Dedev

1NC

1. Economic decline doesnt cause war diversionary theory is wrong and their
statistics are flawed.
Boehmer 10 (Charles, associate professor of political science at the University of Texas, Defense and Peace Economics, Economic
Growth and Violent International Conflict: 1875-1999 June 2010, Volume 21: 249-68, Hopkins)
Crisis-Scarcity as a Source of Violent Conflicts I term the next body of literature the Crisis-Scarcity perspective because it links violent interstate
conflicts to domestic or international economic crises. The first group of studies within this broad perspective argues that downswings in
Kondratieff cycles in the global economy or other crises of capitalism increase the risk of war. The theories of imperialism by Hobson (1917,
1938) and Lenin (1939 [1916]) make broad arguments in this manner. World-systems or Dependency scholars advance similar arguments
(Chase-Dunn, 1978; Frank, 1978; Bosquet, 1980; Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1982; Bergesen, 1983, 1985). However, many of the theories in this
category are difficult to test due to conceptual ambigu- ities and the number of available observations, considering that the temporal length of
an entire cycle is purportedly 50 to 60 years. Moreover, World-Systems theory lacks an opera- tional definition by which to categorize states
into periphery, semi-periphery, and core, making it difficult to quantitatively assess some of its claims. Although there could be strong
consensus on how to categorize many states into the core or periphery categories, the roster ECONOMIC GROWTH AND VIOLENT CONFLICT 253
of semi-periphery states is much less clear. However, some propositions in these theories have been tested with historical data or have been
covered in studies at the systemic level of analysis. The studies by Mansfield (1988), Goldstein (1988), Pollins (1996), and Pollins and Murrin
(1999) yielded results contrary to some of the claims made by World-System theory, or similar theories, relating global economic cycles to
violent conflicts. On the one hand, the historical analysis of World-Systems theory examines a longer time-frame than extant quan- titative
studies, but on the other hand these historical approaches must assume that the main economic and political processes that shaped much of
the past millennium will continue into the future, which may be heroic. Because I am in particular interested in whether individual states
become more or less prone to involvement in violent interstate conflicts as their economic growth rises or falls, I do not offer further tests of
systemic-level propositions found in the literature. In contrast, studies of diversionary theory make state-level (monadic) or dyadic arguments.
Most studies to date have been monadic and only a few have examined strategic diversionary behavior
from a dyadic perspective. Of central importance to this study are those theories of diversionary conflict
arguing that economic crisis induces foreign conflicts. However, while diversionary theory has been
popular, the bulk of extant research examines the foreign policy of the United States (Ostrom and Job, 1986;
James and Oneal, 1991; Morgan and Bickers, 1992; DeRouen, 1995; Hess and Orphanides, 1995; Wang, 1996; Fordham, 1998; Mitchell and
Moore, 2002; Foster, 2006). Meernik (1994) and Meernik and Waterman (1996) find no evidence of diversionary behavior. Of
more importance to this analysis are those studies that theorize or examine cases more generally at the state-level of analysis. Russett
(1987) finds an inverse relationship between economic growth (two and three year moving averages)
and conflict involvement using a pooled time series of 23 countries. In an extension of this study, he
later finds evidence that negative growth leads to a higher rate of militarized conflict participation by
democracies but that the opposite is true of autocracies (Russett, 1990). When disaggregating by power
and polity type, the results appear less clear. Positive growth leads to a higher participation rate in war
for democracies (the sign is positive for autocracies but insignificant), whereas non-democratic major powers were more apt to use force.
The sign directions for minor powers of both regime types were negative and statistically insignificant. However, Russett (1990: 126) notes in a
larger sample of 100 states from 19531976, using the Penn World Tables (Summers and Heston, 1991), that economic growth was statistically
insignificant. Considering the limitations in data and the lack of control for autocorrelation, these results could be inaccurate. Heldt (1999)
similarly finds at the state level that while high depriva- tion increases the use of force by states, this is
unrelated to regime type or any strategic interactions with other states. His sample though only includes
challengers in territorial disputes with negative growth rates, leading to 187 cases, and he thus neither
provides a general test of growing states compared with non-growing states nor compares conflict
participants to non-conflict participants (non-barking dogs). Enterline and Gleditsch (2000) examine whether political leaders
substitute diversionary tactics with other states for repres- sion when confronted with domestic pressure using the leader-year as the unit of
analysis. While they find that leaders often use both repression and diversion when pressured
domestically, the results were unclear concerning economic growth rates and inflation. They dropped
these variables from most of their discussion due to limited data and the resulting loss in cases.

2. Growth is unsustainable increased complexity and diminishing returns prove.
Collapse is the only way to create dedevelopment and avoid extinction
Mackenzie 08 (Deborah Mackenzie 08 BBC Correspondant. Quotes Joe Tainter - an archaeologist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake
City, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Sociceties, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems
Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts 4/5/2008 (Are WE doomed? Ebsco))
DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few
survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why
should ours be any different? Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a
catastrophic pandemic . Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is
destined to collapse sooner or later? A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as
complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of
complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor
disturbance can bring everything crashing down. Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start
thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep disaster at bay.
History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller , Jared Diamond of the University of
California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and warned that we might be
heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our environmental support systems. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in
Washington DC agrees. He has that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet.
It's about saving civilisation," he says. Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build
cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced
increasing complexity in human societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and
author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies . If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals.
When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population,
build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and
tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the sums
paid. That much the Sumerians knew. Diminishing returns There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra
layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human efforts,
from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing
returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes
as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar
invested in research as that research investment mounts. This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter
says. To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates
a larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for your buck.
Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing
level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses. What
emerges is a less complex society, which is organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group. Tainter sees
diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early
Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be
harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart. Western industrial
civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are
limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get is mounting and although global is still increasing,
constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving - the yield boosts
per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are inevitable," Tainter warns, "this
process is in part ineluctable." Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New
England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached
from studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both
with environmental problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says.
This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised. "To run a hierarchy,
managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases,
societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole
thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at
this point. This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical
systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our
strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old
Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised. Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the
University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down . "Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one
village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn't The very nature of civilisation may make its demise inevitable, says
Debora MacKenzie New Scientist April 5, 2008 As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This
means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if
either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely
understood." The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate
networks that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials, information, money and energy
- amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant
destabilising effects, from one side of the world to the other." For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered when
apparently insignificant nodes of their respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit
power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow
of Yale University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters. Credit crunch Perrow says interconnectedness in the
global production system has now reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means
a breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's financial systems, where the coupling
is very tight. "Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be
enormous." "A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping a chunk off a
sheep." Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't
clear - it may not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late. "When we do the
analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more
sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable." So what can we do?
"The key issue is really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means making sure
our "global sheep" does not get injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel
and mineral resources dwindle. Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar
ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now
at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and
matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid
and ever more tightly coupled system. "It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of
conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger dramatic
changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old
ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one. Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-
tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits.
Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency.
Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems,"
says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits." Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully
climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After the Byzantine
empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined,
their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia." Pulling off the same trick will
be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action
now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second, we need to
remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can
keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action." The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the
grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow
suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise
inefficiency in the public interest. Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls
"tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to.
These include population growth, the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation,
disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns -
just as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy. "This is. the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the
healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy
renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire.
If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial
breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert
breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse. Lester Brown thinks we are fast
running out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has
been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy
might emerge. But it's now a race between tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable
technology, or collapse?" Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in
the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by
cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more.
Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits. Studies of the way by Luis
Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-
faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in
the long run this cannot be sustainable. chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear - it
may not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late. "When we do the analysis,
almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways,
we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable." So what can we do? "The key issue is
really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global
sheep" does not get injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral
resources dwindle. Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas
have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the
University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures,
specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever
more tightly coupled system. "It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions,"
says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger dramatic changes
as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem
and its replacement by a newer, simpler one. Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our
systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products
are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also
minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon.
"Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits." Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the
complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After the Byzantine empire lost most of its
territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became
less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia." Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our
more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. "First, we need to
encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second, we need to remember that slack
isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its
suppliers are temporarily out of action." The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy
available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in
a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.
Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove
our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the
growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate
change In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns - just as we are running out of cheap and
plentiful energy. "This is. the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our
societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in
forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is
recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by
renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any
resulting crisis is actually worse. Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a
day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the
first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between
tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse?" Tainter is not
convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-
based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually
face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing
returns, or perhaps absolute limits. Studies of the way by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico,
support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities
growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.

3. Economic growth is the principal driver of environmental decline.
Speth, 2013 (James Gustave Speth, Growth Fetish: Five Reasons Why Prioritizing Growth is Bad Policy, Huffington Post, September
20
th
2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-gustave-speth/growth-fetish-five-reason_b_4018166.html, 7/17/14, LI)
Economic activity and its growth are the principal drivers of massive environmental decline. In a
remarkable passage of his environmental history of the twentieth century, Something New Under the Sun, historian J. R. McNeill writes that the
"growth fetish" solidified its hold on imaginations and institutions in the twentieth century: "Communism aspired to become the universal
creed of the twentieth century, but a more flexible and seductive religion succeeded where communism failed: the quest for economic growth.
Capitalists, nationalists -- indeed almost everyone, communists included -- worshiped at this same altar because economic growth disguised a
multitude of sins. ... Social, moral, and ecological ills were sustained in the interest of economic growth; indeed, adherents to the faith
proposed that only more growth could resolve such ills. Economic growth became the indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere.
"The growth fetish, while on balance quite useful in a world with empty land, shoals of undisturbed fish,
vast forests, and a robust ozone shield, helped create a more crowded and stressed one. Despite the
disappearance of ecological buffers and mounting real costs, ideological lock-in reigned in both capitalist and communist circles. ... The
overarching priority of economic growth was easily the most important idea of the twentieth century." The relationship between economic
gains and environmental losses is a close one, as McNeill notes. The economy consumes natural resources (both
renewable and nonrenewable resources), occupies the land, and releases pollutants. As the economy has
grown, so have resource use and pollutants of great variety. As Paul Ekins says in Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability, "the
sacrifice of the environment to economic growth. . . has unquestionably been a feature of economic
development at least since the birth of industrialism." And so it remains.

4. Mindset shift WILL happen collapse forces a change to sustainable civilization
Lewis 2k - Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder (Chris H, The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global
Industrial Civilization http://www.cross-x.com/archives/LewisParadox.pdf)
A more hopeful cause of the collapse of global industrial civilization is a global economic collapse
financial crises have become increasingly common with the speed and growth of global capital flows.
The financial crises caused by the 1994 collapse of the Mexican peso, the 1997 Asian financial panic, the 1998 Russian financial panic, and the
1998 bailout of Long Term Capital Management by the United States Federal Reserve and Global Banks are all examples of recent financial
crises that greatly stressed the global financial system. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said,
There was a moment when I thought it could have come undone. He was, of course, referring to the global financial
system. A global depression caused by a financial panic could finally undermine the entire structure of
globalization. With the loss of trillions of dollars of paper money, First World elites would find that they dont have
the funds to bail out Third World countries and banks, and even bail their own banks and corporations
out. With the loss of trillions of dollars, the global economy would come to a grinding halt and there wouldnt be the collective
resources or the will to restart it. Of course, these are the precise sorts of crises that lead to World Wars and military conflict. No
matter how it collapses, through economic collapse and the development of local and regional economies and/or
through a global military struggle by the First World to maintain its access to Third World resources,
global industrial civilization will collapse because its demands for wealth, natural resources, energy,
and ecosystem services aren't sustainable.

2NC

2NC Growth Unsustainable

Continuing consumption inevitably means collapse
MacKenzie 12 (Debora, contributor to New Scientist, Boom and Doom: Revisiting Prophecies of Collapse, Counter Currents,
January 10, 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826501.500-why-the-demise-of-civilisation-may-be-inevitable.html)
This was unexpected and shocking. Why should the worlds economy collapse rather than stabilise? In World3, it
happened because of the complex feedbacks between different global subsystems such as industry,
health and agriculture. More industrial output meant more money to spend on agriculture and
healthcare, but also more pollution, which could damage health and food production. And most importantly, says Randers, in the
real world there are delays before limits are understood, institutions act or remedies take effect. These delayed responses were programmed
into World3. The model crashed because its hypothetical people did not respond to the mounting problems
before underlying support systems, such as farmland and ecosystems, had been damaged. Instead, they
carried on consuming and polluting past the point the model world could sustain. The result was what economists call a
bubble and Limits called overshoot. The impact of these response delays was the fundamental scientific message of the study, says
Randers. Critics, and even fans of the study, he says, didnt get this point.

Increasing population limitations will result in collapse
MacKenzie 12 (Debora, contributor to New Scientist, Boom and Doom: Revisiting Prophecies of Collapse, Counter Currents,
January 10, 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826501.500-why-the-demise-of-civilisation-may-be-inevitable.html)
We already know the future will be different from the standard run in one respect, says Bar-Yam. Although
the actual world population up to 2000 has been similar, in the scenario the rate of population growth
increases with time one of the exponential drivers of collapse. Although Limits took account of the fact that birth rates
fall as prosperity rises, in reality they have fallen much faster than was expected when the book was written. It is reasonable to be
concerned about resource limitations in fifty years, Bar-Yam says, but the population is not even close to growing *the way
Limits projected in 1972+. The book itself may be partly responsible. Bar-Yam thinks some of the efforts in the 1970s to cut population growth
were at least partly due to Limits. If it helped do that, it bought us more time, and its a very important work in the history of humanity, he
says. Yet World3 still suggests well hit the buffers eventually. The original Limits team put out an updated
study using World3 in 2005, which included faster-falling birth rates. Except in the stabilising scenario, World3 still
collapsed.

Maintaining current levels of growth makes economic collapse inevitable
consumption and recourse statistics prove
Trainer 07 Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales *Ted, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A
Consumer Society, p. 125-159]
Rich countries, with about one-fifth of the world's people, are consuming about three-quarters of the world's resource production. Our per capita consumption of assets like oil is
about 15 to 20 times that of the poorest half of the world's people. World population will probably stabilise around 9 billion, somewhere
after 2060. If all those people were to have the present Australian per capita resource consumption, then annual
world production of resources would have to be eight to ten times as great as it is now. If we tried to
raise present world production to that level by 2060, we would by then have completely exhausted all
probably recoverable resources of one third of the basic mineral items we use. All probably recoverable resources of coal, oil, gas, tar sand oil, shale oil, and uranium (via
burner reactors) would have been exhausted by 2050 (Trainer, 1985. Chapters 4 and 5). Petroleum appears to be especially limited. As was noted at the start of Chapter 1. a number of
geologists have concluded that world oil supply will probably peak by 2010 and be down to half that level by 2025-30.
with big price increases soon after the peak. None of the limits-to-growth themes is as potentially teoninal in the short teon for
consumer society. If all 9 billion people were to use timber at the rich-world per capita rate, we would
need 3.5 times the world's present forest area. If all 9 billion were to have a rich-world diet, which takes
about 0.5 ha of land to produce, we would need 4.5 billion ha of food-producing land. But there is only
1.4 billion ha of cropland in use today, and this is not likely to increase. Recent "Footprint" analysis (Wachernagel
and Rees, 1996) estimates that it probably takes 7+ ha of productive land to provide water, energy settlement area
and food for one person living in Australia. The US figure is close to 12 ha. So if 9 billion people were to
live as we do in rich countries, we would need about 70 billion ha of productive land. But that is about 10
times all the available productive land on the planet. As was explained in Chapter I, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change estimates
that if the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is to be kept to sensible levels, and carbon use was shared equally among the world's people, then rich-world per capita carbon release
would probably have to be reduced to somewhere under 5% of the present amount. These are some of the main limits to growth arguments which lead to
the conclusion that there is no possibility of all people rising to anywhere near the living standards we take
for granted today in rich countries. We can only live the way we do because we are taking and rapidly using up
most of the scarce resources, and preventing most of the world's people from having anything like a fair
share. Therefore we cannot morally endorse our affluent way of life. We must accept the need to move to far less resource-expensive ways. Few people seem to grasp the magnitude of
the required reductions. It follows from the foregoing discussion that the world is over-populated. However the most serious problem we have is not
over-population. It is over-consumption.


--Methodology Indict

Growth is not sustainableyour methodology is flawed
Trainer 07 Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales *Ted, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A
Consumer Society, p. 125-159]
Above all it must be stressed how far beyond sustainable levels of production and consumption we are. The foregoing figures
show that we must develop ways of living in which we can have a good quality of life on per capita resource rates that are a small fraction of today's rates. Overall,
consumer society shows a stunning inability to respond to the alarming challenges now facing it. Most
people seem to be totally unaware of and indifferent to the fact that their high "living standards" are delivered
by a massively unjust global economy which so severely deprives the majority that tens of thousands of people die prematurely every day,
and to the fact that their "living standards" are grossly unsustainable. The fact that their supreme values remain raising
"living standards" and the GDP testifies to the overwhelming failure, refusal, to recognise the fundamental problem. Indeed among governments,
academics, the media, educational institutions and the general public there is an almost universal and
impenetrable mentality of delusion and denial.

2NC Environment Impact

Growth rapidly increases global warming and exacerbates poverty. Dedevelopment
solves sustainability.
Victor 10 (Peter, Professor in Environmental Studies at York University where he teaches an undergraduate course in environmental
management and graduate and undergraduate courses in ecological and environmental economics, Nature: Vol. 468, 11/18/2010, Questioning
economic growth ND)
An alternative is to encourage growth in sectors of the economy that use fewer resources, such as the service sector. Such a strategy could buy
some time, but not if it simply shifts the production of resource-intensive products and their related environmental burdens to other countries,
as has been the pattern in recent years. A third option is to limit growth itself. The battle against climate change
illustrates the attractiveness of this strategy. To reduce greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG) by 80% over 50
years, an economy that increases its real gross domestic product (GDP) by 3% a year must reduce its
emissions intensity -- tonnes of GHG per unit of GDP by an astonishing 6% a year. For an economy that does
not grow, the annual cut would be a still very challenging 3.2%. The view that we should curb planetary
impacts by reducing growth in richer countries is reinforced by several considerations. First, there is
mounting evidence that this growth is largely unrelated to measures of happiness. Second, in recent
decades, increasing inequality has accompanied much of this growth, leading to problems ranging from
poor public health to social unrest. Third, the prospects for real improvement in the developing world are likely to be diminished if
developed countries continue to encroach on more ecological space. Removing economic growth as a major policy priority runs counter to the
views of governments and many international agencies. Many nations responded to the recent financial crisis with
desperate measures to resume economic growth. Yet when we recognize how briefly economic growth
has held such prominence in policy circles, dethroning it seems less improbable. Regular estimates of GDP by
governments date back only to the 1940s, and the measure was initially used in support of specific objectives, such as stimulating employment.
Only in the 1950s did economic growth become a policy priority in its own right6. Economists and other
social scientists now need to map out functional economies in which growth is sidelined, and stability,
resilience and wellbeing are the prime objectives, within environmental and resource constraints.
Ecological economist Herman Daly, who has investigated and promoted a steady-state economic model for several decades, has
formulated a useful set of principles for limiting material use, including: the harvest of renewable
resources should not exceed their regeneration rate; the rate of extraction of non-renewable resources
should not exceed the rate of creation of renewable substitutes; and waste emissions should not exceed
the environments capacity to assimilate them. To these we should add the protection of land and water to reduce
competition among humans and other species. Among the many successful applications of these principles is the
crea- tion of protected areas and green belts. Daly, with theologian John Cobb, also proposed an alternative
measure of macro- economic success: the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), incorporating
environmental degradation, resource depletion and other factors. Estimates of this index show a major divergence
from GDP per person for many countries In one study by environmental charity Friends of the Earth7, the gap between US GDP and the
Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), calculated similarly to the ISEW, was particularly marked: whereas GDP per person rose from the 1970s, GPI
actually declined (see Genuine progress?).

Ecocide will kill all life without dedev overexploitation and biodiversity loss prove
The Observer 02 (The Observer, July 7, 2002, http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,750783,00.html)
A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to be released on Tuesday, warns that the human race is
plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. In a damning condemnation of
Western society's high consumption levels, it adds that the extra planets (the equivalent size of Earth) will be required by the
year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted. The report, based on scientific data from across the
world, reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the
past three decades. Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth,
the report warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no
longer be able to sustain its growing population. Experts say that seas will become emptied of fish
while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater
supplies become scarce and polluted. The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their
extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain
human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now. Systematic
overexploitation of the planet's oceans has meant the North Atlantic's cod stocks have collapsed
from an estimated spawning stock of 264,000 tonnes in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995. The study will also reveal a sharp fall in the
planet's ecosystems between 1970 and 2002 with the Earth's forest cover shrinking by about 12
per cent, the ocean's biodiversity by a third and freshwater ecosystems in the region of 55 per
cent. The Living Planet report uses an index to illustrate the shocking level of deterioration in the
world's forests as well as marine and freshwater ecosystems. Using 1970 as a baseline year and
giving it a value of 100, the index has dropped to a new low of around 65 in the space of a single
generation. It is not just humans who are at risk. Scientists, who examined data for 350 kinds of
mammals, birds, reptiles and fish, also found the numbers of many species have more than halved.
Martin Jenkins, senior adviser for the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, which helped compile the report, said: 'It
seems things are getting worse faster than possibly ever before. Never has one single species had
such an overwhelming influence. We are entering uncharted territory.'

--A2: Tech Solves

Tech cant fix the environment. Even renewables have unintended consequences
Trainer 12 (Ted, Dr. Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Can Renewable
Energy Sustain Consumer Societies? A Negative Case,
http://simplicityinstitute.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/04/CanRenewableEnergySustainConsumerSocietiesTrainer.pdf)
The total investment sum arrived at above is considerably less than that derived in Trainer [112], but the derivation is much more soundly
based mainly due to recent access to more confident estimates of output and future capital costs. The general conclusion supported by
this discussion is that the capital costs for a totally renewable global energy supply would be far beyond
affordable. This means that greenhouse and energy problems cannot be solved by action on the
supply side, i.e., by technical developments which promise to provide quantities taken for granted
in energy intensive societies. This general limits to growth perspective is that these and the 15 other major
global problems can only be solved by action on the demand side, i.e., by moving to ways, values, institutions and systems which
greatly reduce the need for materials, energy and ecological resources. It should be stressed that the 700 EJ/y
supply target would give the worlds expected 10 billion people by 2050 a per capita energy consumption of 70 GJ/y, which is around only
one third of the present Australian level. Thus if renewable sources were to provide all the worlds people in 2050
with the present Australian per capita energy consumption, the supply target would have to be three
times that taken in this exercise. This analysis is not an argument against transition to full reliance on renewable energy
sources. It is only an argument against the possibility of sustaining high energy societies on them. Trainer
[113] and [114] detail the case that the limits to growth predicament cannot be solved by technical reforms
to or within consumer capitalist society and that there must be radical social transition to some kind of
Simpler Way. This vision includes developing mostly small and highly self sufficient local economies, abandoning
the growth economy, severely controlling market forces, shifting from representative to
participatory democracy, and accepting frugal and cooperative lifestyles. Chapter 4 of Trainer [115] presents
numerical support for the claim that footprint and energy costs in the realm of 10% of those in present rich countries could be achieved,
based on renewable energy sources. Although at this point in time the prospects for making such a transition would seem to be highly
unlikely, the need to consider it will probably become more evident as greenhouse and energy problems intensify. It is not likely to be
considered if the present dominant assumption that high energy societies can run on renewable energy remains relatively unchallenged.


2NC Disease Impact

Growth and globalization guarantees disease spread -- makes transmission quicker
and likelier
Gannon 10 Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (John C., The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the
United States, http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/nie99-17d.htm) SP
The increase in international air travel, trade, and tourism will dramatically increase the prospects that
infectious disease pathogens such as influenza--and vectors such as mosquitoes and rodents--will spread
quickly around the globe, often in less time than the incubation period of most diseases. Earlier in the decade,
for example, a multidrug resistant strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae originating in Spain spread
throughout the world in a matter of weeks, according to the director of WHO's infectious disease
division. The cross-border movement of some 2 million people each day, including 1 million between
developed and developing countries each week, and surging global trade ensure that travel and
commerce will remain key factors in the spread of infectious diseases.

We control the only internal link into disease spread
Kaferstein et al. 97 (F.K., Motarjemi, Y. & Bettcher D.W., World Health Organization, Switzerland, Emerging Infectious Disease Vol.
3 No.4 Foodborne Disease Control: A transitional Challenge)
Many factors have contributed to the increase in foodborne disease. Industrialization, leading to increased
wealth and urbanization, has revolutionized the food supply system, resulting in mass production and an explosive increase in
the number of food service establishments and food outlets. Mass production, environmental factors, and inadequate
knowledge on the part of food handlers have contributed to increased contamination of primary
foodstuffs. The increase in international trade has increased the risk for cross-border transmission of
infectious diseases. The globalization of food (and feed) trade, facilitated by the liberalization of world
trade, while offering many benefits and opportunities, also presents new risks (3). Food, a major trade commodity, is also an
important vehicle for transmission of infectious diseases. Because food production, manufacturing, and marketing are now
global, infectious agents can be disseminated from the original point of processing and packaging to locations
thousands of miles away. This multinational approach to food production and distribution and the progressive opening up of world
markets have allowed the international food trade to flourish. The value of food trade, U.S. $266 billion in 1994, was more than 300% greater
than it was 20 years ago and continues to grow rapidly (4). The globalization of foodborne diseases also results from
increased travel. International travel is more accessible today. The World Tourism Organization estimates world tourist
arrivals at 567 million in 1995, and this figure is expected to rise to 660 million by the year 2000. Over the past 200 years, the
average distance traveled and the speed of travel have increased 1,000 times while incubation periods
for diseases have not changed. As a result, a person can be exposed to a foodborne illness in one
country and expose others to the infection in a location thousands of miles from the original source of
the infection (5). Depending on their destination, travelers are estimated to run a 20% to 50% risk of contracting a foodborne illness. As
international trade and travel increase, foodborne disease outbreaks of the same origin are more likely
to occur in different parts of the globe. Food safety in the late 20th century represents a transnational challenge requiring
enhanced levels of international cooperation in setting standards and regulations and in strengthening surveillance systems. Effective food
safety programs, built on a clear understanding of the epidemiology of foodborne disease, must be developed and implemented. The
globalization of the worlds economy has been accompanied by intense economic competition and
increased pressure on governments to downsize. Public sector austerity has reduced disease
surveillance in many countries (6). For example, in Great Britain, the failure to maintain public health infrastructures has, in the
words of the British Medical Association, resulted in Britain returning to the 19th century in terms of public health, with problems such as dirty
water, contaminated food, and old infectious diseases reemerging (7). Failing a reversal of this trend, public health authorities and health
services may be overwhelmed in the near future by outbreaks or epidemics of foodborne diseases. The 1991 epidemic of cholera in Peru and
the 1996 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157 in Japan demonstrate how one single foodborne disease epidemic or outbreak may disrupt the
functioning of a health-care system

Diseases lead to extinction
Fox 97 (C. William. Lieutenant COLONEL. 6/24/97. http://se1.isn.ch/serviceengine/FileContent?serviceID=ISN&fileid=4341F68C-1AF1-FEB7-
10D7-5EE127216D05&lng=en.)
HIV is a pandemic killer without a cure, and viruses such as Ebola-Zaire are merely a plane ride away from the
population centers of the developed world. Viruses like ebola, which are endemic to Africa, have the
potential to inflict morbidity and mortality on a scale not seen in the world since the Black Plague
epidemics of medieval Europe (which killed a full quarter of Europe's population in the 13th and 14th centuries.)18 These
diseases are not merely African problems, they present a real threat to mankind. They should be taken every
bit as seriously as the concern for deliberate use of weapons of mass destruction.


--A2: Tech Solves

Multinational corporations are drowning out local developing world producers and
creating medicine for profit, not for the cure tuberculosis proves.
Saker et al. 4 (Lance. Lee, Kelley. Cannito, Barbara. Gilmore, Anna. Campbell-Lendrum, Diarmid, Centre on Global Change and Health &
ECOHOST, Globalization and infectious diseases: A review of these linkages)
In low and middle-income countries, pharmaceuticals account for about 30% of total health expenditure. The potential health benefits and risks
posed by trade liberalization to access to pharmaceuticals are varied. Baris and McLeod (2000) argue that, as freer trade reduces tariffs on
imported pharmaceuticals, drug imports will increase. In theory, countries will benefit from enhancing the range of drugs available particularly
where there is little or no domestic capacity to produce such products, and foreign competition should exert more pressure on prices overall. In
practice, however, the effects on production and consumption are more complex given the changing structure of the pharmaceutical industry.
Like the food industry, pharmaceuticals are increasingly dominated by a small number of large TNCs. In
1992, the top ten pharmaceutical companies were based in the US and Europe, accounting for about
one-third of total combined sales worldwide (Baris and McLeod, 2000). No low-income country appears
in this super league (with the exception of China, which produces all of its essential drugs), but such
countries do have the advantage of cheap labour and indigenous medicinal plants. Hence, there is a thriving
genetics industry in the developing world, and rapidly growing international trade. However, increased access by large TNCs to markets in the
developing world could undermine these local producers. Under the TRIPS agreement, domestic subsidies on drugs could be deemed an unfair
trade advantage, and there may be a tightening of regulations around the production and trade of generic drugs. In relation to drug
development, an emerging global market for pharmaceuticals raises concerns about a greater focus on conditions and markets deemed most
profitable, regardless of the global burden of disease. How drugs will be developed for infectious diseases afflicting the poorest population
groups within such a context remains unclear. For example, only 13 of the 1223 new chemical entities commercialized between 1975 and 1997
were for tropical diseases (Pecoul et al, 1999), and no new drugs for tuberculosis have been developed for over 60
years because, despite its enormous toll, only 5% of the 16 million infected can afford medication. These
inequities contribute to the 10/90 gap in which 90 per cent of research funds address the health needs of 10 per cent of the worlds population
(Global Forum for Health Research, 1999). Finally, unregulated access to, and inappropriate consumption of, pharmaceuticals in a global
market-place raises the issue of drug resistance. These factors have, for example, contributed to the spread of multidrug resistant tuberculosis
(MDR-TB) worldwide, and will lead to further spread of resistance to antiretroviral for HIV, particularly given the important role that the
unregulated private sector plays in providing care for stigmatizing conditions (Brugha, 2003). Control of such disease could
therefore be jeopardized, and the misuse of pharmaceutical products facilitated, if sufficient regulatory
mechanisms (including proscribed standards of use with adequate monitoring and enforcement) are not implemented alongside globalization
of the pharmaceutical industry.

2NC Mindset Shift

Collapse now creates a mindset shift towards small local civilizations
Lewis 2k - Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder (Chris H, The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global
Industrial Civilization http://www.cross-x.com/archives/LewisParadox.pdf)
With the collapse of global industrial civilization, smaller, autonomous, local and regional civilizations,
cultures, and polities will emerge. We can reduce the threat of mass death and genocide that will surely accompany
this collapse by encouraging the creation and growth of sustainable, self-sufficient regional polities. John Cobb
has already made a case for how this may work in the United States and how it is working in Kerala, India. After the collapse of global
industrial civilization, First and Third World peoples won't have the material resources, biological
capital, and energy and human resources to re-establish global industrial civilization. Forced by
economic necessity to become dependent on local resources and ecosystems for their survival, peoples
throughout the world will work to conserve and restore their environments. Those societies that destroy
their local environments and economies, as modern people so often do, will themselves face collapse
and ruin.
--Movements Now

Movements to localize civilization and end ecological destruction are rapidly gaining
strength; global economic collapse is the critical mass for achieving dedevelopment
Trainer 03 Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, Modified 5/29/2003,
http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/D24TheTransIsUnderway.html
Although a minor phenomenon at present, it can be confidently predicted that this paradigm shift will
accelerate in coming years given the pace at which the globalisaztion of the economy will make it
painfully obvious to more and more people that the old values and systems will not provide well
for all. Building new systems. Much more impressive than the evidence of a change in world view is the growth of alternative
settlements and systems. As Ife says, "At the grassroots level...increasing numbers of people in different
countries are experimenting with community-based alternatives, such as local economic systems,
community-based education, housing co-operatives...a community-based strategy based on
principles of ecology and social justice is already emerging, as a result of the initiative of ordinary
people at grass-roots level, who are turning away from mainstream structures..." (Ife, 1995, p. 99.)
According to Norberg-Hodge, "Around the world, people are building communities that attempt to get
away from the waste, pollution, competition, and violence of contemporary life. (Norberg-Hodge, 1996, p.
405.) The agency she has founded, the International Society for Ecology and Culture, works in Ladakh to reinforce local economies and its
video Local Futures, is an inspiring illustration of what is being done in many parts of the world. The New Economic Foundation in London
works to promote local economic development, with a special interest in bujilding local quality of life indicators and in establishing local
currencies. Schroyer"s book Towards a World That Works (1997) documents many alternative community initiatives. "Everywhere
people are waking up to the realities of their situation in a globalising economy and are beginning
to recognise that their economies resources and socio-political participations must be regrounded
in their local and regional communities." (p. 225) "Everywhere social and economic structures are re-
emerging in the midst of the market system that are spontaneously generated social protections to
normatively re-embed the market..." "It is no exaggeration to say that local communities everywhere are on
the front lines of what might well be characterised as World War III." (p. 229.) "It is a contest between
the competing goals of economic growth to maximise profits for absentee owners vs creating healthy
communities that are good places for people to live." (p. 230.) "In Britain, over 1.5 million people now
take regular part in a rainbow economy of community economic initiatives." (New Internationalist, 1996, p.
27.) Friberg and Hettne (1985) argue that two main groups are behind the emergence of self reliant communities, viz., those holding "post
materialist" values, and those who have been marginalised, such as the unemployed and the Third World poor. In Living Lightly Schwarz
and Schwarz discuss the many alternative settlements they visited on a recent world tour. They say that these people "...hope
that the tiny islands of better living which they inhabit will provide examples which will eventually
supplant the norms of unfettered capitalism which rule us today. Their hope is not in revolution
but in persuasion by example." ( p. 2.) "What is new is that small groups of Living Lightly people are
now part of an articulate and increasingly purposeful global culture which promotes values that
run counter to those of the mainstream." (p. 2.) "They think the empire will eventually
disintegrate...In anticipation of that collapse islands of refuge must be prepared." (p. 3.) Living Lightly
people "...can only hope to prevail through their own example and the gradual erosion of the
dominant system through local initiatives that exchange high living standards for a high quality of
life." (p. 165.) Living Lightly people "...are in revolt against the emerging global economy and want to
set up viable local alternatives." (p. 150.)

Movements exist nowall is needed is the jolt for a large scale conciousness shift
towards sustainable living
Trainer 02 - Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of New South Wales (Ted, Debating the Significance of the Global Eco-village
Movement: A Reply to Takis Fotopoulos Democracy & Nature, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2002)
The basic task before us at this point in time is to get the mainstream to grasp (a) that capitalist society
is grossly and unavoidably unjust and unsustainable , and that it is delivering a falling quality of life, and
(b) that only The Simpler Way, centred on more materially simple, co-operative and self-sufficient
ways within a zero-growth economy can solve the major global problems. Unless these points become widely understood
there will be no possibility of change in the required direction. Continuing to write books and articles about these themes as many of us have been doing for decades will not be sufficient to
get them to become widely understood and accepted. My argument is that what is likely to contribute most to this end is the development of many impressive radically alternative
settlements, systems and local economies. These need to be seen and experienced as delivering very satisfactory living standards despite very low ecological footprints. This is not all that has
to be done but my belief is that is constitutes the best beginning point and direction for action, and the best base from which to do the other things that need to be done, notably the
educational work. It is conceivable to me that this general strategic beginning point could achieve a more or less peaceful replacement of the capitalist system. Remember that it is very
likely that within 20 years capitalist-consume r society will have run into huge problems, especially to do
with environmental deterioration, Third World squalor, armed conflict, deteriorating social cohesion
and above all a sudden, major and insoluble petroleum crisis. It is in other words quite possible that we
will soon enter conditions that will both jolt people in general towards recognising the need for
change to The Simpler Way and dramatically undercut the systems capacity to persuade or force
people to adhere to the capitalist way. Traditional Left theoreticians must realise that if this happens all will be lost if we have not by then sufficiently
developed the new ways and built the examples that could be rapidly taken up. The window of opportunity will soon close.

Movements existits only a question of economic collapse to strengthen them
Trainer 2K, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, (Ted, What Should We Do? Build
Eco-Villages)
Although a minor phenomenon at present, it can be confidently predicted that this paradigm shift will
accelerate in coming years given the pace at which the globalisaztion of the economy will make it painfully
obvious to more and more people that the old values and systems will not provide well for all. Building new systems. Much more
impressive than the evidence of a change in world view is the growth of alternative settlements and
systems. As Ife says, "At the grassroots level...increasing numbers of people in different countries are
experimenting with community-based alternatives, such as local economic systems, community-based
education, housing co-operatives...a community-based strategy based on principles of ecology and social justice is already
emerging, as a result of the initiative of ordinary people at grass-roots level, who are turning away from mainstream structures..." (Ife, 1995,
p. 99.) According to Norberg-Hodge, "Around the world, people are building communities that attempt to get away
from the waste, pollution, competition, and violence of contemporary life. (Norberg-Hodge, 1996, p. 405.) The
agency she has founded, the International Society for Ecology and Culture, works in Ladakh to reinforce local economies and its video Local
Futures, is an inspiring illustration of what is being done in many parts of the world. The New Economic Foundation in London works to
promote local economic development, with a special interest in bujilding local quality of life indicators and in establishing local currencies.
Schroyer"s book Towards a World That Works (1997) documents many alternative community initiatives. "Everywhere people are waking
up to the realities of their situation in a globalising economy and are beginning to recognise that their
economies resources and socio-political participations must be regrounded in their local and regional
communities." (p. 225) "Everywhere social and economic structures are re-emerging in the midst of the market system that are spontaneously
generated social protections to normatively re-embed the market..." "It is no exaggeration to say that local communities everywhere are on the
front lines of what might well be characterised as World War III." (p. 229.) "It is a contest between the competing goals of economic growth to
maximise profits for absentee owners vs creating healthy communities that are good places for people to live." (p. 230.) "In Britain, over 1.5
million people now take regular part in a rainbow economy of community economic initiatives." (New Internationalist, 1996, p. 27.) Friberg and
Hettne (1985) argue that two main groups are behind the emergence of self reliant communities, viz., those holding "post materialist" values,
and those who have been marginalised, such as the unemployed and the Third World poor. In Living Lightly Schwarz and Schwarz discuss
the many alternative settlements they visited on a recent world tour. They say that these people "...hope that the tiny islands of better living
which they inhabit will provide examples which will eventually supplant the norms of unfettered capitalism which rule us today. Their hope is
not in revolution but in persuasion by example." ( p. 2.) "What is new is that small groups of Living Lightly people are now part of an articulate
and increasingly purposeful global culture which promotes values that run counter to those of the mainstream." (p. 2.) "They think the
empire will eventually disintegrate...In anticipation of that collapse islands of refuge must be prepared."
(p. 3.) Living Lightly people "...can only hope to prevail through their own example and the gradual erosion of
the dominant system through local initiatives that exchange high living standards for a high quality of
life." (p. 165.) Living Lightly people "...are in revolt against the emerging global economy and want to set up
viable local alternatives." (p. 150.)

2NC War

Global war will kill everyone in 2025 without dedev
Chase-Dunn and Podobnik 99 (Christopher Chase-Dunn, Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems, University
of California-Riverside, and Bruce Podobnik, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College,
1999, in The Future of Global Conflict, ed. Bornschier and Chase-Dunn, p. 43)
While the onset of a period of hegemonic rivalry is in itself disturbing, the picture becomes even grimmer when the influence of long-terni
economic cycles is taken into account. As an extensive body of research documents (see especially Van Duijn, 1983), the
50 to 60 year business cycle known as the Kondratieff wave (K-wave) has been in synchronous
operation on an international scale for at least the last two centuries. Utilizing data gathering by Levy (1983) on
war severity, Goldstein (1988) demonstrates that there is a corresponding 50 to 60 year cycle in the number of
battle deaths per year for the period 1495-1975. Beyond merely showing that the K-wave and the war cycle are linked in
a systematic fashion, Goldsteins research suggests that severe core wars are much more likely to occur late in the
upswing phase of the K-wave. This finding is interpreted as showing that, while states always
desire to go to war, they can afford to do so only when economic growth is providing them with
sufficient resources. Modelski and Thompson (1996) present a more complex interpretation of the systemic relationship between
economic and war cycles, but it closely resembles Goldsteins hypothesis. In their analysis, a first economic upswing generates the
economic resources required by an ascending core state to make a bid for hegemony; a second period of economic growth follows a period
of global war and the establishment of a new period of hegemony. Here, again, specific economic upswings are associated with an
increased likelihood of the outbreak of core war. It is widely accepted that the current K-wave, which entered a
downturn around 1967-73, is probably now in the process of beginning a new upturn which will
reach its apex around 2025. It is also widely accepted that by this period US hegemony, already
unravelling, will have been definitively eroded. This convergence of a plateauing economic cycle
with a period of political multicentricity within the core should, if history truly does repeat itself,
result in the outbreak of full-scale warfare between the declining hegemon and the ascending core
powers. Although both Goldstein (1991) and Modelski and Thompson (1996) assert that such a global war can (somehow) be avoided,
other theorists consider that the possibility of such a core war is sufficiently high that serious steps should
be taken to ensure that such collective suicide does not occur (Chase-Dunn and OReilly, 1989; Goldfrank, 1987).

Growth cycles make severe wars inevitable
Modelski and Thompson 96 (George Modelski, professor of political science, University of Washington; and William R.
Thompson, professor of political science; director, Center for the Study of International Relations; Indiana University, 1996, Leading Sectors and
World Powers, pp. 20-22)
Goldstein (1985, 1987, 1988, 1991a) has probably contributed more than anyone else to reviving the question of how wars and prosperity
are linked. His 1988 analysis went some way in summarizing many of the arguments concerning economic long waves and war. His 1991
analysis is one of the more sophisticated empirical studies to emerge after nearly a century of controversy (spatiotemporal boundaries:
world system from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries).3 The basic perspective that emerges from his analyses, outlined in
figure 2.2, sees economic upswings increasing the probability of severe wars. Severe wars usher in a
phase of stagnation from which the world economy eventually recovers leading to another
resurgence of robust economic growth. Goldsteins analysis suggests that this process has gone on since at
least 1495. Economic upswings create economic surpluses and full war chests. The ability to wage
war makes severe wars more likely. Severe wars, in turn, consume the surpluses and war chests and
put an end to the growth upswing. Decades are required to rebuild. While there may be some gains registered
in terms of resource mobilization for combat purposes, these gains are offset by the losses brought about by wartime distortions and
destruction. Goldstein is careful to distinguish between production and prices. Prices, in his view, are functions of war. Other things being
equal, the severity of the war greatly effects the rate of war-induced inflationin other words, the greater the severity, then the higher the
rate of inflation. When prices rise, real wages decline. Yet he also notes that production (production waves are said to precede war/price
waves by some ten to fifteen years) is already stagnating toward the end of the upswing. This phenomenon is explained in terms of
demand increases outstripping supply. As a result, inflation occurs. The lack of clarity on this issue may be traceable to the lack of
specification among innovation, investment, and production. Cycles in innovation and investment are viewed as reinforcing the production
long wave. Increases in innovation facilitate economic growth but growth discourages further innovation. Investment increases on the
upswing but, eventually, over investment results. Investors retrench and growth slows down as a consequence. What is not exactly
specified is whether innovation, investment, war, or some combination of the three processes is responsible for ending the upswing.
Goldstein also raises the question of how these economic/war cycles impact the distribution of capabilities among the major powers.
War severity increases capability concentration. Relative capabilities then begin a process of
diffusion as they move toward equality among the major powers. Another bout of severe war
ensues and the cycle repeats itself. In addition to war, differential rates of innovation and production influence relative
capability standings. Presumably, all three factors share some responsibility for generating the fluctuations in capability concentration.


2NC Water Shortages

Fast and unsustainable growth ensure water shortages and conflicts also triggers
biodiversity collapse
Speth, 8 Rhodes Scholar @ Oxford University, Chairman of Council on Environmental Quality for Executive Office, Founder of World
Recourses Institute (Think-Tank), Led the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development, Administrator of United Nations
Development Program, Dean of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Leader of the Presidents Task Force on Global Recourses
and the Environment, Holds multiple awardsNational Wildlife Federations Recourse Defense Award and Lifetime Achievement Award of
Environmental Law Institute, and Blue Planet Prize *James, The Bridge at the Edge of the World)
It has been said that there are alternative sources of energy, but there are no alternatives to water. There are several
dimensions to what has correctly been called the world water crisis.40 First, there is the crisis of natural
watercourses and their attendant wetlands. No natural areas have been as degraded by human
activi ties as freshwater systems. Natural water courses and the vibrant life associated with them have been
extensively affected by dams, dikes, diversions, stream channelization, wetland filling and other
modifica tions, and, ofcourse, pollution. Six percent of the world's major river basins have been severely or moderately fragmented by
dams or other construction. Since 1950 the number of large dams has increased from 5,700 worldwide to more than 41,000. Much of this
activity is done to secure access to the water, but power production, flood control, navigation, and land reclamation
have also been important factors. As freshwater is diverted from natural sources, ecosystems dependent on that water suffer,
including aquatic systems, wetlands, and forests. About half the world's wetlands have been lost, and more than a
fifth of known freshwater species have already been driven to extinction.41 The second crisis is the crisis of
freshwater supply. Human demand for water climbed sixfold in the twentieth century, and the trend
continues today. Humanity now withdraws slightly over half of accessible freshwater, and water
withdrawals could climb to 70 percent by 2025.42 Meeting the world's demands for freshwater is proving
problematic. About 40 percent of the world's people already live in countries that are classified as "water stressed," meaning that already 20
to 40 percent of liate pressures the available freshwater is being used by human societies. Projections indicate that the
percentage of people living in water-stressed countries could rise to 65 percent by 2025.43 A large
portion of freshwater withdrawals, about 70 percent, goes to agriculture. Since 1960, acreage under irrigation has
more than doubled. A special problem is occurring in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia where tens of millions of tube wells are depleting
"fossil" ground waters. The New Scientist reports that "hundreds of millions of Indians may see their land turned to desert.,,44 Overall,
according to a study by top water specialists from around the world, world demand for water could
double by 2050.45 "At the worst," the New York Times reported, "a deepening water crisis would fuel violent
conflicts, dry up rivers and increase groundwater pollution.... It would also force the rural poor to clear ever-more grasslands and forests to
grow food and leave many more people hungry."46 Last, there is the crisis of pollution. Pollutants of all types are discharged
into the world's waters in enormous quantities, reducing the capacities of bodies of water to support
life in the water and to support human communities. Contamination denies a large portion of the world's population access
to clean water supplies. About a billion people, a fifth of the world's population, lack clean drinking water; 40
percent lack sanitary services. The World Health Organization calculates that each year about 1.6 million children die from diseases caused by
unsafe drinking water and lack of water for sanitation and hygiene.47 Water supply issues will become increasingly prevalent in the
United States. Freshwater withdrawals per capita from surface and ground waters in the United States are twice that of the OECD
(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) as a whole. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that if current
American water use remains constant at a hundred gallons per person per day, thirtysix states will face
water shortages by 2013. As a result, humanity's "first need" will soon be privatized. Investors are moving into a water related market
that is estimated to be worth at least $15 billion in the United States by 20IO. "Water is a growth driver for as long and as far as the eye can
see," a Goldman Sachs water analyst told the New York Times in 2006. 48

Water shortages will trigger nuclear war and extinction.
NASCA 06 *Water shortages only a matter of time, National Association for Scientific and Cultural Appreciation,
http://www.nasca.org.uk/Strange_relics_/water/water.html]
Water is one of the prime essentials for life as we know it. The plain fact is - no water, no life! This becomes
all the more worrying when we realise that the worlds supply of drinkable water will soon diminish quite
rapidly. In fact a recent report commissioned by the United Nations has emphasised that by the year 2025 at least 66%
of the worlds population will be without an adequate water supply. As a disaster in the making water shortage
ranks in the top category. Without water we are finished, and it is thus imperative that we protect the
mechanism through which we derive our supply of this life giving fluid. Unfortunately the exact opposite is the
case. We are doing incalculable damage to the planets capacity to generate water and this will have far ranging consequences for the not
too distant future. The United Nations has warned that burning of fossil fuels is the prime cause of water shortage. While there may be
other reasons such as increased solar activity it is clear that this is a situation over which we can exert a great deal of control. If not then
the future will be very bleak indeed! Already the warning signs are there. The last year has seen devastating heatwaves in many parts of
the world including the USA where the state of Texas experienced its worst drought on record. Elsewhere in the United States forest fires
raged out of control, while other regions of the globe experienced drought conditions that were even more severe. Parts of Iran,
Afgahnistan, China and other neighbouring countries experienced their worst droughts on record. These conditions also extended
throughout many parts of Africa and it is clear that if circumstances remain unchanged we are facing a disaster of epic proportions.
Moreover it will be one for which there is no easy answer. The spectre of a world water shortage evokes a truly
frightening scenario. In fact the United Nations warns that disputes over water will become the prime source
of conflict in the not too distant future. Where these shortages become ever more acute it could
forseeably lead to the brink of nuclear conflict. On a lesser scale water, and the price of it, will acquire an importance
somewhat like the current value placed on oil. The difference of course is that while oil is not vital for life, water most certainly is! It
seems clear then that in future years countries rich in water will enjoy an importance that perhaps they
do not have today. In these circumstances power shifts are inevitable, and this will undoubtedly
create its own strife and tension. In the long term the implications do not look encouraging. It is a two edged sword. First the
shortage of water, and then the increased stresses this will impose upon an already stressed world of politics. It means that answers
need to be found immediately. Answers that will both ameliorate the damage to the environment, and also find
new sources of water for future consumption. If not, and the problem is left unresolved there will
eventually come the day when we shall find ourselves with a nightmare situation for which there
will be no obvious answer.



2NC Inequality

Growth makes poverty, ecological destruction, and conflict inevitable-- transitioning
away from accelerated consumption is a necessary moral action.
Trainer 10- Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales. (Ted, "THE LIMITS TO GROWTH
PERSPECTIVE: A SUMMARY" 10/20/10, http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/Limits.Shrt.html)//AP
Our way of life is grossly unsustainable. Our levels of production and consumption are far too high. We
can only achieve them because we few in rich countries are grabbing most of the resources produced and
therefore depriving most of the world's people of a fair share, and because we are depleting stocks faster than they can
regenerate. Because we consume so much we are rapidly using up resources and causing huge ecological
damage. It would be impossible for all the world's people to rise to our rich world per capita levels of consumption. Most people have
no idea how far we are beyond sustainable levels. Although present levels of production, consumption, resource use and
environmental impact are unsustainable we are obsessed with economic growth, i.e., with increasing production and consumption, as much as
possible and without limit! Most of the major global problems we face, especially environment, Third World
poverty, conflict and social breakdown are primarily due to this limits problem; i.e., to over-consumption. (This
does not mean over-population is not a serious problem.) Following are some of the main facts and arguments that support the limits to
growth position. Rich countries, with about one-fifth of the world's people, are consuming about three
quarters of the world's resource production. Our per capita consumption is about 15-20 times that of the poorest half of the
world's people. World population will probably stabilise around 9 billion, somewhere after 2060. If all
those people were to have present Australian per capita resource consumption, then rates of production of
resources would have to be 5 to 10 times as great as they are now. If we tried to rise to those levels of resource output
we would completely exhaust all probably recoverable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, tar sand oil, shale oil and uranium (assuming the
present "burner" reactors) well before 2050. We would also have exhausted potentially recoverable resources for one third of the mineral
items by then. Petroleum is especially limited. World oil supply will probably peak between 2005 and 2010. If all 9 billion people were
to use timber at the rich world per capita rate we would need 3.5 times the world's present forest area. If all 9 billion were to have a US
diet, which takes about .5 ha of land to produce, we would need 4.5 billion ha of food producing land. But there is only 1.4 billion ha of cropland
in use today and this is likely to decrease. Recent "Footprint" analysis estimates that it takes about 8 ha of productive land to provide water,
energy settlement area and food for one person living in an Australian world city. So if 9 billion people were to live as we do in
rich world cities we would need about 72 billion ha of productive land. But that is 10 times all the
productive land on the planet. (Note that a number of other factors could be added to the footprint calculation, such as the land
needed to absorb pollution.) Even though only one-fifth of the worlds people are resource-affluent, we are using resources at rate that would
take 1.4 planet earths to provide sustainably, (because we are consuming stocks such as forests faster than they can reproduce.) The
biological diversity and resilience of the planet is deteriorating alarmingly. There are serious problems
of water, food scarcity , forest and soil loss, decline of fish stocks, loss or coral reefs and tropical forests
and mangroves and grasslands. We are heading into an era of massive species extinction. The cause of these
problems is the fact that humans are taking so much from nature and dumping so many wastes back into nature. It will probably soon be
generally accepted that we must totally eliminate all CO2 emissions to the atmosphere by 2050. (Hansen, 2008, Meinshausen et al,
2009.) There is a strong case that it will not be possible to do this while maintaining consumer-capitalist society. Firstly it will not be possible to
burn coal and sequester the resulting CO2 because only 80-90% of it can be captured for storage, and because the 50% of emissions from non-
stationary sources cannot be captured. Secondly there is a strong case that it will not be possible to substitute alternative energy sources for
carbon emitting fuels on the scale required. (Trainer, 2008.) These are some of the main limits to growth arguments which lead to the
conclusion that there is no possibility of all people rising to the living standards we take for granted today in rich countries. We can only live like
this because we are taking and using up most of the worlds scarce resources, preventing most of the world's people from having anything like a
fair share, and depleting the planets ecological capital. Therefore we cannot morally endorse our affluent way of life.
We must accept the need to move to far simpler and less resource-expensive ways.

Rapid Economic growth promotes totalitarian regimes
Gassebner 07
(Martin, et al., Princeton university, Extreme Bounds of Democracy,
http://www.princeton.edu/~pcglobal/conferences/globdem/papers/Gassebner-Lamla-Vreeland.pdf)
In an early large-n study of democracy, Almond and Verba (1963) propose a cultural explanation of democracy. Using survey-based
research in five countries, they argue that a participant culture (as opposed to a subject or parochial culture) is
required for democracy. The civic culture argument is tested cross-nationally in the work, of Inglehart (1988), who finds that
democracy is correlated with the percentage of people reporting high levels interpersonal trust, low
levels of support for revolutionary change, and high levels of life satisfaction. His findings are of course, disputed
by Seligson (2002), who shows that the correlation disappears when one controls for level of economic
development. Przeworski et al. (2000) test a full range of other cultural variables, finding that none has a robust relationship with
democracy once one accounts for level of economic development. Economic explanations of democracy date back to Lipset (1959) who is
often cited as the first modernization theorist. Modernization Theory argues that as countries develop economically, social structures
become too complex for authoritarian regimes to manage technological change endows owners of capital with some autonomy and private
information, complex labor processes require active cooperation rather than coercion, and civil society emerges. At some point in this process,
dictatorship collapses and democracy emerges as the alternative. Huntington (1968) adds that sustainable democracy requires political
development along with economic development, but basically agrees that as a dictatorship experiences economic development
democratization becomes more likely. Without political development, however, rapid economic development can
also destabilize democracies. Thus he proposes a bell-shaped pattern of stability of regimes with respect to economic
development. In their expansive large-n study of democracy and development, Przeworski et al. (2000) thoroughly explore the relationship.
They begin with the observation that the correlation between level of economic development and democracy is strong. They question,
however, the process by which this correlation is driven. They suggest, in contrast to modernization theorists, that this
correlation is possible even if the emergence of democracy is completely random with respect to
economic development. The correlation may be driven instead by a relationship between economic
development and the survival of democracy. This is in fact what their book argues. The emergence of democracy
has no relationship with level of economic development; the correlation instead is entirely driven by the survival of
democracy. In other work, Przeworski (2005: 253) argues that Democracy prevails in developed societies because too much is at stake in
turning against it. Conversely, in poor democracies, the value of becoming a dictator is greater and the
accumulated cost of destroying capital stock is lower (Przeworski and Limongi, 1997: 166 fn. 1). It should be noted,
however, that while Przeworski et al. (2000) show that transitions to democracy are not well predicted by economic development and survival
of democracy is, the estimated effect of economic development on the transition to democracy is statistically significant in their
specification.1 We suspect (and show below) that it is not a robust relationship. Since the Przeworski et al. (2000) study, many large-n studies
of democracy have been pursued too many to adequately review here. We are in the process of collecting data from all available studies
and we describe them briefly in the appendix. (Suggestions of data from studies we still need to collect would be greatly appreciated.) Given
the interests of the particular audience for this conference, we continue by highlighting some specific studies. The Przeworski et al. (2000)
study ignores the oil rich countries of the Middle East. As these scholars were originally interested in estimating the effect of regime on
economic growth, they chose not to include oil rich countries, whose process of augmenting GDP per capita is much different from that of
other countries. Nevertheless, these countries present a real challenge to the modernization theory argument that should be considered. The
argument of Boix (2003) provides a compelling answer.2 He argues that level of economic development, income distribution, and
importantly asset specificity together impact the probability of the emergence of democracy. Where asset specificity is high
and the income distribution is highly skewed, such as in many oil-rich countries, the rich face severe
redistributional consequences for allowing popular sovereignty, and they have no credible threat to
flee the country taking their productive capacity with them. Thus, it is in their interest to pay high costs
of repressing democracy, maintaining dictatorial rule. If assets are not highly specific, however, the rich have a credible
exit threat. If the rich flee the country, taking the productive capacity along with them, they can severely harm the national economy. The
credible threat restrains the redistributional demands of the poor and may make democracy possible even in countries with relatively low
levels of economic development, such as India. Asset specificity aside, if redistributional demands diminish at higher levels of economic
development, Boix argues that economic development should make democracy more likely both to emerge and to survive.

Their studies are wrong empirical evidence are coincidences and modern growth
forces the poor to work more without gaining more money means growth doesnt
solve poverty
Irwin 6/4 (Neil, senior economics correspondent for The New York Times, 6/4/14, New York Times, Growth Has Been Good for Decades.
So Why Hasnt Poverty Declined?, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/upshot/growth-has-been-good-for-decades-so-why-hasnt-poverty-
declined.html?_r=0, ND)
The surest way to fight poverty is to achieve stronger economic growth. That, anyway, is a view
embedded in the thinking of a lot of politicians and economists. The federal government, Paul Ryan, the House Budget
Committee chairman, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, needs to remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth, which is
not so different from the argument put forth by John F. Kennedy (in a somewhat different context) that a rising tide lifts all boats. In
Kennedys era, that had the benefit of being true. From 1959 to 1973, the nations economy per person grew 82 percent, and that was enough
to drive the proportion of the poor population from 22 percent to 11 percent. But over the last generation in the United States, that simply
hasnt happened. Growth has been pretty good, up 147 percent per capita. But rather than decline further, the poverty rate has bounced
around in the 12 to 15 percent range higher than it was even in the early 1970s. The mystery of why and how to change that is one of
the most fundamental challenges in the nations fight against poverty. The disconnect between growth and poverty reduction is a key finding of
a sweeping new study of wages from the Economic Policy Institute. The liberal-leaning groups policy prescriptions are open to debate, but this
piece of data the researchers find is hard to dispute: From 1959 to 1973, a more robust United States economy and fewer people living below
the poverty line went hand-in-hand. That relationship broke apart in the mid-1970s. If the old relationship between growth and poverty had
held up, the E.P.I. researchers find, the poverty rate in the United States would have fallen to zero by 1986 and stayed there ever since. It used
to be that as G.D.P. per capita grew, poverty declined in lock step, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at E.P.I. and an author of the study.
There was a very tight relationship between overall growth and fewer and fewer Americans living in poverty. Starting in the 70s, that link
broke. Now, one shouldnt interpret that too literally. The 1959 to 1973 period might be an unfair benchmark. The Great Society social safety
net programs were being put in place, and they may have had a poverty-lowering effect separate from that of the overall economic trends. In
other words, it may be simply that during that time, strong growth and a falling poverty rate happened to take place simultaneously for
unrelated reasons. And there presumably is some level of poverty below which the official poverty rate will never fall, driven by people whose
problems run much deeper than economics. But the facts still cast doubt on the notion that growth alone will solve
Americas poverty problem. If you are committed to the idea that poor families need to work to earn a
living, this has been a great three decades. For households in the bottom 20 percent of earnings in the United States in 2012,
that meant less than $14,687 a year the share of income from wages, benefits and tax credits has risen from 57.5 percent of their total
income in 1979 to 69.7 percent in 2010. The percentage of their income from public benefits, including Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security
and unemployment insurance, has fallen in that time. The fact that more of poor families income is coming from
wages doesnt necessarily mean that theyre getting paid more, though. In fact, based on the E.P.I.'s analysis of
data from the Census Bureau, it appears that what income gains they are seeing are coming from working more
hours, not from higher hourly pay. Indeed, if you adjust for the higher number of hours worked, over the
1979 to 2007 period (selected to avoid the effects of the steep recession that began in 2008), hourly pay for the bottom 20
percent of households rose only 3.2 percent. Total, not per year. In other words, in nearly three decades, these lower-
income workers saw no meaningful gain in what they were paid for an hour of labor. Their overall inflation-adjusted income
rose a bit, but mainly because they put in more hours of work. The researchers at E.P.I. also looked at demographic
factors that contribute to poverty, including race, education levels and changes in family structure (such as the number of one-parent versus
two-parent households). This look at the data also shows rising inequality as the biggest factor in contributing
to the poverty rate, dwarfing those other shifts. Debates over what kind of social welfare system the United States ought to
have are always polarizing, from the creation of the Great Society in the 1960s to the Clinton welfare reforms of the 1990s to the Paul Ryan
budgets of this era. Conservatives tend to attribute the persistence of poverty, even amid economic growth, to the
perverse incentives that a welfare state creates against working. But the reality is that low-income
workers are putting in more hours on the job than they did a generation ago and the financial rewards
for doing so just havent increased. Thats the real lesson of the data: If you want to address poverty in the United
States, its not enough to say that you need to create better incentives for lower-income people to work.
You also have to devise strategies that make the benefits of a stronger economy show up in the wages of the people on the edge of poverty,
who need it most desperately.

2NC Decline =/= War

Economic decline doesnt cause extinction
Heinberg 04 journalist, teaches at the Core Faculty of New College of California, on the Board of
Advisors of the Solar Living Institute and the Post Carbon Institute (Richard, Power Down, Published by
New Society Publishers, pg. 149-150)
These are the lessons of the past. However, we should also keep in mind the ways in which present circumstances
differ from previous ones. Todays industrial society is the first global civilization in history. It is
characterized by interlocking systems of trade such that hardly a single country today is entirely self-
sufficient in food, energy, or other basic necessities. Its environmental impacts are global in extent, so that the survivors will
not be able simply to move elsewhere in order to escape. Moreover, todays industrial civilization has developed weapons capable of
extinguishing all higher life on the planet. In the worst imaginable case, the collapse of our current civilization will be absolute and permanent:
no one will survive. However, it is more likely that collapse will be survivable, at least for some. More
significantly, because industrial civilization is drawing down important resources far more quickly than
they can be replenished, its fall will almost certainly have the characteristics of a depletion-led collapse.
According to Greer, if depletion is limited by decreased drawdown of resources as a consequence of diminished production, the crisis may play
out much like a maintenance crisis. However, a society in which depletion is advancedmay not be able to escape catabolic collapse even if
such steps are taken. Cultural and political factors may also make efforts to avoid catabolic collapse difficult to accomplish, or indeed to
contemplate. A possible scenario for the collapse of our own civilization might go something like this: Energy shortages commence
in the second decade of the century, leading to economic turmoil, frequent and lengthening power
blackouts, and general chaos. Over the course of several years, food production plummets, resulting in
widespread famine, even if formerly wealthy countries. Wars including civil wars rage intermittently.
Meanwhile ecological crisis also tears at the social fabric, with water shortages, rising sea levels, and
severe storms wreaking further havoc. While previous episodic disasters could have been dealt with by disaster management
and rescue efforts, by now societies are too disorganized to mount such efforts. One after another, central governments collapse. Societies
attempt to shed complexity in stages, thus buying time. Empires devolve into nations; nations into smaller regional or tribal states. But each
lower stage while initially appearing to offer a new beginning and a platform of stability reaches its own
moment of unsustainability and further collapse ensues. Between 2020 and 2100, the global population declines steeply, perhaps to fewer than
one billion. By the start of the next century, the survivors grandchildren are entertained by stories of a great civilization of the recent pas:t in
which people flew in metal birds and got everything they wanted by pressing buttons.

Recent empirics go neg
Barnett, senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC, contributing editor/online columnist for Esquire, 8/25/9 (Thomas P.M, The New Rules: Security
Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis, Aprodex, Asset Protection Index, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-
amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)
When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with all sorts of scary
predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to
world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets
-- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly
worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security landscape. None of the
more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global
recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the
economic crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts
listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly, the Russia-Georgia conflict last August
was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most
important external trigger (followed by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long
struggle between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a most familiar
picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the
recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied
to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with
the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-Pakistan), our
involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up to and following the onset of the
economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America, the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with
pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally
pressing the Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything
beyond advising and training local forces.

A2: Transition Wars

Transition wars are unlikely and the chance of reaching sustainable society outweighs
any risk
Trainer 02 - Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of New South Wales (Ted, Debating the Significance of the Global Eco-village
Movement: A Reply to Takis Fotopoulos Democracy & Nature, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2002)
However I am not convinced the transition must inevitably involve overt conflict, let alone violence. It probably will,
but it is conceivable that as conditions deteriorate and as the existence of a more sensible way becomes
more evident, and as access to it increases as a result of Eco-village building, there will be a more or less
peaceful shift to The Simpler Way. Again I do not think this is very likely, but it is possibility to be worked for. Nothing is
foregone in heading down that path, on the understanding that in time it might become clear that overt confrontation might have to be
accepted. The longer we can grow while avoiding confrontation the less likely that we will be crushed if it does
occur. However the issue is of no practical importance at this point in time. Whatever conclusion one comes to on it our best
strategy here and now is to plunge into establishing and spreading the new ways. It will be a long time before it
will be evident whether or not we must contest those who have power now, or whether they will lose their power in
a collapse of the present resource-expensive infrastructures and of legitimacy.

First World economic collapse prevents lashout
Lewis 98 Chris H. Lewis, Professor of American Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998, in The Coming Age of Scarcity, ed
Dobkowski and Wallimann, p 56-57
It is also entirely possible that the global economy is already so fragile that developed countries cannot afford to
engage in these neocolonial wars, especially if they do not do it as a global block of developed nations through
the United Nations. The desperate struggle among competing modern empires to maintain their
resource pipelines into the underdeveloped world will only further undermine global civilization. Warring
nations attempts to cripple their enemies by denying access to their economies and resources will only
hasten the collapse of the global economy. No matter how it collapses, through economic collapse and the development
of local and regional economies or through a global military struggle by the First World to maintain its access to Third World resources, or
both modern industrial civilization will collapse because its demands for energy, natural resources,
and ecosystem services are not sustainable. The current collapse of economies and states in Africa,
Latin America, and the former Soviet Union demonstrate that this global collapse is already
occurring. The inability of the United States and the United Nations in the 1990s to solve the
economic and political problems that exacerbate conflicts in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe,
and the former Soviet Union demonstrate that the developed countries might be under such
economic and political stress that they cannot afford to use the political or military capital
necessary to force recalcitrant nations and peoples to remain within the global industrial economy.
Although many would argue that the massive death and suffering caused by these conflicts must be stopped, it could be that this death will
be less than if the First World intervened and tried to force Third World countries to remain within global civilization. Attempts to
intervene in these growing regional conflicts, on the basis of liberal internationalism and global
civilization, will backfire and cause only more suffering. In fact, these interventions will further
accelerate the collapse of global civilization.

Backlash is impossible; once dedev starts, shortages force all nations to follow
Lewis 98 Chris H. Lewis, Professor of American Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998, in The Coming Age of Scarcity,
Dobkowski and Wallimann, eds, pp. 55-56.
The successful collapse of global industrial civilization is, in part, dependent on the 80 percent not
fully integrated with the global economy breaking free from their ties to modern industrial
civilization. Faced with growing threats of economic and ecological collapse, many underdeveloped
nations and regions should declare their independence from the global economy, recognizing that
this economy is the larger cause of their poverty. After breaking free from the First Worlds
economic and political hegemony, underdeveloped countries can then use their resources and
people to feed themselves and improve their quality of life. Of course, we have been witnessing such
attempts for the past fifty years after World War II as colonial and neocolonial struggles for independence. The wars in
Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, and in the
nations of the former Soviet Union were all struggles to win independence from foreign
domination. The cold war was, in large part, a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union
over who would dominate the modern world and the so-called nonaligned nations of the Third World.
With the global instability created by the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and
the decline of American hegemony, underdeveloped countries may find that they have the
strategic opportunity to demand their independence from First World domination. They can refuse
to pay their debts, withdraw from the global industrial economy, nationalize foreign corporations
that are exploiting their wealth, and create local and regional economies to support their own
people. But Third World independence from the First World-dominated global economy will not come
without a heavy economic, political, and military price. With the withdrawal of underdeveloped
countries from the global economy within the next thirty to fifty years, the developed countries
will face continual material, ecological, and energy shortages that will force them to downscale
their economies. The First World will, ironically, be forced to follow the lead of the Third World and
create local and regional economies that are sustainable and self-sufficient. In many instances, nations
will break up, forming smaller polities tied together by ethnic, religious, or social bonds. If these
polities and nations take responsibility for helping their peoples survive the hardship and suffering imposed by the devolution of the
global industrial civilization and economy, they will be better able to reduce the real threat of mass death and
genocide that will arise from the collapse of modern industrial civilization.

A2: Heg Good

Hegemony ensures U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts and nuclear war
Layne 06 Christopher Layne (Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University) 2006
The Peace of Illusions p 169
Rather than being instruments of regional pacification, today America's alliances are transmission belts
for war that ensure that the U.S. would be embroiled in Eurasian wars. In deciding whether to go war in Eurasia, the
United States should not allow its hands to be tied in advance. For example a nongreat power war on the Korean
Peninsulaeven if nuclear weapon were not involvedwould be very costly. The dangers of being entangled in a great power
war in Eurasia, of course, are even greater, and could expose the American homeland to nuclear attack. An offshore
balancing grand strategy would extricate the United States from the danger of being entrapped in Eurasian conflicts by its
alliance commitments.

No impact from loss of heg threats exaggerated
Layne 97 (Christopher Layne, Visiting Associate Professor at Naval Postgraduate School, From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing:
Americas Future Grand Strategy, International Security, Vol. 22 Issue. 1 Summer 1997).
The security/interdependence nexus results in the exaggeration of threats to American strategic interests because it
requires the United States to defend its core interests by intervening in the peripheries. There are three reasons for this. First, as Johnson
points out, order-maintenance strategies are biased inherently toward threat exaggeration. Threats to order generate an
anxiety that has at its center the fear of the unknown. It is not just security, but the pattern of order upon which the sense of security
depends that is threatened. Second, because the strategy of preponderance requires U.S. intervention in places that
concededly have no intrinsic strategic value, U.S. policymakers are compelled to overstate the dangers to American
interests to mobilize domestic support for their policies. Third, the tendency to exaggerate threats is tightly linked to
the strategy of preponderances concern with maintaining U.S. credibility.

A2: Food Scarcity

Dedev promotes environmentally beneficial, sustainable technologies that are still
agriculturally viable
Ophlus 97 (William Ophuls, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern, 1997, Requiem For Modern Politics, p. 10)
Technological intervention in nature does indeed foster entropy, but does this mean that our situation is
hopeless or that we need to give up all the perceived gains of scientific advance and economic development? As
the previous paragraphs show, the answer is clearly no, provided we learn to understand and respect nature
instead of merely exploiting it. Although all human interaction with the environment necessarily involves
some disruption of natural cycles, and therefore has entropic costs, different types of technology and
different ways of life have radically different ecological consequences. Consider, for example, the
horticultural agriculture of Bali, where farmers have maintained the fertility and health of the soil
for millennia using only the natural flow of solar energy, as contrasted with the mechanical
agriculture of Iowa, where farmers mine the soil for short-term profit and require vast inputs of
polluting fossil-fuel energy to produce a crop. In other words, technologies can be more or less thermodynamically
efficient and ways of life can be more or less ecologically harmonious. Many earlier forms of technology, such as the wind and water mills
of medieval Europe, were relatively less en-tropic. Possible future forms of technologymore ethereal and based on sustainable flow
resources such as solar energypromise to provide a sufficiency of material well-being at reasonable ecological cost. But more
efficient technologies must be matched by more harmonious ways of living. At the very least, since
continual growth in human numbers and in human demand must eventually overwhelm even the
most efficient technology, the goal of economic life must be redefined as plenitude for a reasonable
number of people rather than as affluence for an ever-growing population. Thus a technological
future in reasonable harmony with the laws of ecology and thermodynamics is attainable, but it depends
on a political decision to live a different kind of life.

A2: Tech Solves (General)

Newly developed technologies will worsen the problem. Its basic science, yo.
Huesemann and Huesemann, 11 (Michael, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, M.B.A., Arizona State
University, Joyce, activist and academic, Techno-fix: why technology won't save us or the environment, New Society
Publishers, pg. 17, Tashma)
As discussed in Chapter 1, many negative environmental consequences resulting from the technological
exploitation, control and modification of nature are inherently unavoidable because human actions cannot
really "improve" nature, a complex interconnected system that is continually adapting to change
through the process of evolution. In addition, the conservation of mass principle as well as the first and second laws of
thermodynamics can be invoked to demonstrate that it is impossible to escape the negative environmental
effects of newly introduced technologies.

Tech solutions wont work need to have shift from growth
Trainer 12 (Ted, Dr. Ted Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, and a contributing
author at the Simplicity Institute. This Report is an improved version of a paper published in Energy Policy (2010), made possible by the recent
publication of better cost and output data., CAN RENEWABLE ENERGY SUSTAIN CONSUMER SOCIETIES? A NEGATIVE CASE, Simplicity Institute
Report 12e, 2012, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/CanRenewableEnergySustainConsumerSocietiesTrainer.pdf)
The total investment sum arrived at above is considerably less than that derived in Trainer [112], but the derivation is much more soundly
based mainly due to recent access to more confident estimates of output and future capital costs. The general conclusion
supported by this discussion is that the capital costs for a totally renewable global energy supply would
be far beyond affordable. This means that greenhouse and energy problems cannot be solved by action on
the supply side, i.e., by technical developments which promise to provide quantities taken for granted in
energy- intensive societies. This general limits to growth perspective is that these and the other major global problems can only be
solved by action on the demand side, i.e., by moving to ways, values, institutions and systems which greatly reduce the need for materials,
energy and ecological resources. It should be stressed that the 700 EJ/y supply target would give the worlds
expected 10 billion people by 2050 a per capita energy consumption of 70 GJ/y, which is around only
one-third of the present Australian level. Thus if renewable sources were to provide all the worlds
people in 2050 with the present Australian per capita energy consumption, the supply target would
have to be three times that taken in this exercise. This analysis is not an argument against transition to full reliance on
renewable energy sources. It is only an argument against the possibility of sustaining high energy societies on them. Trainer [113] and [114]
detail the case that the limits to growth predicament cannot be solved by technical reforms to or within
consumer-capitalist society and that there must be radical social transition to some kind of Simpler
Way. This vision includes developing mostly small and highly self-sufficient local economies, abandoning the growth economy, severely
controlling market forces, shifting from representative to participatory democracy, and accepting frugal and cooperative lifestyles. Chapter 4 of
Trainer [115] presents numerical support for the claim that footprint and energy costs in the realm of 10% of those in present rich countries
could be achieved, based on renewable energy sources. Although at this point in time the prospects for making such a transition would seem to
be highly unlikely, the need to consider it will probably become more evident as greenhouse and energy problems intensify. It is not likely to be
considered if the present dominant assumption that high energy societies can run on renewable energy remains relatively unchallenged.