Aff

PEMEX Updates

1AC Pemex Brink

Pemex reform now key to economic growth Espinosa and Cattan 7/10 Veronica Navarro Espinosa reporter at Bloomberg LP
Nacha Cattan is a reporter for Bloomberg News in Mexico City. Pemex Official Sees Monopoly End as JPMorgan Sees Reform Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/mexico-poised-to-end-state-energymonopoly-pemex-official-says.html
Mexico is on the cusp of opening its energy industry to outside investment as a wide consensus has
developed that the constitution must be changed to end the governments monopoly on production, according to a board member o f state-controlled oil producer Petroleos Mexicanos. The

country needs very deep reforms to lure investment to its natural gas and crude fields after eight years of declining oil output, and proposed changes could be ready by the end of summer, Hector Moreira, who also is a former official in the countrys Energy
Ministry, said today at the Bloomberg Mexico Conference in New York. A congressional bill to open the oil monopoly would prompt as much as $50 billion in annual investments if approved, he said. Much-needed

changes will open the way for faster growth and a stronger currency in the regions second-largest economy,Gray Newman,
Morgan Stanleys chief Latin American economist, said at the event. Officials from JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Grupo Financiero Banorte said theyre optimistic President Enrique Pena Nieto will lead a successful effort at reforms this year. This

administration doesnt only have the willingness, but the political power and political capital to enact the changes,Gabriel Casillas, Banortes chief Mexico economist, said. Casillas said he was
very bullish on the peso, the best-performing major currency against the dollar this year, and that investors hadnt yet priced in the reforms.

Mexico economic slowdown now- Pemex reform boosts growth 6% Espinosa and Cattan 7/10 Veronica Navarro Espinosa reporter at Bloomberg LP Nacha Cattan is a reporter for Bloomberg News in Mexico City. Pemex Official Sees Monopoly End as JPMorgan Sees Reform Bloomberg. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/mexico-poised-to-end-state-energymonopoly-pemex-official-says.html
A slowdown in economic expansion is putting pressure on Pena Nieto to gain approval to open the energy industry and change laws to boost tax collection, reforms he says may lift growth to 6 percent. We need far more investment, we need capacity in production and we need technology, Moreira said. We need to transform the energy sector in a very deep way. I think now is the time. The ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party has the ability to pass the key bills, which will attract investment and bolster Mexican markets, according to Eduardo Cepeda, the senior country officer for JPMorgan in Mexico. Mexicos

stock market may slump 10 percent if none of the promised reforms are carrier out this year, Cepeda said. Still, that could present a
buying opportunity because the structural changes will eventually get done, he said. The IPC stock index has dropped 8.4 percent this year, compared with declines of 25 percent for Brazils benchmark, 12 percent declines in Chile and a 15 percent fall in Colombia.

Yes Can Reform PEMEX

Private investment and tech from THA key to PEMEX reform Enrique Pea Nieto 12 olds a law de- gree from the Universidad Pana- mericana in Mexico City and a masters in business administra- tion from the Instituto Tecnolgi- co de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. He was a state legislator for the State of Mexico, the most populous one in the country, between 2003 and 2004. Current president of Mexico. http://www.carlosgoedder.com/uploads/2/1/3/3/21330/lapj2013_forwebsite_1.pdf#page= 7. Page 8-9. Similarly, we must change the view that for decades has predominated in Mexicos energy sector. Now is the time to modernize the countrys most important company, Petrleos Mexicanos (PEMEX). We must find new ways to take advantage of the countrys enormous energy potential. While I do not intend to privatize PEMEX, reform is needed to allow private investmentboth national and foreignin this important segment of the Mexican economy. The challenge to achieving such a reform is reaching politi- cal consensus to break the political gridlock that has led to years of stagnation in energy production. My proposal to reform the energy sector keeps the state in control of
the oil indus- try and the nations hydrocarbon reserves but provides PEMEX the powers and legal authority necessary to enter into strategic public-private alliances. If PEMEX is to benefit all Mexicans, the company requires investments in new technologies, which come through increased private-sector part- nerships. Why exhaust Mexicos financial capacity by investing in new projects if they 8 can be financed by private capital? As a re- sult, a new legal framework must be in place to allow private investors to assume greater investment risks. This is the only way to maximize PEMEXs production capabilities, increase its profitability, and improve trans- parency. These changes will bring millions of dollars into our economy. Simultaneously, we must wean the federal government off its

dependence on PEMEX by pushing for changes in Mexicos tax sys- tem. Currently PEMEXs revenue provides about one-third of Mexicos public budget, according to the INEGI. I will introduce a bill to simplify and expand tax collection starts by boosting funding for social welfare programs. It also includes measures such as increased domestic agricultural production to reduce prices of basic goods and contribute to the reduction of poverty, temporary unem- ployment insurance for those who lose their jobs, and a universal pension for Mexicans sixty-five and older. Indeed, Mexico is poised to enter a new period of expansion. Achieving the promi- nence we so desire can only happen if Mexico breaks through its past political stagnation and institutional roadblocks to build an econ- omy that has long-term strength and allevi- ates the epidemic of poverty. We can do both. Reforms are possible - Mexicos congress currently has enough votes to pass PEMEX reforms Irwin 7/9 ( Conway Irwin, staff writer at breaking energy and staff at the heritage foundation, Mexican Political Parties Align
Behind Energy Sector Reform, http://breakingenergy.com/2013/07/09/mexican-political-parties-align-behind-energy-sector-reform/

Mexico is heading towards much-needed energy sector reform, and with two of the countrys three major political parties in broad alignment on energy goals, major changes to the sector look more likely than ever, according to attorneys in the energy practice of

law firm Mayer Brown. Mexico is major oil producer, and one of the top sources of US

imports, according to the Energy Information Administration. The EIAs most recent
study shows Mexicos estimated shale gas resources at 545 trillion cubic feet, ranking it 6th of 41 non-US countries. There is great potential in Mexicos deep water and shale gas resources, Mayer Brown associate Gabriel Salinas told Breaking Energy. But Mexicos oil production has been declining since 2004, and the onus on arresting or reversing production declines falls squarely on the shoulders of Petrleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), the

state-owned oil company, due to constitutional limits on foreign involvement in the exploration, production, and ownership of the nations hydrocarbon resources, the EIA says. Mexicos production has been declining sharply during the last decade. If Mexico does not start to invest more in exploration, this trend will not be reversed, Salinas said. Jose Valera, a partner with Mayer Brown, explained that Mexico has long prioritized spending on production at the expense of exploration. Mexicos congress allocates the budget of state-controlled oil and gas monopoly Pemex based on expectations of income generated from the sale of petroleum products. Income from oil exports feeds into Mexicos
treasury, which depends, to a large extent, on export revenues to finance ordinary operating expenses, Valera said. To generate an exportable product is to generate revenues in US dollars. Because the revenues of Pemex are so important to finance the Treasury, there has always been an inclination to allow Pemex to risk relatively little capital for exploration, Valera said. The priority was to maximize the US dollars that Mexico could spend, and to maximize those dollars meant to take as little risk as possible to produce something that would generate revenues for the government. This may all be set to change, as the government is facing declines in three respects: reserves, production, and perhaps most importantly, exports, with a direct impact on government revenues. The export decline is more economically significant, Valera said. Mexico is getting squeezed, in that its production is declining while demand is increasing, so theres a smaller and smaller delta every year for exportable volumes. Low on Gas Developing Mexicos gas resources is also critical. The country is a major importer of natural gas, despite its large resources, and consumption has continued to rise steadily. Imported volumes from the US more than doubled from 2007 to 2012, according to EIA data. Right now, Mexico is having to ration natural gas for the volumes demanded by industry, said Valera. Mexico cannot rely solely on piped gas from the US to meet its needs. Mexico has relatively poor gas transportation infrastructure, so not all the gas that can be imported from the US by pipeline can effectively reach all the demand centers in Mexico, Valera said. The country also imports LNG. Mexico is having to buy LNG on the spot market to bring in more g as, but at very high prices $14, $15, even $17 per million Btu, Valera said. When you add what Mexico has to pay to import fuels with what Mexico has to pay to import natural gas, it is almost what Mexico makes exporting crude oil, said Valera. Soon youll have a negative trade balance in hydrocarbons. Those two elements, to me, make a convincing case that the public interest is not being served as a direct result of energy policy, Valera said. Two Out of Three Aint Bad Mexicos declining prod uction and rising energy consumption have been on the reform agenda for yea rs. But political conditions may finally

be conducive to moving forward with reforms that have failed in the past, with two of the

countrys three major political parties the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) backing energy reform. The PAN has tried to reform the energy framework in the past, with no success. But for the first time in decades, the PRI appears to be on board, as well. The current president, Enrique Pea Nieto, is a member of the PRI, which is the party behind the initial nationalization of Mexicos oil and gas industry. The political party in Mexico with the most political capital to reform the energy sector in Mexico is the part that created the monopoly and nationalization in the first place, Valera said. For the first time, you have the PRI openly and seriously proposing energy reform, Valera said. And the combined efforts of the PAN and the PRI could be sufficient to move reforms past the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which opposes them. For the first time you have two political parties

with enough numbers in the Mexican Congress to make the reform happen, Valera said.

That is why it does look different today than at any other time in the past. The PRI will cooperate on PEMEX reforms in order to win presidential election Mares 11 (David Mares June 3 2011, Baker Institute Scholar for Energy Studies - James A Baker III Institute for Public Policy,
Rice University, Round 2 of Pemex reform?, http://www.bnamericas.com/interviews/en/david-mares-james-a-baker-iii-institute-forpublic-policy-rice-university)

These are things Mexico could do, that are not that hard to swallow, and that if PRI has any kind of a vision will see it in their interest to adopt. I think it is really short-sighted for people in PRI to say they don't want to make reforms now because they want to win the
next presidential election. If new reforms are not promulgated now, when they win the next presidential election, the president will shortly have a fiscal crisis. It is not going to be an

economic crisis, but it will be a fiscal crisis for the state and the next president is going to have to deal with adopting a fiscal reform and having less income because oil exports have decreased significantly. It should be in PRI's interest, believing it will win the next
election, to make some reforms now to make Pemex more effective.

PEMEX is confident reforms will happen Rathbone 2/27 (John Rathbone, writer for financial times, Mexican reforms set to boost oil flows,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3ee499c4-80d8-11e2-9c5b-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Ys2d4ZNK)

The head of Mexicos state oil monopoly has said he expects legislators to pass President Enrique Pea Nietos landmark energy reform as soon as this summer, in a move expected to unleash tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment. Oil majors such as

ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, previously shut out by the countrys protectionist energy policies, have said they are ready to invest if congress passes the long-awaited reform. Im confident that political parties will come to an agreement, Emilio Lozoya, the newly appointed chief executive of Pemex, told the Financial Times in his first in-depth interview. Mr Lozoya said the reform would allow Pemex to work hand in hand with the worlds largest oil companies for the first time in more than half a century. Pemex, with sales of more than $100bn a year, is the worlds seventh biggest oil producer. The burden of being the governments cash cow Pemex provides more than a third of federal revenues has left it struggling to take advantage of some of North Americas most promising oil reserves. We cant do it alone, Mr Lozoya said. We need to change Mexicos legal framework so that companies can share risk. He also ruled out any possibility Pemex might be privatised, like Brazils Petrobras or Colombias Ecopetrol. No, clearly not, he said. Not under Enrique Pea Nietos administration. Pemex has suffered from years of under-investment, with production falling to under 2.6m barrels of oil a day from a peak of 3.4m bpd in 2004. An explosion at the groups Mexico City headquarters last month killed 32 people. Mr Lozoyas optimism comes as foreign investors shift their gaze from Brazil to Mexico, sending the local stock market to record highs. Mr Pea Nieto has vowed to deliver the countrys most ambitious reform package in decades. Economists believe the measures which include tax, competition, labour and education reforms could transform Mexico into one of the worlds most promising emerging markets and increase economic growth to 6 per cent a year. Energy is the
centrepiece of Mr Pea Nietos reforms.

Mexican government realizes passing reforms is necessary Siskind 6/25 (Cory Siskind, research analyst for Control Risks, a global risk management consultancy, Mexico Plays the
Waiting Game on Big Reforms, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cory-siskind/mexico-plays-the-waiting-_b_3493542.html)

Passing fiscal and energy reforms will almost certainly happen, as most parties involved recognize their importance to Mexico's future. The markets are likely to boom in the wake

of the new legislation, reinvigorating the hope and high expectations seen during Pea Nieto's first one hundred days. But in Mexico the real challenge will begin after the reforms have passed. Implementation, particularly in opening PEMEX, will be complicated by an extensive bureaucracy with a traditionally lethargic approach to change. The challenges are numerous, but the payoff will be big. Mexico must endure the
waiting game, revive political cooperation, pass meaningful fiscal and energy reforms, and then actually implement both. If it succeeds, all the hype will have been deserved. It will

truly be Mexico's moment PEMEX Reform Possible. Tracy Wilkinson. March 04, 2013 Mexico president wins key party vote on reform of national oil company .http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/04/world/la-fg-wn-mexicopri-oil-pemex-20130304. Pemex, a symbol of nationalistic pride, is the top income earner for the Mexican state, but its production of oil has been declining dramatically and the company is in dire need of outside expertise for deep-sea exploration and other projects. Pea Nieto has stated that reform of Pemex is a top priority, but his partys bylaws forbid its members who serve in Congress from voting on any change in the way the company is managed. On Sunday, after hearing from the president, several thousand members of the party voted unanimously to change the rules and allow support for Pemex reform. PEMEX reforms are now possible- changing national priorities Ibrezosky.07/10/2013.http://texas.construction.com/yb/tx/article.aspx?story_id=1876275 65. National politics could be lining up in favor of reform, said Shannon O'Neil, senior fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Pena Nieto's statements reiterated a key campaign promise and followed a significant agreement to reform the nation's education system. And like education, energy sector reform is one of the tenets of the "Pact for Mexico," signed by Mexico's three main political parties and unveiled on Pena Nieto's first full day in office. "It's prepping the agenda for the next big reform -energy reform," O'Neil said.

Mexican Econ Down

Mexican economy Slowing down- weakening stocks and peso prove Lliff 7/12 Laurence Iliff Writer/analyst for the Wall Street Journal Mexico Stocks End
Lower; Peso Slips vs Dollar http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20130712710497.html MEXICO CITY--Mexican stocks ended lower on Friday, and the peso lost ground against the dollar, on continuing concerns over a possible unwinding of the bond-buying program by the U.S. Federal Reserve and as local economic news pointed to a slowdown. The IPC index of the leading 35 stock issues fell 0.4% to 40330 points on volume of 254 million shares valued at 7.02 billion pesos ($547.4 million). For the week, the index was off 0.7%. Monex said in a research note that it continued to recommend speculative buying of equities, although it warned that the current correction may continue and take the IPC to support levels below 40000 points. The dollar was quoted in Mexico City at MXN12.8260, according to Infosel, compared with Thursday's close of MXN12.8090. On the week, the peso strengthened 1.9% and Banco Base said the currency could move below resistance at MXN12.78 to the dollar should China meet expectations for secondquarter gross domestic product when it releases the data next week. In local economic news, industrial production for May grew at just 0.5% versus the year-ago month, which was slightly weaker than expected, and the central bank kept its overnight rate unchanged at 4% as expected. The Bank of Mexico also expressed worries about slowing economic growth. In equities, the V shares of Mexico's biggest retailer Wal-Mart de Mexico lost 2% to MXN35.99, and the CPO shares of cement and building-materials maker Cemex rose 2% to MXN14.50. Mexican economy weak- cuts in benchmark rates prove Reuters 7/12 Reuters: Economic news source. UPDATE 1-Mexico central bank holds rates, shows concern over growth http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/12/mexicoeconomy-rates-idUSL1N0FI0PV20130712

Mexico's central bank held borrowing costs steady on Friday, noting risks to economic activity had increased, and saying it would closely monitor the effect of slower growth on inflation. The Banco de Mexico
left its benchmark interest rate at 4 percent, in line with the expectations of analysts in a Reuters poll. Policymakers said their current stance was in line with the outlook for no generalized price pressures, and that the balance of risks

for inflation had improved

after price increases cooled from a recent spike. A pick-up in U.S. job growth is expected to help boost demand for exports from Latin America's second biggest economy, and the central bank said Mexican growth should accelerate in the second half of the year. "Still, due to the quickness and depth with which the economic slowdown has happened,

the downside risks for economic activity have increased," the bank wrote in its statement. Mexico's government cut its growth estimate for 2013 to 3.1 percent from 3.5 percent about two months ago, after a weak start to the year. The central bank said a recent sharp slump in the peso currency had not spurred any inflation pressures. The peso's losses have assuaged policymakers' previous worries that it was becoming too strong. In March, the central bank cut its benchmark rate for the first time in nearly four years in what was seen as a bid to reduce the appeal of local assets to yield-hungry investors. Since then, fears the U.S. Federal Reserve could begin to withdraw its massive monthly stimulus this year have hammered the peso as investors bet tighter U.S. monetary policy would strengthen the dollar and draw out funds that sought higher yields in Mexico due to the Fed's easy policies. Mexico's peso sank to its weakest in nearly a year last month, but it has since bounced back to trade around 12.80 this week,
pushing the cost of dollars in pesos back below the psychological 13-per-dollar level, but well above the levels near 12 that could crimp exporters' profits and slow growth. Mexican annual inflation cooled to a four-month low of 4.09 percent in June, retreating after a surge in fresh food prices. The central bank said that the annual inflation rate would be between 3 percent and 4 percent in the second half of 2013, below policymakers' 4 percent ceiling.

Artic Drilling Inevitable

Arctic drilling makes spills inevitable and worse than gulf spills Kroh, Conothan, and Huvos 12 [Emily, Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress, Michael, s the Director of Ocean Policy at the Center for American Progress, Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/02/pdf/arcticreport.pdf]
In a recent report, co-authored by the National Research Council, the

National Academy of Engineering found that the oil industry and the federal government have a misplaced trust in the functionality of blowout preventers, designed to seal an oil well in the event of an emergency. 25 Since their invention in 1922, the evolution of this expensive and long-lived piece of equipment appears to have been limited, and was neither designed nor tested for the conditions that likely occurred at the time of the Macondo well blowout. Though drilling overseers have made progress in expunging the failure of supervision and accountability that led to the Macondo well blowout, the Arctic, as the Commission emphasized, requires the utmost care, given the special challenges and risks associated with this frontier. 26, 27 If we learned anything from Deepwater Horizon its that the importance of preparedness cannot be overstated and that caution should be exercised to an even greater degree given the unique variables that will dramatically increase the degree of difficulty of responding to an oil spill in a high-risk environment such as the Arctic. As one WWF staffer has put it, an oil spill occurring in the Gulf is like a heart attack happening in a hospital you have everything you need to be treated. A spill in the Arctic is like having a heart attack on the North Pole youre on your own.

Arctic drilling and oil spill inevitable Vidal 2011 John Vidal, staff writer for the Guardian. Why an oil spill in Arctic waters would be devastating. Guardian News and Media. April 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/22/oil-spill-arcticanalysis?INTCMP=SRCH>.
As sea ice disappears and open water seasons last longer, the High North that vast area above the Arctic circle has become the oil industry's new frontier, offering potentially billions of barrels of oil from deep offshore wells in return for the huge technical, safety and financial risks. But conservationists increasingly argue it is only a matter of time before a catastrophic spill devastates some of the least polluted waters in the world. So far, the industry has mostly worked onshore or in shallow, easily accessible waters off Alaska. The worst spill was the Exxon Valdez tanker, which sank in 1989, with the effects still felt today. But the major oil companies are all now preparing to move into areas where a spill would not just be almost impossible to clean up, but could take years to even control.

2AC: AT No Funding for Oversight

Safety training in the gulf of mexico is high and efficient API 13. (Gulf of Mexico Offshore Oil & Natural Gas Safety, pg. 1.
http://www.api.org/environment-health-and-safety/clean-water/oil-spill-prevention-andresponse/gulf-of-mexico-offshore.)

Safety is a core value of the oil and natural gas industry. The industry follows and constantly improves best practices for safe offshore operations, including training, operational procedures, regulations, industry standards and technology. It also works closely with local, state and federal regulators including the U.S. Coast Guard and BOEMRE to ensure a strong focus on safety. Stringent regulatory oversight helps maintain environmental performance, and offshore operators are required to obtain 17 major federal permits and comply with 90 sets of federal and state regulations to operate on OCS. Furthermore, BOEMRE and the U.S. Coast Guard conduct thousands of offshore

facility inspections each year.

Multiple standards ensure safe OCS drilling API 13. (Gulf of Mexico Offshore Oil & Natural Gas Safety, pg. 1.
http://www.api.org/environment-health-and-safety/clean-water/oil-spill-prevention-andresponse/gulf-of-mexico-offshore.)

The American Petroleum Institute (API) has also produced more than 45 standards related to offshore operations and practices that help protect workers and the environment, including recommended practices for blowout prevention systems and well control operations. Both BOEMRE and the U.S. Coast Guard often incorporate industry standards into their regulations, giving them the force of law, and the standards and recommended practices are regularly reviewed and updated.

Training and Guidelines are high now- Industry learned lessons from BP Brady 2012 Brady, Jeff, NPR reporter and journalist, report published April 20th, 2012, As Workers Age, Oil Industry Braces for Skills Gap http://www.npr.org/2012/04/20/150871935/asworkers-age-oil-industry-braces-for-skills-gap
Two years after the Deepwater Horizon accident killed 11 men and sent oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, the oil industry says it has learned valuable lessons from the disaster that are making drilling safer today. But there's still a pressing issue looming for the oil industry: Oil field
workers are retiring in huge numbers, leaving a workforce that's younger and more importantly less experienced. Dubbed "the great crew change," the staffing challenge comes even as crews venture into places where drilling is more difficult, like the Arctic and below the world's oceans. More Drilling, Less Experience Investigations into the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster point to a series of mistakes, including a failed blow-out preventer and results of a key test that managers ignored. But investigations by the U.S. Department of the Interior and a presidential commission also point to an issue that has received much less attention: there was a reorganization of personnel on the rig just before the accident. While the new crew leaders had years of experience, they were new to their positions. "When the Deepwater Horizon exploded, no one in the BP engineering team had been on the job for more than six months," says John Konrad, a former drill ship captain and coauthor of. Konrad says such staffing reorganizations are becoming more common. Around the globe, as more huge drill ships like the Deepwater Horizon are built to take advantage of high oil prices, companies have had difficulty finding enough experienced workers. "It only takes a year to

build a billion-dollar ship," Konrad says. "But it takes 10, 20, 30 years to build a billion-dollar captain who's going to navigate and command the ship." And just as demand for more experienced workers is rising, their numbers are declining. A survey by Schlumberger Business Consulting finds that 22,000 experienced geoscientists and engineers will leave the field by 2015. While workers currently rising through the ranks will replace many retirees, the survey shows a quarter of those positions will be filled by much younger workers with less experience. An 80s Bust, Reverberating Today The oil bust of the 1980s helps explain the demographic shift in the industry. As crude prices plummeted from $35 a barrel to $10, companies laid off workers and, in many cases, stopped hiring. Three decades later, those staffing changes have left an age gap in the industry's workforce. A growing number of training programs are attracting new potential workers who hope to fill that gap. Marvin Harris, a student at Lone Star Corporate College outside of Houston, hopes to transition from a warehouse job to a position in the oil industry. "There's always opportunities in the oil field to move up, move around, see different countries and travel," Harris says. "I love to travel, and in the oil industry you get to travel quite a bit." George King, an instructor at Lone Star, spent a career as a mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry before turning to teaching. "A significant amount of technology, expertise and knowledge know-how is leaving the industry," King says. "So those of us that are ending our careers in industry are coming back into education, because we have a story to tell and we have skills and experiences that can be relayed through teaching." The question for the industry now is whether expertise, once developed over a decade or more on the job, can be taught in classrooms in a matter of months. Concerns Over Safety Another concern for many industry observers: if transitioning from a workforce with decades of experience to one that's just getting its bearings will compromise safety. "We haven't seen that," says Jim Noe, senior vice president at the drilling company Hercules Offshore. Noe points to federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing the trend for injury accidents in the oil business has been heading down. He says there are incentives to make sure that continues. "I think we've all seen what happens when you have a big incident and how much of a business interruption and how much business impact that can have by looking at BP," Noe says. BP estimates the disaster will cost the company more than $40 billion, and is selling assets to help pay those costs. Today, BP wants to demonstrate that it will operate safely. Even quarterly

earnings calls begin with Chief Executive Bob Dudley issuing a safety message about what to do if the fire alarm goes off. More Stringent Training Guidelines Mark Denkowski,

vice president of accreditation and certification at the International Association of Drilling Contractors, says extensive safety briefings and long training programs are quite a change from his experiences early in his career. "Thirty years ago ... when I saw my first rig ... there was little or no training," Denkowski says. "It was literally, 'Here's your hard hat, here's some safety equipment, and go to work,'" Even before the Deepwater Horizon accident, companies had voluntary

guidelines to make sure all their workers were adequately trained. Now federal regulators have made some of those voluntary guidelines mandatory. "No longer would you have a that that individual has been through that orientation." Two years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the industry says it's doubling down on safety. The real test as a
generation of experienced workers retires and a new generation takes over is ahead.

person that's just hired and literally put on a boat or on a helicopter and flown out to a rig with little or no orientation or training," Denkowski says. "Companies are going to be required to prove

Off-Shore environmental regulations are high and increasing now German, Ben (Energy and Environment Reporter). "Interior's Offshore Drilling Safety Chief Stepping down." The Hill. N.p., 09 July 2013. Web. 12 July 2013. <http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/309837-interiors-offshore-drilling-safety-chiefstepping-down>.
BSEE was created in the wake of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which led to the overhaul of Interiors long-troubled offshore drilling oversight and regulation. Director Watson has served with distinction and has helped implement the most aggressive and comprehensive offshore oil and gas regulatory reforms in the nations history, Interior

Secretary Sally Jewell said in a statement. Watson is slated to leave in late summer and Interior has not yet named a replacement. In September, Watson will become the president and CEO of the Americas division ABS, an organization that helps develop and verify standards for maritime vessels. His planned departure comes as BSEE is implementing toughened safety rules and

preparing to propose new standards for subsea blowout preventers, the supposedly failsafe device that didnt contain BPs runaway Macondo well. During Watsons tenure, the agency has expanded workplace safety requirements imposed after the BP disaster, modified separate post-spill drilling safety standards around integrity of offshore wells and related topics, and issued a new safety culture policy, among other steps.

Offshore drilling inspection is high now Donald W. Solanas 2/5 (Offshore Technology Conference) http://www.onepetro.org/mslib/servlet/onepetropreview?id=OTC-1754-MS
This paper reports on the progress made in 1972 by the Geological Survey's management program of the Gulf of Mexico OCS leases. During 1972 more stringent OCS Orders were issued; and new Orders or revisions are now in preparation with

systematic supervision and more comprehensive inspection procedures are now utilized. Further improvements of
the full cooperation of OCS lessees and operators committees. More

the safety and pollution control of the offshore operations are being considered. Some of the innovations in the program are: hazards analyses, failure-reporting and corrective-action systems, information exchange, safety and antipollution motivation programs, and better identification of research and development needs.
The training of operators and Government personnel is proceeding so as to keep pace with new requirements. As a result of these efforts, the likelihood of oil pollution incidents in the Outer Continental Shelf lease operations should be significantly reduced. INTRODUCTION The evolution of the petroleum industry and the concurrent emergence
of conservation laws and regulations over the past 50 years have been of great significance. From the highly individualistic oil producers of a few decades ago has emerged a major industry and technology. Now it is comprehensively and constructively regulated so as to permit an efficient exploration and the development and recovery of the Nation's oil and gas reserves, while protecting the environment and the rights of others. In retrospect, the early oilman by today's standards seems wasteful, but it must be remembered that knowledge was meager as to the causes of waste and the remedies therefor. Despite its relatively short life span, the petroleum industry has a remarkable record of rapid development of technology and its widespread use. Government has the responsibility to establish reasonable regulations and standards that assure safe, clean operations; while also giving proper consideration to technical feasibility and lead times. The burden of proving that petroleum operations can be carried on safely rests mainly with the petroleum industry. Government and industry have a joint responsibility to avoid that OCS operations are improperly conducted or that the nature of those operations be misunderstood, so that public consent is not withheld. The public needs to know that not only a satisfactory technologic capability exists for safely carrying out difficult and potentially dangerous operations, but also it needs to be assured that adequate regulatory and supervisory capabilities exist to see that operations will indeed be conducted safely. Each operator must have an earnest desire to conduct his activities properly, which often is more effective than regulations or enforcement procedures. Nevertheless, considering the important values at stake, the protection of the public interest

The U. S. Geological Survey is the organization that bears' the responsibility for seeing that offshore petroleum exploration and production are conducted properly.
should not depend on good intentions alone.

2AC A2: Oil DA- Prices Low

Crude oil trading lower now Nirmal Bang 7/12 Nirmal Bang (Retail broking house in India). Nirmal Bang Expects Crude Oil Prices to Trade Lower http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/brokerage-recos-commodities/nirmalbang-expects-crude-oil-prices-to-trade-lower_916420.html (jm) acc. 7/12
Crude oil had the steepest fall in three weeks on Thursday, retreating from a 15-month high as traders took profits on a three-week rally that upended price spreads and reshaped the forward market. Iran has asked India to settle all oil trade including USD1.53 billion

owed to Tehran in the partly convertible rupee as the sanctions-hit nation cannot find an alternative payment channel, industry and government sources in Delhi said. BP Plc was shutting one of two small crude distillation units for a planned overhaul at its 405,000 barrel per day (bpd) Whiting, Indiana refinery on Thursday, according to sources familiar with the refinery's operations. The North American shale oil boom could spur the biggest
rise in non-OPEC supply growth in decades next year, helping meet strong global demand and eroding the market share of OPEC countries, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday. FUNDAMENTAL OUTLOOK: Crude oil is trading lower on NYMEX today. We expect prices to trade lower for the day on account of weak imports numbers from China and poor jobless data from the US.

Prices drop after spikes Norman 7/12 , Barry (FX Empire Analyst) Crude Oil Fundamentals Should Push Prices Down http://www.fxempire.com/news/economic-news/crude-oil-fundamentals-should-pushprices-down/ (jm) acc. 7/12
The EIA said crude oil stockpiles tumbled by 9.9 million barrels in the week ended July 5.

That was more than triple the 2.9-million-barrel drop expected by analysts polled by Dow Jones Newswires, and followed the prior weeks drop of nearly 10 million barrels.
Traders remain deeply concerned over potential disruption in Middle East supply

following the overthrow last week of Egypts Islamist president Mohamed Morsi by the military. Egypt is not a major crude oil exporter but is home to key oil transit points of the Suez Canal and the Sumed Pipeline. It was inevitable that WTI prices would climb just as operators increased pipeline capacity, easing the supply glut in Cushing, Oklahoma, where physical oil demanded from NYMEX WTI futures contracts gets delivered and sent on to refineries. BP also recently restarted full operations at its refinery in Whiting, Indiana, which boosted demand, and imports have been constrained after flooding in Canada. But the latest spike is already proving short lived, because the U.S.
continues to pump out shale oil like never before. Production is now 16% higher than where it was a year ago. Traders should expect to see prices decline as production and inventory climbs.

Low U.S. Oil imports are keeping prices low Chen 7/9 , Xun Yao . (Industrial analyst) US oil imports fall to a record low since 2007, oil shipping (tanker) outlook remains negative http://marketrealist.com/2013/07/us-oil-

imports-fall-to-a-record-low-since-2007-oil-shipping-tanker-outlook-remains-negative/ (jm) acc. 7/12 As the worlds largest importer of crude oil, making up more than 21% of worlds total import volume in 2010, the United States imports have a significant effect on global oil trade. If the United States imports less crude oil, due to an economic downturn for example, it can have large impact on shipping rates, since supply is inelastic (a small change in demand can have a greater effect on prices). This will eventually lead to companies reporting lower margins and earnings since most of their costs are fixed. For the week ending June 8th, U.S. imported a record low volume of crude oil: 7.32 million barrels a day, according to American Petroleum Institution. The largest energy boom in the United States, driven by technologies called hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, is creating thousands of jobs and attracting millions of dollars in investment funds from oil companies around the world. This has kept oil prices low, aside from weak
developed economies over the past five years, which is benefiting domestic manufacturers and consumers.

Oil prices poised to drop Paterson 7/3 ,Jim.(Consultant for Kiplinger Personal Finance) Lower oil prices on the Horizion Kiplinger Personal Financehttp://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/T019-C021-S005lower-oil-prices-on-the-horizon.html (jm) acc. 6/3
After nearly a decade of unrelenting gains, oil prices are poised for a drop. New sources of supply and slowing demand both at home and abroad will combine to push prices down by 20% to 30% by 2016. The plunge will also lower gasoline prices, to around $3 a gallon,

on average a welcome break for motorists, who will be able to spend the money they save at the pumps on other purchases, helping to boost the economy. To appreciate just how significant the coming downshift will be, consider the recent history of oil prices: In 2002, crude oil in the U.S. averaged $26 per barrel, fairly close to the low prices that prevailed for much of the 1980s and 1990s. But by 2008, crude had nearly quadrupled, to $100 per barrel, because of surging demand from China and other fast-growing countries, along with waning domestic oil output. The recession that hit the U.S. economy that year brought a sharp drop, but only briefly. Prices have averaged about $95 per barrel since 2011. But now, the factors behind the bull oil market are reversing. Expensive gasoline has convinced many consumers to trade in SUVs for fuel-sipping alternatives, and automakers are scrambling to boost the fuel economy of every model they sell. At the same time, high prices have unleashed a surge of new exploration and drilling by energy
firms eager to cash in on expensive oil. As a result, U.S. oil consumption is off 11% from its peak, while output has rebounded by 30% in just four years. Similar shifts are happening

abroad. Oil demand in emerging markets is easing, after a decade of torrid growth. Fuel subsidies meant to spur newly middle-class consumers to buy their first automobiles are being pared back as China and other fast-growing nations look to cut costs and air pollution. Wealthy Middle Eastern countries are building power plants that run on natural gas, to lessen the need to burn oil for electricity during the regions scorching summers. In Europe and Japan, weak economies and stringent environmental policies figure to keep oil demand stagnant at best. Meanwhile, output is surging from Canada to Iraq to deepwater fields off the coasts of Africa.

2AC Already Passed House

No link already passed the house Govtrack 7/12 ( Govtrack.com, H.R. 1613: Outer Continental Shelf Transboundary Hydrocarbon Agreements Authorization Act, one of the worlds most visited government transparency websites. The site helps ordinary citizens find and track bills in the U.S. Congress and understand their representatives legislative recor updated daily, http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr1613) H.R. 1613: Outer Continental Shelf Transboundary Hydrocarbon Agreements Authorization Act Introduced: Apr 18, 2013 (113th Congress, 20132015) Sponsor: Rep. Jeff Duncan [R-SC3] Status: Passed House The bills title was written by the bills sponsor. H.R. stands for House of Representatives bill. TRACK THIS BILL SHARE OVERVIEWSUMMARIESRELATEDCITATIONSCOMMENTS (0) STATUS This bill passed in the House on June 27, 2013 and goes to the Senate next for consideration. PROGRESS Introduced Apr 18, 2013 Referred to Committee Apr 18, 2013 Reported by Committee May 15, 2013 Passed House Jun 27, 2013 Passed Senate ... Signed by the President ... VOTES House Vote on Passage Jun 27, 2013 3:04 p.m. Passed 256 You really dont get a link, not only has it already passed the house but the vote was bipartisan Committee on Natural Resources 6/27 (Chairman Doc hasting, House Votes to Approve Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement with Mexico, from the official website of the House Natural Gas Committee, 6/27/13, http://naturalresources.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=340794) WASHINGTON, D.C., June 27, 2013 - Today, the House of Representatives passed H.R.
1613, the Outer Continential Shelf Transboundary Hydrocarbon Agreements Authorization Act, with a bipartisan vote of 256-171. This legislation, sponsored by Rep. Jeff Duncan

(SC-03), would approve and implement the terms of the U.S. - Mexico Transboundary

Hydrocarbons Agreement, signed by the Obama Administration in 2012, that governs the development of shared oil and natural gas resources along the U.S. Mexico maritime border in the Gulf of Mexico. The bill would open up nearly 1.5 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico that is estimated to contain as much as 172 million barrels of oil and 304 billion cubic feet of natural gas. This would expand U.S. energy production, create new American jobs, lower energy prices, and generate tens of millions of dollars in new revenue. The bill would also put into place an important and transparent framework for future implementation of similar transboundary hydrocarbon agreements with other nations.

Inherency
THA will be held up in the Senate now
DeFazio 6/27, Peter, Congressman, OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF TRANSBOUNDARY HYDROCARBON
AGREEMENTS AUTHORIZATION ACT, https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/item/speech/CREC-2013-06-27-pt1-PgH4096-6.chunk32/rep-peter-defazio-outer-continentalshelf-transboundary-hydrocarbon-agreements-authorization-act

Okay. With that, I would reclaim my time. I could ask to have the record read back, but I won't because it would delay things. But you said this is what Mexico wanted. You did say that just before as you spoke. Now you're saying that you believe that this is reflecting the spirit of the agreement. Now I will accept that. You believe that changing the agreement by waiving our financial services law is in the spirit of the agreement. I don't believe that. Maxine Waters, who serves on the Committee on Financial Services, doesn't agree with that. And, unfortunately, the President of the United States doesn't agree with that, so this bill is going nowhere. It's not going to get out of the Senate. They have a bipartisan bill over there that doesn't waive Dodd-Frank that they could pass by unanimous consent. We could be done with this. But no, we're not going to do that; we're going to play games. So here's what the President said. He's got something to say about this in the end, he really does: The administration cannot support H.R. 1613, as reported by the House Committee on Natural Resources because of the unnecessary, extraneous provisions that seriously detract from the bill. Most significantly, the administration strongly objects to exempting actions taken by public companies in accordance with the transboundary hydrocarbon agreements from requirements section 1504 of the DoddFrank Act and the Securities and Exchange Commission's natural resource extraction disclosure rule. As a practical matter, this provision would waive the requirement for the
disclosure of any payments made by resource extraction companies to the United States or foreign governments in accordance with a transboundary hydrocarbon agreement. The provision directly and negatively impacts U.S. efforts to increase transparency and accountability, particularly in the oil, gas, and minerals sectors. So if we proceed with this bill in this form, the President will veto the bill, and we'll be back again. And how many

months that'll take, I don't know. But to assert that somehow Mexico wanted this, or the administration wanted it, and they just kind of forgot to put it in the agreement, and now we're helping them out, even though the administration says they don't want it, and I don't know what the government of Mexico says--and then there was another issue raised about confidentiality provisions.

Neg

PEMEX Answers
Mexicos econ doing fine now

Enrique Pea Nieto 12 olds a law degree from the Universidad Pana- mericana in Mexico City and a masters in business administra- tion from the Instituto Tecnolgi- co de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. He was a state legislator for the State of Mexico, the most populous one in the country, between 2003 and 2004. Current president of Mexico. http://www.carlosgoedder.com/uploads/2/1/3/3/21330/lapj2013_forwebsite_1.pdf#page= 7. Page 7-8. Mexicos economic acceleration is already happening. Fortunately, the global economic crisis of 2008 spared many emerging economiesMexico includedfrom much damage. Today, Mexico is in the enviable position of enjoying an economic rebound, despite the fact that many of our large Latin American partners are starting to slow down.
A survey by Mexicos central bank expects the economy to expand by 3.87 percent in 2012

(Banco de Mexico 2012). My government views the acceleration of the economic expansion as our number one priority. If Mexico is to achieve its place as a world leader, we mustonce and for alluse economic growth to raise millions of our fellow citizens out of poverty. According to analysts at Goldman Sachs and Nomura, Mexico will be one of the ten largest economies in the next decade (ONeill 2012). Goldman Sachs Jim ONeill explains that by 2020, Mexico could be one of the top ten economies if it develops to its full po- tential (2011). Similarly, Nomuras Tony Volpon and Benito Berber argue that Mexicos economy might even be bigger than Brazils within ten years (Rapoza 2012). ARTICLE | PEA NIETO I like to agree with those financial leaders who have said that the coming decade will be- long to the so-called MIST nations (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, and Turkey), which are the four biggest markets in Goldman Sachs Next-11 Equity Fund. Today, Mexico is one of the most open large economies in the world. It is the
sec Competitiveness estimated that the first three of these reforms would add 2.5 percentage points to our countrys growth rate (Instituto Mexicano para la Competitividad 2011).

Drilling Not Inev- Arctic Shell has shut down plans to drill in the Arctic, drilling isnt inevitable
Lavelle 2/27 (Marianne, energy editor for National Geographic Digital Media, has spent more than two decades covering environment, business, climate and policy in Washington, D.C. Previously, she spearheaded a project tracking climate change lobbying for the nonprofit, nonpartisan journalism organization The Center for Public Integrity. Before that, she was a senior writer at U.S. News and World Report magazine, where she wrote the Beyond the Barrel blog. Before joining U.S. News, she created a beat on federal regulation for The National Law Journal, and led a team of reporters in a series on environmental justice, Unequal Protection," winner of the George Polk Award and numerous other honors, Shell Suspends Arctic Drilling Plan for 2013, National Geographic, 2/27/13, http://energyblog.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/27/shell-suspends-arctic-drilling-planfor-2013/) JM

Shells rig, the Kulluk, off the coast of Alaska this past winter will reverberate through the summer; the oil company announced today it would not seek to drill in U.S. Arctic waters in 2013. Weve made progress in Alaska, but this is a long-term programme that we are pursuing in a safe and measured way, said Marvin Odum, director of Shells Upstream Americas division. Our decision to pause in 2013 will give us time to ensure the readiness of all our equipment and people following the drilling season in 2012. Shell never drilled into oil-bearing formations in the Arctic last year, but completed top-hole drilling on two wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, marking the industrys return to offshore drilling in the Alaskan Arctic after more than a decade. Shell noted the drilling was completed safely, with no serious injuries or environmental impact. But other troubles beset its two specially equipped rigs.
The troubles that roiled Its drill rig, the Noble Discoverer, slipped its anchor in Alaskas Dutch Harbor last summer before heading north, and after it returned in the fall, a small fire broke out aboard ship. But it was a mishap with Shells other rig, the Kulluk, that mobilized an ex traordinary rescue and recovery drama. A violent storm caused it to lose its mooring to tow ships and run aground on New Years Eve. The U.S. Coast Guard-led response, including a rescue of the crew by helicopter, eventually involved more than 700 people. The incident ended with no spill of the diesel fuel or oil products that the Kulluk carried. But Shell said that both the Kulluk and the Discoverer will be towed to Asia for maintenance and repairs. Because Shells permits for drilling in the Arctic were predicated on use of the two

how long a pause in Shells plans will depend not only on the companys own timetable, but on U.S. regulators. After the Kulluk incident, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ordered a 60-day review of last years Arctic drilling program, the results of which are expected by the end of next week. Although none of Shells mishaps involved drilling, some environmentalists are urging a revamp of the exploration plan to include more stringent safeguards, while many others are working to halt drilling altogether. It appears Shell is realizing they need to take a more careful approach to ensure they dont put the Arctics people and marine life at risk, said Marilyn Heiman, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts U.S. Arctic Program, in
rigs, the decision to forgo drilling this season is not unexpected. But

The causes of last years mishaps must be remedied so they do not occur in the future. Its time that all parties, from the administration and local communities to conservation groups
an email. and industry sit down and develop world class industry standards and ecological and cultural protections to safeguard the Arc tic. David Yarnold, president of the National Audubon Society, however, maintains spills will happen no matter how careful the oil

Drilling amid ice floes in the neighborhood of nurseries for threatened wildlife isnt either smart or safe. Shell seems to have come to its senses for now but how many accidents did it take?
companies are. Shell has seen the ice. Or the light, he said in a prepared statement. But Shell, which has invested more than $4.5 billion in leases and equipment for exploration in the Alaskan Arctic, said it is committed to drilling there in the future. Alaska remains an area with high potential for Shell over the long term, the com pany said, adding that resources there would take years to develop. A 2008 report by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the area north of the Arctic Circle holds 13 percent of the worlds undiscovered oil, and 30 percent of its undiscovered natural ga s.

NEW LINK MODS

Oil Link Mod

The affs enframing of Mexico in terms of oil produces an extractive and violent approach to the land that ensures environmental violence economic engagement is merely a means of creating a stable network for the reproduction of this social terrain Nixon 11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 17-18)

In the global resource wars, the environmentalism of the poor is frequently triggered when an official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one." A vernacular landscape is shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features. A vernacular landscape, although neither monolithic nor undisputed, is integral to the socioenvironmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly externalized-treated as out there, as a separate nonrenewable resource. By contrast, an official landscape-whether governmental, NGO, corporate, or some combination of those-is typically oblivious to such earlier maps; instead, it writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is often pitilessly instrumental. Lawrence Summers' scheme to export rich-nation garbage and toxicity to Africa, for example, stands as a grandiose (though hardly exceptional) instance of a highly rationalized official landscape that, whether in terms of elite capture of resources or toxic disposal, has often been projected onto ecosystems inhabited by those whom Annu Jalais, in an Indian context, calls "dispensable citizens.'?" I would argue, then, that the exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions across the globe during the high age of neoliberalism has resulted largely from a clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers who arrive (with their official landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the longtermers who must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time's scales.
In the pages that follow, I will highlight and explore resource rebellions against developer-dispossessors who descend from other time zones to impose on habitable

Change is a cultural constant but the pace of change is not. Hence the temporal contests over how to sustain, regenerate, exhaust, or obliterate the landscape as resource become critical. More than material wealth is here at stake: imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased. The ensuing losses are consistent with John Berger's lament over capitalism's disdain for interdependencies by foreshortening our sense of time, thereby rendering the deceased immaterial: The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective. Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the eliminated.40 Hence, one should add, our perspective on environmental asset stripping should include among assets stripped the mingled presence in the landscape of multiple generations, with all the hindsight and foresight that entails. Against this backdrop, I consider in this book what can be called the temporalities of place. Place is a temporal attainment that must be constantly renegotiated in the face of changes that arrive from without and within, some benign, others potentially ruinous. To engage the temporal displacements involved in slow violence against the poor thus requires that we rethink questions of physical displacement as well. In the chapters that follow, I track the socioenvironmental fallout from developmental agendas whose primary beneficiaries live elsewhere; as when, for example, oasis dwellers in the Persian Gulf get trucked off to unknown destinations so that American petroleum engineers and their sheik collaborators can develop their "finds." Or when a megadam arises and (whether erected in the name of Some dictatorial edict,
environments unsustainable calculations about what constitutes the duration of human gain.

the free market, structural adjustment, national development, or far-off urban or industrial need) displaces and disperses those who had developed through their vernacular landscapes their own adaptable, if always imperfect and vulnerable, relation to riverine possibility. Paradoxically, those forcibly removed by development include conservation refugees. Too often in the global South, conservation, driven by powerful transnational nature NGOs, combines an antidevelopmental rhetoric with the development of finite resources for the touristic few, thereby depleting vital resources for long-term residents. (I explore this paradox more fully in Chapter 6: Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time.) In much of what follows, I address the resistance mounted by impoverished communities who have been involuntarily moved out of their knowledge; I address as well the powers transnational, national, and local-behind such forced removals. My angle of vision is largely through writers who have affiliated themselves with social movements that seek to stave off one of two ruinous prospects: either the threatened community capitulates and is scattered (across refugee camps, placeless "relocation" sites, desperate favelas, and unwelcoming foreign lands), or the community refuses to move but, as its world is undermined, effectively becomes a community of refugees in place. What I wish to stress here, then, are not just those communities that are

I want to propose a more radical notion of displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable.
involuntarily (and often militarily) relocated to less hospitable environs, but also those affected by what I call displacement without moving. In other words,

The impact is extinction neoliberal globalizations coding of the land in terms of energy consumption produces multiple trends for extinction can only address these problems by transforming consumption levels Ehrenfeld 5,
(David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, The Environmental Limits to Globalization, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2 April 2005)

Among the environmental impacts of globalization, perhaps the most significant is its fostering of the excessive use of energy, with the attendant consequences. This surge in energy use was inevitable, once the undeveloped four-fifths of the world adopted the energy-wasting industrialization model of
the developed fifth, and as goods that once were made locally began to be transported around the world at a tremendous cost of energy. Chinas booming production, largely the result of its surging global exports, has caused a huge increase in the mining and burning of coal and the building of giant dams for more electric power, an increase of power that in only the first 8 months of 2003 amounted to 16% (Bradsher 2003; Guo 2004). The many environmental effects of the coal

burning include, most importantly, global warming. Fossil-fuel-driven climate change seems likely to result in a rise in sea level, massive extinction of species, agricultural losses from regional shifts in temperature and rainfall, and, possibly, alteration of major ocean currents, with secondary
climatic change. Other side effects of coal burning are forest decline, especially from increased nitrogen deposition; acidification of freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems from nitrogen and sulfur compounds; and a major impact on human health from polluted air. Dams, Chinas alternative method of producing electricity without burning fossil fuels,

themselves cause massive environmental changes. These changes include fragmentation of river channels; loss of floodplains, riparian zones, and adjacent wetlands; deterioration of irrigated terrestrial environments
and their surface waters; deterioration and loss of river deltas and estuaries; aging and reduction of continental freshwater runoff to oceans; changes in nutrient cycling; impacts on biodiversity; methyl mercury contamination of

food webs; and greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. The impoundment of water in reservoirs at
high latitudes in the northern hemisphere has even caused a small but measurable increase in the speed of the earths rotation and a change in the planets axis (Rosenberg et al. 2000; Vo ro smarty & Sahagian 2000). Moreover, the millions of

people displaced by reservoirs such as the one behind Chinas Three Gorges Dam have their own environmental impacts as they struggle to survive in unfamiliar and often unsuitable places. Despite the importance of coal and hydropower in Chinas booming economy, the major factor that enables globalization to flourish around the worldeven in Chinais still cheap oil. Cheap oil runs the ships, planes, trucks, cars,
tractors, harvesters, earth-moving equipment, and chain saws that globalization needs; cheap oil lifts the giant containers with their global cargos off the container ships onto the waiting flatbeds; cheap oil even mines and processes the coal,

grows and distills the biofuels, drills the gas wells, and builds the nuclear power plants while digging and refining the uranium ore that keeps them operating. Paradoxically, the global warming caused by this excessive burning of oil is exerting negative feedback on the search for more oil to replace
dwindling supplies. The search for Arctic oil has been slowed by recent changes in the Arctic climate. Arctic tundra has to be frozen and snow-covered to allow the heavy seismic vehicles to prospect for underground oil reserves, or long-lasting damage to the landscape results. The recent Arctic warming trend has reduced the number of days

that vehicles can safely explore: from 187 in 1969 to 103 in 2002 (Revkin 2004). Globalization affects so many environmental systems in so many ways that negative interactions of this sort are frequent and usually unpredictable. Looming over the global economy is the imminent disappearance of cheap oil. There is some debate about when global oil production will peakmany of the leading petroleum

geologists predict the peak will occur in this decade, possibly in the next two or three years (Campbell 1997; Kerr 1998; Duncan & Youngquist 1999; Holmes & Jones 2003; Appenzeller 2004; ASPO 2004; Bakhtiari 2004; Gerth 2004)but it

is abundantly clear that the remaining untapped reserves and alternatives such as oil shale, tar sands, heavy oil, and biofuels are economically and energetically no substitute for the cheap oil that comes
pouring out of the ground in the Arabian Peninsula and a comparatively few other places on Earth (Youngquist 1997). Moreover, the hydrogen economy and other high-tech solutions to the loss of cheap oil are clouded

by serious, emerging technological doubts about feasibility and safety, and a realistic fear that, if they can work, they will not arrive in time to rescue our globalized industrial civilization (Grant 2003; Tromp et al. 2003; Romm 2004). Even energy conservation, which we already know how to implement both technologically and as part of an abstemious lifestyle, is likely to be no friend to globalization, because it reduces consumption of all kinds, and consumption is what globalization is all about. In a keynote
address to the American Geological Society, a noted expert on electric power networks, Richard Duncan (2001), predicted widespread, permanent electric blackouts by 2012, and the end of industrial, globalized civilization by 2030. The energy

crunch is occurring now. According to Duncan, per capita energy production in the world has already peaked that
happened in 1979and has declined since that date. In a more restrained evaluation of the energy crisis, Charles Hall and colleagues (2003) state that: The world is not about to run out of hydrocarbons, and perhaps it is not going to run out of oil from unconventional sources any time soon. What will be difficult to obtain is cheap petroleum, because what is left is an enormous amount of low-grade hydrocarbons, which are likely to be much more expensive financially, energetically, politically and especially environmentally. Nuclear power still has important. . .technological, economic, environmental and public safety problems, they continue, and at the moment renewable

energies present a mixed bag of opportunities. Their solution? Forget about the more expensive and dirtier hydrocarbons such as tar
sands. We need a major public policy intervention to foster a crash program of public and private investment in research on renewable energy technologies. Perhaps this will happen necessity does occasionally bring about change. But I do not

see renewable energy coming in time or in sufficient magnitude to save globalization. Sunlight, wind, geothermal energy, and biofuels, necessary as they are to develop, cannot replace cheap oil at the current rate of use without disastrous environmental side effects. These renewable alternatives can only power a nonglobalized civilization that consumes less energy (Ehrenfeld 2003b). Already, as the output of the giant Saudi oil reserves has started to fall (Gerth 2004) and extraction of the remaining oil is becoming increasingly costly, oil prices are climbing and the strain is being felt by other energy sources. For example, the production of natural gas, which fuels more than half of U.S. homes, is declining in the United States, Canada, and Mexico as wells are exhausted. In both the United States and Canada, intensive new drilling is being offset by high depletion rates, and gas consumption increases
yearly. In 2002 the United States imported 15% of its gas from Canada, more than half of Canadas total gas production. However, with Canadas gas production decreasing and with the stranded gas reserves in the United States and Canadian Arctic regions unavailable until pipelines are built 510 years from now, the United States is likely to become more dependent on imported liquid natural gas ( LNG). Here are some facts to consider. Imports of LNG in the United States increased from 39 billion cubic feet in 1990 to 169 billion cubic feet in 2002, which was still <1% of U.S. natural gas consumption. The largest natural gas field in the world is in the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Gas is liquefied near the site of production by cooling it to260 F (162 C), shipped in special refrigerated trains to waiting LNG ships, and then transported to an LNG terminal, where it is off-loaded, regasified, and piped to consumers. Each LNG transport ship costs a half billion dollars. An LNG terminal costs one billion dollars. There are four LNG terminals in the United States, none in Canada or Mexico. Approximately 30 additional LNG terminal sites to supply the United States are being investigated or planned, including several in the Bahamas, with pipelines to Florida. On 19 January 2004, the LNG terminal at Skikda, Algeria, blew up with tremendous force, flattening much of the port and killing 30 people. The Skikda terminal, renovated by Halliburton in the late 1990s, will cost $800 million to $1 billion to replace. All major ports in the United States are heavily populated, and there is strong environmental opposition to putting terminals at some sites in the United States. Draw your own conclusions about LNG as a source of cheap energy (Youngquist & Duncan 2003; Romero 2004). From LNG to coal gasification to oil shale to nuclear fission to breeder reactors to fusion to renewable

energy, even to improvements in efficiency of energy use (Browne 2004), our society looks from panacea to panacea to feed the ever-increasing demands of globalization. But no one solution or combination of solutions will suffice to meet this kind of consumption. In the words of Vaclav Smil (2003): Perhaps the evolutionary imperative of our species is to ascend a ladder of everincreasing energy throughputs, never to consider seriously any voluntary consumption limits and stay on this irrational course until it will be too late to salvage the irreplaceable underpinnings of biospheric services that will be degraded and destroyed by our progressing use of energy and materials.

2NC Oil Link=DA to Perm

The perm fails it reasserts the logic of competition in order to solve Big Oil economic manipulations and generates misdirected populism Huber 11
(Matt, Department of Geography, Syracuse University, Shocked: Energy Crisis and Neoliberal Transformation in the 1970s, globetrotter.berkeley.edu/bwep/colloquium/papers/Huber_Shocked.pdf) Yet, several polls

revealed that the majority of Americans did not feel that OPEC was primarily to blame, but the private oil companies.78 The blame for the oil companies emerged out of a long history of
popular disdain for Big Oil; rooted at least in the muckraking expose of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil by Ida Tarbell in the early 20th Century.79 In the 1970s, books like The Seven Sisters, The Brotherhood of Oil, and The Control of Oil all depicted a story of a world oil market controlled by a handful of multinational oil companies.80 As one letter to Nixons energy czar exclaimed, all foreseen and purposely augmented, if not engineered

appearances lead to the conclusion that this crisis has been by the international oil cartels, to make their grip on the

economy more secure.81 The most vocal critics of Big Oil were on the political left, like consumer advocate Ralph Nader who described the energy debacle as, the most phony crisis ever afflicted on a modern society.82 He charged specifically that, ...the energy crisis was orchestrated for political and economic benefit by the oil industry.83 Like the disdain for the monopolies known as labor unions, the popular rage against Big Oil was also rooted in the accusa tion that the oil companies were monopolists who unfairly rigged the marketplace for their narrow gain. One reporter observed a s chool bus that ran out of gas with a 14 year old shouting out the window, You see what happens when a couple of monopolistic oil companies take over? Bumper stickers were circulated that read, The oil companies are hoarding oil to raise prices.84 The fact that high oil prices in the 1970s also generated record oil profits did not dampen suspicion of the oil companies. One citizen

the logical solution to this was the reassertion of competition in the marketplace. Even Ralph Nader
wrote to Nixons energy czar, It is appalling to me to go to my local service station and discover a 3 cent per gallon jump in one we Of course,

conceded as much in his recommendations to energy czar William Simon in Congressional testimony, [Simon] should be concerned with devising ways to break up the oil monopolies and with bringing some competition into the industry.86 More

everyday reactions concentrated on the idea of fairness and the imaginary of an even playing field of the marketplace. One letter suggested, Give the oil companies a fair margin of profit, but do not allow the monopolistic practices of the major companies
to continue.87 Ordinary consumers believed that the oil companies position in the market was unfair in comparison to themselves, ...where are the incentives for the overburdened middle class?...they [the oil companies] get a 15% price increase while the forgotten consumer is supposed to be satisfied with a 5.5% salary increase that has to cover unlimited price increases on all the necessities of life. Where is the equity in that?88 The

logic of market fairness centered on the well-worn distinction between big and little forces in the market. Countless letter
writers identified themselves as simply the little guy or just an average citizen w hose fate was stacked against the big forces of oil monopolies and the government that serves them. As one letter-to-the-editor put it, It appears that the average working class citizens vote has lost all economic power and the policy of the fe deral government is now determined by corporate board room decisions.89ek, and then to read in Time Magazine that Exxon showed a net p rofit increase last year of 80% to $638,000,000. 85

Hegemony Link
Neoliberal hegemony uses exceptionalism to render its violent side effects invisible, ensuring environmental destruction and global conflict- be suspicious of all their answers because their means of structuring the social field erases vast sectors of the global population from view Nixon 11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 33-36) There are signs that the environmental humanities are beginning to make some tentative headway toward incorporating the impact of U.S. imperialism on the poor in the global South-Vitalis's book America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (2008) is an outstanding instance, as are powerful recent essays by Elizabeth DeLoughrey on the literatures associated with American nuclear colonialism in the Pacific, Susie O'Brien on Native food security, colonialism, and environmental heritage along the U.S-Mexican border, and Pablo Mukherjee's groundbreaking materialist work on Indian environmental literatures,'? Yet despite such vitally important initiatives, the environmental humanities in the United States remain skewed toward nation-bound scholarship that is at best tangentially international and, even then, seldom engages the environmental fallout of U.S. foreign policy head on. What's broadly, what one might call superpower

at stake is not just disciplinary parochialism but, more parochialism, that is, a combination of American insularity and America's power as the preeminent empire of the neoliberal age to rupture the lives and ecosystems of non- Americans, especially the poor, who may live at a
geographical remove but who remain intimately vulnerable to the force fields of U.S. foreign policy. To be sure, the U.S. empire has historically been a variable force, one that is not monolithic but subject to ever-changing internal fracture. The U.S., moreover, has long been-and is increasingly-globalized itself with all the attendant insecurities and inequities that result. However, to

argue that the United States is subject to globalization-through, for example, blowback from climate change-does not belie the disproportionate impact that U.S. global ambitions and policies have exerted over socioenvironmental landscapes internationally. Ecocritics-and literary scholars more broadly-faced with the challenges of thinking through vast
differences in spatial and temporal scale commonly frame their analyses in terms of interpenetrating global and local forces. In such analyses cosmopolitanism-as a mode of being linked to particular aesthetic strategies-does much of the bridgework between extremes of scale. What

critics have subjected to far less scrutiny is the role of the national-imperial as a mediating force with vast repercussions, above all, for those billions
whom Mike Davis calls "the global residuum.'?" Davis's image is a suggestive one, summoning to mind the remaindered humans, the

compacted leavings on whom neoliberalism's inequities bear down most heavily. Yet those leavings, despite their aggregated dehumanization in the corporate media, remain animate and often resistant in unexpected ways; indeed, it is from such leavings that grassroots antiglobalization and the environmentalism of the poor have drawn nourishment. As American writers, scholars, and environmentalists how can we attend more imaginatively how can we attend more imaginatively to the outsourced conflicts inflamed by our unsustainable consumerism, by our military adventurism and unsurpassed arms industry, and by the global environmental
fallout over the past three decades of American-led neoliberal economic policies? (The immense environmental toll of militarism is particularly burdensome: in 2009, U.S. military expenditure was 46.5 percent of the global total and exceeded by 10 percent the expenditure of the next fourteen highest-ranked countries combined.)" How, moreover, can we engage the impact of our outsized consumerism and militarism on the life prospects of people who are elsewhere not just geographically but elsewhere in time, as slow violence seeps long term into ecologies-rural and urban-on which the global poor must depend for generations to come? How, in other words, can

we rethink the standard formulation of neoliberalism as internationalizing profits and externalizing risks not just in spatial but in temporal terms as well, so that we recognize the full force with which the externalized risks are out sourced to the unborn? It is a pervasive condition of empires that they affect great swathes of the planet without the empire's populace being aware of that impact-indeed, without being aware that many of the affected places even exist. How many Americans are aware of the
continuing socioenvironrnental fallout from U.S. militarism and foreign policy decisions made three or four decades ago in, say, Angola or Laos? How many could even place those nation-states on a map? The

imperial gap between foreign policy power and on-the-street awareness calls to mind George Lamming's shock, on arriving
in Britain in the early 1950s, that most Londoners he met had never heard of his native Barbados and lumped together all Caribbean immigrants as Jamaicans.'?' What I call superpower

parochialism has been shaped by the

myth of American exceptionalism and by a long-standing indifference-in the U.S. educational system and national media-to the foreign, especially foreign history, even when it is deeply enmeshed with U.S. interests. Thus, when considering the representational challenges posed by transnational slow violence, we need to ask what role American indifference to foreign history has played in camouflaging lasting environmental damage inflicted elsewhere. If all empires create acute disparities between
global power and global knowledge, how has America's perception of itself as a young, forward-thrusting nation that claims to flourish by looking ahead rather than behind exacerbated the difficulty of socioenvironmental answerability for ongoing slow violence?" Profiting from the asymmetrical relations between a domestically regulated environment and unregulated environments abroad is of course not unique to America, But since World War II, the

United States has wielded an unequalled power to bend the global regulatory climate in its favor. As William Finnegan notes regarding the Washington Consensus, "while we make the world safe for multinational corporations, it is by no means clear that they intend to return the favor."? The unreturned favor weighs especially heavily on impoverished communities in the global South who must stake their claims to environmental justice in the face of the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank, the IMF), the World Trade Organization, and the G8 (now G20) over which the United States has exercised disproportionate influence. That influence has been exercised, as well, through muscular conservation NGOs (the Nature Conservancy, the World Wild- life Fund, and Conservation International prominent among them) that have a long history of disregarding local human relations to the environment in order to implement American- and European-style conservation agendas. Clearly, the beneficiaries of such power asymmetries are not just American but transnational corporations, NGOs, and governments from across the North's rich nations, often working hand-in-fist with authoritarian regimes.

Spills/Conservation Link
Your link turns are outdated- international conservation focus like the plan is part in parcel of the global neoliberal agenda Corson 10
Catherine Corson, Environmental Studies, Mount Holyoke, 2010, Wiley Sience, Antipode Volume 42, Issue 3, pages 576 602, June 2010

The reduction of the state under neoliberalism,1 and the resulting reconfiguration of state, market, and civil society relations, has shifted the landscape of twenty-first century environmental governance, in particular opening up room for private actors to influence state policy. This article explores how the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and its
institutionalization in the 1990s members of

underpinned the formation of a dynamic alliance among

US Agency for International Development ( USAID ), an evolving group of

the US Congress, the

environmental

non-governmental organizations ( NGOs )2

and the corporate sector around

biodiversity conservation funding . By focusing strictly on international biodiversity conservation this alliancedriven to a great extent by non-elected agents who are perceived to represent civil society despite their corporate partnershipshas been able to shape public foreign aid policy and in the process create new spaces for capital expansion . The arguments presented
here forge new ground in academic conversations about conservation and neoliberalism by illuminating the concrete practices within US foreign aid through which new forms of environmental governance under neoliberalism are produced. Specifically, they draw on the work of intellectuals who document the opportunities for civil society groups provided by the downsizing of the neoliberal state (eg Castree 2008; Peck and Tickell 2002) to address a lacuna in three interrelated bodies of literature. Together, these works examine the

neoliberalism of nature (eg Castree 2008; Heynen et al 2007), the growth of the big international conservation NGOs (BINGOs)3 and their increasing corporate linkages (eg Brockington, Duffy and Igoe 2008; Bscher and Whande 2007), and the contemporary move in conservation away from engaging local actors (eg Brosius and Russell 2003; Dressler and
Buscher 2008). While these scholars unveil critical transformations in humanenvironment relations taking place in the name of conservation under neoliberalism, they have often elided the intricacies of the shifting and uneven power dynamics among state, market and civil society organizations through which such changes have emerged. By focusing on the interorganizational relations entailed in US environmental foreign aid policy-making, this article helps to launch critical engagement with policy issues related to nature's neoliberalization, as called for by Castree (2007). At the same time, it responds to appeals for analysis of the micro-politics of foreign aid donors (Cooper and Packard 1997; Watts 2001), and particularly the sponsors of international conservation (King 2009), to advance an emerging scholarship that applies ethnographic methods to elucidate the internal workings of conservation and development funding institutions (eg Crewe and Harrison 1998; Lewis and Mosse 2006). In doing so, it illustrates how collaboration

among the public and non-profit sectors have both reflected and contributed to a move within global environmentalism from an anti-capitalist stance in the 1960s and 1970s to its twenty-first century embrace of the market.

The plan specifically is apologia for US politicians who dont want to confront resource depletion in the US Corson 10
Catherine Corson, Environmental Studies, Mount Holyoke, 2010, Wiley Sience, Antipode Volume 42, Issue 3, pages 576 602, June 2010 Second, the

strict focus on international biodiversity has been fundamental to the development of an alliance among the BINGOs, USAID, corporate leaders and members of the US Congress behind US environmental foreign aid. By defining the environment as foreign biodiversity, to be protected in parks away from competing economic and political interests and in foreign countries, the BINGOs and allied partners have enticed US politicians and corporate leaders to support environmental foreign aid .

They have created an avenue through which they can become environmentally friendly without confronting the environmental degradation caused by excessive resource consumption in the USA or the foreign and domestic investments of US corporations. These successful political strategies, aimed at mobilizing funding for foreign environmental issues, have contributed to the process by which environmentalism has become enrolled in the promotion of capitalist expansion. In fact, I contend that the international biodiversity conservation agenda has created new symbolic and material spaces for global capital expansion. First, it supplies a critical stamp of environmental stewardship for corporate and political leaders. Second, not only does it carve out new physical territories for capitalist accumulation through both the physical demarcation and enclosure of common lands as protected areas, but also through the growing capitalist enterprise that is forming around the concept of biodiversity conservation.

US is no less important than ____ - their keystone species arguments are silly CNN 00
CNN News, March 17, 2000, Nature: U.S. biodiversity in jeopardy, study shows, http://articles.cnn.com/2000-0317/nature/biodiversity.enn_1_previously-unknown-species-natural-heritage-study?_s=PM:NATURE

The study is the most complete inventory of Americas plants and animals to date. More than 200,000 native plants and animals double the previous estimate were documented. The study also reveals the United States is one of the most ecologically diverse countries in the world . It is home to 10 percent of all species found on Earth. Every year, some 30 previously unknown species of flowering plants are found in the country, according to the study. Thats the good news. The bad news is included in other key findings in the study Despite these trends, there is time to protect the countrys natural heritage, the study notes. Scientists are buoyed by the fact that the United States has a greater diversity of major ecosystems, from prairies to tundras to forests to deserts, than any other country in the world. The good news is Americans enjoy an incredibly rich natural heritage, from rare fish surviving in desert oases, to the worlds tallest trees Californias coastal redwoods to Hawaiis
honeycreepers, colorful birds whose evolutionary story rivals that of the famous Darwins finches, noted Bruce Stein, lead author of the report.

The bad news is that Americans risk losing much of the wealth if

current trends continue .

Conservation Link=DA to Perm

International conservation programs only create the conditions conducive to capitals expansion- even when they tackle the side effects of capital in some instances, that only makes it easier for the overall system to continue- makes all of their impacts inevitable. Corson 10 Catherine Corson, Environmental Studies, Mount Holyoke, 2010, Wiley Sience, Antipode Volume 42, Issue 3, pages 576602, June 2010
Within our argument there are echoes of the Gramscian critique of civil society (Forgacs 1999). Gramsci

observed that an unintended effect of civil society was that it forged consent for capitalism. Even where civil society organizations fought the worst social abuses of capitalism, they ultimately sustained the legitimacy of capitalism at the same time as they decried its effects. The critics within civil society challenged specific aspects of capitalism's functioning, but they did not challenge capitalism itself. For example, tackling problems of child labour, low wages, pollution and slum housing did not in itself challenge the labour relations that lay at the basis of capitalism. But these actions did make the social reproduction of these relations more palatable and made capitalism more socially legitimate and ultimately more sustainable. Likewise one could see environmental and conservation NGOs generally as tackling the ecological ills that capitalism produces such that ultimately capitalist economies emerge healthier but unchallenged; indeed they enjoy more legitimacy. However, our argument differs from this position in that the conservation NGOs we describe are not dealing with the contradictions internal to the operation of capitalism. Rather they are working on the frontiers of capitalism, creating the conditions conducive to its expansion . As we shall demonstrate, they provide means of turning the financial wealth produced in northern economies into new commodities, and of creating new markets for some conservation associated industries.

2NC A2: Plan=Enforce Existing Regs

And, claims that the plan is only more effective management of existing regulations are false- environmental governance support ensures a move towards a more diffuse method of governance that emphasizes the private sphere and ensures neoliberal market expansion Corson 10 Catherine Corson, Environmental Studies, Mount Holyoke, 2010, Wiley Sience, Antipode Volume 42, Issue 3, pages 576602, June 2010
With its ideological and material antipathy toward state regulation and influence, neoliberalism has become manifest not only in deregulation, but also in re-regulation designed to create new commodities and new governing structures that sustain neoliberalism . As states have faced cuts to fiscal and administrative resources and functions under neoliberal reforms, there has been an associated move toward publicprivate partnerships, which bring increasing influence by the private and non-profit sectors on what was once state policy. This transition has diffused environmental governance among states, individuals, NGOs, private companies, transnational institutions and local communities. In particular, as the boundaries among the state, private sector and non-profit worlds have become more porous under neoliberalism, certain NGOs have stepped into the vacuum of state social provision (Bscher and Dressler
2007; Castree 2008; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Igoe and Brockington 2007; Jepson 2005; McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Peck and Tickell 2002). They

have become, as Harvey (2005:177) writes, the Trojan horses of global

neoliberalism .

2nc Energy Use Impact

Current energy consumption rates cause extinction alternative energy technologies fail and produce their own negative feedbacks, only reduction in consumption can solve Ehrenfeld 5,
(David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, The Environmental Limits to Globalization, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2 April 2005)

Among the environmental impacts of globalization, perhaps the most significant is its fostering of the excessive use of energy, with the attendant consequences. This surge in energy use was inevitable, once the undeveloped four-fifths of the world adopted the energy-wasting industrialization model of
the developed fifth, and as goods that once were made locally began to be transported around the world at a tremendous cost of energy. Chinas booming production, largely the result of its surging global exports, has caused a huge increase in the mining and burning of coal and the building of giant dams for more electric power, an increase of power that in only the first 8 months of 2003 amounted to 16% (Bradsher 2003; Guo 2004). The many environmental effects of the coal

burning include, most importantly, global warming. Fossil-fuel-driven climate change seems likely to result in a rise in sea level, massive extinction of species, agricultural losses from regional shifts in temperature and rainfall, and, possibly, alteration of major ocean currents, with secondary
climatic change. Other side effects of coal burning are forest decline, especially from increased nitrogen deposition; acidification of freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems from nitrogen and sulfur compounds; and a major impact on human health from polluted air. Dams, Chinas alternative method of producing electricity without burning fossil fuels,

themselves cause massive environmental changes. These changes include fragmentation of river channels; loss of floodplains, riparian zones, and adjacent wetlands; deterioration of irrigated terrestrial environments
and their surface waters; deterioration and loss of river deltas and estuaries; aging and reduction of continental freshwater runoff to oceans; changes in nutrient cycling; impacts on biodiversity; methyl mercury contamination of

food webs; and greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs. The impoundment of water in reservoirs at
high latitudes in the northern hemisphere has even caused a small but measurable increase in the speed of the earths rotation and a change in the planets axis (Rosenberg et al. 2000; Vo ro smarty & Sahagian 2000). Moreover, the millions of

people displaced by reservoirs such as the one behind Chinas Three Gorges Dam have their own environmental impacts as they struggle to survive in unfamiliar and often unsuitable places. Despite the importance of coal and hydropower in Chinas booming economy, the major factor that enables globalization to flourish around the worldeven in Chinais still cheap oil. Cheap oil runs the ships, planes, trucks, cars,
tractors, harvesters, earth-moving equipment, and chain saws that globalization needs; cheap oil lifts the giant containers with their global cargos off the container ships onto the waiting flatbeds; cheap oil even mines and processes the coal,

grows and distills the biofuels, drills the gas wells, and builds the nuclear power plants while digging and refining the uranium ore that keeps them operating. Paradoxically, the global warming caused by this excessive burning of oil is exerting negative feedback on the search for more oil to replace
dwindling supplies. The search for Arctic oil has been slowed by recent changes in the Arctic climate. Arctic tundra has to be frozen and snow-covered to allow the heavy seismic vehicles to prospect for underground oil reserves, or long-lasting damage to the landscape results. The recent Arctic warming trend has reduced the number of days

that vehicles can safely explore: from 187 in 1969 to 103 in 2002 (Revkin 2004). Globalization affects so many environmental systems in so many ways that negative interactions of this sort are frequent and usually unpredictable. Looming over the global economy is the imminent disappearance of cheap oil. There is some debate about when global oil production will peakmany of the leading petroleum
geologists predict the peak will occur in this decade, possibly in the next two or three years (Campbell 1997; Kerr 1998; Duncan & Youngquist 1999; Holmes & Jones 2003; Appenzeller 2004; ASPO 2004; Bakhtiari 2004; Gerth 2004)but it

is abundantly clear that the remaining untapped reserves and alternatives such as oil shale, tar sands, heavy oil, and biofuels are economically and energetically no substitute for the cheap oil that comes
pouring out of the ground in the Arabian Peninsula and a comparatively few other places on Earth (Youngquist 1997). Moreover, the hydrogen economy and other high-tech solutions to the loss of cheap oil are clouded

by serious, emerging technological doubts about feasibility and safety, and a realistic fear that, if they can work, they will not arrive in time to rescue our globalized industrial civilization (Grant 2003; Tromp

et al. 2003; Romm 2004). Even

energy conservation, which we already know how to implement both likely to be no friend to globalization, because it reduces consumption of all kinds, and consumption is what globalization is all about. In a keynote
technologically and as part of an abstemious lifestyle, is address to the American Geological Society, a noted expert on electric power networks, Richard Duncan (2001), predicted widespread, permanent electric blackouts by 2012, and the end of industrial, globalized civilization by 2030. The energy

crunch is occurring now. According to Duncan, per capita energy production in the world has already peaked that
happened in 1979and has declined since that date. In a more restrained evaluation of the energy crisis, Charles Hall and colleagues (2003) state that: The world is not about to run out of hydrocarbons, and perhaps it is not going to run out of oil from unconventional sources any time soon. What will be difficult to obtain is cheap petroleum, because what is left is an enormous amount of low-grade hydrocarbons, which are likely to be much more expensive financially, energetically, politically and especially environmentally. Nuclear power still has important. . .technological, economic, environmental and public safety problems, they continue, and at the moment renewable

energies present a

mixed bag of opportunities. Their solution? Forget about the more expensive and dirtier hydrocarbons such as tar
sands. We need a major public policy intervention to foster a crash program of public and private investment in research on renewable energy technologies. Perhaps this will happen necessity does occasionally bring about change. But I do not

see renewable energy coming in time or in sufficient magnitude to save globalization. Sunlight, wind, geothermal energy, and biofuels, necessary as they are to develop, cannot replace cheap oil at the current rate of use without disastrous environmental side effects. These renewable alternatives can only power a nonglobalized civilization that consumes less energy (Ehrenfeld 2003b). Already, as the output of the giant Saudi oil reserves has started to fall (Gerth 2004) and extraction of the remaining oil is becoming increasingly costly, oil prices are climbing and the strain is being felt by other energy sources. For example, the production of natural gas, which fuels more than half of U.S. homes, is declining in the United States, Canada, and Mexico as wells are exhausted. In both the United States and Canada, intensive new drilling is being offset by high depletion rates, and gas consumption increases
yearly. In 2002 the United States imported 15% of its gas from Canada, more than half of Canadas total gas production. However, with Canadas gas production decreasing and with the stranded gas reserves in the United States and Canadian Arctic regions unavailable until pipelines are built 510 years from now, the United States is likely to become more dependent on imported liquid natural gas ( LNG). Here are some facts to consider. Imports of LNG in the United States increased from 39 billion cubic feet in 1990 to 169 billion cubic feet in 2002, which was still <1% of U.S. natural gas consumption. The largest natural gas field in the world is in the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar. Gas is liquefied near the site of production by cooling it to260 F (162 C), shipped in special refrigerated trains to waiting LNG ships, and then transported to an LNG terminal, where it is off-loaded, regasified, and piped to consumers. Each LNG transport ship costs a half billion dollars. An LNG terminal costs one billion dollars. There are four LNG terminals in the United States, none in Canada or Mexico. Approximately 30 additional LNG terminal sites to supply the United States are being investigated or planned, including several in the Bahamas, with pipelines to Florida. On 19 January 2004, the LNG terminal at Skikda, Algeria, blew up with tremendous force, flattening much of the port and killing 30 people. The Skikda terminal, renovated by Halliburton in the late 1990s, will cost $800 million to $1 billion to replace. All major ports in the United States are heavily populated, and there is strong environmental opposition to putting terminals at some sites in the United States. Draw your own conclusions about LNG as a source of cheap energy (Youngquist & Duncan 2003; Romero 2004). From LNG to coal gasification to oil shale to nuclear fission to breeder reactors to fusion to renewable

energy, even to improvements in efficiency of energy use (Browne 2004), our society looks from panacea to panacea to feed the ever-increasing demands of globalization. But no one solution or combination of solutions will suffice to meet this kind of consumption. In the words of Vaclav Smil (2003): Perhaps the evolutionary imperative of our species is to ascend a ladder of everincreasing energy throughputs, never to consider seriously any voluntary consumption limits and stay on this irrational course until it will be too late to salvage the irreplaceable underpinnings of biospheric services that will be degraded and destroyed by our progressing use of energy and materials.

2nc Biodiversity Loss Impact

Globalization causes massive biodiversity collapse eco-tourism and trade spread invasive species and cause habitat destruction Ehrenfeld 5,
(David, Dept. of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources @ Rutgers University, The Environmental Limits to Globalization, Conservation Biology Vol. 19 No. 2 April 2005) The reduction of diversity in agriculture is paralleled by a loss and reshuffling of wild species. The global die-off of species now occurring, unprecedented in its rapidity, is of course only partly the result of globalization, but globalization is a

major factor in many extinctions. It accelerates species loss in several ways. First, it increases the numbers of exotic species carried by the soaring plane, ship, rail, and truck traffic of global trade. Second, it is responsible for the adverse effects of ecotourism on wild flora and fauna (Ananthaswamy 2004). And third, it promotes the development and exploitation of populations and natural areas to satisfy the demands of global trade, including, in addition to the agricultural and energyrelated disruptions already mentioned, logging, over-fishing of marine fisheries, road building, and mining. To give just one example, from 1985 to 2001, 56% of Indonesian Borneos (Kalimantan) protected lowland forest

areasmany of them remote and sparsely populatedwere intensively logged, primarily to supply international timber markets (Curran et al. 2004). Surely one of the most significant impacts of globalization on wild species and the ecosystems in which they live has been the increase in introductions of invasive species ( Vitousek et al. 1996; Mooney & Hobbs 2000). Two examples are zebra mussels (Dreissena
polymorpha), which came to the Great Lakes in the mid-1980s in the ballast water of cargo ships from Europe, and Asian longhorn beetles (Anoplophera glabripennis), which arrived in the United States in the early 1990s in wood pallets and crates used to transfer cargo shipped from China and Korea. Zebra mussels, which are eliminating native mussels

and altering lake ecosystems, clog the intake pipes of waterworks and power plants. The Asian longhorn beetle now seems poised to cause heavy tree loss (especially maples [Acer sp.]) in the hardwood forests of
eastern North America. Along the U.S. Pacific coast, oaks (Quercus sp.) and tanoaks (Lithocarpus densiflorus) are being killed by sudden oak death, caused by a new, highly invasive fungal disease organism (Phytophthora ramorum), which is probably also an introduced species that was spread by the international trade in horticultural plants (Rizzo & Garbelotto 2003). Estimates of the annual cost of the damage caused by invasive species in the United States

range from $5.5 billion to $115 billion. The zebra mussel alone, just one of a great many terrestrial, freshwater,
and marine exotic animals, plants, and pathogens, has been credited with more than $5 billion of damage since its introduction (Mooney & Drake 1986; Cox 1999). Invasive species surely rank among the principal

economic and ecological limiting factors for globalization. Some introduced species directly affect human health, either as vectors of disease or as the disease organisms themselves. For example, the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), a vector for dengue and yellow fevers, St. Louis
and LaCrosse encephalitis viruses, and West Nile virus, was most likely introduced in used truck tires imported from Asia to Texas in the 1980s and has spread widely since then. Discussion of this and other examples is beyond the scope of this article. Even the partial control of accidental and deliberate species introductions requires stringent, well-funded governmental regulation in cooperation with the public and with business. Many introductions of alien species cannot be prevented, but some can, and successful interventions to prevent the spread of introduced species

can have significant environmental and economic benefits. To give just one example, western Australia
has shown that government and industry can cooperate to keep travelers and importers from bringing harmful invasive species across their borders. The western Australian HortGuard and GrainGuard programs integrate public education; rapid and effective access to information; targeted surveillance, which includes preborder, border, and postborder activities; and farm and regional biosecurity systems (Sharma 2004). Similar programs exist in New Zealand. But there is only so much that governments can do in the face of massive global trade. Some of the significant effects of globalization on

wildlife are quite subtle. Mazzoni et al. (2003) reported that the newly appearing fungal disease chytridiomycosis (caused by Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis), which appears to be the causative agent for a number of mass die-offs and extinctions of amphibians on several continents, is probably being spread by the international restaurant trade in farmed North American bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana). These authors
state: Our findings suggest that international trade may play a key role in the global dissemination of this and other emerging infectious diseases of wildlife. Even more unexpected findings were described in 2002 by Alexander et al., who noted that expansion of ecotourism and other consequences of globalization are increasing

contact between free-ranging wildlife and humans, resulting in the first recorded

introduction of a primary human pathogen, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, into wild populations of

banded mongooses (Mungos mungo) in Botswana and suricates (Suricata suricatta) in South Africa.

NEW ANSWERS TO CARDS

2NC A2: Elites Wont Change

These movements are different- crumbling economies in the global north have created material solidarity between the first and third world- creates an effective mindset shift Harvey 10/27
(Ryan, writer, an organizer with the Civilian-Soldier Alliance, Globalization Is Coming Home: Protests Spread as Financial Institutions Target Global North, Thursday 27 October 2011, http://www.truth-out.org/world-finally-fighting-infectionneoliberalism/1320164620?q=globalization-coming-home-protests-spread-financial-institutions-target-global-north/1319721791) Shortly before the once-prized economy of Argentina collapsed at the

end of 2001, a European Summer saw massive protests across Europe against neoliberalism, the corporate economic system behind what is commonly called globalization. Emphasizing the privatization of public services and resources and the removal of environmental and human rights regulations deemed barriers to trade, neoliberal globalization was widely recognized as the key factor exacerbating the gulf between rich and poor on a global scale. These protests were the largest and most brutal events that this movement experienced
in the Global North; with In Gothenburg, three protesters would be shot by the police, and in Genoa, 21 year-old Carlo

The echoes of these events can still be heard throughout Europe, especially among those who experienced the
Giuliani would be shot twice in the face and then run over by a police truck, killing him instantly. traumatic police repression or served jail time for their role in the events. A few weeks ago, I saw a beautiful stencil memorial to Carlo in a hallway of one of Austrias last political squats just one reminder that the political memory of these uprisings is very much part of the fabric of the European autonomous left. But

theres a much louder echo being heard in Europe right now, the echo of corporate-globalization itself. And as in the last decade, a rage that has built up over many years is beginning to emerge in the form of a mass, loosely coordinated social movement. In Europe, young and old alike have been facing the dissolution of what had long been considered staples of western European countries; Englands health care system is on the privatization block; the right to squat abandoned houses is being stripped in England and The Netherlands; the International Monetary Fund has tightened its grip on Greece, Ireland, and Portugal with increasing austerity measures, and tuition rates for students across the continent are rising dramatically. Alongside these economic conditions, increasingly militarized restrictions to immigration into what has been dubbed Fortress Europe stand as a drastic reminder that money and products, but not people, travel freely into and out of neoliberal economies. What is happening is that globalization is coming home to the countries that helped create it. The rich economies of the global north, which long relied on the exploitation of southern peoples and economies, are coming under the same restrictions they once imposed on the rest of the world. Though many poor people in these countries have long suffered from domestic exploitation, the present wave of budgets cuts threatens to expose both the poor and middle-classes to harsher realities, unifying them in a social movement that is now attempting to maintain this often-fragile alliance. What we are seeing now is the emergence of a similar political discussion to the days after Seattle, only this time we have turned inward in the Global North: we are now not just talking about solidarity with the Global South, rather we are addressing issues both global and local, as we are feeling the harsh effects of a global economy designed for a
minority of the worlds wealthiest people.

AT Permutation
The permutation ensures co-option- political action is only possible if it directly engages existing hegemonic coordinates, they ensure collapse of the transition Zizek 10/26
(Slavoj, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Occupy first. Demands come later, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/occupy-protesters-bill-clinton)

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper
way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new. The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where recycling your Coke cans, giving a couple of dollars to charity, or buying a cappuccino where 1% goes towards developing world troubles, is enough to make them feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, they

saw that for a long time they were also allowing their political engagements to be outsourced and they want them back. The art of politics is also to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly "realist", disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology: ie one that, while definitely feasible and legitimate, is de facto impossible (universal healthcare in the US was such a case). In the aftermath of the Wall Street protests, we should definitely mobilise people to make such demands however, it is no less important to simultaneously remain subtracted from the pragmatic field of negotiations and "realist" proposals. What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy's turf ; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror", ominous and threatening as it should be.

Impossible demands are good- their net benefits to the permutation perpetuate an unsustainable economic system and ensure extinction Ross 11/18
(Clifton, writer and videographer. His book, Translations from Silence won the 2010 Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence from Oakland PEN and has just been published in Spanish by Editorial Perro y Rana, Venezuela. His film, Venezuela: Revolution from the Inside Out was published in 2008 by PM Press, The New Realism: Reflections on the Voyage of an Epigraph, http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/11/the-new-realism-reflections-on-the-voyage-of-an-epigraph/)

does it mean to be realistic and demand the impossible? What impossible demand must we make in our context, a context in which the continuation of the capitalist system has become impossible (if Immanuel Wallerstein is correct in his analysis that were now experiencing a systemic crisis), and the survival of human civilization unlikely? Those currently
In this context, what occupying the cities across the US and the world have been criticized for not making demands or having a program or an agenda. Occupiers have responded that our occupation is our demand. Certainly the right to peaceably assemble is a first requirement for any movement, but the occupiers, more than anyone, are quite clear that the dema nds cant end there. Many

argue that the occupiers need to come up with a long list of specific demands, but I would side with those Situationists who would argue that such a list would be self-defeating: it would invite the rulers of the world to cede demands and ensure that things stay the same. Yet its clear that the impossible demand is the only alternative to this impossibly irrational and unsustainable system that turns reason and all its resources to the exploitation and destruction of the planet. The occupiers, for the most part, arent so simple-minded as to fall for the possible. They know that the last thing they should do is offer a realistic set of demands and settle for a realistic program. The time has come to make impossible demands on this impossible system because the future of the world is at stake. And we cant settle for
anything less.

AT Cede the Political

The link goes the opposite way- lack of theory has created a simplistic and dangerous public economics, only bringing epistemological questions to the fore can create reflexivity Rodrik 11
(Dan, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, Occupy the classroom?, 16 Dec 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/2011121494147161362.html)

Consider the global financial crisis. Macroeconomics and finance did not lack the tools needed to understand how the crisis arose and unfolded. Indeed, the academic literature was chock-full of models of financial bubbles, asymmetric information, incentive distortions, self-fulfilling crises, and systemic risk. But, in the years leading up to the crisis, many economists downplayed these models' lessons in favour of models of efficient and self-correcting markets, which, in policy terms, resulted in inadequate governmental oversight over financial markets. In my book The Globalization Paradox, I contemplate the following thought experiment. Let a journalist call an economics professor for his view on whether free trade with country X or Y is a good idea. We can be fairly certain that the economist, like the vast majority of the profession, will be enthusiastic in his support of free trade. Now let the reporter go undercover as a student in the professor's advanced graduate seminar on international trade theory. Let him pose the same question: Is free trade good? I doubt that the answer will come as quickly
and be as succinct this time around. In fact, the professor is likely to be stymied by the question. "What do you mean by 'good'?" he will ask. "And good for whom?" The professor would then launch into a long and tortured exegesis that will ultimately culminate in a heavily hedged statement: "So if the long list of conditions I have just described are satisfied, and assuming we can tax the beneficiaries to compensate the losers, freer trade has the potential to increase everyone's wellbeing". If he were in an expansive mood, the professor might add that the effect of free trade on an economy's growth rate is not clear, either, and depends on an altogether different set of requirements. A

direct, unqualified assertion about the benefits of free trade has now been transformed into a statement adorned by all kinds of ifs and buts. Oddly, the knowledge that the professor willingly imparts with great pride to his advanced students is deemed to be inappropriate (or dangerous) for the general public. Economics instruction at the undergraduate level suffers from the same problem. In our zeal to display the profession's crown jewels in untarnished form - market efficiency, the invisible hand, comparative advantage - we skip over the real-world complications and nuances, well recognised
as they are in the discipline. It is as if introductory physics courses assumed a world without gravity, because everything becomes so much simpler that way. Applied

appropriately and with a healthy dose of common sense, economics would have prepared us for the financial crisis and pointed us in the right direction to fix what caused it. But the economics we need is of the "seminar room" variety, not the "rule-of-thumb" kind. It is an economics that recognises its limitations and knows that the right message depends on the context. Downplaying the diversity of intellectual frameworks within their own discipline does not make economists better analysts of the real world. Nor does it make them more popular.

AT US Economic Model Good/Comparative Power

The U.S. is ineffective at using its economic power. Gelb December 10
Leslie, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a senior official in the U.S. Defense Department from 1967 to 1969 and in the State Department from 1977 to 1979, November/December Foreign Affairs, Proquest

Most nations today beat their foreign policy drums largely to economic rhythms, but less so the United States. Most nations define their interests largely in economic terms and deal mostly in economic power, but less so the United States. Most nations have adjusted their national security strategies to focus on economic security, but less so the United States. Washington still principally thinks of its security in traditional military terms and responds to threats with military means. The main
challenge for Washington, then, is to recompose its foreign policy with an economic theme, while countering threats in new and creative ways. The goal is to redefine "security" to harmonize with twenty-first-century realities. The model already exists for such an economic-centric world and for a policy to match: the approach of U.S. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. They understood that a strong economy is the basis of both a vibrant democracy at home and U.S. military might abroad. They also knew that no matter how strong the U.S. economy and military, Washington would need a lot of help in checking communism. Accordingly, they bolstered U.S. power by resurrecting the economies of Western Europe and Japan, and they added legitimacy to that power by establishing international institutions such as the World Bank and nato. To respond to threats from the Soviet Union and communism, Truman and Eisenhower fashioned the policies of containment and deterrence, backed up by military and economic aid. The idea was to check Soviet military power without bankrupting the United States. Today, of course, any U.S. approach must account for the complexity of the global economy as well as new threats from terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. All this can be done-but not without causing some intellectual and political mayhem.

The most ferocious fight will be over how to rejuvenate the U.S. economy. Everyone agrees that it must be fixed, lest the nation face further decline and more dangers. But few agree on how.
The basic must-do list is lengthy, unforgiving, and depressingly obvious: improve public schools to sustain democracy and restore global competitiveness; upgrade the physical infrastructure critical to economic efficiency and homeland security; reduce public debt, the interest on which is devouring revenue; stimulate the economy to create jobs; and promote new sources of energy and freer trade to increase jobs, lower foreign debt, and reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Even as

politicians and experts do their war dances on these do-or-die domestic issues, they will grapple over foreign policy, as they should. The United States is less and less able to translate its economic strength into influence abroad, even though it will remain for some time the world's largest economy. Why this gap between U.S. power and results? In part, it is because many problems internal to states today are beyond all external ministrations. It is also because U.S. power has been squandered and employed inefficiently. Having overlooked profound changes in the world, U.S. leaders have done little to modernize their national security strategy. Present U.S. strategy offers too little bang for its buck because there is not enough buck in the strategy. A new way of thinking about
U.S. interests and power must aim for a foreign policy fitted to a world in which economic concerns typically-but not alwaysoutweigh traditional military imperatives

We control the uniqueness- the debt crisis already collapsed the legitimacy of the USs economic model Altman and Haas December 10
Roger C Altman, Chair and CEO of Evercore Partners. He was U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary in 1993-94, and Richard N Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department in 2001-3. American Profligacy and American Power: The Consequences of Fiscal Irresponsibility. Foreign Affairs. New York: Nov/Dec 2010. Vol. 89 , Iss. 6; pg. 25. Proquest. More than just financial resources will be affected. The United States' global influence, in all of its facets, will

suffer. Washington's ability to lead on global economic matters, such as its recent urgings in the G-20 for more stimulus spending, will be compromised by the coming plunge into austerity. Similarly, the United States' voice within the imf and other multilateral financial institutions will be weakened. Nor will Washington have the capacity to engineer direct financial interventions , as it did with the 1994 rescue of Mexico. A related cost of the United States' debt has even greater consequences: the diminished appeal of the American model of market-based capitalism. Foreign policy is carried out as much by a country's image as it is by its deeds. And the example of a thriving economy and high living standards based on such capitalism was a powerful instrument of American power, especially during the Cold War, when the

American model was competing with Soviet-style communism around the world. Now, however,

the competition comes from Chinese-style authoritarianism: a top-heavy political system married to a directed and hybrid form of capitalism. The recent stellar performance of China's economy in the midst of Western economic troubles has enhanced the appeal of its system. Reinforcing this trend is the reality that the U.S. approach (one associated with a system of little oversight and regulation) is widely seen as risk-prone and discredited after the recent financial crisis. If the United States is unable to address its own
debt crisis and a solution is forced on it, then the appeal of democracy and marketbased capitalism will take a further blow.

2NC A2: World Getting Better

This is a new link neoliberalism has cloaked social injustice to undercut action based on shared responsibility
Giroux 3-20
Professor @ McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department Henry, Gated Intellectuals and Ignorance in Political Life: Toward a Borderless Pedagogy in the Occupy Movement, http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/8009-gated-intellectuals-and-ignorance-in-political-life-toward-a-borderless-pedagogy-inthe-occupy-movement

Neoliberalism or market fundamentalism as it is called in some quarters and its army of supporters cloak their interests in an appeal to "common sense," while doing everything possible to deny climate change, massive inequalities, a political system hijacked by big money and corporations, the militarization of everyday life and the corruption of civic culture by a consumerist and celebrity-driven advertising machine. The financial elite, the 1 percent and the hedge fund sharks have become the highest-paid social magicians in America. They perform social magic by making the structures and power relations of racism, inequality, homelessness, poverty and environmental degradation disappear. And in doing so, they employ deception by seizing upon a stripped-down language of choice, freedom, enterprise and self-reliance - all of which works to personalize responsibility, collapse social problems into private troubles and
reconfigure the claims for social and economic justice on the part of workers, poor minorities of color, women and young people as a species of individual complaint. But this deceptive strategy does more. It also substitutes shared

responsibilities for a culture of diminishment, punishment and cruelty. The social is now a site of combat, infused with a live-for-oneself mentality and a space where a responsibility toward others is now gleefully replaced by an ardent, narrow and inflexible responsibility only for oneself. When the effects of structural injustice become obscured by a discourse of individual failure, human misery and misfortune, they are no longer the objects of compassion, but of scorn and derision. In recent weeks, we have witnessed Rush Limbaugh call Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a "slut" and "prostitute"; US Marines captured on video urinating on the dead bodies of Afghanistan soldiers; and the public revelation by Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs trader, that the company was so obsessed with making money that it cheated and verbally insulted its own clients, often referring to them as "muppets."(2) There is also the mass misogyny of right-wing extremists directed against women's reproductive rights,
which Maureen Dowd rightly calls an attempt by "Republican men to wrestle American women back into chastity belts."(3) These are not unconnected blemishes on the body of neoliberal capitalism. They are symptomatic of an infected

political and economic system that has lost touch with any vestige of decency, justice and ethics.

AT Self-interest Inevitable
Consequentialism and self-interest arent inevitable, theyre ideological assumptions Boldman 7
Lee Boldman, The Australian National University, 2007, The Flawed Assumptions of Neoclassical Economic Idealisation

The above critique undermines the normative instrumental view of rationality used in mainstream economics.[44] This was a view of rationality that was rejected firmly in Chapter 5. Human judgement cannot be reduced to static optimisation . People do often act in a selfinterested fashion, but it can be rational to do things that are not in ones personal interests. Indeed, it is normal to do so. It can be rational to make choices in accordance with moral values and it is normal to do so . It can also be rational to disregard the consequences in making choices . Some things are just not done and some things have to be done regardless. Some economists might respond to these arguments by making a distinction between shortterm and long-term self-interest, and then try to accommodate our moral commitments to those long-term interests. Really,

this is just further consequentialism and, as we saw in Chapter 7, it is an attempt to legislate a particular moral theory that is part of the same tradition of moral reasoning as mainstream economics. In that regard, it is now obvious that our moral principles cannot be reduced to a single conceptual system and that the moral rules that regulate life in contemporary Western society derive from several incompatible historical sources augmented constantly by contemporary cultural influences. These in turn are different from those operating in other societies. Consequently, the appeal to long-term interests is simply further evasion. One could play that game forever; but the average punter should just decline to play .

AT Rational Choice Theory

Rational choice theory is based on the assumption of an insane amount of human cognitive power- it doesnt describe actual behavior Boldman 7
Lee Boldman, The Australian National University, 2007, The Flawed Assumptions of Neoclassical Economic Idealisation Nevertheless, mainstream

economists continue to claim that economic agents in their choices optimise the benefits to be derived and that it is only rational to do so. Behavioural economists have, however, demonstrated successfully that everyday human economic behaviour is not consistent with this claim. This demonstration undermines much of the associated analysis. In particular, real human beings simply lack the cognitive abilities to maximise the benefits from their choices. Furthermore, the contexts within which we make decisions are such that optimisationeither ex anti or ex postis simply not possible. This brings us back to the realisation that human choices involve a dynamic process relying on practical wisdom based on experience, learning about opportunities and tastes and balancing different attainable goalsrather than a crude optimisation process.

AT Util/Competition Most Efficient

Competition and util dont actually produce the best outcomes Boldman 7
Lee Boldman, The Australian National University, 2007, The Flawed Assumptions of Neoclassical Economic Idealisation

This scheme draws on utilitarianisms search for the greatest happiness of the greatest number to propose that the consumer is motivated to purchase goods by the utility she or he derives from ita reflection of her or his preferences. Then it is claimed that with competition in demand, the benefit or utility received by the individual consuming the last unit of goods for example, an appleequals the price she or he is willing to pay. Similarly, with competition in supply, it is claimed the resource cost to produce that last apple equals the price the producer receives. Voluntary exchange between the producer and consumers in a market-clearing auction will then yield a set of prices that equates the marginal benefit of each commodity with its marginal cost. This has the practical effect of assuming out of existence the problems for the achievement of the greatest happiness that result from the existing socio-economic order and its power relationships. To the limited extent that these problems are recognised, they are seen as constraints on preferences that disappear into the background. At one stage, it was hoped that utility might be measured and thus provide an objective measure of the benefit derived. This quickly proved an illusion,
turns out, leading ultimately to the development of the empty concept of revealed preferences. As we saw earlier,

this

means that people buy only what they prefer and they prefer what they buy ; and, as it they are not logically consistent in those purchases .[46] There are even further technical problems with this most basic of models in the marginalist movement.[47] The model assumes that supply and demand curves are continuous and well behaved, but that is not necessarily the case. Prices can also be resistant to change. In any event, can this model be operationalised? The most damaging criticism of these models is that they impose impossible computational demands on individuals and firms. Real people cannot be making production and purchasing decisions on the basis of such computations. Consequently, in the real world prices cannot be established in this manner except in the crudest possible sense. The result is that it seems likely that the marginalism implicit in the model is an artefact of the analytical system rather than an accurate description of real behaviour. The whole model appears to exaggerate the influence of pricing signals on economic decisions, reducing all other influences to costs, however difficult it might be to attribute a monetary value to those costs. Nevertheless, these concerns are generally ignored. The first fundamental law of welfare economics is then derived by generalising from such single-commodity models to general equilibrium of the economy, abstracting from much detail. This involves the unrealistic assumptions of optimisation in all other markets and independence from them. We are then told that under very restrictive and unrealistic assumptions, a competitive market equilibrium is Pareto-efficient or Pareto-optimal or socially optimalwhere Pareto-optimality is defined as that state in
which it is impossible to improve the welfare of some members of society without reducing the welfare of others. In practice, those restrictive assumptions are quickly forgotten. Although

superficially attractive as a definition of maximum welfare, Pareto-optimality is more than deeply flawed; it is simply not true. As Blaug
writes: Pareto welfare economicsachieves a stringent and positivist definition of the social optimum in as much as Paretooptimality is defined with respect to an initial distribution of income. The practical relevance of this achievement for policy is nil.[48]

Efficiency is ideological cover for the defense of the status quo- nothing about it is objective science Boldman 7
Lee Boldman, The Australian National University, 2007, The Flawed Assumptions of Neoclassical Economic Idealisation

Bromley is among the many other economists who have attacked the scientific objectivity of Pareto-optimality as a decision rule in policy analysis, seeing it as being inconsistent and incoherent with no special claim to legitimacy. [49]

The claim

that economic efficiency is an objective measure of objective scientists is simply wrong. Warren Samuels, for his part, has described in some detail the large number of normative assumptions underpinning the definition, showing that the concept of Paretooptimality necessarily involves moral judgements about the existing distribution of wealth and power and the legal system, which enforces ownership rights.[50] Its imposition as a decision rule in economic policy makingthe requirement that economic efficiency ought to be the decision rule for collective decision makingis also a normative choice.[51] In short, it is nothing but a pseudo-scientific defence of the economic and social status quo.

AT Economic Rationality Best

Economic analysis rests on faulty assumptions- leads to massive failures in predictions Reiss 11
Michael Reiss, What Went Wrong with Economics: The flawed assumptions that led economists astray, 2011, http://www.amazon.com/What-Went-Wrong-Economics-assumptions/dp/146367029X In April 2007, a

report produced by the International Monetary Fund concluded that the world economy was in great shape only for the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression to hit just months later. How could economists have got it so wrong? When engineers try to understand complex systems, they are forced to make simplifying assumptions. Sadly if these are flawed, no amount of mathematical wizardry will repair the damage. This book examines the possibility that the problem with economics stems from flawed assumptions. It appears that mainstream economics set off on the wrong foot. This book uncovers many such flaws and shows how the resulting bad economic theories have devastating consequences. Dr
Michael Reiss shows how, with more realistic assumptions, economics, and our economic system, can be rescued.

Atomistic assumptions of classical economics fail and make social analysis super faulty Boldman 7
Lee Boldman, The Australian National University, 2007, The Flawed Assumptions of Neoclassical Economic Idealisation

Among the flawed assumptions of neoclassical economics is its reliance on methodological individualism as its official methodology. This is a research stratagem imported from Greek
atomism via Descarteswith his atomistic system and mechanical rulesand then the individualistic political theorising of Hobbes and Locke. In those stories, explanation

was to be located in the actions of individual actors interacting in a mechanical fashion rather than in the complex organic interplay of social institutions, groups and individuals. As we saw in Chapter 5, the emerging dominance of theoretical reasoning in political and moral theorising through the Enlightenment marked a sharp discontinuity with the practical approach to political and moral reasoning that had been derived from Aristotle and which characterised the medieval world. One important
element in this transformation was the abandonment of forms of explanation based on organic metaphors and the emergence of a mechanical Newtonian metaphor as the dominant form of explanation. This

atomism is an essential feature of this form of explanation, in which causal relationships are seen as being analogous to the forces operating in the movement of the planets or in classical mechanics, with individuals taking the place of the planets or of billiard balls and interacting in a mechanical fashion. As
we saw in Chapter 5, however, the Newtonian mechanistic world-view has been undermined. Newtonian physics has been completely discredited as an answer to any fundamental question about the nature of the world. Physics

has come to understand reality not in terms of atomismof discrete particles that can be described independently of all othersbut as a complete network, the most basic elements of which are not entities or substances, but relationships. The properties of things are no longer seen as being fixed absolutely with respect to some unchanging background; rather, they arise from interactions and relationships.[40] This abandonment of Newtonianism within its parent discipline should cause economists to pause and wonder whether the Newtonian metaphor provides an adequate master narrative for economics. Having stressed the fundamental importance of our social relationships and our socially constructed moral codes in Chapters 2 and 7, I dont believe methodological individualism can deal adequately with these continuing social relationships. In any event, Kincaid warns us that individualism is a fuzzy doctrine: Sometimes it makes ontological claims, for example, that social entities do not act independently of their parts. Other individualists put the issue in terms of knowledge: we can capture all social explanations in individualistic terms or no social explanation is complete or confirmed without individualist mechanisms.[41] Kincaid argues that the debate about holism and

individualism is primarily an empirical issue about how to explain society. The upshot for Kincaid is that individualism

is seriously misguided: When individualism is interesting, it is implausible; when it is plausible, it is uninteresting.[42] It should already be clear from Chapter 2 that the claim that methodological individualism provides the exclusive proper explanatory strategy in the social disciplines is deeply flawed. It mistakes the biological entity for the complete human. To use a modern metaphor, it mistakes a discrete piece of hardware for the whole system, forgetting that the software is an open social construct and that together they form part of a large network. In the spirit of narrative pluralism, this does not mean that
methodological individualism might not be useful in some instances. It is up to the analyst using that assumption to demonstrate its usefulness and the validity of the results. The Enlightenment tradition from Descartes and Locke onwards to contemporary mainstream economics has just assumed this question away. In economics, this

strategy assumes that all individual choices are self-serving and promote individual welfare. Not only does it fail to acknowledge the social constraints on choice, it fails to confront the possibility of mistaken choices and the normative consequences of that possibility. In
those cases, one could always respond that people should bear the consequences of their mistaken choices. This, however, is a normative judgement that is open to question and is something economists claim not to be making. It is also a judgement with which the rest of us might disagreethough not necessarily all the time. There is a dynamic element in choices as people learn over time what is important to them in the changing circumstances of their lives. Mistakes are an important part of that learning process.

AT Alt Violence
Neoliberalism makes violence inevitable because its concept of stability is juryrigged to maintain massive inequality only an alternative approach to knowledge production can prevent these contradictions from escalating to global conflict Vattimo & Zabala 11 (Gianni, Prof. of Theoretical Philosophy @ U of Turin, Santiago, Prof. of Philosophy @ U of Barcelona, Hermeneutic Communism, pg. 136-140) The democratically elected governments of South America are also an indication of how Western democracies have submitted to those private interests without which politicians could not finance their political campaigns. The intention of our book, though it explores the status of communism, is also to provoke a reflection on the value of democracy as it is practiced in the West. We should stop considering as scandalous the idea that a revolution can occur without a previous authorization by the citizens as expressed in a referendum; after all, no modem constitution was ever born democratically starting with that of the United States, whose constitution was drafted by a group of progressive intellectuals. Although it is a tricky argument, one should ask oneself whether, today U.S. citizens are actually freer than Cubans. After all, the freedoms that Cubans have missed in these recent years are not constitutional but rather depend on the limitations imposed on their economy by years of U.S. embargo. This is why progressive American public figures such as Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, and Noam Chomsky have repeatedly emphasized how the effective possibilities of a fair life are all in favor of Cubans today . Although these South American governments have not yet betrayed parliamentary democracy we are convinced that they ought to be defended even if eventually they do have to violate these rules. As Mao said: A revolution is not a dinner party or writing an essay or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." We do not know how the relationship between the armed capitalism of framed
democracies and Latin American governments will develop, but we must all hope it will not become a violent conflict, even though the United States seems to countenance this option. The problem we must ask ourselves at the end of this book, which tries to regain faith in a radical transformation of our current order, is well summarized in Maos

Regardless of our admiration for a vision of history that progressively excludes violence, we are not very hopeful, as the recent social, economic,
affirmation: a revolution is not a dinner party.

and military levels of inequality caused by capitalism continue to increase, threatening any project of social transformation. History as the dialectical conflict of authorities, classes, or entire populations, has not ended. Neither has the universal proletarianization (upon which Marx made the communist revolution depend) been exorcised by the wellbeing spread by globalization, because globalization has not spread wealth. With the pretext of possible terrorist attacks, the intensification of control will end by forcing us to live in the imprisoned world that Nietzsche called accomplished nihilism: a world where in order to survive as human beings we must become Ubermensch, that is,
individuals capable of constructing our own alternative interpretation of the world instead of submitting to the official truths . This is also why the bisheriger Mensch, the man so far, is the man of modernity who needs to emerge from
his enslavement to metaphysics in order to encounter other cultures of the world and propose alternative ways of life. Contrary to metaphysical conservative realism,

hermeneutic communism allows other cultures to suggest different visions of the world, visions not yet framed within the logic of production, profit, and dominion . Although the

revolt of colonial populations is still largely dominated by Western capitalism, these

revolts are increasingly aware of the possibility of becoming a cultural revolt rather than a method for an equal redistribution of wealth. While European modernity claimed to be the bearer of universal values and therefore viewed with suspicion any demand from individual communities or identity populations, today we cannot believe anymore in the necessity of say international proletarianism, that is, of a universal value. The world will not cease to be alienated by finding its identity but rather by being open to the multiplicity of identities .
Nevertheless, if in order to construct such a world we must unite all the proletarians of all the world, then it will event ually become necessary to plan the foundation of a Fifth

the communist project must always bear in mind its hermeneutic inspiration against all those metaphysical temptations and the horrors of those universalisms that have shed blood throughout the world. Unfortunately hermeneutic communism cannot assure peaceful existence, dialogue, or a tranquil life, because this normal realm already belongs to the winners within framed democracies . In
International, as Chavez has recently suggested. While we also endorse Chavezs suggestion,

these democracies, the weak have been discharged so that the winners may preserve a life without alterations ; this, after all, must be why the word stability or bipartisanship is so often used by Obama and other presidents in international and domestic summits. But, as the recent economic crisis has demonstrated, the so-called stable world is not stable at all. As this instability increases, so do the possibilities of world revolution, a revolution that hermeneutic communism is not waiting for at the border of history but rather is trying (paradoxically) to avoid. If we prefer to circumvent such revolution, it is not because we do not believe in the necessity of an alternative but rather because the powers of armed capitalism are too powerful both within framed democracies and in its discharge. As we have seen above, these same territories at the margins of armed democracies are also part of the mechanism of armed capitalism and are therefore subjected to what Danilo Zolo calls humanitarian wars in order to guarantee stability As we indicated in chapter 3, hermeneutics is not an
assessment of tradition but most of all an ontology of the event, a philosophy of instability. In this context, communisms dial ectical conception of history is not dominated, as in the metaphysical systems, by the moment of conciliation but rather by the awareness that Being as event continuously questions again the provisional conciliations already achieved. As a dialectic theory hermeneutic communism does not consider itself the bearer of metaphysical truths or a metaphysics of history as conflicts and clashes. Instead, it is convinced that in the current situation of increasing universalization, lack of emergency and the impossibility of revolution, philosophy has the task of intensifying the

hermeneutic communism proposes an effective conception of existence for those who do not wish to be enslaved in and by a world of total organization. Although we are not thinking about the professional revolutionary figure as the
consciousness of conflict, even though everything (stability cultural values, and analytic philosophys realism) seems to prove it wrong. In sum, only possibility for authentic existence, we are not going to exclude that such an idea is interesting. Heideggers thesis, a ccording to which existence is a thrown project, is the only

That the transformation of the world cannot be projected in the form of a violent engagement, which would only provoke increased repression, makes much more difficult the goal of resistance and opposition and therefore communism. After all, great revolutions of the past, such as the Russian and Chinese revolutions, seem today like events that had to adopt the arms of their enemies, leading to regimes as violent and repressive as the ones that they had set out to destroy But we do not accept the desperate vision of Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, according to whom any form of renovation, after the great experience of groups in fusion, must fall again into the routine of dominion, in a triumph that he regarded as practico -inert. Today the global integration of
one we manage to suggest as an alternative to the pure static discipline of the politics of descriptions, founded on dominion in all its forms.

the world offers different forms of resistance than the armed revolts of the past . Examples of nonviolent methods, from Gandhi to the pressure exerted by the simple existence of the communist democracies of Chavez and Lula, may operate to limit the current dominion of the great empire of capitalism. These are the most productive alternatives at our disposal today Other forms of passive resistance, such as boycotts, strikes, and other manifestations against oppressive institutions, may be effective, but only if actual masses of citizens take part, as in Latin America. These mass movements might avoid falling back again into the

practico-inert, which is the natural consequence of those revolutions entrusted to small and inevitably violent avant-garde intellectuals, that is, those who have only described the
world in various ways. The moment now has arrived to interpret the world.