “We have emitted too much already.” And these sentiments are echoed by Prof Alice Larkin, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, and Dr Chris Vernon, a glaciologist and former scientist at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science. Only one influential scientist preferred their comments to remain anonymous, but they too said we were off-target, because the “international negotiating process is disconnected from national policymaking”. In short, not a single one of the scientists polled thought the 2C target likely to be met. Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, is most emphatic. “My personal view,” he says, “is that there is not a cat in hell’s chance.” The most positive response came in the guarded words of Chris Jones, head of the Earth system and mitigation science team at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, who says that current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “don’t preclude” successfully achieving the target. Prof Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, would “only confirm that it is still possible to keep global warming below 2C”. The last point, however, is contentious, for precisely the reason the target exists. Namely, to prevent global warming from feeding off itself by triggering long-term, potentially irreversible environmental domino effects, such as ice loss and forest die-back, and the weakening ability of things such as our oceans to absorb carbon. “The open question for me is not whether we will breach the 2C target,” says Prof Barry McMullin of Dublin City University, “but how soon.” In addition, the temperature target is a global average, and local variations matter. In November 2016, the Arctic was already experiencing extraordinary anomalies. Temperatures were 20C above normal. A global average rise of 2C implies higher temperatures still for the Arctic , sufficient to push long-term ice loss and trigger other potentially uncontrollable climate changes. At the other end of the world, a development more bizarre than extraordinary is touching the Antarctic. Gambling with our future used to be largely a metaphor, but it is now possible to place bets on when the next giant iceberg will detach itself from the Larsen C ice shelf. At the time of writing, betting company PaddyPower is offering odds of 7/2 in February 2017 or 12/1 in August. Hoskins says: “We have no evidence that a 1.9C rise is something we can easily cope with, and 2.1 is a disaster.” But Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, one of the countries most vulnerable to warming, warns in stark terms of the failure to stick to a much lower target: “The consequences of failing to keep the temperature below 1.5C will be to wilfully condemn hundreds of millions of the poorest citizens of Earth to certain deaths from the severe impacts of climate change.” “I think we actively chose to forgo the carbon budgets for a likely chance of 2C many years ago,” says Kevin Anderson, currently professor of climate change at Uppsala University in Sweden. “Judging that rate at which our emissions would need to be reduced was too politically challenging to contemplate.” The one thing agreed by all the climate scientists was the need for immediate and dramatic transition to a low-carbon economy, at a scale and speed we have not yet remotely approached. And the truly striking thing is that a huge number of the actions we need to take are things that bring enormous economic, social and environmental benefits. Rationally, we would be choosing to do them anyway. Where there are challenging shifts in behaviour required, they mostly affect only a small, wealthy proportion of society. Take flying, for example: 70% of all flights by UK residents are accounted for by just 15% of the population. So, what scale of change are we looking at to stay below 2C? Being optimistic about what might be achieved in terms of saving forests from being cut down and cleaning up industry, especially the production of steel and cement, Anderson estimates globally we can afford to emit around 650bn tonnes of carbon dioxide in total from energy systems. Currently, the world pumps out about 36bn tonnes every year alone. Starting from today, and assuming that poorer and industrialising nations see a peak in the emissions from energy use by 2025 and go zero carbon by 2050, Anderson calculates that this leaves a rich country such as the UK with the challenge of cutting its emissions by around 13% per year. Chris Goodall charts the remarkable rise of renewable energy and its equally dramatic falling costs. But renewables have to substitute for fossil fuels, not merely add to overall energy supply. In the meantime, it matters as much that we reduce our total energy use. You will hear a lot of talk about technologies to capture carbon from the burning of fuel and prevent it entering the atmosphere. Most of the climate models used to project what will happen to our atmosphere rely heavily on the assumption that they will be used at large scale. While most climate scientists see these so-called “negative emissions technologies” for carbon capture and storage (CCS) as essential parts of the toolkit to tackle climate change, many are sceptical of hope being placed in them. It is easier not to burn the carbon in the first place. “There is no guarantee that CCS will work at a sufficiently global scale,” says Dr Hugh Hunt, a Cambridge specialist on climate engineering. “These technologies will take decades to reach any meaningful scale.” Tellingly, as an engineer, he argues that our top priorities are to stop burning fossil fuels and for the biggest consumers to live less extravagantly. And, it seems, moderate shifts by the most profligate could yield huge climate dividends. Currently about half of all global emissions are the responsibility of just of just one in 10 of the global population. If just this group reduced their carbon footprints to that of the average, barely impoverished European, argues Anderson, global emissions would be cut by around one-third. There are many ways to reach a 2C world, according to Prof Diana ?rge-Vorsatz, of the Central European University. “Their common characteristic is that they all require rapid and transformational action,” she says. Small, incremental changes won’t do it. Retrofitting existing buildings in rich countries can save 70-90% of the energy used to heat and cool them, she adds. And such a move also tackles fuel poverty, creates local jobs and reduces deaths from cold. Switching transport from fossil fuels to electricity power by renewables cuts emissions but also removes the air pollution that is responsible for an epidemic of lethal respiratory disease. In Europe alone, about half a million people suffer premature deaths each year due to air pollution. In November 2016, many, mostly low-income countries, from Bangladesh to Tanzania and Guatemala, committed to switching entirely to renewable energy by 2030-50 at the latest. Costa Rica, aided by favourable geography, has already managed to power itself for extended periods, relying just on renewables. Portugal has managed the same for shorter periods. But great leaps forward are happening elsewhere, too. China is installing more new wind energy capacity in a single year than the UK has in total. So, adding to the prevailing global strangeness, the edifice of international climate policy rests on a target that no one believes it is likely can be met. And some think even that insufficiently ambitious. Yet, among climate scientists, there is a consensus that swift action is vital, and with it the target remains, at least, possible. With the amount of carbon burned by humans, we have now created a climate not experienced on Earth since the Pliocene era, 2m-5m years ago. We are daily rolling the climate dice with the odds stacked against us. But we are also clever, quick and innovative when we want to be. Now that we understand the game better, the question we face is whether we will choose to change it, fast and enough, so that we can all have better lives.Trump lashes out – goes nuclear Street 16. [(Tim Street - Senior Programme Officer on the Sustainable Security programme at ORG and has worked for many years on the politics of nuclear disarmament and the arms trade) “President Trump: Successor to the Nuclear Throne” ORG Briefing – November 2016 Oxford Research Group, November 2016]. MCM.With the former, Trump’s recent comment that he now has an ‘open mind’ about the importance of the Paris climate agreement—having previously said climate change is a ‘hoax’—is unlikely to assuage fears that he will seek to dramatically expand the US’s extraction and reliance on fossil fuels. With the latter, strong doubts have been raised over whether the new President is capable of responsibly handling the incredible power that will be at his fingertips. Moreover, several commentators are already raising concerns that a Trump administration will pursue policies that will aggravate and disappoint his supporters, a situation that could increase the possibility of the US engaging in a ‘diversionary’ war. In order to consider what we can expect from a Trump presidency, as well as noting whom Trump empowers as members of his cabinet and those whom he draws on for advice, it is vital to study the track record of recent administrations and appreciate the powers Trump will inherit. In doing so this briefing focuses on the question of what a Trump presidency might mean for international relations with a focus on nuclear arms, including doctrine and disarmament. This means reviewing policies relevant to the US’s nuclear arsenal and pressing international challenges such as non-proliferation, including in East Asia and the Middle East, as well as the US’s relationship with Russia and its role in NATO. The power and responsibilities of the nuclear monarch Since the dawn of the nuclear age, all US Presidents have been solely responsible for the decision to use the near-unimaginably destructive power of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Thus, as Bruce Blair—a former intercontinental ballistic missile launch control officer— makes clear, ‘Trump will have the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons whenever he chooses with a single phone call.’ The wider political meaning of the bomb for the world is aptly summarised by Daniel Deudney, who describes nuclear weapons as ‘intrinsically despotic’ so that they have created ‘nuclear monarchies’ in all nuclear-armed states. Deudney identifies three related reasons for this development: ‘the speed of nuclear use decisions; the concentration of nuclear use decision into the hands of one individual; and the lack of accountability stemming from the inability of affected groups to have their interests represented at the moment of nuclear use’. Similarly, Elaine Scarry has explained in stark terms in her 2014 book Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing between Democracy and Doom, how the possession of nuclear weapons has converted the US government into ‘a monarchic form of rule that places all defense in the executive branch of government’ leaving the population ‘incapacitated’. In response to this situation, Scarry argues that the American people must use the Constitution as a tool to dismantle the US nuclear weapons system, thereby revitalising democratic participation and control over decision-making. Scarry also outlines the incredible might the president wields, with each of the US’s fourteen nuclear-armed submarines alone carrying ‘enough power to destroy the people of an entire continent’, equivalent to ‘eight times the full-blast power expended by Allied and Axis countries in World War II’. Nuclear specialist Hans Kristensen has described how the US’s strategic nuclear war plan ‘if unleashed in its full capacity’ could ‘kill hundreds of millions of people, devastate entire nations, and cause climatic effects on a global scale’. This war plan consists of a ‘family of plans’ that is aimed at ‘six potential adversaries’ whose identities are kept secret. Kristensen understands that they include ‘potentially hostile countries with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons (WMD)’, meaning China, North Korea, Iran, Russia and Syria as well as a terrorist group backed by a state that has conducted a catastrophic WMD attack. The ‘dominant mission’ for US nuclear weapons within these plans is termed counterforce, meaning strikes on ‘military, mostly nuclear, targets and the enemy’s leadership’. Despite these plans, the US’s nuclear arsenal is often described by mainstream commentators as being solely intended to ensure mutual assured destruction (MAD), i.e. as part of the ‘balance of terror’ with Russia, in order to prevent armed conflict between the two nations and to ensure a response in kind to a surprise nuclear attack. However, as Joseph Gerson and John Feffer explain, rather than deterrence just being about enough nuclear forces surviving a surprise first strike attack to ensure MAD, US military planners have also understood it to mean ‘preventing other nations from taking “courses of action” that are inimical to US interests’. David McDonough thus describes the ‘long-standing goal of American nuclear warplanners’ as being the achievement of the ability to launch a disarming first-strike against an opponent- otherwise known as nuclear superiority. This has been magnified in recent years as the US seeks to ‘prevent’ or ‘rollback’ the ability of weaker states—both nuclear and non-nuclear powers—to establish or maintain a deterrence relationship. Taking all this into account, the new commander-in-chief’s apparently volatile temperament thus raises deep concerns since his finger will be on the nuclear trigger as soon as he assumes office on 20th January 2017. Given his past experience, Bruce Blair’s statement that he is ‘scared to death’ by the idea of a Trump presidency is but one further reason why urgent discussion and action, both in the US and globally, on lessening nuclear dangers—and reviving disarmament—is vital. A recent report by the Ploughshares Fund on how the US can reduce its nuclear spending, reform its nuclear posture and restrain its nuclear war plans should thus be required reading in Washington. However, as the Economist has rightly noted, ‘It is not Mr Trump’s fault that the system, in which the vulnerable land-based missile force is kept on hair-trigger alert, is widely held to be inherently dangerous’ since, as they point out, ‘no former president, including Barack Obama, has done anything to change it.’ Over sixty years after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclearism thus remains very much embedded in the nation’s strategic thinking. Yet the election of Obama, and the rhetoric of his 2009 Prague speech, in which he stated ‘America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons’ led many to think that a real change was on the cards. Obama’s visit to Hiroshima earlier this year to commemorate the bombings was thus a painful reminder of how wide the gap is between the rearmament programmes that the US and other nuclear weapon states are engaged in and the disarmament action that they are legally obliged to pursue under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT). Obama himself said in Japan that, ‘technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.’ For this statement to be meaningful it is necessary to identify who is responsible for the existing, highly dangerous state of affairs. In short, the US government’s recent record supports Scarry’s suggestion that a democratic revolution is what, in reality, is most needed if the US is to make substantial progress on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament. Short-term reforms towards the democratic control and ultimate dismantlement of the US’s nuclear arsenal have been outlined by Kennette Benedict, who writes that the next administration should: place our nuclear weapons on a much lower level of launch readiness, release to the public more information about the nuclear weapons in our own arsenals, include legislators and outside experts in its nuclear posture review and recognize Congress’ authority to declare war as a prerequisite to any use of nuclear weapons. Assessing Obama’s nuclear legacy In order to properly appreciate what a Trump presidency may bring, we need to revisit the range and types of powers bequeathed to the commander-in-chief by previous administrations. Despite the military advances made by China and Russia in recent years, it is important to recognise that the US remains far and away the biggest global spender on conventional and nuclear weapons and plans to consolidate this position by maintaining significant technological superiority over its adversaries, which will, as is well appreciated, push Beijing, Moscow—and thus other regional powers—to respond. Yet spending on nuclear weapons alone is set to pose significant budgeting difficulties for future US governments. According to a 2014 report by the James Martin Center, the Departments of Defense and Energy plan to spend approximately $1 trillion over the next 30 years ‘to maintain its current nuclear arsenal and procure a new generation of nuclear-armed or nuclear capable bombers and submarines’ as well as new submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Arms Control Today has found that total Defense Department nuclear spending ‘is projected to average more than $40 billion in constant fiscal year 2016 dollars between 2025 and 2035, when modernization costs are expected to peak’. Including costs for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s projected weapons-related spending during this period ‘would push average spending during this period to more than $50 billion per year’. If anywhere near these sums are spent, then the modest reductions to the US’s nuclear stockpile achieved during the Obama presidency will be entirely overshadowed. Moreover, as analyst Andrew Lichterman notes, the US’s continued modernisation of its nuclear forces is ‘inherently incompatible’ with the ‘unequivocal undertaking’ given at the 2000 NPT Review Conference to eliminate its nuclear arsenal and apply the ‘principle of irreversibility’ to this and related actions. For Lichterman, the huge outlays committed to the nuclear weapons complex were part of a political ‘bargain’ made by the Obama administration with Republicans. This ensured that the New START nuclear arms control treaty would pass in the Senate whilst also not disturbing the development of missile defense and other advanced conventional weapons programmes. New START is a bilateral agreement between Russia and the US, which Steven Pifer describes as ‘one of the few bright spots’ that exists in these nations’ relationship. Under the treaty Moscow and Washington must, by 2018, reduce their stockpile of operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550. Furthermore, both must keep to a limit of 700 deployed strategic launchers (missiles) and heavy bombers, and to a combined limit of 800 deployed and non-deployed strategic launchers and heavy bombers. Despite New START ‘proceeding smoothly’ according to Pifer, Hans Kristensen recently produced a report comparing Obama’s record with that of the previous presidents holding office during the nuclear age, which found that, hitherto, Obama has cut fewer warheads—in terms of numbers rather than percentages—than ‘any administration ever’ and that ‘the biggest nuclear disarmers’ in recent decades have been Republicans, not Democrats. Kristensen thus drily observes of this situation that, a conservative Congress does not complain when Republican presidents reduce the stockpile, only when Democratic president try to do so. As a result of the opposition, the United States is now stuck with a larger and more expensive nuclear arsenal than had Congress agreed to significant reductions. As his presidency draws to a close, presumably as a means of securing some sort of meaningful legacy in this area, it has been reported that Obama considered adopting a no first use (NFU) policy for nuclear weapons, something which, whilst reversible, could act as a restraint on future presidents. Yet this was apparently abandoned, according to the New York Times, after ‘top national security advisers argued that it could undermine allies and embolden Russia and China’. Furthermore, according to Josh Rogin of the Washington Post, the governments of Japan, South Korea, France and Britain all privately communicated their concerns about Washington adopting NFU. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is also said to have argued that such a move would be unwise because ‘if North Korea used biological weapons against the South the United States might need the option of threatening a nuclear response’. However, as Daryll Kimball explains, the US’s ‘overwhelming’ conventional military advantage means that ‘there is no plausible circumstance that could justify—legally, morally, or militarily—the use of nuclear weapons to deal with a non-nuclear threat’. Such resistance to NFU is thus deeply disappointing given that, as Kimball goes on to note, this move would go some way to reassuring China and Russia about the US’s strategic intentions. It would also be an important confidence-building measure for the wider community of non-nuclear weapon states, showing that the US is willing to act in 'good faith' towards its disarmament obligations under the NPT. Thinking about the causes of proliferation more widely requires us to understand what drives weaker states to seek deterrents, if their reliance on them is to be reduced. For example, as Dr Alan J. Kuperman observes, NATO’s bombing and overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 ‘greatly complicated the task of persuading other states such as Iran and North Korea ‘to halt or reverse their nuclear programs’. The lesson Tehran and Pyongyang took is thus that because Gaddafi had voluntarily ended his nuclear and chemical weapons programmes, the West now felt free to pursue regime change. When assessing the importance of the Iran nuclear deal, which is often hailed as one of Obama’s landmark achievements, and which the next President must not be allowed to derail, it is thus important also to consider carefully what behaviour by the most powerful states will enable existing or potential nuclear possessors to embrace disarmament and reduce their interest in seeking non-conventional deterrents. The inability of Washington to make substantial progress towards reducing the salience of nuclear weapons at home and abroad is all the more noteworthy when one considers the state of US and Russian public opinion on nuclear arms control and disarmament. As John Steinbrunner and Nancy Gallagher observe, ‘responses to detailed questions reveal a striking disparity between what U.S. and Russian leaders are doing and what their publics desire’. For example, their polling found that: At the most fundamental level, the vast majority of Americans and Russians think that nuclear weapons have a very limited role in current security circumstances and believe that their only legitimate purpose is to deter nuclear attack. It is highly consistent, then, that the publics in both countries would favor eliminating all nuclear weapons if this action could be taken under effective international verification. Another important measure which the US has failed to hitherto ratify is the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). This is despite President Obama stating in 2009 that he intended to pursue Senate ratification of the treaty ‘immediately and aggressively’. Once more, there is notably strong public support–82% according to a 2010 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs—for the US joining the CTBT but, again, the Republican-controlled Senate has blocked the treaty at every opportunity. Overall, the gap between the public’s will and the government’s inaction on nuclear issues is alarming and redolent of the wider democratic deficit in the US. On a more positive note, the fact that the citizenry supports such measures suggests that groups advocating arms control and disarmament initiatives should continue to engage with and understand the public’s positions in order to effectively harness their support. Stepping back from the brink In terms of priorities for the incoming administration in the US, stepping back from military confrontation with Russia and pushing the threat of nuclear war to the margins must be at the top of the list. Whilst much has been made of a potential rapprochement between Trump and Putin, the two have, reportedly, only just spoken for the first time on the phone and still need to actually meet in person to discuss strategic issues and deal with inevitable international events and crises, including in relation to Ukraine and Syria. As of now, whilst the mood music from both sides might suggest a warming of relations, as has been seen with previous administrations, unless cooperation is rooted in a real willingness to resolve problems (which for Russia includes US ballistic missile defense deployments in Eastern Europe and NATO expansion) then tensions can quickly re- emerge. Another related question concerns how Trump will conduct himself during any potential crisis or conflict with Russia or another major power, given the stakes and risks involved, as highlighted above. Whilst we must wait to find out precisely what the new administration’s approach to international affairs will be, in the past week, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told the BBC that he had been personally informed by Donald Trump, following the election, that the US remains ‘strongly committed to NATO, and that the security guarantees to Europe stand’. Trump had previously shaken sections of the defence and foreign policy establishment by suggesting that NATO was ‘obsolete’ and that countries such as Japan (and by extension others such as South Korea and Saudi Arabia) ‘have to pay us or we have to let them protect themselves’, which could include them acquiring the bomb. One reason why some in Washington have, in the past, not wanted their regional allies to develop their own nuclear weapons is because the US might then become dragged into an escalating conflict. Moreover, if an ally in one region seeks the bomb, this may cause others elsewhere to pursue their own capabilities- an act of strategic independence that might make these states harder to influence and control. The US’s key relationships in East Asia and the Middle East illustrate why, if a future US President wishes to take meaningful moves towards a world free of nuclear weapons, then developing alternative regional political agreements, including strategic cooperation with China and Russia, will be necessary. As Nancy Gallagher rightly notes, the ‘weaknesses of existing international organizations’ thus requires ‘more inclusive, cooperative security institutions’ to be constructed regionally ‘to complement and someday, perhaps, to replace exclusive military alliances’, alongside progressive demilitarisation. Such confidence-building measures would also support efforts to halt missile and nuclear tests by states such as North Korea, which may soon be capable of striking the US mainland. Imagining the next enemy As well as mapping out the US’s current nuclear weapons policies and its regional relationships, it is important to reflect upon how domestic political dynamics under a Trump presidency might drive Washington’s behaviour internationally, particularly given the nuclear shadow that always hangs over conflicts involving the US. For example, in the near-term, Trump’s economic plan and the great expectations amongst the American working class that have been generated, may have particularly dangerous consequences if, as seems likely, the primary beneficiaries are the very wealthy. Reviewing Trump’s economic plans, Martin Wolf of the Financial Times concludes that ‘the longer-term consequences are likely to be grim, not least for his angry, but fooled, supporters. Next time, they might be even angrier. Where that might lead is terrifying’. Gillian Tett has also highlighted the ‘real risks’ that Trump’s policies could ‘spark US social unrest or geopolitical uncertainty’. Elsewhere, George Monbiot in the Guardian, makes the stark assertion that the inability of the US and other governments to respond effectively to public anger means he now believes that ‘we will see war between the major powers within my lifetime’. If these warnings weren’t troubling enough, no less a figure than Henry Kissinger argued on BBC’s Newsnight that ‘the more likely reaction’ to a Trump presidency from terror groups ‘will be to do something that evokes a reaction’ from Washington in order to ‘widen the split’ between it and Europe and damage the US’s image around the world. Given that Trump has already vowed to ‘bomb the shit out of ISIS’ and refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against the group, it goes without saying that such a scenario could have the gravest consequences and must be avoided so that the US does not play into the terrorists’ hands. Looking more widely, President-elect Trump’s existing and potential cabinet appointments, which Glenn Greenwald has summarised as ‘empowering…by and large…the traditional, hard, hawkish right-wing members of the Republican Party’ also point to the US engaging in future overseas conflicts, rather than the isolationism which many in the foreign policy establishment criticised Trump for proposing during the presidential campaign. William Hartung and Todd Harrison have drawn attention to the fact that defence spending under Trump could be almost $1trillion (spread over ten years) more than Obama’s most recent budget request. Such projections, alongside Trump’s election rhetoric, suggest that the new nuclear monarch will try to push wide open the door to more spending on nuclear weapons and missile defense, a situation made possible, as we have seen, by Obama’s inability to implement progressive change in this area at a time of persistent Republican obstruction. Conclusion The problem now, for the US and the world, is that if Trump does make good on his campaign promises then this will have several damaging consequences for international peace and security and that if Trump does not sufficiently satisfy his supporters then this will likely pour fuel on the flames at home, which may then quickly spread abroad. The people of the US and the world thus now have a huge responsibility to act as a restraining influence and ensure that the US retains an accountable, transparent and democratic government. This responsibility will only grow if crises or shocks take place in or outside the US which ambitious and extremist figures take advantage of, framing them as threats to national security in order to protect their interests and power. If such scenarios emerge the next administration and its untried and untested President will find themselves with a range of extremely powerful tools and institutional experience at their disposal, including nuclear weapons, which may prove too tempting to resist when figuring out how to respond to widespread anger, confusion and unrest, both at home and abroad1AR1AR – No UQ Trump will win in November – Hall 7/8 [((Louise Hall, Reporter for the Independent), “Trump has 91% chance of winning second term, professor’s model predicts”, July 8, 2020] KMPresident Donald Trump has a 91 per cent chance of winning the November 2020 election, according to a political science professor who has correctly predicted five out of six elections since 1996. “The Primary Model gives Trump a 91 percent chance of winning in November,” Stony Brook professor Helmut Norpoth told Mediaite on Tuesday. Mr Norpoth told the outlet that his model, which he curated in 1996, would have correctly predicted the outcome for 25 of the 27 elections since 1912, when primaries were introduced. The model calculates the winning candidate based on early presidential nominating contests and placing an emphasis on how much enthusiasm candidates are able to generate early in the nominating process, the professor said. “The terrain of presidential contests is littered with nominees who saw a poll lead in the spring turn to dust in the fall,” Mr Norpoth said. If the prediction is correct, former vice president Joe Biden is placed at a severe disadvantage due to losses in his party’s first two presidential nominating contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. The professor also said the model, which predicted Mr Trump’s election in 2016, worked partially by discounting opinion surveys. “Polls and poll-based forecasts all handed Hillary Clinton a certain victory,” he said. The prediction comes as a number other election models have suggested that Mr Trump will lose to Mr Biden as a result of a number of factors including the ongoing pandemic.Trump’s approval rating has dropped over the past months, obliterating his chances of re-electionGalston 6/29 [(William A. Galston, William A. Galston holds the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, where he serves as a Senior Fellow. He was the Saul Stern Professor and Acting Dean at the School of Public Policy. A participant in six presidential campaigns, he served from 1993 to 1995 as Deputy Assistant to President Clinton for Domestic Policy.) “Trump’s reelection campaign is in crisis,”June 29,2020 past three months have been a catastrophe for President Trump. With the odds against his reelection lengthening, and just 126 days until the election, the time to turn things around is dwindling. The president could still win a narrow victory, but only if everything breaks right. A president’s job approval is the single most accurate measure of his political standing. As recently as April 1, Trump’s approval averaged 45.8%—about the share of the popular vote he received in 2016—and his disapproval 49.7%, his best showing since the first month of his presidency. By June 26, his approval stood at 40.6%, down 5.2 points, while his disapproval rose by 6.4 points to 56.1%.In modern political campaigns, job approval is a good indicator of the popular vote percentage the incumbent president is likely to receive. The closer the contest gets to election day, the smaller the gap between these two metrics. During the past six elections involving incumbents (1980, 1984, 1992, 1996, 2004, and 2012), the difference between the president’s final pre-election job approval and his share of the popular vote has averaged about 1 percentage point. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn1" [1] In 2020, this convergence has already occurred. As of June 26, President Trump was averaging 41.4% of the vote in head-to-head contests with Joe Biden, just 0.8% higher than his job approval, and these numbers will be tightly linked between now and the election. If past is prologue unless he can raise his job approval significantly during the next four months, he cannot win. This will not be easy. During the past six reelection campaigns, the only president who has been able to raise his job approval ratings by more than 6 points between June and November was Barack Obama. In 2012, he raised his approval from 46% to 52%, thus becoming the only modern incumbent to turn likely defeat into victory during his general election campaign. Duplicating Obama’s impressive feat probably would not be enough to give President Trump a come-from-behind victory. A 6-point gain would bring his job approval to 46.6%. This was barely enough in 2016, and it almost certainly won’t be enough in 2020. In 2016, 6 percentage points of the total vote went to independent and third-party candidates, the highest by far since Ross Perot left the stage after 1996. Since then, the non-major party share has averaged about 3 points, a level to which it seems likely to return in 2020. If so, Trump’s 46% would leave Biden 50-51%—about what he is averaging right now, and more than enough to prevail in the Electoral College. The optimists in the Trump camp might argue that the president’s support has declined far more in the blue states he never had a chance of winning than in the swing states he needs to reach 270 electoral votes. But the facts do not sustain this hypothesis. In fact, the president’s numbers in most of the states that could matter in 2020 have shifted against him more than has his national average, as the following table indicates. In short, the decline in President Trump’s support since 2016 has not been confined to the blue states and has been close to uniform in the 13 states that could be in play in 2020. At the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign believed that it could nail down the South and Southwest early in the contest and focus its resources on the states that made the difference in 2016 (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) plus targets of opportunity such as Minnesota and New Hampshire. This plan is now obsolete. The president’s prospects in the Electoral College are dismal—unless he can raise his standing across the country. Although this is not impossible, it will be challenging. Three reasons for President Trump’s current plight—the public’s negative evaluations of his character, his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his response to the killing of George Floyd—are unlikely to change significantly. But five other factors could shift in the president’s favor. The economy could recover more quickly than economists now project; the protestors could overplay their hand by resorting to violence and tearing down statues without authorization; Trump campaign operatives could come up with effective lines of attack against Joe Biden’s record and character; the president could belatedly articulate a rationale for his second term; and the presidential debates could convince wavering Americans who might have supported Biden that he is too old for the job. This is not close to an even-money bet. But it’s the best shot President Trump has left.1AR – Sanctions UnpopularIranThe plan is unpopular – Americans support sanctionsReiss 2018 [(Megan, Megan Reiss is senior national security fellow with the R Street Institute, where she writes about cybersecurity and other pressing national security issues.?) “Americans Support Sanctions ... Most of the Time”: LAWFARE, 1/22/18, ] LBOn Jan. 12, 2018, the Trump administration put in place sanctions against Sadegh Amoli Larijani, the head of the?Iranian judiciary, and others in response to Iranian human rights abuses. A month earlier, the Senate Banking Committee completed a markup on the?Otto Warmbier Banking Restrictions Involving North Korea (BRINK) Act of 2017, which would implement mandatory secondary sanctions on banks that facilitate North Korea’s?illicit?activities. The month prior to that, legislators proposed applying sanctions to the?Myanmar military?in response to its crackdown on the Rohingya minority. In November, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on?10 individuals?in Venezuela who supported?President Nicolas Maduro’s efforts?to hold onto power by use of fraudulent elections—and four more Maduro regime-related individuals were just?designated?on Jan. 5.In view of the broad scope of existing sanctions and the expansive nature of future sanctions, we at?Lawfare?decided to get a sense of Americans’ support for implementing sanctions in response to various provocations.Between Feb. 15, 2018 and Feb. 18, 2018, we used Google Surveys to try to better understand whether Americans approve of sanctioning foreign governments that?support designated terrorist groups,?banks that financially support terrorist groups, or countries that?buy arms?from another country that financially supports terrorism. The answers showed that respondents strongly supported applying sanctions under all three circumstances. The winning results were statistically significant: If we ran the poll again, we would expect the same results 19 out of 20 times.NoKoThe plan is unpopular – Poushter 17 [(Jacob Poushter - Associate director of the Pew Research Center) “Americans hold very negative views of North Korea amid nuclear tensions” Pew Research Center. 4/5/17] LMRoughly two-thirds of Americans (65%) are very concerned about North Korea having nuclear weapons. And 64% say that in the event of a serious conflict, the United States should use military force to defend its Asian allies, such as Japan, South Korea or the Philippines, against the Pyongyang regime, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. A further 61% think sanctions, rather than attempts at closer ties, are the best way to deal with the nuclear threat posed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.Cuba The plan is unpopular – Americans like the embargo Torres 19 [(Nora Gámez Torres - writer at the Miami Herald) “Support for embargo on Cuba increases among Cuban Americans in Miami, FIU poll shows” Miami Herald. 1/10/19] LMAccording to the FIU telephone survey of 1,001 Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade, 45 percent favor maintaining the embargo, 44 percent oppose it, and 11 percent said they don’t know or did not provide an answer.Those results contrast sharply with the “increased optimism toward an engagement” found by the FIU poll in 2016, when support for ending the embargo hit 54 percent, according to the pollsters, FIU professors Guillermo Grenier and Hugh Gladwin.FIU has conducted polls of Cuban Americans in Miami since the 1990s. The 2018 version was carried out after the midterm elections in November. It has a margin of error of 3.1 percent.Cuban Americans k2 reelection Drucker 19 [(David M. Drucker is the senior political correspondent for the?Washington Examiner. He has previously reported for CQ Roll Call and the Los Angeles Daily News) Washington Examiner. “100% Republican — Cuban Americans high on 2020 as ramps up in Florida” 6/19/19] LM Part of a broader, Republican-leaning diaspora community that has proliferated throughout South Florida and spawned generations of native-born Americans since the rise of the Castro dictatorship decades ago, Cuban Americans are fervent backers of President Trump, attracted by his economic policies, stance against Cuba, and especially the perception that he is an unabashed patriot.Cuban Americans are a critical component of the Trump coalition in this 2020 battleground, which by itself could hold the keys to his reelection.1AR – Impact DTweets not warTierney 17 [(Dominic Tierney - contributing editor at the Atlantic. Associate professor of political science at Swarthmore) “The Risks of Foreign Policy as Political Distraction” The Atlantic. 6/15/17]?LM But what about military force? To be clear, there is little cause to speculate that Trump plans to launch a full-scale war solely to distract attention. For one thing, as president, the worst possible time to start a major military campaign is when you’re deeply unpopular. And the political upside is shaky at best. Recent big wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were politically damaging to George W. Bush. Even victory doesn’t guarantee a pay-off, as George H. W. Bush discovered when he won the 1991 Gulf War and then lost his bid for reelection in 1992No extinction – it takes 12 degrees without adaptationFarquhar et al 17 [Sebastian Farquhar (PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Oxford and Project Manager at Future of Humanity Institute), John Halstead (climate activist and one of the co-founders of 350 Indiana-Calumet), Owen Cotton-Barratt (PhD in pure mathematics at Oxford. Previously worked as an academic mathematician and as Director of Research at the Centre for Effective Altruism), Stefan Schubert (Researcher at Department of Experimental Psychology at University of Oxford), Haydn Belfield (Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He has a background in policy and politics, including as a Senior Parliamentary Researcher to a British Shadow Cabinet Minister, as a Policy Associate to the University of Oxford’s Global Priorities Project, and a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oriel College, University of Oxford), Andrew Snyder-Beattie (Director of Research at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, Holds degrees in biomathematics and economics and is currently pursuing a PhD in Zoology at Oxford), Existential Risk: Diplomacy and Governance, Global Priorities Project (Bostrom’s Institute), 2017-01-23, ] TDIThe most likely levels of global warming are very unlikely to cause human extinction.15 The existential risks of climate change instead stem from tail risk climate change – the low probability of extreme levels of warming – and interaction with other sources of risk. It is impossible to say with confidence at what point global warming would become severe enough to pose an existential threat. Research has suggested that warming of 11-12°C would render most of the planet uninhabitable,16 and would completely devastate agriculture.17 This would pose an extreme threat to human civilisation as we know it.18 Warming of around 7°C or more could potentially produce conflict and instability on such a scale that the indirect effects could be an existential risk, although it is extremely uncertain how likely such scenarios are.19 Moreover, the timescales over which such changes might happen could mean that humanity is able to adapt enough to avoid extinction in even very extreme scenarios. The probability of these levels of warming depends on eventual greenhouse gas concentrations. According to some experts, unless strong action is taken soon by major emitters, it is likely that we will pursue a medium-high emissions pathway.20 If we do, the chance of extreme warming is highly uncertain but appears non-negligible. Current concentrations of greenhouse gases are higher than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years,21 which means that there are significant unknown unknowns about how the climate system will respond. Particularly concerning is the risk of positive feedback loops, such as the release of vast amounts of methane from melting of the arctic permafrost, which would cause rapid and disastrous warming.22 The economists Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman have used IPCC figures (which do not include modelling of feedback loops such as those from melting permafrost) to estimate that if we continue to pursue a medium-high emissions pathway, the probability of eventual warming of 6°C is around 10%,23 and of 10°C is around 3%.24 These estimates are of course highly uncertain. It is likely that the world will take action against climate change once it begins to impose large costs on human society, long before there is warming of 10°C. Unfortunately, there is significant inertia in the climate system: there is a 25 to 50 year lag between CO2 emissions and eventual warming,25 and it is expected that 40% of the peak concentration of CO2 will remain in the atmosphere 1,000 years after the peak is reached.26 Consequently, it is impossible to reduce temperatures quickly by reducing CO2 emissions. If the world does start to face costly warming, the international community will therefore face strong incentives to find other ways to reduce global temperatures. ................
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