2014 NDI 6WS – Fitzmier, Lundberg, Abelkop

*****Methane Hydrates Neg*****

InherencyNot Inherent – the government is already working on methane hydrate researchPollution Solutions 13 (Pollution Solutions, Published in 2013, “Burning ice could make fracking wastewater drinkable,’ http://www.pollutionsolutions-online.com/news/water-wastewater/17/breaking_news/burning_ice_could_make_fracking_wastewater_drinkable/26651/)

Research programs focused on methane hydrate detection and extraction can be found in numerous nations, including Japan, South Korea, India, China, Norway, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Canada, Russia, New Zealand, Brazil and Chile. Much of the initial research has been highly

collaborative, with the government and private companies from the United States playing a prominent role. Most of these research programs are in the exploratory, experimental and laboratory phases, with expeditions seeking samples to determine the extent of deposits so as to direct further research. Last year, however, Japan completed a successful field test in Alaska in collaboration with Norway and ConocoPhillips, successfully producing natural gas through controlled dissociation via carbon dioxide injections. In recent weeks, Japan has also begun offshore production tests in the Nankai Trough off the coast of central Honshu.

Environment Adv

1NC - Methane Extraction BadExploitation guarantees extinction – carbon emissions will be game over for the planetMcDermott 13 (Mat McDermott, “Why Japan's Methane Hydrate Exploitation Would Be Game Over for the Climate”, http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/why-japans-methane-hydrate-exploitation-is-game-over-for-climate, 3/14/13)

You know how NASA scientist James Hansen has characterized continuing to tap Alberta's tar sands as being game over for the climate, thanks to the massive amount of carbon that'd be released in burning them? Well, if that's the case, then the recent news from Japan that a team has

successfully extracted gas from methane hydrates from the seafloor isn't good. In fact, if Japan is able to commercially exploit the

reserves in six years, as is planned, then it's game over for the climate. According to the Washington Post, which cites US Geological

Survey stats, all the gas hydrates around the world contain "between 10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas." In other words, if even the low estimate is actually technically and economically

recoverable, that's over twelve times more natural gas than in all the US shale gas reserves. And, here's the really

game over part: The Post, again citing USGS estimates, says there's "more carbon trapped inside [them] than is contained in all known reserves of fossil fuels." (Another widely-cited estimate puts the total amount of carbon trapped in methane hydrates at between 500-2500 gigatons, which is less than all fossil fuels, but still significantly more than natural gas reserves.) Regardless–and this point

should be in all italics, bold, and with several exclamation points–if methane hydrates begin to get tapped en masse, our shrinking hopes of curbing climate change are gone. The discovery is being hailed in Japan as a potential huge boost for domestic energy supplies. There's an estimated 39 trillion cubic meters of gas from methane hydrates in Japanese waters—enough for 10 years of gas consumption. Remember that Japan imports about 84 percent of its energy, a figure that's higher after Fukushima and the nuclear power soul searching that has resulted. All told it is clearly a climate disaster in the making, on top of, well, you know, the catastrophic climate disaster already proceeding full steam ahead. Let's compare all these estimates to the "terrifying new math" that 350.org's Bill McKibben sketched out last summer in Rolling Stone. To keep global temperature rise below 2°C—which, it's worth remembering, is both the internationally agreed upon aspirational target for limiting temperature rise, as well as 0.5°C too high according to scientists to totally avoid dangerous climate change—McKibben says we can emit another 565 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere. And we've got 2,795 gigatons of carbon in proven fossil fuels reserves. In other words, McKibben writes, "We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We'd have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate"—as in, to not cook the planet.

Even adding another 500 gigatons of carbon to the pile, let along nearly doubling it, is simply suicide (and ecocide). It's delusional madness.

2NC – Methane Extraction BadMethane extraction guarantees we will never shift away from fossil fuelsMorningstar 14 (Cory, independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of the non-profit industrial complex, “Part III:The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction: Methane, Propaganda & the Architects of Genocide”, 6/17/14, http://netteandme.blogspot.com/2014/06/part-iiithe-real-weapons-of-mass.html)//WL

It is now beyond obvious that those who control the world’s economy are hell-bent on burning all of our planet’s remaining fossil fuels – including those that not long ago, were considered impractical to exploit. Corporate-colluded states, corporate-controlled media and

corporate-funded scientists will be red-lining the well-oiled engine of the propaganda machine as it works overtime. They will try to convince you the methane hydrates in the world’s oceans are deep enough that the inevitable increased temperature will not affect them. (Think again. Take a look at the map – the methane hydrates, even outside of the Arctic, are almost all located on shallow continental shelves.) And if that doesn’t work they will try to convince you that mysterious bacteria will rapaciously devour all methane gas. In the following paragraphs, the danger that this misinformation presents is outlined. Layered upon the

aforementioned spin, at the same time they will try to convince you that because the methane hydrates are now destabilizing and melting (because governments have done nothing for decades to halt global warming), we have no choice but to extract the methane and burn it – for the safety of humanity. If the misinformation contradicts itself, this in itself is of little to no importance – as long as the key message is allowed to weave itself into the collective subconscious. The key message being: “There is no emergency. Methane risks are non-threatening.” Corporatized states, media and scientists who have pledged allegiance to protect the current economic system will try to convince us that methane hydrates will provide society with a “clean,” “sustainable” fossil fuel.

[14] Make no mistake – they are not clean or sustainable . Nor are they renewable . [15] The burning of fossil fuels –

including natural gas/methane – creates CO2. All the spin in the world will not make this fact any less true. On 14 January 2001, Dr. Gideon Polya explains that a further phony approach that is now being implemented on a massive scale around the world is a

coal-to-gas transition on the basis that natural gas is “clean”. He states, “The reality is that gas burning seriously threatens the Planet because (a) humanity should be urgently decreasing and certainly not increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution; (b) Natural Gas (mainly methane, CH4) is not a clean energy greenhouse gas-wise; and (c) pollutants from gas leakage and gas burning pose a chemical risk to residents, agriculture and the environment.” The asserted “clean-er” status of gas as a fossil fuel is contradicted in the recent analysis by Professor Robert Howarth of Cornell University, who has concluded that ” A complete consideration of all emissions from using natural gas seems likely to make natural

gas far less attractive than oil and not significantly better than coal in terms of the consequences for global warming. ” It is grossly negligent to spend billions of tax dollars on a dangerous scheme that will lock humanity into what is essentially a promissory note for the annihilation of our children, grandchildren and all life . Polya states:

“Top climate scientists state that we must urgently reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration from the current damaging 392 parts per million (ppm) to a safe and sustainable 300 ppm for a safe and sustainable planet for all peoples and all species.” This is absolutely true. It is also true that onlyzero carbon can achieve any reduction in atmospheric CO2; only zero carbon can reduce

ocean acidification. If we do not stop burning all fossil fuels, the runaway greenhouse scenario will be upon us. The global scheme to drill methane hydrates ensures that there will be no real transition to clean, safe, renewable energy alternatives.

Extraction of hydrates causes irreversible C02 release into the atmosphereOwens 13 (Matt, Executive director at Fairfax Climate Watch - Matt studied environmental science and focuses his efforts on climate change, “Climate doomsday device being assembled”, 4/10/13, http://www.fairfaxclimatewatch.com/blog/2013/04/climate-doomsday-device-being-assembled.html)//WL

In the biting satire and anti-nuclear war movie "Dr. Strangelove," it turns out that the Soviets have built a doomsday device that will automatically explode and shower the Earth with very long-lasting radiation so powerful that it will kill all surface life - that is if the Soviet Union is attacked first. It was meant as a fail-safe to deter any attack. Unfortunately, before the Soviets publicly announce their completion of this device, a paranoid and war-mongering American Air Force general manages to instigate a nuclear war by faking orders and sending a few of his

bombers to drop nukes on the Soviet Union. One bomb makes it through and the world ends in a blaze of nuclear explosions. The tar sands and oil shale are the widely considered to be akin to such a doomsday device. James Hansen famously

said burning tar sands would be game over. But an even larger fossil reserve is out there - much larger .

I'm talking about methane hydrates. However, these have generally been presumed non-recoverable - at least before now. Earth Cooked As recently reported in the Journal Science, a Japanese firm, Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC), working about 80 km from the Japanese coast, in 1,000 meter water, drilled through 330 meters of sediment and reached a 60 meter thick layer of sand containing methane hydrates. Then, using a relatively simple method of pumping water out of that 60 meter thick formation, they lowered the pressure sufficiently to cause the icy methane hydrate to dissociate into gaseous methane and water - the methane then freely flowed through their pipe to the surface ship. JOGMEC estimates that in this one reserve alone, there exists 11 years' supply of natural gas imports (for Japan) that they can recover. They plan to continue to develop the recovery process for another 3 to 5 years before starting to extract the fossil fuel. In 2010, Japan imported about 3,500 billion cubic feet of natural gas and produced less than 200 billion cubic feet itself. Doing some basic math

shows that means this reserve is close to 40,000 billion cubic feet in size. To put that in perspective, that's close to double the current annual methane emissions directly caused by human activity. This one reserve, if there were to be some kind of accident that allowed the whole thing to release quickly, would have an impact on climate, but not one so large that it would be

immediately noticeable. So it alone isn't an instant doomsday device. What's truly alarming however, is that this simple new method of extraction could be used to exploit global methane hydrates - leading to unrelenting carbon emissions - probably until human life is exterminated, along with the rest of the life on this planet. Many climate scientists had assumed that either we would stop using fossil fuels of our own accord (sometime around now), or that we would run into physical recovery limitations sometime in the middle to end of this century - and thus be forced to stop using fossil fuels. But those fantasies are now shattered. With this new extraction method, it looks very likely that vast stores methane could be burned for energy, fueling an ever increasing global energy demand (rising at a fairly steady 2.1% per year over at least the past 30+

years). This is a doomsday discovery. CO2 levels could soar high enough to exterminate almost all global life. What's more, natural gas releases less CO2 per energy unit produced by its use - so some people think it's a better alternative to coal and

oil - but this justification would enable widespread exploitation of the methane hydrates, and there are way more methane hydrates than all other forms of fossil fuel. It's no longer reasonable to just assume humans will stop using fossil fuels by choice. We are placed in a strange position now, where some people persist in disbelief and ignorance, and this is increasingly a threat to the very existence of our own lives and life itself on this planet. Of the few scientists who have considered what emissions so high as to lead to 3,000 ppm CO2 or higher (the levels we'd be faced with) would do, there is a general consensus that it would be

as bad as it gets. The oceans would mostly die for one thing - turning into a fetid cesspool. The scientists however, can't

agree on one key point. Would the oceans boil off and turn the planet's surface into a virtual oven with temperatures so hot that all multicellular life would be sterilized? Those who oppose climate action now may soon change their mind however. Public opinion on a number of things has seen complete reversal. Drugs once were legal, then mostly made illegal, and then alcohol was added, only to be legalized again. Women were denied the right to vote. Slavery was legal. And so on. So there is hope. There is always hope. Let's hope the Climate Movement is successful and let's hope a war isn't required - and let's also hope that some of the unexpected consequences of climate change don't come about first and cause a knee-jerk response that's just as damaging as climate change itself. Although, that last worry is increasingly becoming moot. Below: video interview with David Wasdell in 2007, saying some things about climate change and the IPCC reports that are true to this day - and must be carefully considered. In brief, he highlights the delayed nature of climate change/global warming response to carbon pollution; and also explains how the bureaucratic process of making the IPCC cuts out a lot of important information, making climate change seem less threatening than it really is.

Safe extraction is a myth GVC 12 [GVConsulting, comprehensive consulting firm, “Indigenous Solidarity for Arctic Protection,” Alaska Inter-Tribal Council Statement of Indigenous Solidarity for Arctic Protection, September 14, 2012, http://gregoryvickrey.com/tag/drilling/]There was a reason why the Cancún set of “agreements” was nothing more than an agreement to do nothing. Melting permafrost and venting methane hydrates – the greatest accelerating threat to all life on Earth – are seen to those blinded by stupidity, greed and psychopathic tendencies as nothing less than the ultimate climate wealth jackpot with global warming having opened up

the Arctic. Burn baby burn. Keep raping and pillaging our Earth to burn ever more earth-locked hydrocarbons as we apparently have not suffered enough to learn. And as we continue to burn the fossil fuels, burn with

them the dreams of the children of those most vulnerable whose lives will be annihilated for short-term monetary wealth. The insanity is breathtaking. Lying hundreds of metres below the sea and deeper still below sediments,

frozen methane gas is exceedingly difficult and extremely dangerous to extract as the pressure is enormous. If Japan “succeeds,” it will have a massive impact, equivalent to the use of shale gas now being witnessed in the United States.

1NC - Methane Internal Link DefenseTheir evidence is all hype – methane lasts in the atmosphere for a very short time – even a large release would be barely noticeableArcher 12 (David, PhD, computational ocean chemist at the University of Chicago, “Much ado about methane”, 1/4/12, http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/01/much-ado-about-methane)//WL

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, but it also has an awesome power to really get people worked up, compared to other equally frightening pieces of the climate story. What methane are we talking about? The largest methane pools that people are talking about are in

sediments of the ocean, frozen into hydrate or clathrate deposits (Archer, 2007). The total amount of methane as ocean hydrates is poorly constrained but could rival the rest of the fossil fuels combined. Most of this is unattractive to extract for fuel, and mostly so deep in the sediment column that it would take thousands of years for anthropogenic warming to reach them. The Arctic is special in that the water column is colder than the global average, and so hydrate can be found as shallow as 200 meters water depth. On land, there is lots of methane in the thawing Arctic, exploding lakes and what not. This methane is probably produced by decomposition of thawing organic matter. Methane could only freeze into hydrate at depths below a few hundred meters in the soil, and then only at “lithostatic pressure” rather than “hydrostatic”, meaning that the hydrate would have to be sealed from the atmosphere by some impermeable layer. The great gas reservoirs in Siberia are thought to be in part frozen, but evidence for hydrate within the permafrost soils is pretty thin (Dallimore and Collett,1995) Russian gas well Is methane escaping due to global warming? There have been observations of bubbles emanating from the sea floor in the Arctic (Shakhova, 2010; Shakhova et al., 2005) and off Norway (Westbrook, 2009). The Norwegian bubble plume coincides with the edge of the hydrate stability zone, where a bit of warming could push the surface sediments from stable to unstable. A model of the hydrates (Reagan, 2009) produces a bubble plume similar to what’s observed, in response to the observed rate of ocean water warming over the past 30 years, but with this warming rate extrapolated further back in time over the past 100 years. The response time of their model is several centuries, so pre-loading the early warming like they did makes it difficult to even guess how much of the response they model could be attributed to human-induced climate change, even if we knew how much of the last 30 years of ocean warming in that location came from human activity. Sonar images of methane plumes, from Westbrook Lakes provide an escape path for the methane by creating “thaw bulbs” in the underlying soil, and lakes are everywhere appearing and disappearing in the Arctic as the permafrost melts. (Whether you get CO2 or a mixture of CO2 plus methane depends critically on water, so

lakes are important for that reason also.) Methane bubbles captured in freezing lake ice in Alaska So far there hasn’t been strong evidence presented for detection enhanced methane fluxes due to anthropogenic warming yet . Yet it is

certainly believable for the coming century however, which brings us to the next question: What effect would a methane release have on climate? The climate impact of releasing methane depends on whether it is released all at once, faster than its lifetime in the atmosphere (about a decade) or in an ongoing, sustained release that lasts for longer than that. chronic vs catastrophic release cartoon When methane is released chronically, over decades, the concentration in the atmosphere will rise to a new equilibrium value. It won’t keep rising indefinitely, like CO2 would, because methane degrades while CO2 essentially just accumulates . Methane degrades into CO2, in fact, so in simulations I did (Archer and Buffett, 2005) the radiative forcing from the elevated methane concentration throughout a long release was about matched by the radiative forcing from the extra CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere from the methane as a carbon source . In the figure below, the dashed lines are from a simulation of a fossil fuel CO2 release, and the solid lines are the same model but with an added methane hydrate feedback. The radiative forcing from the methane combines the CH4 itself which only persists during the time of the methane release, plus the added CO2 in the atmosphere, which persists throughout the simulation of 100,000 years. response of carbon cycle / hydrate model to fossil fuel CO2

forcing The possibility of a catastrophic release is of course what gives methane its power over the imagination (of journalists in particular it seems). A submarine landslide might release a Gigaton of carbon as methane (Archer, 2007), but the radiative effect of that would be small, about equal in magnitude (but opposite

in sign) to the radiative forcing from a volcanic eruption. Detectable perhaps but probably not the end of humankind as a species. What could happen to methane in the Arctic? The methane bubbles coming from the Siberian shelf are part of a system that takes centuries to respond to changes in temperature . The methane

from the Arctic lakes is also potentially part of a new, enhanced, chronic methane release to the atmosphere. Neither of them could release a catastrophic amount of methane (hundreds of Gtons) within a short time frame (a few years or less).

There isn’t some huge bubble of methane waiting to erupt as soon as its roof melts . And so far, the sources of

methane from high latitudes are small, relative to the big player, which is wetlands in warmer climes. It is very difficult to know whether the bubbles are a brand-new methane source caused by global warming, or a response to warming that has happened over the past 100 years, or

whether plumes like this happen all the time. In any event, it doesn’t matter very much unless they get 10 or 100 times larger, because high-latitude sources are small compared to the tropics . Methane as past killing agent?

Mass extinctions like the end-Permean and the PETM do typically leave tantalizing spikes in the carbon isotopic records preserved in limestones and organic carbon. Methane has an isotopic signature, so any methane hijinks would be recorded in the carbon isotopic record, but so would changes in the size of the living biosphere, soil carbon pools such as peat, and dissolved organic carbon in the ocean. The end-Permean extinction is particularly mysterious, and my impression is that the killing mechanism for that is still up for grabs. Methane is also one of the usual suspects for the PETM, which consisted of about 100,000 years of isotopically light carbon, which is thought to be due to release of some biologically-produced carbon source, similar to the way that fossil fuel CO2 is lightening the carbon isotopes of the atmosphere today, in concert with really warm temperatures. I personally believe that the combination of the carbon isotopes and the paleotemperatures pretty much rules out methane as the original carbon source (Pagani et al., 2006), although Gavin draws an opposite conclusion, which we may hash out in some future post. In any case, the 100,000-year duration of the warming means that

the greenhouse agent through most of the event was CO2, not methane. Could there be a methane runaway feedback?. The “runaway greenhouse effect” that planetary scientists and climatologists usually call by that name involves water vapor. A runaway greenhouse effect involving methane release (such as invoked here) is conceptually possible, but to get a spike of methane concentration in the air it would have to released more quickly than the 10-year lifetime of methane in the atmosphere. Otherwise what you’re talking about is elevated methane concentrations, reflecting the increased source, plus the radiative forcing of that accumulating CO2. It wouldn’t be a methane runaway greenhouse effect, it would be more akin to any other carbon release as CO2 to the atmosphere. This sounds like semantics, but it puts the methane system into the context of the CO2 system, where it belongs and where we can scale it. So maybe by the end of the century in some reasonable scenario, perhaps 2000 Gton C could be released by human activity under some sort of business-as-usual scenario, and another 1000 Gton C could come from soil and methane hydrate release, as a worst case. We set up a model of the methane runaway greenhouse effect scenario, in which the methane hydrate inventory in the ocean responds to changing ocean temperature on some time scale, and the temperature responds to greenhouse gas concentrations in the air with another time scale (of about a millennium) (Archer and Buffett, 2005). If the hydrates released too much carbon, say two carbons from hydrates for every one carbon from fossil fuels, on a time scale that was too fast (say 1000 years instead of 10,000 years), the system could run away in the CO2 greenhouse mode described above. It wouldn’t matter too much if the carbon reached the atmosphere as methane or if it just oxidized to CO2 in the ocean and then partially degassed into the atmosphere a few centuries later. The fact that the ice core records do not seem full of methane spikes due to high-latitude sources makes it seem like the real world is not as sensitive as we were able to set the model up to be. This is where my guess about a worst-case 1000 Gton from hydrates after 2000 Gton C from fossil fuels in the last paragraph comes from. On the other hand, the deep ocean could ultimately (after a thousand years or so) warm up by several degrees in a business-as-usual scenario, which would make it warmer than it has been in millions of years. Since it takes millions of years to grow the hydrates, they have had time to grow in response to Earth’s relative cold of the past 10 million years or so. Also, the climate forcing from CO2 release is stronger now than it was millions of years ago when CO2 levels were higher, because of the band saturation effect of CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

In short, if there was ever a good time to provoke a hydrate meltdown it would be now. But “now” in a geological sense, over thousands of years in the future, not really “now” in a human sense . The methane hydrates in the ocean, in cahoots with permafrost peats (which never get enough respect), could be a significant multiplier of the long tail of the CO2, but will probably not be a huge player in climate change in the coming century. Could methane be a point of no return? Actually, releasing CO2 is a point of no return if anything is. The only way back to a natural climate in anything like our lifetimes would be to anthropogenically extract CO2 from the atmosphere. The CO2 that has been absorbed into the oceans would degas back to the atmosphere to some extent, so we’d have to clean that up too. And if hydrates or peats contributed some extra carbon into the mix, that would also have to be part of the bargain, like paying interest on a loan. Conclusion It’s the CO2, friend.

2NC – Methane Internal Link DefenseCatastrophic methane release extremely unlikely – no impact to current trendsRuppel and Noserale 12 (Carolyn and Diane, U.S. Geological Survey Woods Hole Field Center AND USGS communications worker, “Gas Hydrates and Climate Warming—Why a Methane Catastrophe Is Unlikely”, May/June 2012, http://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2012/06/)//WL

News stories and Web postings have raised concerns that climate warming will release large volumes of methane from gas hydrates, kicking off

a chain reaction of warming and methane releases. But recent research indicates that most of the world’s gas hydrate deposits should remain stable for the next few thousand years. Of the gas hydrates likely to become unstable, few are likely to release methane that could reach the atmosphere and intensify climate warming. Gas Hydrates Primer Gas hydrates are an ice-like combination of natural gas and water that can form in deep-water ocean sediments near the continents and within or beneath continuous permafrost. Specific temperatures and pressures and an ample supply of natural gas are required for gas hydrates to form and remain stable. An estimated 99 percent of gas hydrates are in ocean sediment and the remaining 1 percent in permafrost areas (see map). Methane hydrate or “methane ice,” which is the most common type of gas hydrate, represents a highly concentrated form of methane: one cubic foot of methane hydrate traps about 164 cubic feet of methane gas. The amount of methane trapped in the Earth’s gas hydrate deposits is uncertain, but even the most conservative estimates conclude that about 1,000 times more methane is trapped in hydrates than is consumed annually worldwide to meet energy needs. The most active area of gas-hydrate research focuses on gas hydrates’ potential as an alternative source of natural gas (for example, see http://web.mit.edu/mitei/research/studies/documents/natural-gas-2011/Supplementary_Paper_SP_2_4_Hydrates.pdf [842 KB PDF]); the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Gas Hydrates Project has several programs addressing this topic (see

http://energy.usgs.gov/OilGas/UnconventionalOilGas/GasHydrates.aspx). Gas Hydrates and Climate Change Gas hydrate researchers are examining the link between climate change and the stability of methane-hydrate deposits . Warming climate could cause gas hydrates to break down (dissociate), releasing the methane that they now trap. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. For a given volume, methane causes 15 to 20 times more greenhouse-gas warming than carbon dioxide, and so the release of large volumes of methane to the atmosphere could, in theory, exacerbate climate warming and cause more gas hydrates to destabilize. Some research suggests that such large-scale, climate-driven dissociation events have occurred in the past. For example, extreme warming during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 55 million years ago may have been related to a large-scale release of methane from global methane hydrates. Some scientists have also advanced the clathrate-gun hypothesis to explain observations that may be consistent with repeated, catastrophic dissociation of gas hydrates and triggering of submarine landslides during the late Quaternary (400,000 to 10,000 years ago). Methane As a Greenhouse Gas The atmospheric concentration of methane, like that of carbon dioxide, has increased since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Methane in the atmosphere comes from many sources, including wetlands, rice cultivation, termites, cows and other ruminants, forest fires, and fossil-fuel production. Some researchers have estimated that as much as 2 percent of atmospheric methane may originate with dissociation of global gas hydrates. Currently, scientists do not have a tool to say with certainty how much, if any, atmospheric methane comes

from hydrates. Although methane is a potent greenhouse gas, it does not remain in the atmosphere for long; within about 10 years, it reacts with other compounds in the atmosphere to form carbon dioxide and water. Thus, methane that is released to the atmosphere ultimately adds to the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Climate-Driven Gas Hydrate Dissociation For the most part, warming at rates documented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the 20th century should not lead to catastrophic breakdown of methane hydrates or major leakage of methane to the ocean-atmosphere system from gas hydrates that dissociate. Although most methane hydrates would have to experience sustained warming over thousands of years before dissociation was triggered, gas hydrates in some places are dissociating now in response to short- and long-term climatic processes. The following discussion refers to the numbered type locales or sectors shown in the diagram of gas-hydrate deposits below. Sector 1, Thick

Onshore Permafrost: Gas hydrates that occur within or beneath thick terrestrial permafrost will remain largely stable even if climate warming lasts hundreds of years. Over thousands of years, warming could cause gas hydrates at the top of the stability zone, about 625 feet (190 meters) below the Earth’s surface, to begin to dissociate. Sector 2, Shallow Arctic Shelf: The shallow-water continental shelves that circle parts of the Arctic Ocean were formed when sea-level rise during the past 10,000 years inundated permafrost that was at the coastline. Subsea permafrost is thawing beneath these continental shelves, and associated methane hydrates are likely dissociating now. (For example, see related Sound Waves article "Degradation of Subsea Permafrost and Associated Gas Hydrates Offshore of Alaska in Response to Climate Change.") If methane from these gas hydrates reaches the seafloor, much of it will likely be emitted to the atmosphere. Less than 1 percent of the world’s gas hydrates probably occur in this setting, but this estimate could be revised as scientists learn more. Sector 3, Upper Edge of Stability: Gas hydrates on upper continental slopes, beneath 1,000 to 1,600 feet (300 to 500 meters) of water, lie at the shallowest water depth for which methane hydrates are stable. The upper continental slopes, which ring all of the world’s continents, could host gas hydrate in zones that are roughly 30 feet (10 meters) thick. Warming ocean waters could completely dissociate these

gas hydrates in less than 100 years. Methane emitted at these water depths will probably dissolve or be oxidized in the water column and is unlikely to reach the atmosphere. About 3.5 percent of the Earth’s gas hydrates occur in this climate-sensitive setting. Sector 4, Deepwater: Most of the Earth’s gas hydrates, about 95 percent, occur in water depths greater than 3,000 feet (1,000 meters). They are likely to remain stable even with a sustained increase in bottom temperatures over thousands of years. Most of the gas hydrates in these settings occur deep within the sediments. If the gas hydrates do dissociate, the released methane should remain trapped in the sediments, migrate upward to form new gas hydrates, or be consumed by oxidation in near-seafloor sediments. Most methane released at the seafloor would likely dissolve or be oxidized in the water column. A recent article, “Methane Hydrates and Contemporary Climate Change,” provides more detail.

1NC - Warming DefenseNo impact to climate change – IPCC models do not account for critical negative feedback models – their evidence is garbage in and garbage outBast and Taylor 14 (Joseph and James, president and CEO of The Heartland Institute, a 29-year-old national nonprofit research center located in Chicago, Illinois and has been recognized many times for his contributions to public policy research and debate AND managing editor of Environment & Climate News, a national monthly publication devoted to sound science and free-market environmentalism. He is also senior fellow for The Heartland Institute, focusing on energy and environment issues. “Global Warming: Not a Crisis”, 2014, http://heartland.org/ideas/global-warming-not-crisis)//WL

The burning of fossil fuels to generate energy produces carbon dioxide (CO2), a greenhouse gas which, everything else being equal, could lead to some warming of the global climate. Most scientists believe the Earth experienced a small rise in temperatures during the second half of the twentieth century, but they are unsure how large a role human activities may have played. The important questions from a public policy perspective are: How much of the warming is natural? How sure are we that it will continue? Would continued warming be beneficial or

harmful? The answers, in brief, are: Probably two-thirds of the warming in the 1990s was due to natural causes ; the warming trend already has stopped and forecasts of future warming are unreliable; and the benefits of a moderate warming are likely to outweigh the costs. Global warming, in other words, is not a crisis. Why Does Heartland Address Global Warming? The Heartland Institute has been studying global warming since 1994, when it produced Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism (Madison Books). Heartland is a national nonprofit research and education organization that focuses on economics, not science. So why have we become, in the words of the science journal Nature, “a major force among climate sceptics”? (Tollefson, 2011) We were made curious by the fact that every single environmental group in the U.S. says global warming is “real”

and a “crisis,” even though there was in 1994, and still is today, considerable debate going on in the scientific community. Many of the world’s most distinguished scientists believe climate processes are too poorly understood to support calls for immediate action or predictions of catastrophic global warming (Solomon, 2008). The reason for the consensus among environmentalists is simple: If AGW is true, then stopping or preventing it requires higher taxes, more income redistribution, more wilderness preservation, more regulations on corporations, “smart growth,” subsidies for renewable energy, and on and on. In other

words, many of the policies already on the liberal political agenda. Liberals have no reason to “look under the hood” of the global warming scare, to see what the real science says. They believe in global warming because they feel it justifies their ideological convictions (Hulme, 2009). Independents, conservatives, and libertarians – about 80 percent of the general population, according to surveys, but less than 20 percent of journalists and academics – don’t want to go down the road to higher taxes and more regulations unless it is necessary. They open the hood of the global warming scare and look at the real science. They study the issue and come to understand it. Based on that understanding – not ideological conviction or belief – 60 percent of them conclude global warming is not a crisis. (Rasmussen 2012) The Heartland Institute “looked under the hood” and concluded concern over the possibility of catastrophic global warming was being manufactured to advance a political agenda. We then took upon ourselves the task of publicizing the scientific uncertainty behind the global warming scare and documenting the high costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions – economic costs as well as the loss of freedom. And now you know why an economic think tank is so prominent in a scientific debate. We do not do this to raise money from oil companies or others with a stake in the issue – oil companies never contributed more than 5 percent of our annual budgets, and they give a

trivial amount today. (See Reply to Our Critics for more about efforts to smear us with false claims about our funding.) We challenge claims that climate change is a crisis because our pursuit of the truth led us to this position . Isn’t There a

Consensus? Science doesn’t advance by “consensus.” A single scientist or study can disprove a theory that is embraced by the vast majority of scientists. The search for a consensus is actually part of what philosophers call “post-normal science,” which isn’t really science at all . Still, many people ask: What do scientists believe? Most surveys cited by those who claim there is a consensus ask questions that are too vague to settle the matter. It is important to distinguish between the statement that global warming is a crisis and the similar-sounding but very different statements that the climate is changing and that there is a

human impact on climate. Climate is always changing, and every scientist knows this. Our emissions and alterations of the landscape are surely having impacts on climate, though they are often local or regional (like heat islands) and small relative to natural variation. There is plenty of evidence that there is no scientific consensus that climate change is man-made and dangerous (Bast and Spencer, 2014). The multi-volume Climate Change Reconsidered series cites thousands of articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals that challenge the basic underlying

assumptions of AGW (Climate Change Reconsidered 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2014). More than 30,000 scientists have signed a petition saying there is no threat that man-made global warming will pose a threat to humanity or

nature (Petition Project). Alarmists often cite an essay by Naomi Oreskes claiming to show that virtually all articles about global warming in peer-reviewed journals support the so-called consensus. But a no-less-rigorous study by Benny Peiser that attempted to replicate her results searched the abstracts of 1,117 scientific journal articles on “global climate change” and found only 13 (1 percent) explicitly endorse the “consensus view” while 34 reject or cast doubt on the view that human activity has been the main driver of warming over the past 50 years. A more recent search by Klaus-Martin Schulte of 928 scientific papers published from 2004 to February 2007 found fewer than half explicitly or implicitly endorse the so-called consensus and only 7 percent do so explicitly (Schulte, 2008). A survey that is frequently cited as showing consensus actually proves just the opposite. German scientists Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch have surveyed climate scientists three times, in 1996, 2003, and 2007 (Bray and von Storch, 2010). Their latest survey found most of these scientists say they believe global warming is man-made and is a serious problem, but most of these same scientists do not believe climate science is sufficiently advanced to predict future climate conditions. For two-thirds of the science questions asked, scientific opinion is deeply divided, and in half of those cases, most scientists disagree with positions that are at the foundation of the alarmist case (Bast, 2011). On August 2, 2011, von Storch posted the following comment on a blog: “From our own observations of discussions among climate scientists we also find hardly consensus [sic] on many other issues, ranging from changing hurricane statistics to the speed of melting Greenland and Antarctica, spreading of diseases and causing mass migration and wars” (von Storch, 2011). These are not minor issues. Extreme weather events, melting ice, and the spread of disease are all major talking points for Al Gore and other alarmists in the climate debate. If there is no consensus on these matters, then “skeptics” are right to

ask why we should believe global warming is a crisis. Cognitive Dissonance? How can scientists say they believe global warming is a problem, but at the same time not believe there is sufficient scientific evidence to predict future climate conditions? Either this is hollow careerism and ought to be subject to public criticism, or it is cognitive dissonance – holding two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. If the latter, it is probably caused by the complexity of the issue (we must trust the judgment of scientists working in other fields to form opinions on subjects we are not ourselves expert about) and its close association with social and economic agendas (we want to believe something is true even if our own research suggests it is not). This is not an unreasonable claim or an attack on the integrity of working scientists. It is a standard theme in many books on the history of science, dating back at least as far as Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and as recently as Mike Hulme’s 2009 tome, Why We Disagree About Climate Change. Hulme, not incidentally, is no skeptic: He contributes to the alarmist IPCC reports and works at the University of East Anglia (home of the Climategate scandal). Even he admits that his position is based on belief rather than scientific understanding and is inseparable from his partisan political beliefs. Bray and von Storch, in an essay in 1999 reporting on the results of their first survey, remarked on how a willingness to make predictions and recommendations about public policy that aren’t supported by actual science is a sign of “post-normal science,” or the willingness to rely on “consensus” rather than actual scientific knowledge when the risks are perceived as being great (Bray and von Storch, 1999). Scientists who express beliefs about global warming that they can’t support with real science are sharing opinions shaped by ideology and trust. Their beliefs should be given no more weight than the beliefs of nonscientists. Natural or Man-Made? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an agency of the United Nations, claims the warming that has occurred since the mid-twentieth century “is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas

concentrations” (IPCC, 2007). Many climate scientists disagree with the IPCC on this key issue. As Idso and Singer wrote in

2009, The IPCC does not apply generally accepted methodologies to determine what fraction of current warming is natural, or how much is caused by the rise in greenhouse gases (GHG). A comparison of “fingerprints” from best available observations with the results of state-of-the-art GHG models leads to the conclusion that the (human-caused) GHG contribution is minor. This fingerprint evidence, though available, was

ignored by the IPCC. The IPCC continues to undervalue the overwhelming evidence that, on decadal and century-long time scales, the Sun and associated atmospheric cloud effects are responsible for much of past climate change. It is therefore highly likely that the Sun is also a major cause of twentieth-century warming, with anthropogenic GHG making only a minor contribution. In addition, the IPCC ignores, or addresses imperfectly, other science issues that call for discussion and explanation (Idso and Singer, 2009). Scientists who study the issue say it is impossible to tell if the recent small warming trend is natural , a continuation of the planet’s recovery

from the more recent “Little Ice Age,” or unnatural, the result of human greenhouse gas emissions. Thousands of peer-reviewed articles point to natural sources of climate variability that could explain some or even all of the warming in the second half of the twentieth century (Idso and Singer, 2009). S. Fred Singer and Dennis Avery documented natural

climate cycles of approximately 1,500 years going back hundreds of thousands of years (Singer and Avery, second edition 2008). It is clear from climate records that the Earth was warmer than it is now in recorded human history, before man-made greenhouse gas emissions could have been the cause. We know enough about how the Earth’s climate works to

know that biological and physical processes remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a faster rate when concentration levels are higher and release more heat into space when temperatures rise . These feedback factors and radiative forcings are poorly modeled or missing from the computer models that alarmists use to

make their forecasts. The arguments are complex, but the debate over natural versus man-made climate change is unquestionably still ongoing.

The more we learn, the less likely it becomes that human greenhouse gas emissions can explain more than a small amount of the climate change we witness. How Much Warming? NASA satellite data recorded since 1979 allow us to check the accuracy of claims that the past three decades have been warming at an alarming rate. The data show a warming rate of 0.123 degrees C per decade. This is considerably less than what land-based temperature stations report during the same time period, and which are relied on by the IPCC (Christy, 2009). If the Earth’s temperature continues to rise at the rate of the past three decades, the planet would see only 1.23 degrees C warming over the course of an entire century. Most climate scientists, even “skeptics,” acknowledge that rising CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would, all other things held constant, cause some small amount of warming. Alarmists claim that small amount will trigger increases in the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, which in turn

will cause further warming. But other scientists have found no evidence of rising levels of moisture in those areas of the atmosphere where the models claim it should be found. Without this “amplification,” there is no global warming crisis (Singer, 2011). While the global climate warmed slightly during the 1980s and 1990s, it has not warmed at all since 2000 , and there is some evidence that a cooling trend has begun (Taylor, 2007).

This contradicts the predictions of the IPCC and poses a challenge to the theory that CO2 concentrations play a major role in global temperature trends. It confirms the views of many less-politicized climate scientists who

acknowledge that the global climate is always warming or cooling (Michaels, 2005; Christy, 2006). The scientific community’s lack of certainty about future climate trends is rooted in the shortcomings of computer models . These models are the centerpiece of the IPCC’‘s reports, yet it is widely recognized that they fail to account for changes in precipitation, water vapor, and clouds that are likely to occur in a warmer world. It is a case of “ garbage in, garbage out .” If we cannot predict how much warming will occur, how can we claim that continued human emissions of greenhouse gases is harmful? Global Warming Benefits as Well as Harms Alarmists claim global warming will cause massive flooding, more violent weather, famines, and other catastrophic consequences. If these claims are true, then we should have seen evidence of this trend during the twentieth century. Idso and Singer (2009) provide extensive evidence that no such trends have been observed. Even von Storch (2011) admits there is no consensus on these matters. The preponderance of scientific data suggest sea levels are unlikely to rise by more than several inches, weather may actually become more mild, and since most warming occurs at night and during the winter season, it has little adverse effect (and some positive effect) on plants and wildlife. Hurricanes are likely to diminish, not increase, in frequency or severity (Spencer, 2008; Singer and Avery, 2008). Higher levels of CO2 have a well-documented fertilizing effect on plants and make them more drought-resistant. Warmer temperatures are also likely to be accompanied by higher soil moisture levels and more frequent rain, leading to a “greening of the Earth” that is dramatically different from the “parched Earth” scenario featured in many biased and agenda-driven documentary films (Idso, 1995). The current best estimate is that, if left unaddressed, by 2060 global warming is likely to have a small (0.2 percent of GDP) positive effect on the U.S. economy and a small (1 to 2 percent of GDP) negative effect on the global economy (Mendelsohn and Neumann, 1999). These estimates are very small and speculative.

Global warming has stopped – natural factors supplant C02 effectsAkasofu 8 (Syun-Ichi, former director of the Geophysical Institute and the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, “Former director of International Arctic Research Center says: ‘Global warming has paused’”, 9/27/14, Originally published in the Fairbanks Daily News Miner, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/27/former-director-of-international-arctic-research-center-says-global-warming-has-paused/)//WL

Recent studies by the Hadley Climate Research Center (UK), the Japan Meteorological Agency, the National Oceanic and

Atmospheric Administration, the University of East Anglia (UK) and the University of Alabama Huntsville show clearly that the rising trend of global average temperature stopped in 2000 -2001. Further, NASA data shows that warming in the southern hemisphere has stopped, and that ocean temperatures also have stopped rising . The global average temperature had been rising until about 2000-2001. The International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and many scientists hypothesize rising temperatures were mostly caused by the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide (CO2), and they predicted further temperature increases after 2000. It was natural to assume that CO2 was responsible for the rise, because CO2 molecules in the atmosphere tend to reflect back the infrared radiation to the ground, preventing cooling (the greenhouse effect) and also because CO2 concentrations have been rapidly increasing

since 1946. But, this hypothesis on the cause of global warming is just one of several. Unfortunately, many scientists appear to forget that weather and climate also are controlled by nature, as we witness weather changes every day and climate changes in longer terms. During the last several years, I have suggested that it is important to identify the

natural effects and subtract them from the temperature changes. Only then can we be sure of the man-made contributions. This suggestion brought me the dubious honor of being designated “Alaska’s most famous climate change skeptic.” The stopping of the rise in global average temperature after 2000-2001 indicates that the hypothesis and prediction made by the IPCC need

serious revision. I have been suggesting during the last several years that there are at least two natural components that cause long-term climate changes. The first is the recovery (namely, warming) from the Little Ice Age, which

occurred approximately 1800-1850. The other is what we call the multi-decadal oscillation. In the recent past, this component had a positive gradient (warming) from 1910 to 1940, a negative gradient (cooling — many Fairbanksans remember the very cold winters in the 1960s) from 1940 to 1975, and then again a positive gradient (warming — many Fairbanksans have enjoyed the comfortable

winters of the last few decades or so) from 1975 to about 2000. The multi-decadal oscillation peaked around 2000, and a negative trend began at that time. The second component has a large amplitude and can overwhelm the first, and I believe that

this is the reason for the stopping of the temperature rise. Since CO2 has only a positive effect, the new trend indicates that natural changes are greater than the CO2 effect, as I have stated during the last several years. Future changes in global temperature depend on the combination of both the recovery from the Little Ice Age (positive) and the multi-decadal oscillation (both positive

and negative). We have an urgent need to learn more about these natural changes to aid us in predicting future changes.

Not anthropogenic—other factors are more important and there is a diminishing curve.Paterson 11 [Norman R., Professional Engineer and Consulting Geophysicist, PhD in Geophysics from University of Toronto, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, “Global Warming: A Critique of the Anthropogenic Model and its Consequences,” Geoscience Canada, Vol. 38, No 1, March, Ebsco]

The term ‘global warming’ is commonly used by the media to mean ‘anthropogenic’ global warming; that is, warming caused by human activity. In this article, the writer has chosen to prefix ‘global warming’, where appropriate, by the terms ‘anthropogenic or ‘humancaused’ in order to

avoid confusion. We are led today by our media, governments, schools and some scientific authorities to believe that, through his CO2 emissions, man is entirely, or almost entirely, responsible for the modest, modulated rise in global temperature of about 0.7° C that has taken place over the past 100 years. We are told, and many sincere people believe, that if we continue on this path, the planet will experience escalating temperature and dangerous sealevel rise before the end of this century. Over the past 20 years or so, this has become so much a part of our belief system, that to challenge it is to be labelled a ‘denier’

and put in the same category as a member of the Flat Earth Society. Yet, even a cursory review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature will show that the popular anthropogenic global warming dogma is being questioned by hundreds of respected scientists. Furthermore, emerging evidence points directly to other natural phenomena as probably having greater effects on global temperatures than can be attributed to human-caused CO2 emissions. The disproportionate scientific weighting attributed to the anthropogenic warming interpretation, and the general public perception of its validity, could be a serious problem for society, as the human-caused global warming belief is diverting our attention from other, more serious anthropogenic effects such as pollution and depletion of our water resources, contamination of our food and living space from chemicals, and diminishing conventional energy resources.

PROBLEMS WITH THE ANTHROPOGENIC MODEL The fact that the world has undergone cycles of warming and cooling has been known for a very long time, but the question as to man’s influence on climate did not become a hot debate until after the mid-twentieth century, when Revelle and Seuss (1957) first drew attention to the possible effect of greenhouses gases (particularly CO2 ) on the earth’s temperature.

Subsequent studies pointed to the increase in atmospheric CO2 from roughly 0.025% to 0.037%, or 50%, over the past 100 years. Much was made of the apparent but crude covariance of atmospheric CO2 and global temperature, and the conclusion was drawn that [hu]man’s escalating carbon emissions are responsible for the late 20 th century

temperature rise. Anxiety was rapidly raised among environmentalists, and also attracted many scientists who found ready funding for studies aimed at better understanding the problem. However, scientists soon encountered three important difficulties:

i) To this date, no satisfactory explanation is forthcoming as to how CO2 at less than 0.04% of atmospheric concentration can make a major contribution to the greenhouse effect, especially as the relationship between increasing CO2 and increasing temperature is a diminishing logarithmic one (Gerlich and Tscheuschner 2009);

ii) Geological records show unequivocally that past temperature increases have always preceded, not followed, increases in CO2; i.e. the warming could potentially cause the CO2 increase, but not the reverse. Studies (e.g. Petit et al. 1999) have shown that over the past 400 000 years of cyclical variations, temperature rose from glacial values about 800 years before CO2 concentration increased . A probable explanation is that solar warming, over a long period of time, causes the oceans to outgas CO2 , whereas cooling results in more CO2 entering solution, as discussed by Stott et al. (2007). Averaged over a still longer period of geological time, it has been shown (Shaviv and Veizer 2003)

that there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature; for example, levels of CO2 were more than twice present day values at 180 Ma, at a time when temperature was several degrees cooler ;

iii) Other serious mistakes in analysis were made by some scientists over the years. Perhaps the worst of these

(see Montford 2010 for a thorough discussion) was the publication of the ‘Hockey Stick Curve’ (Fig. 1), a 1000-year record of past temperature which purported to show that “The 20 th century is likely the warmest century in the Northern Hemisphere, and the 1990s was

the warmest decade, with 1998 as the warmest year in the last 1000 years” (Mann et al. 1999). This conclusion was adopted by the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2001 report and also by Al Gore in the movie An Inconvenient Truth.

Subsequently, Mann et al.’s work has been challenged by several scientists (though to be fair, it is also supported by

some). For example, McIntyre and McKitrick (2003) amended Mann’s graph, using all available data and better quality control (Fig. 1), and showed that the 20 th century is not exceptionally warm when compared with that of the 15 th century. However, the IPCC has continued to report a steady increase in global temperature in the face of clear evidence that average temperature has remained roughly level globally, positive in the northern hemisphere and negative in the southern hemisphere, since about 2002 (Archibald 2006; Fig. 2).

WHAT CAUSES WARMING? It is likely that the cyclical warming and cooling of the earth results from a number of different causes, none of which, taken alone, is dominant enough to be entirely responsible . The more important ones are solar changes (including both irradiance and magnetic field effects), atmosphere–ocean interaction

(including both multidecadal climatic oscillations and unforced internal variability), and greenhouse gases. All of these factors have been discussed by IPCC, but the first two have been dismissed as negligible in comparison with the greenhouse-gas effect and man’s contribution to it through anthropogenic CO2 . It is claimed (e.g. Revelle and Suess 1957) that the particular infrared absorption bands of CO2 provide it with a special ability to absorb and reradiate the sun’s longer wavelength radiation, causing warming of the troposphere and an increase in high-altitude (cirrus) cloud, further amplifying the heating process. Detailed arguments against this conclusion can be found in Spencer et al. (2007) and Gerlich and Tscheuschner (2009). These scientists point out (among other arguments, which include the logarithmic decrease in absorptive power of CO2 at increasing concentrations), that clouds have poor ability to emit radiation and that the transfer of heat from the atmosphere to a warmer body (the earth) defies the Second Law of Ther-modynamics. They argue that the Plank and Stefan-Boltzman equations used in calculations of radiative heat transfer cannot be applied to gases in the atmosphere because of the highly complex multi-

body nature of the problem. Veizer (2005) explains that, to play a significant role, CO2 requires an amplifier, in this case water vapour. He concludes that water vapour plays the dominant role in global warming and that solar effects are the driver, rather than CO2 . A comprehensive critique of the greenhouse gas theory is provided by Hutton (2009).

It is firmly established that the sun is the primary heat source for the global climate system, and that the atmosphere and oceans modify and redirect the sun’s heat. According to Veizer (2005), cosmic rays from outer space cause clouds to form in the troposphere; these clouds shield

the earth and provide a cooling effect. Solar radiation, on the other hand, produces a thermal energy flux which, combined with the solar magnetic field, acts as a shield against cosmic rays and thereby leads to global warming. Figures 3 and 4 illustrate both the cooling by cosmic rays (cosmic ray flux, or CRF) and warming by solar irradiation (total solar irradiance, or TSI) in the long term (500 Ma) and short term (50 years), respectively. CRF shows an excellent negative correlation with

temperature, apart from a short period around 250 Ma (Fig. 3). In contrast, the reconstructed, oxygen isotope-based temperature curve illustrates a lack of correlation with CO2 except for a period around 350 Ma.

Other studies have highlighted the overriding effect of solar radiation on global heating. Soon (2005) studied solar irradiance as a possible agent for medium-term variations in Arctic temperatures over the past 135 years, and found a close correlation in both decadal (5–10 years) and multi-decadal (40–80 years) changes (Fig. 5). As to the control on this variation, the indirect effect of solar irradiance on cloud cover undoubtedly results in modulations of the sun’s direct warming of the earth. Veizer (2005) estimated that the heat reflected by cloud cover is about 78 watts/m2 , compared to an insolation effect of 342 watts/m2 , a modulation of more than 25%. This contrasts with an IPCC estimate of 1.46 watts/m2 , or about 0.5% of TSI, for the radiative effect of anthropogenic CO2 accumulated in the modern industrial era (IPCC 2001). Veizer concludes: “A change of cloud cover of a few percent can therefore have a large impact on the

planetary energy balance.” In addition to solar insolation effects, the intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field (which deflects the charged particles that constitute cosmic rays) and associated sun-spot maxima are correlated with historic periods of global warming such as the Medieval Climate Optimum (Fig. 6), and typically occur mid-way between ice ages (Veizer 2005). Solar magnetic minima have accompanied global cooling, such as occurred during the Little Ice Age between 1350 and 1850 A.D. A proxy for sunspot activity prior to the start of telescope observations in 1610 can be reconstructed from the abundance of cosmogenic 10 Be in ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland (Miletsky et al. 2004).

Global temperature oscillations have been evident in both geologic and recent times, with periods varying from a few years (mostly solar and

lunar driven) up to 120 million years (galactic and orbital influences) (Plimer 2009). In addition, ocean– atmosphere interactions are implicated in the control of some shorter-period climatic oscillations . For example, McLean et al. (2009) have studied the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a tropical Pacific ocean–atmosphere phenomenon, and compared the index of intensity (the Southern Oscillation Index, or SOI) with global tropospheric temperature anomalies (GTTA) for the 1960–2009 period (Fig. 7). McLean et al. (2009) concluded that “Change in SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA for the 29-year long record, and 68% for the 50-year record”. They found the same or stronger correlation between SOI and mean global temperature, in which SOI accounted for as much as 81% of the variance in the tropics (Fig. 8). A delay of 5 to 7 months was deduced between the SOI maximum and the associated temperature anomaly.

Volcanic influences on temperature are also evident (Figs. 7, 8), probably caused by the injection of sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it is converted into sulphate aerosols that reflect incoming solar radiation (McLean et al. 2009). The GTTA nearly always falls in the year or two following major eruptions.

Both solar irradiation and ocean–atmosphere oscillations have therefore been demonstrated to have effects on global temperature of at least the same order of magnitude as the CO2 greenhouse gas hypothesis, and these alternative mechanisms are supported by well-documented empirical data .

Nevertheless, the CO2 hypothesis, the theoretical basis for which is being increasingly challenged, remains the popular explanation for global warming in the public domain.

THE CONTROVERSY The main factors that have led to heated scientific controversy regarding the cause of the mild late

20 th century global warming can be summarized as follows: i) A surge of media coverage and consequent public interest and anxiety, magnified by productions such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

ii) Fear and concern on the part of environmentalists, who were already aware of many other harmful aspects of industrial, commercial and

other human activities. Environmentalists, including NGOs such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, exploited the open disagreements that existed among scientists as to the scale of the warming and its impacts , disagreements that inevitably arose because climate science is complex and empirical data were in short supply until recently.

No extinction from climate change NIPCC 11 (the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, an international panel of nongovernment scientists and scholars, March 8, 2011, “Surviving the Unprecedented Climate Change of the IPCC,” online: http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/mar/8mar2011a5.html)

In a paper published in Systematics and Biodiversity, Willis et al. (2010) consider the IPCC (2007) "predicted climatic changes for the next century" -- i.e., their contentions that "global temperatures will increase by 2-4°C and possibly

beyond, sea levels will rise (~1 m ± 0.5 m), and atmospheric CO2 will increase by up to 1000 ppm" -- noting that it is "widely suggested that

the magnitude and rate of these changes will result in many plants and animals going extinct ," citing studies that suggest that "within the next century, over 35% of some biota will have gone extinct (Thomas et al., 2004; Solomon et al., 2007) and there will be extensive die-back of the tropical rainforest due to climate change (e.g. Huntingford et al., 2008)."¶ On the other hand, they indicate

that some biologists and climatologists have pointed out that "many of the predicted increases in climate have happened before, in terms of both magnitude and rate of change (e.g. Royer, 2008; Zachos et al., 2008), and yet biotic communities have remained remarkably resilient (Mayle and Power, 2008) and in some cases thrived

(Svenning and Condit, 2008)." But they report that those who mention these things are often "placed in the 'climate-change denier' category," although the purpose for pointing out these facts is simply to present "a sound scientific basis for understanding biotic responses to the magnitudes and rates of climate change predicted for the future through using the vast data resource that we can exploit in fossil records."¶ Going on to do

just that, Willis et al. focus on "intervals in time in the fossil record when atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased up to 1200 ppm, temperatures in mid- to high-latitudes increased by greater than 4°C within 60 years, and sea levels rose by up to 3 m higher than present," describing studies of past biotic responses that indicate "the scale and impact of the magnitude and rate of

such climate changes on biodiversity." And what emerges from those studies, as they describe it, "is evidence for rapid community turnover, migrations, development of novel ecosystems and thresholds from one stable ecosystem state

to another." And, most importantly in this regard, they report "there is very little evidence for broad-scale extinctions due to a warming world."¶ In concluding, the Norwegian, Swedish and UK researchers say that "based on such evidence we urge

some caution in assuming broad-scale extinctions of species will occur due solely to climate changes of the

magnitude and rate predicted for the next century," reiterating that "the fossil record indicates remarkable biotic resilience

to wide amplitude fluctuations in climate."

2NC – Warming DefenseNo anthropogenic warming and no impact – scientific consensus flows our way.Taylor 13 (James, Forbes magazine contributor on energy and environmental issues, citing a survey published by Organization Studies, a peer-reviewed academic journal “Peer-Reviewed Survey Finds Majority of Scientists Skeptical of Global Warming Crisis”, 2/13/13; < http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/02/13/peer-reviewed-survey-finds-majority-of-scientists-skeptical-of-global-warming-crisis/>)

It is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus . Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus

exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims. According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature,

and humans are the main or central cause.” The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims. The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. “In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.” Another group of scientists fit the “Fatalists” model. These scientists, comprising 17 percent of the

respondents, “diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling.” These scientists are likely to ask, “How can anyone take action if research is biased?” The next largest group of scientists, comprising 10 percent of respondents, fit the “Economic Responsibility” model. These scientists “diagnose

climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the ‘real’ cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable. Similar to the ‘nature is overwhelming’ adherents, they disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal life. They are also less likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled and that the IPCC modeling is accurate. In their prognostic framing, they point to the harm the Kyoto Protocol and all regulation will do to the economy.” The final group of scientists, comprising 5 percent of the respondents, fit the “Regulation Activists” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life.” Moreover, “They are also skeptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate.” Taken together,

these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern. The next largest group of scientists, comprising 10 percent of respondents, fit the “Economic Responsibility” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being natural or human caused. More than any other group, they underscore that the ‘real’ cause of climate change is unknown as nature is forever changing and uncontrollable. Similar to the ‘nature is overwhelming’ adherents, they disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal life. They are also less likely to believe that the scientific debate is settled and that the IPCC modeling is accurate. In their prognostic framing, they point to the harm the Kyoto Protocol and all regulation will do to the economy.” The final group of scientists, comprising 5 percent of the respondents, fit the “Regulation Activists” model. These scientists “diagnose climate change as being both human- and naturally caused, posing a moderate public risk, with only slight impact on their personal life.” Moreover, “They are also skeptical with regard to the scientific debate being settled and are the most indecisive whether IPCC modeling is accurate.” Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36

percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern. One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate

projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’ Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists.

We now have meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers all reporting that they are skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis, yet the bureaucrats of these organizations frequently suck up to the media and suck up to government grant providers by trying to tell us the opposite of what their scientist members actually believe. People who look behind the self-serving statements by global warming alarmists about an alleged “consensus” have always known that no such alarmist consensus exists among scientists. Now that we have access to hard surveys of scientists themselves, it is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the

asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus. Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern.

Global warming is absurd and has no impact – empirics and flawed methods.Deming 11 (David, geophysicist and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, “Why I deny Global Warming”, 10/19/11; <http://www.lewrockwell.com/2011/10/david-deming/why-i-deny-global-warming/>)

I’m a denier for several reasons. There is no substantive evidence that the planet has warmed significantly or that any significant warming will occur in the future. If any warming does occur, it likely will be concentrated at higher latitudes and therefore be beneficial. Climate research has largely degenerated into

pathological science, and the coverage of global warming in the media is tendentious to the point of being fraudulent. Anyone who is an honest and competent scientist must be a denier. Have you ever considered how difficult it is to take the temperature of the planet Earth? What temperature will you measure? The air? The surface of the Earth absorbs more than twice as much incident heat from the Sun than the air. But if you measure the temperature of the surface, what surface are you going to measure? The solid Earth or the oceans? There is twice as much water as land on Earth. If you decide to measure water temperature, at what depth will you take the measurements? How will the time scale on which the deep ocean mixes with the shallow affect your measurements? And how, pray tell, will you determine what the average water temperature was for the South Pacific Ocean a hundred years ago? How will you combine air, land, and sea temperature measurements? Even if you use only meteorological measurements of air temperature, how will you compensate for

changes in latitude, elevation, and land use? Determining a mean planetary temperature is not straightforward, but an extremely complicated problem. Even the best data are suspect. Anthony Watts and his colleagues have surveyed

82.5 percent of stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network. They have found — shockingly — that over 70 percent of these stations are likely to be contaminated by errors greater than 2 deg C [3.6 deg F]. Of the remaining stations, 21.5 percent have inherent errors greater than 1 deg C. The alleged degree of global warming over the past 150 years is less than 1 deg C. Yet even in a technologically advanced country like the US, the inherent error in over 90 percent of the surveyed meteorological stations is greater than the putative signal. And these errors are not random, but systematically reflect a warming bias related to urbanization. Watts has documented countless instances of air temperature sensors located next to air conditioning vents or in the middle of asphalt parking lots. A typical scenario is that a temperature sensor that was in the middle of a pasture a hundred years ago is now

surrounded by a concrete jungle. Urbanization has been a unidirectional process. It is entirely plausible — even likely — that all of the temperature rise that has been inferred from the data is an artifact that reflects the growth of urban heat islands. The “denier” is portrayed as a person who refuses to accept the plain evidence of his senses. But in fact it is the alarmist who doesn’t know what they are talking about. The temperature of the Earth and how it has varied over the past 150 years is poorly constrained. The person who thinks otherwise does so largely because they have no comprehension of the science. Most of these people have never done science or thought about the inherent difficulties and uncertainties involved. And what is “global warming” anyway? As long ago as the fifth century BC, Socrates pointed out that intelligible definitions are a necessary precursor to meaningful discussions. The definition of the term “global warming” shifts with the context of the discussion. If you deny global warming, then you have denied the existence of the greenhouse effect, a reproducible phenomenon that can be studied analytically in the laboratory. But if you oppose political action, then global warming metamorphoses into a nightmarish and speculative planetary catastrophe. Coastal cities sink beneath a rising sea, species suffer from wholesale extinctions, and green pastures are turned into deserts of choking hot sand. In fact, so-called “deniers” are not “deniers” but skeptics. Skeptics do not deny the existence of the greenhouse effect. Holding all other factors constant, the mean planetary air temperature ought to rise as the

atmosphere accumulates more anthropogenic CO2. Christopher Monckton recently reviewed the pertinent science and concluded that a

doubling of CO2 should result in a temperature increase of about 1 deg C. If this temperature increase mirrors those in the geologic past, most of it will occur at high latitudes. These areas will become more habitable for man, plants, and other animals. Biodiversity will increase. Growing seasons will lengthen. Why is this a bad thing? Any temperature increase over 1 deg C for a doubling of CO2 must come from a positive feedback from water vapor. Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere, and warm air holds more water than cold air. The theory is that an increased concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere will lead to a positive feedback that amplifies the warming from CO2 by as much as a factor of three to five. But

this is nothing more that speculation. Water vapor also leads to cloud formation. Clouds have a cooling effect. At the

current time, no one knows if the feedback from water vapor will be positive or negative. Global warming predictions cannot be tested with mathematical models. It is impossible to validate computer models of complex natural systems. The only way to corroborate such models is to compare model predictions with what will happen in a hundred years. And one such result by itself won’t be significant because of the possible compounding effects of other

variables in the climate system. The experiment will have to repeated over several one-hundred year cycles. In other words, the theory of catastrophic global warming cannot be tested or empirically corroborated in a human time frame. It is hardly conclusive to argue that models are correct because they have reproduced past temperatures. I’m sure they have. General circulation models have so many degrees of freedom that it is possible to endlessly tweak them until the desired result is obtained. Hindsight is always 20-20. This tells us exactly nothing about a model’s ability to accurately predict what will happen in the future. The entire field of climate science and its coverage in the media is tendentious to the point of being outright fraudulent. Why is it that every media report on CO2 — an invisible gas — is invariably accompanied by a photograph of a smokestack emitting particulate matter? Even the cover of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, shows a smokestack. Could it be that its difficult to get people worked up about an invisible, odorless gas that is an integral component of the photosynthetic cycle? A gas that is essential to most animal and plant life on Earth? A gas that is emitted by their own bodies through respiration? So you have to deliberately mislead people by showing pictures of smoke to them. Showing one thing when you’re talking about another is fraud. If the case for global warming alarmism is so settled, so conclusive, so irrefutable…why is it necessary to repeatedly resort to fraud? A few years ago it was widely reported that the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would cause

poison ivy to grow faster. But of course carbon dioxide causes almost all plants to grow faster. And nearly all of these plants have beneficial human uses. Carbon dioxide fertilizes hundreds or thousands of human food sources. More CO2 means trees grow faster. So carbon dioxide promotes reforestation and biodiversity. Its good for the environment. But none of this was reported. Instead, the media only reported that global

warming makes poison ivy grow faster. And this is but one example of hundreds or thousands of such misleading reports. If sea ice in the Arctic diminishes, it is cited as irrefutable proof of global warming. But if sea ice in the Antarctic increases, it is ignored. Even cold weather events are commonly invoked as evidence for global warming. People living in the future will look back and wonder how we could have been so delusional. For the past few years I have remained silent

concerning the Climategate emails. But what they revealed is what many of us already knew was going on: global warming research has largely degenerated into what is known as pathological science, a “process of wishful data interpretation.” When I testified before the US Senate in 2006, I stated that a major climate

researcher told me in 1995 that “we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” The existence and global nature of the Medieval Warm Period had been substantiated by literally hundreds of research articles published over decades. But it had to be erased from history for ideological reasons . A few years later the

infamous “hockey stick” appeared. The “hockey stick” was a revisionist attempt to rewrite the temperature history of the last thousand years. It has been discredited as being deeply flawed. In one Climategate email, a supposed climate scientist admitted to “hiding the decline.” In other words, hiding data that tended to disprove his ideological agenda. Another email described how alarmists would try to keep critical manuscripts from being published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. One of them wrote, we’ll “keep them out somehow —

even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” Gee. If the climate science that validates global warming is so unequivocal, why is it necessary to work behind the scenes to suppress dissent? You “doth protest too much.” As described in my book, Science and Technology in World History: The Ancient World and Classical Civilization, systematic science began with the invocation of naturalism by Greek philosophers and Hippocratic physicians c. 600-400 BC. But the critical attitude adopted by the Greeks was as important as naturalism. Students were not only allowed to criticize their teachers, but were encouraged to do so. From its beginnings in Greek natural philosophy, science has been an idealistic and dispassionate search for truth. As Plato explained, anyone who could point out a mistake “shall carry off the palm, not as an enemy, but as a friend.” This is one reason that scientists enjoy so much respect. The public assumes that a

scientist’s pursuit of truth is unencumbered by political agendas. But science does not come easy to men. “Science,” George Sarton reminded us, “is a joykiller.” The proper conduct of science requires a high degree of intellectual discipline and rigor. Scientists are supposed to use multiple working hypotheses and sort through these by the processes of corroboration and falsification. The most valuable evidence is that which tends to falsify or disprove a theory. A scientist, by the very definition of his activity, must be skeptical. A scientist engaged in a dispassionate search for truth elevates the critical — he does not suppress it. Knowledge begins with skepticism and ends with conceit. Finally, I’m happy to be known as a “denier” because the label of “denier” says nothing about me, but everything about the person making the charge. Scientific theories are never denied or believed, they are only corroborated or falsified. Scientific knowledge, by its very nature, is provisional and subject to revision. The provisional nature of scientific knowledge is a necessary consequence of the epistemological basis of science. Science is based on observation. We never have all the data. As our body of data grows, our theories and ideas must necessarily evolve. Anyone who thinks scientific knowledge is final and complete must necessarily endorse as a corollary the absurd proposition that the process of history has stopped. A scientific theory cannot be “denied.” Only a belief can be denied. The person who uses the word “denier” thus reveals that they hold global warming as a belief, not a scientific theory. Beliefs are the basis of revealed religion. Revelations cannot be corroborated or studied in the laboratory, so religions are based on dogmatic beliefs conservatively held. Religions tend to be closed systems of belief that reject criticism. But the sciences are open systems of knowledge that welcome criticism. I’m a scientist, and therefore I must happily confess to being a denier.

No warming – modeling fails, cooling now, no tipping point, causal-correlative mistakes, resilient Arctic AND warming strengthens the biosphere.Hayden 9 (Howard C., geophysicist and associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, “Physicist Howard Hayden’s One-Letter Disproof of Global Warming Claims”, 10/29/12; < http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/41453.html>)

It has been often said that the “science is settled” on the issue of CO2 and climate. Let me put this claim to rest with a simple one-letter proof that it is false. The letter is s, the one that changes model into models. If the science were settled, there would be precisely one model, and it would be in agreement with measurements. Alternatively, one may ask which one of the twenty-some models settled the science so that all the rest could be discarded along with the research funds that have kept those models alive.

We can take this further. Not a single climate model predicted the current cooling phase. If the science were settled,

the model (singular) would have predicted it. Let me next address the horror story that we are approaching (or have passed) a “tipping point.” Anybody who has worked with amplifiers knows about tipping points. The output “goes to the rail.” Not only that, but it stays there. That’s the official worry coming from the likes of James Hansen (of NASAGISS) and Al Gore.

But therein lies the proof that we are nowhere near a tipping point. The earth, it seems, has seen times when the CO2 concentration was up to 8,000 ppm, and that did not lead to a tipping point. If it did, we would not

be here talking about it. In fact, seen on the long scale, the CO2 concentration in the present cycle of glacials (ca. 200 ppm) and interglacials (ca. 300-400 ppm) is lower than it has been for the last 300 million years .

Global-warming alarmists tell us that the rising CO2 concentration is (A) anthropogenic and (B) leading to global warming. (A) CO2 concentration has risen and fallen in the past with no help from mankind. The present rise began in the 1700s, long before humans could have made a meaningful contribution . Alarmists have failed to ask, let alone answer, what the CO2 level would be today if we had never burned any fuels. They simply assume that it would be the “pre-industrial” value.

The solubility of CO2 in water decreases as water warms, and increases as water cools. The warming of the earth since the Little Ice Age has thus caused the oceans to emit CO2 into the atmosphere. (B) The first principle of causality is that the

cause has to come before the effect. The historical record shows that climate changes precede CO2 changes . How, then, can one conclude that CO2 is responsible for the current warming? Nobody doubts that CO2 has some greenhouse effect, and nobody

doubts that CO2 concentration is increasing. But what would we have to fear if CO2 and temperature actually increased? A warmer world is a better world. Look at weather-related death rates in winter and in summer, and the case is overwhelming that warmer is better. The higher the CO2 levels, the more vibrant is the biosphere, as numerous experiments in greenhouses have shown . But a quick trip to the museum can make that case in spades. Those

huge dinosaurs could not exist anywhere on the earth today because the land is not productive enough. CO2 is plant food, pure and simple. CO2 is not pollution by any reasonable definition. A warmer world begets more precipitation. All computer models predict a smaller temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. Necessarily, this would mean fewer and less violent storms . The melting point of ice is 0 ºC in Antarctica, just as it is

everywhere else. The highest recorded temperature at the South Pole is –14 ºC, and the lowest is –117 ºC. How, pray, will a putative few degrees of warming melt all the ice and inundate Florida, as is claimed by the warming alarmists? Consider the change in vocabulary that has occurred. The term global warming has given way to the term climate change, because the former is not supported by the data. The latter term, climate change, admits of all kinds of illogical attributions. If it warms up, that’s climate change. If it cools down, ditto. Any change whatsoever can be said by alarmists to be proof of climate change. In a way, we have been here before. Lord Kelvin “proved” that the earth could not possibly be as old as the geologists said. He “proved” it using the conservation of energy. What he didn’t know was that nuclear energy, not gravitation, provides the internal heat of the sun and the earth. Similarly, the global-warming alarmists have “proved” that CO2 causes global warming. Except when it doesn’t. To put it fairly but bluntly, the global-warming alarmists have relied on a pathetic version of science in which computer models take precedence over data, and numerical averages of computer outputs are believed to be able to predict the future climate. It would be a travesty if the EPA were to countenance such nonsense.

No impact to warming Stafford 13 (James, 2013, interviewing Anthony Watts, 25-year broadcast meteorology veteran "Climate Change without Catastrophe: Interview with Anthony Watts," http://oilprice.com/Interviews/Climate-Change-without-Catastrophe-Interview-with-Anthony-Watts.html, 3/11/2013)

Anthony Watts: The premise of the issue for proponents can be summed up very simply: You put CO2 in the atmosphere and it makes it warmer, that’s bad. The

reality is that the Earth’s climate system is far more complex than that: It isn’t just a linear relationship between CO2 and temperature, it is a dynamic ever-changing one, and climate is tremendously complex with hundreds of interactive variables and feedbacks. Predicting an outcome of a chaotic system over the long term is a very, very big task, one that we’ve really only scratched the surface of. Dr. Judith Curry of Georgia Tech describes it as a “wicked problem”. But it is being popularly portrayed as a simple black-and-white problem and few really delve much beyond the headlines and the calls for action to understand that it is really many shades of grey. Oilprice.com: As a former TV meteorologist and a developer of weather data dissemination technology, can you tell us more about how your background lends to your “pragmatic scepticism” on climate change? Anthony Watts: In TV, if I was wrong on the forecast, or the temperature reported was inaccurate, I’d hear about it immediately. Viewers would complain. That immediate feedback translates very quickly to making sure you get it right. With climate, the forecast is open-

ended, and we have to wait years for feedback, and so the skill level in forecasting often doesn’t improve very much with time. Also, I’ve had a lifetime of experience in designing and deploying weather instrumentation, and like with forecasting, if we don’t get it right, we hear about it immediately. What I learned is that the government weather service (NOAA) had it right at one time, but they’d dropped their guard, and my recent study (preliminary) shows that not only is the deployment of weather stations faulty in siting them, but that the adjustments designed to solve those issues actually make the problem worse. Oilprice.com: Is there any way to remove the “camp” element from the issue of climate change? How far do disastrous weather events—like Hurricane Sandy—go towards reshaping the climate change debate? Anthony Watts: The idea that Hurricane Sandy, a minor class 1 storm, was somehow connected to CO2 driven “climate change” is ludicrous, especially when far worse storms existed in the same area in the past when CO2 was

much lower. Hurricane Hazel in October 1954 is a case in point. In my view, the only way to null out the “camp” element is via education. Looking at the history of severe weather, there really aren’t any trends at all . Both the IPCC and The Journal Nature say this clearly, but activists persist in trying to link severe weather and CO2 driven “climate change” because since temperature increases have paused for about 15 years, it is all they have left. But even that doesn’t hold up when you study the data history: There is also some peer-reviewed analysis which goes into

some depth on this subject. This analysis concludes that "there is no evidence so far that climate change has increased the

normalized economic loss from natural disasters." Oilprice.com: Your message on climate change has been controversial among those who believe this issue is the gravest one facing us today. In what way do you think your message is misunderstood? Anthony Watts: They think and promote that I’m

categorically a “denier” in the pay of “big oil” (for the record, I’m paid nothing for this interview) in an effort to minimize my views, while

ignoring the fact that I was actually on the proponent side of warming at one time. Now, I’d describe myself as a lukewarmer. Yes, it has

gotten warmer, CO2 is partially a factor, but catastrophic predictions of the future just haven’t held up when you look at the observed data compared to the early predictions.

No warming impact---mitigation and adaptation will solve - no tipping point or “1% risk” argsMendelsohn 9 (Robert O., the Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, June 2009, “Climate Change and Economic Growth,” online: http://www.growthcommission.org/storage/cgdev/documents/gcwp060web.pdf)

The heart of the debate about climate change comes from a number of warnings from scientists and others that give the impression that human-induced climate change is an

immediate threat to society (IPCC 2007a,b; Stern 2006). Millions of people might be vulnerable to health effects (IPCC 2007b), crop production might fall in the low latitudes (IPCC 2007b), water supplies might dwindle (IPCC 2007b), precipitation might fall in arid regions (IPCC 2007b), extreme events will grow exponentially (Stern 2006), and between 20–30 percent of species will risk extinction (IPCC 2007b). Even worse, there may be catastrophic events such as the melting of Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets causing severe sea level rise, which would inundate hundreds of millions of people (Dasgupta et al. 2009). Proponents argue there is no time to waste. Unless greenhouse gases are cut dramatically today, economic growth and well‐being may be at risk (Stern 2006).¶ These

statements are largely alarmist and misleading. Although climate change is a serious problem that deserves attention, society’s immediate behavior has an extremely low

probability of leading to catastrophic consequences. The science and economics of climate change is quite clear that emissions over the next few decades will lead to only mild consequences. The severe impacts predicted by alarmists require a century (or two in the case of Stern 2006) of no mitigation. Many of the predicted impacts assume there will be no or little

adaptation. The net economic impacts from climate change over the next 50 years will be small regardless. Most of the more severe impacts will take more than a century or

even a millennium to unfold and many of these “potential” impacts will never occur because people

will adapt. It is not at all apparent that immediate and dramatic policies need to be developed to thwart

long ‐ range climate risks . What is needed are long‐run balanced responses.

Warming does not cause extinction – their models are flawedStockwell 11 (David Stockwell 11, Researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Ph.D. in Ecosystem Dynamics from the Australian National University, developed the Genetic Algorithm for Rule-set Production system making contributions modeling of invasive species, epidemiology of human diseases, the discovery of new species, and effects on species of climate change, April 21, 2011, “Errors of Global Warming Effects Modeling,” online: http://landshape.org/enm/errors-of-global-warming-effects-modeling/)

Predictions of massive species extinctions due to AGW came into prominence with a January 2004 paper in Nature called Extinction Risk from Climate Change by Chris Thomas et al.. They made the following predictions: ¶ “we predict, on the basis of mid-range climate-warming scenarios for 2050, that 15–37% of species in our sample of regions and taxa will be ‘committed to extinction’.¶ Subsequently, three communications appeared in Nature in July 2004. Two raised technical problems, including one by the eminent ecologist Joan Roughgarden. Opinions raged from “Dangers of Crying Wolf over Risk of Extinctions” concerned with damage to conservationism by alarmism, through poorly written press releases by the scientists themselves, and Extinction risk [press] coverage is worth the inaccuracies stating “we believe the benefits of the wide release greatly outweighed the negative effects of errors in reporting”.¶ Among those believing gross scientific inaccuracies are not justified, and such attitudes diminish the standing of scientists, I was invited to a meeting of a multidisciplinary group of 19 scientists, including Dan Bodkin from UC Santa Barbara, mathematician Matt Sobel, Craig Loehle and others at the Copenhagen base of Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. This resulted in Forecasting the Effects of Global Warming on

Biodiversity published in 2007 BioScience. We were particularly concerned by the cavalier attitude to model validations in the Thomas paper, and the field in general: ¶ Of the modeling papers we have reviewed, only a few were validated. Commonly, these papers simply correlate present distribution of species with climate variables, then replot the climate for the future from a climate model and, finally, use one-to-one mapping to replot the future distribution of the species, without any validation using independent data. Although some are clear about some of their assumptions (mainly

equilibrium assumptions), readers who are not experts in modeling can easily misinterpret the results as valid and validated. For example, Hitz and Smith (2004) discuss many possible effects of global warming on the basis of a review of modeling papers, and

in this kind of analysis the unvalidated assumptions of models would most likely be ignored.¶ The paper observed that few mass extinctions have been seen over recent rapid climate changes, suggesting something must be wrong with the models to get such high rates of extinctions. They speculated that species may survive in refugia, suitable habitats below the spatial scale of the models.¶ Another example of an unvalidated assumptions that could bias results in the direction of extinctions, was described in chapter 7 of my book Niche Modeling.¶ When climate change shifts a species’ niche over a landscape (dashed to solid circle) the response of that species can be described in three ways: dispersing to the new range (migration), local extirpation (intersection), or expansion (union). Given the probability of extinction is correlated with range size, there will either be no change, an increase (intersection), or decrease (union) in extinctions depending on the dispersal type. Thomas et al. failed to consider range expansion (union), a behavior that predominates in many groups. Consequently, the methodology was inherently biased towards extinctions.¶ One of the many errors in this work was a failure to evaluate the impact of such assumptions.¶ The prevailing view now, according to Stephen Williams, coauthor of the Thomas paper and Director for the Center for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change, and author of such classics as “Climate change in Australian tropical rainforests: an impending environmental catastrophe”, may be here.¶ Many unknowns remain in projecting extinctions, and the values provided in Thomas et al. (2004) should not be taken as precise predictions. … Despite these uncertainties, Thomas et al. (2004) believe that the consistent overall conclusions across analyses establish that anthropogenic climate warming at least ranks alongside other recognized threats to global biodiversity. ¶ So how precise are the figures? Williams suggests we should just trust the beliefs of Thomas et al. — an approach referred to disparagingly in the forecasting literature as a judgmental forecast rather than a scientific forecast

(Green & Armstrong 2007). These simple models gloss over numerous problems in validating extinction models,

including the propensity of so-called extinct species quite often reappear. Usually they are small, hard to find and

no-one is really looking for them.

Past Tipping PointGuterl 9 (Fred Guterl 9, Executive Editor of Scientific American, Will Climate Go Over The Edge?, 2009 http://www.newsweek.com/id/185822)

Since the real world is so messy, climate scientists Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker turned for insight to the distinctly neater world of mathematics. Last

year, they published an analysis in the journal Science arguing that climate models were skewed in the direction of underestimating the warming effect of carbon. The report reasoned that carbon emissions have the potential to trigger many changes that amplify the warming effect—water absorbs more sunlight than ice, humidity traps more heat, and so on—but few that would

mitigate it. The odds, they figure, are about one in three that temperatures will rise by 4.5 degrees C (the top of the IPCC's range), but there's little chance at all that they'll rise by less than 2 degrees C. "We've had a hard time eliminating the possibility of very large climate changes," says Roe. The answer is still couched in probabilities, but they've shifted in a worrying direction.¶ What can be done? Can a diplomatic miracle in Copenhagen save the planet from the dreaded tipping point? Sea ice in the Antarctic was supposed

to last for 5,000 years until scientists found that the melting was proceeding at a faster pace than expected. Now it will all be gone in a mere 850 years.

Bringing it back would require something like 10,000 years of cooler temperatures. Is there any way to halt the process before it goes too far?¶ No , says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. In a recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, she found that most of the carbon we've already released into the atmosphere will hang around for another 1,000 years. Even if world leaders somehow managed to persuade everybody to stop driving cars and heating their homes—bringing carbon emissions down to zero immediately —the Earth would continue to warm for centuries. The effect of rising temperatures on rainfall patterns is also irreversible, says Solomon. Parts of the world that tend to be dry (Mexico, north Africa, southern Europe and the western parts of Australia and the United States) will continue to get drier, while wet areas (the South Pacific islands, the horn of

Africa) will keep getting wetter. "You have to think of it as being like a dial that can only turn one way," she says.

"We've cranked up the dial, and we don't get to crank it back." The point of a climate treaty, then, isn't so much to roll things back as to keep them from getting a whole lot worse—a worthy and important goal, if not a particularly inspiring one.

View any evidence from the IPCC with skepticism—no actual evidence or authors listedPaterson 11 (Norman R., Professional Engineer and Consulting Geophysicist, PhD in Geophysics from University of Toronto, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, “Global Warming: A Critique of the Anthropogenic Model and its Consequences,” Geoscience Canada, Vol 38, No 1, March, Ebsco)

iii) The IPCC was formed in 1988 by two organizations of the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, to “assess...the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of

risk of humaninduced climate change” (http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings//se ssion21/doc18.pdf). IPCC’s mandate appears to take for granted that man is responsible for at least a significant part of the current global warming. Because of its political nature, the number of subscribing countries (currently 130), and the fact that it carries out no research of its own, defining a scientifically meaningful IPCC consensus has become an almost impossible task. Nevertheless, IPCC has faithfully followed its guidelines in each of its four Assessment Reports, concluding in its fourth report (IPCC 2007) that “Most of the global average warming over the past 50 years is very likely due to anthropogenic GHG increases and it is likely that there is a discernible human-induced warming averaged over each continent (except Antarctica).” (author’s italics). Hidden behind

this bold statement are many dissenting opinions by scientists whose views do not appear in the reports. In fact, it is difficult to find in the IPCC lists of authors and reviewers, any prominent independent scientists such as those whose opinions are referred to in this article . This bias has led to serious criticism of the IPCC process . The criticism culminated recently in a study by the Inter-Academy Council (IAC), which recommended, among other changes, that “The IPCC should encourage Review Editors to exercise their authority to ensure that reviewer’s comments are adequately considered by the authors and that genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report” (Inter-Academy Council 2010). The one-sided nature of the IPCC reports, and the errors that IPCC has since acknowledged, have cast considerable doubt on the validity of the IPCC’s main conclusions. For example, and as mentioned earlier also, claims by IPCC and others that 1998 was the warmest year on record ignore the data from 1500 and earlier, and also fail to point out that 1998 was the year of strongest ocean/atmospheric effect, known as El Niño. Other errors in its climate models, such as the predicted meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers (Guardian, March 10, 2010), and the large number of grey (i.e. not peer-reviewed) literature sources that IPCC cites, have now become widely known in the public domain.

IPCC’s temperature recordings are flawed Taylor 12 (James M, managing editor of Environment & Climate News, senior fellow for The Heartland Institute focusing on environmental issue, JD from Syracuse, “Adjustment Errors Created Nearly Half of IPCC Warming,” 7-20, http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2012/07/20/adjustment-errors-created-nearly-half-ipcc-warming)

Nearly half of the claimed warming during the past century did not occur in the real world but is merely the creation of flawed data adjustments , reports a new paper presented at a meeting of the European

Geosciences Union. Removing flawed adjustments to raw temperature readings shows the Earth warmed merely 0.42 degrees during the past century, rather than the 0.7 to 0.8 degrees claimed by the United

Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Government analysts take raw data gathered from temperature stations around the world and adjust the temperature readings in several ways before releasing official

temperature reports. Skeptics have long pointed out that the majority of the analysts are far from objective referees of the raw temperature data. Most are outspoken global warming alarmists who accumulate and retain large budgets, staff, and

media attention only so long as a global warming crisis appears to exist. The European Geosciences Union paper points out the analysts routinely discard readings from temperature stations showing cooling temperatures and give unwarranted weight to readings from temperature stations showing warming temperatures. Moreover, they often adjust the data at individual temperature stations reporting cooling temperatures in a way that allows them to claim temperatures are actually rising at these stations .

1NC - No Drilling NowMomentum for Arctic Drilling is collapsing – court regulation and harsh conditionsCockerham 14 (Sean, Anchorage Daily News Reporter, “Shell won't drill offshore in Alaska Arctic this year”, 1/30/14, http://www.adn.com/2014/01/30/3298785/shell-abandons-plans-for-alaska.html)//WL

Royal Dutch Shell is abandoning hopes of drilling in the Arctic waters off Alaska this year , the latest blow to the company's effort to exploit huge potential in the petroleum-rich but sensitive region. The decision came as Shell reported a steep drop in earnings and its new CEO announced plans to restructure operations to improve the company's cash flow.

CEO Ben van Beurden cited last week's court ruling that threw offshore Arctic oil leases into question . The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with environmental and Alaska Native groups that the federal government had underestimated how much oil drilling would happen when it sold the leases in 2008. Van

Beurden told investors that the ruling raised "substantial obstacles" for Shell's plans in Alaska waters .

"This is a disappointing outcome, but the lack of a clear path forward means that I am not prepared to commit further resources for drilling in Alaska in 2014," he told the investors Thursday. "We will look to relevant agencies and the court to resolve their open legal issues as quickly as possible." Van Beurden told reporters in London that, in addition to not drilling the Arctic waters in 2014, "we are reviewing our options there." Shell and others had explored offshore in the Alaska Arctic in the 1980s and early 1990s. But before Shell's recent push there had been little activity in the last two decades and none by Shell. A series of mishaps doomed its 2012 effort. Those included the grounding of a drilling rig, reports of safety and environmental violations, and fines for breaking air pollution limits. Ken Salazar, the interior secretary at the time, said Shell "screwed up" the historic Arctic effort. The Coast Guard conducted a full marine casualty investigation into the circumstances of the grounding. But its report has not yet been released. The problems led Shell to drop plans to

drill last year, but it had interest in resuming this year if the federal government agreed to issue permits. Shell has spent almost $6 billion so far on its Arctic offshore effort, the company said Thursday. "We needed more certainty and didn't get it, making it impossible to justify the commitment of resources needed to explore safely in 2014 ," Pete Slaiby, Shell's vice president for Alaska, said in an email. It has yet to extract oil or even drill a single, complete well. While Salazar allowed Shell to start wells in both the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in 2012, the company wasn't allowed to drill into oil-rich geologic zones because its novel oil-spill containment dome failed tests. The entire drilling season was shortened because of a series of equipment problems. Environmental

groups hailed Shell's decision to suspend the effort. "Shell is finally recognizing what we've been saying all along, that offshore drilling in the Arctic is risky, costly and simply not a good bet from a business perspective ," said Jacqueline Savitz, Oceana's vice president for U.S. oceans. Erik Grafe, the Earthjustice attorney who led the lease challenge, called on the Obama administration to do a new environmental study. "The Department of the Interior now needs to take a hard look at whether the Chukchi Sea should be open for oil drilling at all, beginning with a full and public environmental impact statement process that addresses the Ninth Circuit decision and does not minimize the risks of oil drilling in this vibrant but vulnerable sea," Grafe said in a statement. Greenpeace urged other companies that are considering offshore Arctic drilling to learn from Shell's experience and "conclude that this region is too

remote, too hostile and too iconic to be worth exploring." "The decision by Shell's new CEO to suspend Arctic Ocean drilling in 2014 was both sensible and inevitable," Lois Epstein, an engineer and Arctic program director for The Wilderness

Society, said in a statement. "The Arctic Ocean has proven to be logistically challenging for drilling and mobilization, and a bottomless pit for investment." Political leaders faulted the federal government and court rulings and downplayed Shell's own difficulties. Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she was disappointed that Shell wouldn't be going ahead this year. She said it was understandable given the uncertainty due to the federal court ruling on its leases. "Companies willing to invest billions of dollars to develop our country's resources must have confidence that the federal agencies responsible for overseeing their efforts are competent and working in good faith. I'm not convinced that has been the case for Alaska," Murkowski said in a statement. Alaska Democratic Sen. Mark Begich blamed "judicial overreach" for the situation. "I'll be talking with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell today, and expect her agency to move quickly to address the court's questions and concerns and do everything possible to get this process back on track," Begich said in a

statement. Gov. Sean Parnell said Shell's decision was understandable, given the recent court ruling. "Multiple years of federal regulatory delay, litigation delay, and one year of operational issues have created barriers to Alaskans' near-term economic prospects," Parnell said in a statement. "Still, offshore energy development will play an enormous role in Alaska's economic future, and I remain committed to responsibly developing our vast offshore resource basin." The decision came as the company told investors that its fourth-quarter profits had plummeted, in part because of expensive exploration projects around the world. Van Beurden said project delays in several countries and Nigeria's worsening security situation had contributed to a changing outlook for the Dutch

oil company. He said Shell would reduce its capital spending this year by about $10 billion, increase sales of its assets and attempt to improve

its operational performance. "We are making hard choices in our worldwide portfolio to improve Shell's capital efficiency," he said. Other oil companies also have reservations about developing in the harsh Arctic environment . In April,

ConocoPhillips announced it was abandoning its plans to drill this year in its Devil's Paw prospect about 80 miles off the Alaska coast because of uncertainty over government requirements. Statoil, a Norweigian oil and gas company, announced in September 2012 that it was delaying exploration plans. Spanish oil company Repsol also holds leases offshore. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management estimates there are 27 billion barrels of "undiscovered technically recoverable" oil offshore Alaska.

2NC – No Drilling NowCourt Ruling indefinitely prevents further Arctic DrillingSmith 14 (Matt, CNN reporter, “Shell's Arctic dreams postponed another year”, 1/30/14, http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/30/us/shell-arctic/)//WL

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has canceled plans to drill in the Arctic waters off Alaska this year after a federal court ruling put the company's multibillion-dollar project on hold, the company said Thursday. It's the second year Shell has postponed its push to drill in the Chukchi Sea, where it began exploratory drilling in 2012. The effort caused

widespread concern among environmentalists and native Alaskan communities, who have taken the company and the U.S. government to court to stop it. "The lack of a clear path forward and an associated timeline makes it impossible to commit the resources needed to explore safely in 2014," Shell spokesman Curtis Smith said. A federal appeals court ruled last week that federal regulators used "an unrealistically low estimate" of the amount of oil Shell might be able to produce when calculating the project's impact on the Arctic environment. Environmental groups cheered the company's decision to sit out the year. "Arctic offshore drilling is fraught with dangers that defy rational economic development," Margaret Williams, the head of the World Wildlife Fund's Arctic programs, said in a written

statement. "Shell's decision to abandon efforts to drill in this remote and extreme environment in 2014 means that Alaskan communities and wildlife will be able to go at least another year without the added threat of spills from exploratory drilling." Shell began exploration in summer 2012. But it skipped 2013 after some high-profile

snags, including the grounding of a drill barge that was being towed back to the continental U.S. at the end of the 2012 season. Smith said the company is frustrated by the obstacles it has faced but will continue working with the Department of the Interior while it reviews its options. "Every year we are delayed from understanding the oil and gas resources under the Chukchi Sea only further delays the potential creation of tens of thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in tax revenue and much-needed new oil for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline," he said. The shrinking of Arctic sea ice, which hit record summer lows in 2012, has created new opportunities for energy exploration in the region. Climate researchers say that decrease is a symptom of a warming climate, caused largely by the combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels like oil -- a

conclusion that's politically controversial but accepted as fact by most scientists. Shell's plans also were delayed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 rig workers and unleashed an undersea gusher in the Gulf of Mexico that took three months to cap. The company says it's working at far less depth and lower pressures than those involved in that accident.

1NC - Drilling Through Hydrates InevitableDrilling through hydrates inevitable – profit motive outweighs safety considerationsNiiler 13 (Eric, Freelance Writer for Discovery Channel News, “Volatile Methane Ice Could Spark More Drilling Disasters”, 2/11/13http://news.discovery.com/earth/oil-spill-methane-hydrates.htm)//WL

Energy companies used to avoid methane hydrates no matter what. Now the industry may be drilling right into danger. THE GIST BP, Transocean and Halliburton are placing the blame for the disaster on each other. The rush to produce more oil has led companies to take more risks , including drilling in areas with methane hydrates. Methane hydrates could make the seafloor unstable, or turn into methane gas and ignite the rig. The blame-game has reached hurricane force. On Capitol Hill, executives from BP, Transocean and Halliburton are pointing fingers at each other, while in Louisiana, Coast

Guard officials are grilling lower-level managers from the same companies. But the rush to figure out went went wrong from an engineering perspective misses the bigger picture, experts say. The decision by BP and many other energy companies to drill through areas of unusual ice-like crystals -- called methane hydrates -- is a risky one fraught with huge consequences for failure. "Methane hydrates are a geological hazard, and it's been well established for decades that they are dangerous," said Richard Charter, head of the Defenders of Wildlife marine program and member of the

Department of Energy's methane hydrates advisory panel. "Until 10 or 15 years ago, the industry would avoid them no matter what." Now, Charter said, the rush to produce more oil for domestic consumption has forced companies like BP to take bigger risks by drilling in deep waters that are a breeding ground of hydrates . And they worry that a new drilling push into the Arctic Ocean -- which President Barack Obama has authorized to begin next month -- could expose a fragile and remote environment to additional risks from catastrophic oil spills. Methane hydrates only exist in cold water -- just above or below freezing -- and at the undersea pressures found in deep water off the continental shelf. "It's a lot like ice," said William Dillon, a retired marine geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Mass. "The conditions that form them exist at the seafloor and in the sediments below." This slushy mixture of sea water and methane gas makes drilling more complicated. For one, the presence of methane hydrates in sediment makes the seafloor unstable. That's why BP was using a high-tech drilling rig that was positioned like a helicopter on the surface. And if hydrates are warmed by oil moving through pipes, they can turn into methane gas (known as "kicks" to drillers) that can shoot back up the drilling pipe and ignite the rig. Investigators are already focused on that scenario as a possible cause of the blast aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20. Several marine geologists told Discovery News that the location of methane hydrate fields are well-mapped by petroleum companies and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates the industry. Researchers aboard scientific drilling ships say they avoid methane hydrate fields because of the inherent risks. In 2003, Unocal abandoned plans to drill in the deep water off Indonesia for the same reason. China has delayed plans for offshore oil development after finding large hydrate fields, but many industry officials say they can engineer proper safeguards. Arthur Johnson heads up Hydrate Energy International, a firm dedicated to exploiting the potential energy source of hydrates based in Kenner, La. He doesn't believe that they caused the blast. "Based on everything I've seen, there's no way naturally-occurring hydrates had anything to do with loss of the well," Johnson said. Methane hydrates only exist 3,000 to 5,000 feet below the seafloor, Johnson said. The BP drill went down to 18,000 feet. Robert Bea, a civil engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and oil industry consultant, disagrees. He's been interviewing workers who were aboard the rig before it blew and said the BP platform shut down several weeks before the accident because of hydrate problems. "Whether it was either methane hydrate or gas, it doesn't really make a difference," Bea said. "It has unanticipated, undesirable effects. Based on my interviews and investigation, (methane) hydrate seeped into the core." Bea and others say the industry's drilling and spill cleanup technology hasn't caught up with the economic imperative to produce more oil. In June, Shell Oil plans a series of exploratory wells in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas north of Alaska. That region is remote and lacks the kind of spill gear that is being deployed in the Gulf of Mexico. While the White House has delayed plans for oil drilling off the coasts of California and Virginia, the Alaska project is still on for now.

1NC - Spills InevitableMajor spill is inevitable in the arctic – corners will be cut and lack of Russian environmental standardsHarvey and Walker 13 (Fiona and Shaun, award-winning environment journalist for the Guardian, Moscow Correspondent for the Guardian and was previously Moscow Correspondent for The Independent. “Arctic oil spill is certain if drilling goes ahead, says top scientist”, 11/13/13, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/19/arctic-oil-drilling-russia)//WL

A serious oil spill in the Arctic is a "dead cert" if drilling goes ahead, with potentially devastating consequences for the pristine region, according to a leading marine scientist who played a key role in analysis of BP's Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The warning came as Russia filed court orders this week to have Greenpeace activists and journalists kept in prison for a further three months in prison before

their trial over a protest at Arctic oil drilling. Concerns about the potentially dire consequences of drilling for oil in the region have intensified as the Russian government and others have begun exploration under the Arctic seas. In such a cold region, any spill would be much more troublesome, because the oil would not naturally disperse as it does in warmer waters, and because of the difficulty of mounting a clean-up operation in hostile weather conditions. The "Arctic 30" – comprising 28 activists and two journalists – were arrested when Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise vessel was boarded by Russian coastguards in September and are facing lengthy jail terms if they are convicted. They have been kept in harsh conditions in freezing cold jail cells with poor food, and are

being moved 800 miles from Murmansk to St Petersburg. Simon Boxall, an oil spill expert from the University of Southampton, told the Guardian exploring the region was inherently dangerous: "It is inevitable you will get a spill – a dead cert. I would expect to see a major spill in the not too distant future. I would be astonished if you did not see a major spill from this . " The conditions in the Arctic would vastly compound the problem, he said. "It's a completely different environment. In temperate climes, oil disperses quickly. Bacteria help [to digest the oil]. In the Arctic the oil does not break down in this way – it can take decades before it breaks down. Nature will not help us." During those decades, any spilled oil would be a serious

hazard to marine life. No industry is perfect, Boxall said, but the oil industry has behaved poorly in the past. "There are lots of failsafes on planes, but accidents still happen . At times, this is an irresponsible industry . Corners are cut, money is saved in small ways . Then it can go wrong and end up costing a huge amount of money, like in the Gulf of Mexico." He added: "Different countries have different levels of health and safety. Russia does not have an enviable record on this." Even without a spill, exploring the region could disrupt the Arctic environment, warned Jonathan Bamber of the University of Bristol. "You get an increase in shipping, and ships release their ballast water which contains species from other areas. So you could get the introduction to the Arctic of entirely foreign species and we don't know the impact of that . The Arctic ocean is very enclosed, virtually

landlocked, so this could have very big consequences and affect the whole food chain." Greenpeace pointed out that the Arctic is the habitat for "a diverse range of unique wildlife", including 17 species of whale – such as the endangered narwhal, 90% of the remaining population of which lives in Baffin Bay – as well as polar bears, Arctic foxes, seals, hundreds of species of seabirds and millions of migrating birds. There are also 4m people who live in the Arctic, descendants of indigenous communities who have lived there for thousands of years. "The impact of a spill on these communities and already vulnerable animal species would be devastating and long-lasting," the group said. Three Russian nationals among the Arctic 30 – Yekaterina Zaspa, Denis Sinyakov and Andrey Allakhverdov – were released on bail on Monday. Gazprom Neft Shelf, the branch of the Russian state energy behemoth that runs the Prirazlomnaya platform where Greenpeace staged its protest in September, said that after multiple delays it planned to start drilling in December, and currently the rig is working in test mode. Next year, the plan is to produce 600,000 tonnes of oil, and the company says output will peak in 2021 when it will be working at maximum capacity and producing 6m tonnes per year. Gennady Lubin, executive director of Gazprom Neft Shelf, declined to speak to the Guardian, but in a recent interview with an oil and gas periodical rubbished the claims of environmentalists that the rig's location makes it a uniquely dangerous operation. He said there were two icebreakers moored adjacent to the rig which are on permanent standby to deal with any emergency situations, and additional equipment available in the town of Varandey, about 40 miles from the platform. "Of course, in theory it is possible to contemplate any script based on the assumption that if you don't do that, environmental safety might be in danger," said Lyubin. "But that kind of thinking is absurd." He also dismissed concerns about the durability of the rig itself. The top part of the rig was taken from a decommissioned North Sea oil rig built in 1984, which has led to further speculation about the reliability of Prirazlomnaya, but the Russians claim that the critics are again wrong. Lyubin says Prirazlomnaya is a "new facility" that was "built to operate in the specific weather conditions of the Pechora Sea", and that only small parts of the Hutton rig were used in the structure. "The specially designed caisson part has allowed us to create a facility that successfully resists the Arctic climate, waves and ice, to protect all equipment and to ensure safe operation." Lyubin said that Prirazlomnaya was inherently more secure than, for example, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. "The wells there are drilled from a floating platform, which is at hundreds of meters distance from the seabed," said Lyubin. "But here, the sea depth in the field area is 19-20 meters, so the Prirazlomnaya is installed directly on the seabed." "The Arctic has been important for us for centuries,"

said Roman Khatsevich of the Murmansk Institute of Economics. "It's not just economics. Our country is a northern country, and the Arctic is one of the foundation blocks of our statehood. In the 1990s a lot of Arctic financing was stopped due to the economic and political collapse, but since 2000 it has been a priority again." For now, there is a big question about how economically viable oil extraction in the taxing conditions

will be, but Russia is pushing ahead with a number of major programmes to improve infrastructure in the region with an eye on both oil extraction and on developing the Northern Sea route through the Russian Arctic, as an alternative shipping lane from Europe to Asia. "Especially with the worsening situation in the Middle East, the Arctic could become more and more important as a shipping route. In an ideal world, the Arctic can be a forum for international co-operation rather than conflict," said Khatsevich. Just last week, Russian oil giant Rosneft signed a deal with Korean shipbuilding company Daewoo that should lead to the establishment of a major new shipbuilding cluster in Russia's far east, that would build icebreakers and marine equipment for offshore energy projects.

2NC – Spills InevitableRussian spills inevitable – lack of standards and finesBidder, Schepp and Traufetter 12 (Benjamin, Matthias and Gerald, Writers at Spiegel Online, a leading German Newspaper, “'The Black Plague': Russia Plays Game of Arctic Roulette in Oil Exploration”, 8/24/12, http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/russian-oil-exploration-in-arctic-circle-causes-major-environmental-damage-a-851617.html)//WL

The instruments hanging in the Russian city of Severodvinsk -- one by the mayor's office at Victory Square, two more at buildings belonging to the Disaster Prevention Agency -- look like oversized clocks. But rather than showing the time, they indicate radioactivity. They're dosimeters, and they're meant to reassure people here on Russia's northwestern coast, in this city that serves as a home port for Russian nuclear submarines between their trips north into the seas. Less reassuring is the knowledge that just a year and a half ago, one of the submarines caught fire. For decades, these fleets have been both a blessing and a curse in this region with little other infrastructure. The boats have provided jobs, but they have also brought with them the fear of a Chernobyl at sea. Now the region has another cause for hope, as well as a new source of danger: oil. The shipyards in Severodvinsk, on the White Sea, where nuclear submarines were once built, have turned their attention to assembling drilling platforms. One was just recently assembled for use at the Prirazlomnoye oilfield in the Pechora Sea, also along

Russia's northwestern coast. The enormous metal construction, operated by a subsidiary of Russian energy giant Gazprom, is expected to start drilling sometime in the coming months. Growing Environmental Threat Although these plans were made with no

particular fanfare, unexpected resistance has sprung up around the drilling rig. Greenpeace Russia presented an alarming study last week. "If an accident were to occur at the platform in the Pechora Sea, it would contaminate an area twice the size of Ireland," warns Roman Dolgov, director of Greenpeace Russia's Arctic program. There are protected natural areas, home to endangered species such as walruses and beluga whales, just 50 to 60 kilometers (31 to 37 miles)

from the platform. An accident could cover the entire 3,500-kilometer coastline in a toxic slick. But, owing to

the particular conditions of the Arctic, it would only be possible to remove a small portion of that oil. The danger of environmental damage is growing elsewhere in the far north, as well, as the countries that border the Arctic race to exploit previously inaccessible resources. Sea ice here is disappearing and may even drop this year below its previous record low of 4.3 million square kilometers, reached in 2007. "We are witnessing a unique historical situation," says Rüdiger Gerdes, a physicist studying

sea ice at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, in Bremerhaven, Germany. "As new ocean territory opens, it awakens new greed." The Last Frontier According to a United States Geological Survey estimate, around 22 percent of the world's as yet undiscovered, exploitable oil reserves will be found in the Arctic. This is the last frontier for multinational oil corporations -- and even that border is crumbling, as sea ice melts and energy prices rise: Corporations Statoil and Cairn are exploring for oil in Baffin Bay, west of Greenland, with the help of a fleet of icebreaker ships capable of dragging icebergs out of the way. The Dutch-British corporation Shell plans to start test drilling north of Alaska. The oilfield there was discovered in the 1980s, and its exploitation has American President Barack Obama's support. This spring, American energy corporation ConocoPhilips, in test drilling performed together with a Japanese oil company, managed for the first time to extract methane hydrate from natural gas trapped inside ice crystals deep under the earth. Traditionally, though, it is Russia, with its massive reserves of oil, gas and ore in northern Siberia that has been the pioneer in tapping the Arctic's resources. Barely noticed by the rest of

the world, Russia's explorations here have frequently shown that a great deal can go wrong when machinery and brute force are used to extract natural resources from such a sensitive region , in what amounts to a game of Arctic roulette . Hollow Promises But environmental protection has never been a high priority for Kremlin strategists, who see the energy sector as the instrument Moscow can use to cement its position as a world power. Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev introduced a package of laws early this month that establishes tax incentives for oil extraction. Just to complete extraction projects that have already begun, around 60 drilling platforms will be built by 2020, at a cost of $60 billion (€48 billion). President Vladimir Putin has promised to adhere to "strict environmental guidelines," but just how little these assurances mean can be seen in

the pioneering project at the Prirazlomnoye oilfield. If an accident occurred here, the platform's crew would be left completely to its own devices, with the closest rescue team stationed 1,000 kilometers away in the Barents Sea port city of Murmansk. Gazprom Neft Shelf is the Gazprom subsidiary that holds the license for the Prirazlomnoye oilfield, and its emergency plan for handling potential environmental damages currently consists of three axes, 25 buckets, 15 shovels, 15 rakes

and two all-terrain vehicles. The drilling platform's insurance against environmental damage amounts to a laughable €180,000. Russian corporations' lack of experience with offshore projects has led to accidents time and again. Last December, a mobile drilling platform called Kolskaya sank in the Sea of Okhotsk, 200 kilometers off the coast of Sakhalin island, while being towed by an icebreaker. Gazflot, another Gazprom subsidiary, had been using the platform outside of the approved

season. With 53 of the 67 crew members on the rig declared dead or missing in the icy sea, it was the largest number of causalities that an

accident in the Russian oil sector has seen. Reputation for Catastrophe Since the Soviet era, Russia's oil and gas companies have had a reputation for catastrophe. Few people know this better than Greenpeace activist Dolgov. Together with his colleague Tatyana Khakhimullina, the bearded, broad-shouldered man is traveling this summer around the Komi Republic, located at the Arctic Circle in northwestern Russia. Equipped with a GPS device, an old laptop and images from an American research satellite, the two Greenpeace members are searching the taiga for pipeline leaks. According to state-run regulatory authorities, pipelines here in the world's largest country burst at over 25,000 locations each year. Greenpeace estimates this leads to leaks of 5 million tons of oil -- seven times the amount that flowed into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform. Snowmelt here in spring and rain in summer wash around 500,000 metric tons of oil into the region's major rivers and then into the Arctic Ocean. Roman Dolgov swings himself down from the vehicle. The Arctic wind that sweeps across the mountain pines and marshes carries with it a stench like that of a diesel pump at a gas station, and oil pipes can be seen on the taiga's horizon, glinting silver. In January, temperatures here drop to minus 50 degrees Celsius (minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit). "When the first snow falls in October, it lays a white blanket over hundreds of lakes of oil," Dolgov explains. When the snow melts again in May, black-colored ice floes drift down the Pechora River toward the Arctic Ocean. Dolgov marches out across the marshy land. A few hundred meters on, he finds two fresh oil spills, spread across an area of 10 hectares (25 acres), where an underground section of pipe has burst. There are deep wheel tracks in the moss -- the Lukoil corporation that owns this pipeline simply sent an exploratory vehicle out to this

lake of oil, then took no further action. "The companies would rather pay the laughably low fines ," Dolgov says. When Greenpeace reported 14 oil spills in Komi last year, Russia's environmental authorities fined Lukoil , a

company with annual sales of €80 billion, a total penalty equivalent to €27,500. 'Black Plague' A half hour's drive away is the village of Ust-Usa, population 1,300. Wooden huts and a handful of concrete high-rises hunker here on the bank of the Pechora. Once the villagers drank the water from the river, but to do so now could be fatal. In between the rainbow-colored streaks of oil, pale foam floats toward the Arctic. One rural doctor here has kept records of patients' medical histories in Ust-Usa and the surrounding villages. The incidence of cancer is 50 percent higher than it was in 2000, and children and teenagers suffer from respiratory illnesses twice as often. Few men in these villages ever reach retirement age. Average life expectancy here is 58, compared to a national average of 70. Residents at a town hall meeting express their anger at the oil corporations and the Kremlin. One retiree rages against "Putin's regime, exterminating its own people." Yekaterina Dyakova, a biology teacher here in the village, believes that monitoring is "the only solution." She's fighting to establish an independent institute that would monitor pipelines, water quality and pollutants. "The government can't leave that to the oil corporations," she says. "They'll only find what they want to find." Dyakova sent her suggestion "to the president of the Russian Federation" two years ago, and she's still waiting for an answer. "Everywhere else, oil is seen as black gold," she adds. "For us, it's the black plague."

Russia spills the same amount of oil as Deepwater Horizon into the Arctic every yearKennedy 13 (Charles, Staff Writer for oilprice.com, “Russia’s Oil Industry Spills 30 Million Barrels a Year”, 10/16/13 http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Russias-Oil-Industry-Spills-30-Million-Barrels-a-Year.html)//WL

Last month Greenpeace protestors attempted to board the Prirazlomnove oil platform to hang a protest banner against Arctic Sea oil drilling. In a report from February this year, titled “Point of No Return”, Greenpeace identified new oil drilling in the Arctic seas as one of the biggest threats to the environment that is currently ignored by world governments. “Oil companies plan to take advantage of melting sea ice ... to produce up to 8 million barrels a day of oil and gas. The drilling would add 520 million tons of CO2 a year to global emissions by 2020.” The platform is the flagship project for Russia’s multibillion dollar expansion into Arctic waters so it is not surprising that they reacted strongly to Greenpeace’s protest; although the world media has been shocked by the dubious charges of piracy facing the nearly 30 people arrested, and the potential 15 year sentence that such charges carry. With the attention of the world media, Greenpeace now has the perfect platform to

reveal the true extent of Russia’s horrendous impact on the environment, how their oil industry is already polluting Arctic waters, and how it is only likely to get worse if regulation is not improved . Greenpeace Russia

has said that whilst Russia only produces 12% of the world’s oil, it is responsible for nearly 50% of the world’s oil spills; as many as 20,000 oil spills a year leaking up to 30 million barrels. Of these 30 million barrels of spilled oil products,

Greenpeace estimates that around 4 million barrels leak into the Arctic seas via river tributaries each year; as idea of

the scale, the 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill leaked about 4.9 million barrels. Whilst the exact extent of the spills impact on the environment is unknown, Greenpeace claims that it is proof of an inadequate culture of safety within the Russian oil industry, creating a lot of concern about the health of the Arctic as the country aggressively pushes to become one of the first powers to drill in open

Arctic waters. So far, only two Russian oil companies have been granted government approval to drill in Arctic waters, but both have notoriously poor accident records. Gazprom Neft Shelf LLC, is responsible for Russia’s worst ever offshore oil spill after a floating rig sank in the Sea of Okhotsk. Its sustainability report noted that in 2012 the company suffered 2,626 pipeline leaks, and in 2011 that number was 3,257. Rosneft has recently been named the country’s worst environmental polluter after 2,727 oil spills were reported in 2011, in just one province.

Specifically, key Russian wildlife preserves are at riskAlpert 12 (Emily, LA times reporter, “Activists warn of risk of disastrous oil spill in Russian Arctic”, 8/14/12, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/08/russia-arctic-oil-spill-warning.html)//WL

Environmentalists warned Tuesday that drilling for oil in the Arctic could put Russian protected land at risk of being polluted by an oil spill before federal emergency crews could reach the remote area . Their warnings were

backed up by an analysis from a Russian think tank, commissioned by Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, showing that an oil spill could reach nature reserves and protected areas in as little as 18 hours. Although some help could arrive within a few

hours, Greenpeace Russia said it would take professional teams three or four days to arrive at the site. A tanker accident could send 10,000 metric tons of oil spilling out into the Pechora Sea for five days, the Informatika Riska Center estimated.

More than 50,000 square miles could be at risk of being severely affected in the event of a major spill , Greenpeace warned. Such a spill would be quite rare, project manager Valentine Jouravel at Informatika Riska told reporters, though activists

countered that past spills had also been seen as unlikely, the Moscow Times reported. "It seems that in case of [an] extremely large spill ... the nearby nature preserves cannot be avoided with 100% guarantee ," Jouravel wrote in an email to the Los Angeles Times. The state-owned energy company that is behind the drilling plans, Gazprom, could not be immediately reached for comment. It disputed the report in an email to the Associated Press, saying its platform used the latest technology and exceeded environmental standards and that it teams with another oil company that could help it speed up emergency efforts. Gazprom is poised to become the first company to produce Arctic oil, capitalizing on a region believed to contain more untapped oil than any other area on the globe.

Environmental groups have tried to halt such drilling, contending that cleaning up an oil spill in the unforgiving Arctic would be too daunting and the risks for fragile ecosystems too great . The Russian think tank

found that companies might struggle to contain spills at night or in harsh weather, which "can lead to significant pollution in the Pechora Sea coast and protected areas." "There is no technology in the world that could guarantee an effective cleanup," Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia wrote in an email to the Los Angeles Times. The only way to protect the nature reserves, he said, would be "to cancel drilling and phase out this dangerous project." Greenpeace has also

raised concerns that Gazprom has not filed a corrected plan for how it would respond to an oil spill at the Prirazlomnaya oil platform, citing a letter from the Russian Emergencies Ministry that states its last plan expired in July. Without such a plan, the group said, any drilling in this part of the Arctic would be illegal under Russian law.

1NC - BioD DefensePredictions are over-alarmist – extinctions are naturalHoffman 11 [Doug, “The Price of Biodiversity,” 3-21, http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/price-biodiversity]

Not knowing how many species are out there has not prevented Anthony D. Barnosky et al. from declaring the next mass extinction imminent. In “Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?,” published in the journal Nature, studied the differences between fossil and modern data, coming to the conclusion that the end is nigh for most of the world's creatures. From that paper's abstract: Palaeontologists characterize mass extinctions as times when the Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short interval, as has happened only five times in the past 540 million years or so. Biologists now suggest that a sixth mass extinction may be under way, given the known species losses over the past few centuries and millennia. Here we review how differences between fossil and modern data and the addition of recently available palaeontological information influence our understanding of the current extinction crisis. Our results confirm that current extinction rates are higher than would be expected from the fossil record, highlighting

the need for effective conservation measures. This new paper has brought scathing reviews from other researchers and even a few ecologists. Greenpeace Co-Founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore, slammed the new study for claiming a dramatic and irreversible mass species extinction

was underway. “This [journal Nature] article should never have made it through the peer-review process,” Moore told Climate Depot in an interview. “The fact that the study did make it through peer-review indicates that the peer review process has become corrupted,” Moore has previously criticized others who have tried to declare a 6th extinction event, most notably Wilson, who has made a career out of prediction ecological doom. A decade ago, Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet

undiscovered species in the world. Moore said in 2000: “There's no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson's computer at Harvard University. They're actually

electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.” And therein lies the central problem with all this decreasing biodiversity bombast: no one really knows how many species we are dealing with. It is simply impossible to say “50% of Earth's species are in danger of extinction by 2050” without knowing how many species exist and being able to identify the ones supposedly in danger. Yet, whether it is polar bears or coral reefs, eco-alarmists would have us believe they will be extinct by next Tuesday if we don't park our cars, close our factories and turn out the lights, right now! The tipping point is just ahead! Of course, the cost of getting a feel for Earth's actual biodiversity pales when compared to the cost of switching to renewable energy. Ecologists and many scientists are quick to blame people for the

demise of any species, but the simple truth is that species go extinct all the time—with or without human help. A prime example is the sudden decline in amphibian species around the world. Scientists now know the proximate cause is the chytrid fungus,Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (see “Tackling the Mystery of the Disappearing Frogs”). The results of new gene sequencing technologies suggest that in susceptible frogs, the immune system doesn't go

on the defensive. The fungi somehow manages to evade the frogs immune system defenses and has wiped out amphibians around the globe. Humans have no doubt contributed to extinctions of individual species in the past, as have other species through predation, competition and habitat destruction—survival in the natural world is a blood sport. But when green fanatics like Wilson and Barnosky et al. start shouting extinction in a crowded biosphere it serves no useful purpose. I have said it before, if you want to preserve nature you need to make nature more attractive or more useful to people. Running around screaming “extinction” only upsets the weak minded and annoys the rest of us. It should come as no surprise that there are many trying to profit off of biodiversity. In 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity, business leaders from around the world converged on a conference in London to discuss the Business of Biodiversity. “To debate the issues, consider the risks and view the opportunities that are emerging, which are

linked to declining biodiversity and ecosystem services,” proclaimed the online announcement. Bottom line, papers announcing a 6 th extinction event caused by H. sapiens are more about profit than science. It is the biodiversity lobby trying to do for theircause what the

global warming scam has done for climate science. The formula is simple—scare the public with lurid predictions of an apocalypse, then wait for the research funding to pour in. But greens need to consider this: with the US House of Representatives voting to defund the IPCC, oil prices rising, the world economy reeling from the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and governments around the world tightening their belts, the chance that the US or any other nation will pony up $263 billion to study biodiversity is precisely zero.

Climate change dooms Arctic Ecosystems – aff can’t solve greenhouse gas emissionsWolf 10 (Shaye, Climate Science Director, works with the Center’s Climate Law Institute. She graduated with a bachelor’s in biology from Yale University and received a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology and a master’s in ocean sciences from the University of California, “EXTINCTION. It’s Not Just for Polar Bears.” September 2010, http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/climate_law_institute/the_arctic_meltdown/pdfs/ArcticExtinctionReport_Final.pdf)//WL

Climate change is having profound impacts not only on individual species but also on the ecosystems to which they belong—the interconnected assemblages of species and their physical environment. Observed ecosystem-level changes in the Arctic include the disappearance of essential habitats , shifts in species’ timing and

ranges, disruption of species’ relationships, declines in abundance, and looming extinctions . Unless we reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly, we will lose the Arctic as we know it. VANISHING HABITATS. Climate change is triggering the rapid loss of entire Arctic habitats, most notably sea ice and glaciers, and is leading to the degradation of others. For example, ocean acidification is making Arctic waters unlivable for

many calcifying creatures, melting permafrost threatens to drain tundra wetlands , and erosion is degrading coastal habitats. MOVING EARLIER. As the onset of spring arrives earlier, some Arctic species are advancing the timing of important activities to try to keep pace. The flowering of plants, egg-laying of birds, and emergence of insects have shifted by up to 30 days earlier per decade in some Arctic regions.91 However, species may not shift their timing in synch with each other, which can disrupt important relationships. For example, the plant-growing season in Greenland is beginning earlier, but caribou have not advanced the timing of migration and calving to keep up, creating a mismatch between caribou and their food. MOVING NORTHWARD. Many Arctic species, from shrubs to

insects to mammals, are moving northward to keep pace with rising temperatures.92 However, as species enter new areas, communities are altered and disrupted. For example, the red fox has been moving northward into the tundra, following the expansion of shrubs, which has been linked to declines of the smaller, less dominant tundra-dwelling Arctic fox. CHANGING SPECIES

INTERACTIONS. Climate change is altering relationships among species in the Arctic by changing the availability of food resources and exposing them to new predators , competitors and pathogens as species shift their ranges. For example, as temperatures warm and sea ice vanishes, ringed seals are facing pressure from reduced availability of ice-associated prey, a heightened risk of predation from killer whales moving into once inaccessible ice-covered areas, increased competition for food from

harbor seals moving northward, and exposure to novel pathogens. DECLINES AND EXTINCTIONS. Climate change has already been linked to lower survival or population declines of Arctic species from the sea-ice dependent polar bear, to the glacier-affiliated Kittlitz’s murrelet, to the tundra-dwelling caribou, to the marine sea butterfly. Researchers have forecast that at least one species, the

polar bear, will be faced with extinction within this century if sea-ice loss is not halted. The loss of species can have far-reaching effects on the functioning of entire ecosystems. MULTIPLE LAYERS OF IMPACT. Climate change is having multilayered, synergistic impacts on Arctic ecosystems, including threats from increasing human use . As

previously ice covered areas become more accessible, human activities like shipping, oil and gas exploration, commercial fisheries and tourism are on the rise, putting more pressure on already stressed systems. Ecosystem impacts will only worsen the longer greenhouse gas pollution goes unchecked.

2NC – BioD DefenseModels flawed – over predicts lossesKnight 12 [Richard, “Biodiversity loss: How accurate are the numbers?,” 4-24, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17826898]

Twenty years ago, the Earth Summit in Rio resulted in a Convention on Biological Diversity, now signed by 193 nations, to prevent species loss. But can we tell how many species are becoming extinct? One statement on the Convention's website claims: "We are indeed experiencing the greatest wave of extinction since the disappearance of the dinosaurs." While that may (or may not) be true, the next sentence is spuriously

precise: "Every hour three species disappear. Every day up to 150 species are lost." Even putting aside the apparent mathematical error in that claim (on the face of it, if three species are disappearing every hour, 72 would be lost

every day) there is an obvious problem in generating any such number. No-one knows how many species exist. And if we don't know a species exists, we won't miss it when it's gone . "Current estimates of the number of species can vary from, let's say, two million species to over 30 or even 100 million species," says Dr Braulio Dias, executive secretary of the

Convention on Biological Diversity. "So we don't have a good estimate to an order of magnitude of precision," he says. It is possible to count the number of species known to be extinct. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) does just that. It has listed 801 animal and plant species (mostly animal) known to have gone extinct since 1500. But if it's really true that up to 150 species are being lost every day, shouldn't we expect to be able to name more than 801 extinct species in 512 years? Professor Georgina Mace, who works in the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London, says the IUCN's method is helpful but inadequate. "It is never going to get us the answers we need," she says. That's why scientists

prefer to use a mathematical model to estimate species loss. Recently, however, that model has been attacked in the pages of Nature. Professor Stephen Hubbell from the University of California, Los Angeles, says that an error in the model means that it has - for years - over-estimated the rate of species loss. The model applies something called the "species to area relationship" to habitat loss. Put simply, an estimate is made of the number of species in a given area, or habitat - the larger the area, the greater the number of species are said to be in it. Then the model is worked backwards - the smaller the area, the fewer the species. In other words, if you measure habitat loss, you can use the model to calculate how many species are being lost as that habitat gets smaller. The problem, says Hubbell, is that the model does not work in reverse. "The method," he says, "when extrapolated backward, doesn't take into account the fact that you need to remove more area to get to the whole range of a species than you need to remove area to find the first individual of a species." Hubbell's point is that if you increase a habitat by, say, five hectares, and your calculations show that you expect there to be five new species in those five hectares, it is wrong to assume that reversing the model, and shrinking your habitat, eliminates five species. That's because it takes more area to establish extinction - to show that every individual in a species has been eliminated - than it does

to discover a new species, which requires coming across just one individual of that species. Hubbell says when corrected the model shows about half as many species going extinct as previously reported. Unfortunately for scientists trying to measure species loss, the problems don't end there. They also need to calculate the 'background rate' of extinction. If you want to work out the impact of human life on biodiversity, you need to know how many species would have gone extinct anyway without us being here. Mace says that is difficult. "Background rates are not constant either," she says. "If you look back through the history of life on Earth, there

have been major periods of extinctions The level of uncertainty faced by researchers in this field means it is perhaps not surprising that no-one can be sure of the scale of species loss. It also means that when a representative of the Convention of Biological Diversity claimed "every hour three species disappear" he must have known it was too precise.

Bio-D doesn’t matterSagoff 97 (Mark, Senior Research Scholar – Institute for Philosophy and Public policy in School of Public Affairs – U. Maryland, William and Mary Law Review, “INSTITUTE OF BILL OF RIGHTS LAW SYMPOSIUM DEFINING TAKINGS: PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE FUTURE OF GOVERNMENT REGULATION: MUDDLE OR MUDDLE THROUGH? TAKINGS JURISPRUDENCE MEETS THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT”, 38 Wm and Mary L. Rev. 825, March, L/N)

Although one may agree with ecologists such as Ehrlich and Raven that the earth stands on the brink of an episode of massive extinction, it may not follow from this grim fact that human beings will suffer as a result. On the contrary, skeptics such as science writer Colin Tudge have challenged biologists to explain why we need more than a tenth of the 10 to 100 million species that grace the earth. Noting that "cultivated systems often out-produce wild systems by 100-fold or more," Tudge declared that "the argument that humans need the variety of other species is, when you think about it, a theological one." n343 Tudge observed that "the elimination of all but a tiny minority of our fellow creatures does not affect the material well-being of humans one iota." n344 This skeptic challenged ecologists to list more than 10,000 species (other than unthreatened microbes) that are essential to ecosystem productivity

or functioning. n345 "The human species could survive just as well if 99.9% of our fellow creatures went extinct, provided only that we retained the appropriate 0.1% that we need." n346 [*906] The monumental Global Biodiversity Assessment ("the Assessment") identified two positions with respect to redundancy of species. "At one extreme is the idea that each species is unique and important, such that its removal or loss will have demonstrable consequences to the functioning of the community or ecosystem." n347 The authors of the Assessment, a panel of eminent ecologists, endorsed this position, saying it is "unlikely that there is much, if any, ecological redundancy in communities over time scales of decades to centuries, the time period over which environmental policy should operate." n348 These eminent ecologists rejected the opposing view, "the notion that species overlap in function to a sufficient degree that removal or loss of a species will be compensated by others, with negligible overall consequences to the community or ecosystem."

n349 Other biologists believe, however, that species are so fabulously redundant in the ecological functions they perform that the life-support systems and processes of the planet and ecological processes in general will function perfectly well with fewer of them, certainly fewer than the millions and millions we can expect to remain even if every threatened organism becomes extinct. n350 Even the kind of sparse

and miserable world depicted in the movie Blade Runner could provide a "sustainable" context for the human economy as long as people forgot their aesthetic and moral commitment to the glory and beauty of the natural world. n351 The Assessment makes this point. "Although any ecosystem contains hundreds to thousands of species interacting among themselves and their physical environment, the emerging consensus is that the system is driven by a small number of . . . biotic variables on whose interactions the balance of species are, in a sense, carried along." n352 [*907] To make up your mind on the question of the functional redundancy of species, consider an endangered species of bird, plant, or insect and ask how the ecosystem would fare in its absence. The fact that the creature is endangered

suggests an answer: it is already in limbo as far as ecosystem processes are concerned. What crucial ecological services does the black-capped vireo, for example, serve? Are any of the species threatened with extinction necessary to the provision of any ecosystem service on which humans depend? If so, which ones are they? Ecosystems

and the species that compose them have changed, dramatically, continually, and totally in virtually every part of the United States. There is little ecological similarity, for example, between New England today and the land where the Pilgrims died. n353 In view of the constant reconfiguration of the biota, one may wonder why Americans have not suffered more as a result of ecological catastrophes. The cast of species in nearly every environment changes constantly-local extinction is commonplace in nature-but the crops still grow. Somehow, it seems, property values keep going up on Martha's

Vineyard in spite of the tragic disappearance of the heath hen. One might argue that the sheer number and variety of creatures available to any ecosystem buffers that system against stress. Accordingly, we should be concerned if the "library" of creatures ready, willing, and able to colonize ecosystems gets too small. (Advances in genetic engineering may well permit us to

write a large number of additions to that "library.") In the United States as in many other parts of the world, however, the number of species has been increasing dramatically, not decreasing, as a result of human activity. This is because the hordes of exotic species coming into ecosystems in the United States far exceed the number of species that are becoming extinct. Indeed, introductions may outnumber extinctions by more than ten to one, so that the United States is becoming more and more species-rich all the time largely as a result of human action. n354 [*908] Peter Vitousek and colleagues estimate that over 1000 non-native plants grow in California alone; in Hawaii there are 861; in Florida, 1210. n355 In Florida more than 1000 non-native insects, 23 species of mammals, and about 11 exotic birds have established themselves. n356 Anyone who waters a lawn or hoes a garden knows how many weeds desire to grow there, how many birds and bugs visit the yard, and how many fungi, creepy-crawlies, and other odd life forms show forth when it rains. All belong to nature, from wherever they might hail, but not many homeowners would claim that there are too few of them. Now, not all exotic species provide ecosystem services; indeed, some may be disruptive or have no instrumental value. n357 This also may be true, of course, of native species as well, especially because all exotics are native somewhere. Certain exotic species, however, such as Kentucky blue grass, establish an area's sense of identity and place; others, such as the green crabs showing up around Martha's Vineyard, are nuisances. n358 Consider an analogy [*909] with human migration. Everyone knows that after a generation or two, immigrants to this country are hard to distinguish from everyone else. The vast majority of Americans did not evolve here, as it were, from

hominids; most of us "came over" at one time or another. This is true of many of our fellow species as well, and they may fit in here just as well as we do. It is possible to distinguish exotic species from native ones for a period of time, just as we can distinguish immigrants from native-born Americans, but as the centuries roll by, species, like people, fit into the landscape or the society, changing and often enriching it. Shall we have a rule that a species had to come over on the Mayflower, as so many did, to count as "truly" American? Plainly not. When, then, is the cutoff date? Insofar as we are concerned with the absolute numbers of "rivets" holding ecosystems together, extinction seems not to pose a general problem because a far greater number of kinds of mammals, insects, fish, plants, and other creatures thrive on land and in water in

America today than in prelapsarian times. n359 The Ecological Society of America has urged managers to maintain biological diversity as a critical component in strengthening ecosystems against disturbance. n360 Yet as

Simon Levin observed, "much of the detail about species composition will be irrelevant in terms of influences on ecosystem properties." n361 [*910] He added: "For net primary productivity, as is likely to be the case for any

system property, biodiversity matters only up to a point; above a certain level, increasing biodiversity is likely to make little difference." n362 What about the use of plants and animals in agriculture? There is no scarcity foreseeable. "Of an estimated 80,000 types of plants [we] know to be edible ," a U.S. Department of the

Interior document says, "only about 150 are extensively cultivated." n363 About twenty species, not one of which is endangered, provide ninety percent of the food the world takes from plants. n364 Any new food has to take "shelf space" or "market share" from one that is now produced. Corporations also find it difficult to create demand for a new product; for example, people are not inclined to eat paw-paws, even though they are delicious. It is hard enough to get people to eat their broccoli and lima beans. It is harder still to develop consumer demand for new foods. This may be the reason the Kraft Corporation does not prospect in remote places for rare and unusual plants and animals to add to the world's diet. Of the roughly 235,000 flowering plants and 325,000 nonflowering plants (including mosses, lichens, and seaweeds) available, farmers ignore virtually all of them in favor of a very few that are profitable. n365 To be sure, any of the more than

600,000 species of plants could have an application in agriculture, but would they be preferable to the species that are now dominant? Has anyone found any consumer demand for any of these half-million or more plants to replace rice or wheat in the human diet? There are reasons that farmers cultivate rice, wheat, and corn rather than, say, Furbish's lousewort. There are many kinds of louseworts, so named because these weeds were thought to cause lice in sheep. How many does agriculture really require? [*911] The species on which agriculture relies are domesticated, not naturally occurring; they are developed by artificial not natural selection; they might not be able to survive in the wild. n366 This argument is not intended to deny the religious, aesthetic, cultural, and moral reasons that command us to respect and protect the natural world. These spiritual and ethical values should evoke action, of course, but we should also recognize that they are spiritual and ethical values. We should recognize that ecosystems and all that dwell therein compel our moral respect, our aesthetic appreciation, and our spiritual veneration; we should clearly seek to achieve the goals of the ESA. There is no reason to assume, however, that these goals have anything to do with human well-being or welfare as economists understand that term. These are ethical goals, in other words, not economic ones. Protecting the marsh may be the right thing to do for moral, cultural, and spiritual reasons. We should do it-

but someone will have to pay the costs. In the narrow sense of promoting human welfare, protecting nature often represents a net "cost," not a net "benefit." It is largely for moral, not economic, reasons-ethical, not prudential, reasons- that we care about all our fellow creatures. They are valuable as objects of love not as objects of use. What is good for [*912] the marsh may be good in itself even if it is not, in the economic sense, good for mankind. The most valuable things are quite useless.

Marginal losses don’t erode ecosystem resilience. There’s more biodiversity than we could possibly need. And we can just create more.Sagoff 8 (Mark, Senior Research Scholar – Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy – School of Public Policy – U. Maryland, Environmental Values, “On the Economic Value of Ecosystem Services”, 17:2, 239-257, EBSCO)

What about the economic value of biodiversity? Biodiversity represents natureʼs greatest largess or excess since species appear nearly as numerous as the stars except that ʻscientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than how

many species there are on Earthʼ.41 The ʻnextʼ or ʻincrementalʼ thousand species taken at random would not fetch a market price because another thousand are immediately available, and another thousand after that. No one has suggested an economic application, moreover, for any of the thousand species in the USA listed as threatened.42 To defend the ʻmarginalʼ value of biodiversity on economic grounds is to trade convincing spiritual, aesthetic and ethical arguments for bogus, pretextual

and disingenuous economic ones.43 As David Ehrenfeld has written, We do not know how many [plant] species are

needed to keep the planet green and healthy, but it seems very unlikely to be anywhere near the more than quarter of a million we have now. Even a mighty dominant like the American chestnut, extending over half a continent, all

but disappeared without bringing the eastern deciduous forest down with it. And if we turn to the invertebrates, the source of nearly all biological diversity, what biologist is willing to find a value – conventional or ecological – for all 600,000-plus species of beetles?44 The disappearance in the wild even of agriculturally useful species appears to have no effect on production. The last wild aurochs, the progenitor of dairy and beef cattle, went extinct in Poland in 1742, yet no one believes the beef industry is threatened. The genetic material of crop species is contained in tens of thousands of landraces and cultivars in use – rice is an example – and does not depend on the persistence of wild ancestral types. Genetic engineering can introduce DNA from virtually any species into virtually any other – which allows for the unlimited creation of biodiversity. A neighbour of mine has collected about 4,000 different species of insects on his two-acre property in Silver Spring, Maryland. These include 500 kinds of Lepidoptera (mostly moths) – half the number another entomologist found at his residence.45 When you factor in plants and animals the amount of ʻbackyard biodiversityʼ in suburbs is astounding and far greater than you can imagine.46 Biodiversity generates no price ʻat the marginʼ because nature provides far more of it than anyone could possibly administer. If one kind of moth flies off, you can easily attract hundreds of others. The price of a building lot in suburban Maryland, where I live, is a function of its proximity to good schools and to Washington, DC. The thousands of kinds of insects, weeds, microbes, etc. that nature lavishes on the typical suburban lot do not increase its price. No one wants to invest to see if any of these creatures contains a cancer-curing drug, although a raccoon in my attic did test positive for rabies.47 No one thinks that property values are a function of biodiversity; no one could suppose that a scarcity of critters looms that might create a competitive advantage for housing lots that are more generously endowed with deer, opossums, muskrats, raccoons, birds or beavers. (A neighbour who has a swimming pool plays unwilling summer host to a beaver who at night jumps off the diving board into the

pool, swims around, and jumps again.) An astronomical variety of biodiversity is thrown in with every acre zoned for residential use. Buy an acre or two, and an immense amount of biodiversity is yours for nothing .

Presence Adv

1NC - Non-UniqueNo uniqueness – Navy presence is expanding in the Arctic nowBrinkerhoff 14 [Noel Brinkerhoff, Allgov writer, March 4th, 2014, As Arctic Ice Melts, U.S. Navy Expands its Presence, http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/as-arctic-ice-melts-us-navy-expands-its-presence-140304?news=852593]

With global warming causing a dramatic and rapid reduction of ice in the Arctic Ocean, the U.S. Navy is preparing for a new era of seafaring around the North Pole . Changes are happening so fast up north that the Navy felt it necessary to update its Arctic plan, which was created only five years ago. But new scientific calculations showed commercial shipping lanes may open where none existed before in just another six years. The Navy’s latest Task Force Climate Change report (pdf) says the Bering Strait will become ice-free for more than five months at a time by 2020, and that deeper Transpolar routes could be available for 45 days by 2025. “The Arctic is all about operating forward and being ready. We don’t think we’re going to have to do war-fighting up there , but we have to be ready, ” Rear Admiral Jonathan White, the Navy’s top oceanographer and navigator, and director of the Navy’s climate change task force, told Reuters. Naval readiness means doing more research on climate change impacts in the Arctic, and figuring out how and where to base and operate ships and planes for missions in this region, among other concerns. The Navy is also planning submarine exercises for the Arctic, and it intends to work with Norway and Russia on joint training exercises. Russia is among the many countries with eyes on natural resources that could become exploitable once the ice sheets thin, if not disappear for long stretches. The naval report says a less frozen Arctic could yield $1 trillion in oil, gas and minerals for companies and countries to pursue. But less sea ice would not necessarily mean smooth sailing in the Arctic, which would still be a treacherous environment to work in. “If we do start to see a rush, and people try to get up there too fast, we run the risk of catastrophes,” White said, who hopes companies will be slow and careful in entering the region. “Search and rescue in the cold ice-covered water of the Arctic is not somewhere we want to go.”

2NC – Non-UniqueNavy plans to boost Arctic presence now Rosen 14 [US Navy aims to boost its presence in a melting Arctic, Yereth Rosen, Alaska Dispatch reporter, March 9, 2014, http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20140309/us-navy-aims-boost-its-presence-melting-arctic]

The U.S. Navy plans to boost its knowledge of the Arctic in the next few years, preparing for what is expected to be booming growth in vessel traffic and resource expansion in future decades, according to a

report issued this week that updates the Navy’s 2009 Arctic Roadmap. From now until 2020, the Navy expects to increase its Arctic operations and training, partly through continued participation in joint military and emergency exercises as well as scientific missions, the report said. By cooperating with other agencies and

academic institutions, the Navy will be able to “focus on areas where it provides unique capabilities and will leverage joint and coalition partners to fill identified gaps and seams,” the report said. For the next few years, at least, on-scene Arctic activities will be limited to open-water periods because the Navy lacks the vessels and equipment to travel otherwise, the report said. That situation should change in future decades, the report said. By 2030, the Navy expects to have “the necessary training and personnel to respond to contingencies and emergencies affecting national security” in the Arctic, the report said. With summer and fall ice weakening, the open-water periods are expected to expand. By 2025, the Bering Strait should have up to 175 days of open water per year, and after 2030, the Northern Sea Route and Transpolar Route are expected to be navigable 130 days a year, the report said. With abundant natural resources and reduced summer sea ice, the Arctic Ocean will attract growing interest from an array of nations, including non-Arctic nations, and commercial operators, the report says. But even with more ice melt, the Arctic will remain a difficult environment for travelers, and emergency-response capabilities will be increasingly important, the report says.

Navy planning for full Arctic Presence by 2020Shalal 14 (Andrea, Reuters Reporter, “US Navy Eyes 'Aggressive' Plan For Expanding Its Arctic Presence”, 2/27/14, http://www.businessinsider.com/us-navy-arctic-presence-2014-2)//WL

The U.S. Navy is mapping out how to expand its presence in the Arctic beginning around 2020 , given signs that

the region's once permanent ice cover is melting faster than expected, which is likely to trigger more traffic, fishing and resource mining. "The Arctic is all about operating forward and being ready. We don't think we're going to have to do war-fighting up there, but we have to be ready," said Rear Admiral Jonathan White, the Navy's top oceanographer and navigator,

and director of the Navy's climate change task force. "We don't want to have a demand for the Navy to operate up there, and have to say, 'Sorry, we can't go,'" he said. The Navy this week released an "aggressive" update to its 2009 Arctic road map after a detailed analysis of data from a variety of sources showed that seasonal ice is disappearing faster than had been expected even three years ago. The document said the Bering Strait was expected to see open conditions about 160 days a year by 2020, with the deep ocean

routes of the Transpolar transit route forecast to be open for up to 45 days annually by 2025. The document includes dozens of specific tasks and deadlines for Navy offices, including calling for better research on rising sea levels and the ability to predict sea ice thickness, assessment of satellite communications and surveillance needs, and evaluation of existing ports, airfields and hangars. It also puts a big focus on cooperation with other Arctic nations and with the U.S. Coast Guard, which is grappling with the need to build a new $1 billion ice-breaking ship. The Navy is conducting a submarine exercise in the Arctic next month, and plans to participate in a joint training

exercise with the Norwegian and Russian military this summer. White said the Navy's new road map was aimed at answering "the billion dollar question" of how much it would cost to prepare for an increased naval presence in the Arctic, and trying to determine what investments were needed when. "We're trying to use this road map to really be able to answer that question," White said, noting that early smaller-scale investments could help avert bigger bills in the future. He said efforts were under way now in the Navy to identify specific requirements for weather-hardened ships and other equipment, land-based infrastructure, and better bandwidth for satellite and shore-based communications

capabilities. The Office of Naval Research and the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are already funding numerous Arctic-focused projects with industry, White said, predicting increased public-private projects in recent years. He said he realized U.S. military budgets are under pressure, but hoped the plan would help undergird Arctic-related budget requests in coming years by showing lawmakers that the

Navy had carefully studied and evaluated its options. "As far as I'm concerned, the Navy and Coast Guard's area of responsibility is growing," White said. "We're growing a new ocean, so our budget should be growing in line with that." The Navy has long operated submarines in the region, and flies surveillance and unmanned aircraft as needed, but by 2020 it plans to boost the number of personnel trained for Arctic operations. By 2030, as the Arctic Ocean becomes increasingly ice-free, the Navy said it would have the training and personnel to respond to crises and national security emergencies. The Navy's updated road map noted that the Arctic has significant oil, gas and mineral resources, including some rare earth minerals now supplied mainly by China, and estimated hydrocarbon resources of over $1 trillion. Those resources are attractive to big multinational corporations and other countries, but they face big financial, technical and environmental risks due to the harshness of the environment, and the unpredictable weather, White said. "If we do start to see a rush, and people try to get up there too fast, we run the risk of catastrophes," he said, urging a more gradual, measured move into the region by the private sector. "Search and rescue in the cold ice-covered water of the Arctic is not somewhere we want to go."

Inevitable Arctic Oil Drilling Solves (NOTE THIS IN THE 1AC ENVIRONMENT / SPILLS ADVANTAGE – DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE CONTESTING FUTURE ARCTIC OIL DRILLING)World Finance 14 (World Finance is one of the top news sites for finance developments worldwide, “Is Arctic drilling worth the

risk?”, 3/12/14, http://www.worldfinance.com/markets/is-arctic-oil-drilling-worth-the-risk)//WL

Infrastructural insufficiencies and extreme weather conditions have so far proven too big an obstacle for energy companies attempting to tap into the Arctic’s vast hydrocarbon reserves . But that may be about to change. Tucked away among the Arctic’s ever-shifting jags of ice, hidden from the naked eye, are billions upon billions of dollars in black gold. The Arctic landscape, spanning the Barents to the Beaufort Sea and beyond, is home to a reported 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered natural gas reserves and 13 percent of its oil. Whoever conquers it will lay claim to 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 90 billion barrels of oil – almost three times the annual global consumption. Much of the prospective total, according to the US Geological Survey, sits offshore and is up for the taking, provided that those with suitably high ambitions come equipped with the necessary tools, know-how and – most importantly – resources to do so. Although the region accounts for as little as six percent of the Earth’s surface, it accounts for a disproportionately large amount of its resources, and it is this supposed abundance of hydrocarbons that has seen energy companies clamour

for the rights to the region’s many opportunities. “It is only in the last five years that hydrocarbon development has actually been contemplated as a possibility, principally due to technological and navigational advances ,” says Trevor Slack, Senior Analyst at risk analysis company Maplecroft. “To varying degrees, Russia, Canada, the US, Norway and Greenland have all increased exploration and development activity on their relevant portions of the Arctic continental shelf.” The majority of the Arctic countries have granted energy companies licenses to explore offshore reserves, however, the exploration phase is only a fraction of the overall effort required to reap the region’s riches. The difficulties companies face while working in the region can perhaps best be seen in the case of

Royal Dutch Shell and the crisis that befell the Kulluk drilling rig late last year. “What is failure but a bump on the road to triumph?” asked the company on its website soon after the 266ft barge ran aground off the Alaskan coast: circumstances that later incurred an impairment charge of $200m. The failed expedition constitutes only a slither of the oil giant’s overall Arctic spending, which has so far amassed upwards of $5bn and yielded very little in the way of returns. Despite having introduced an armada of 20 support vessels, chartered well over a thousand dedicated flights, and exhausted $1bn on the project through the last year alone,

the Anglo-Dutch powerhouse is yet to complete a single well in the region. While these circumstances could well be considered a failure of sorts, they could just as easily be seen as par for the course, as the extraction of Arctic oil and gas ranks among the most expensive business opportunities in the world . “Oil spill risks, high extraction costs, doubts over the amount of commercially recoverable reserves, and a precedent of cost overruns and delays combine to raise questions about the commercial viability of some proposed Arctic projects,” reads a Greenpeace report into Arctic exploration risks. “The drilling conditions facing oil companies operating in the Arctic are some of the most challenging on Earth.” Risk and reward The challenges of tapping the Arctic’s resources are quite plain to see, these being a harsh climate, underdeveloped infrastructure, long project cycles, spill containment and recovery risks, and conflicting sovereignty claims, to name but a few. All things considered, the complications have caused some to question whether the investment is actually worth the costs, whether they be financial or environmental. Total is the first major oil company to publicly denounce offshore exploration in the Arctic, with the company’s CEO Christophe de Margerie expressing fears about the

potential damages of a spill: “Oil on Greenland would be a disaster,” he told the Financial Times. “A leak would do too much damage to the

image of the company.” Total’s stance on the matter is very much the exception, however, with various competitors such as ExxonMobil, Rosneft, Eni, Statoil and, of course, Shell, having committed a great deal of time and money to the Arctic endeavour. Despite previous problems, Shell hopes to resume its work in the Arctic at some point this year, with CFO Simon Henry believing the region to be the “most attractive single opportunity for the

future,” as stated in The Telegraph. However, the company will be subject to far closer scrutiny than before in light of its previous failings. Shell’s return to the Arctic – however delayed – will be watched by environmentalists,

whose concerns for the surrounding environment need not be explained, as well as industry rivals, who will be keen to know whether or not the region’s treasures can be extracted. Exploration obstacles Although Shell appears quite intent on exploiting the Arctic’s natural resources, a US appeals court has recently ruled that the Alaskan government acted illegally in granting Shell exploration rights to Arctic waters controlled by the US, which has, in effect, curbed the company’s oil ambitions further still. The extraction site was sold for $2.66bn in 2008, of which $2.1bn was paid for by Shell, and has since been hotly contested by local and environmental groups, who claim the consequences were ill conceived and its environmental impact sorely underplayed. Another major player whose progress has been hindered by development costs and other such obstacles is Norway’s Statoil, which late last year expressed concerns about the challenges of exploring and extracting Arctic hydrocarbon reserves. “Logistical difficulties, regulatory hurdles, jurisdictional tensions, environmental opposition and above all extremely inhospitable climatic conditions will ensure that oil and gas activity in the region remains problematic, complex and expensive,” says Slack. “Cost is probably the most important factor, with Statoil estimating that the cost of drilling one oil well in the Arctic could be as much as $500m. This is likely to be prohibitive for most companies in the current climate, with some analysts predicting that the price of crude could drop in the medium term.” Statoil’s Exploration Chief Tim Dodson spoke at a climate change conference last year

about some of the issues facing oil companies in the Arctic. “We don’t envisage production from several of these areas before 2030 at the earliest; more likely 2040, probably not until 2050,” he said. “I think what we have to realise is that the challenges our industry faces in the Arctic are at least as significant as we thought they were just a couple of years back, but they’re not insurmountable.” Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy, meanwhile, has announced that, regardless of having spent over $1bn in the region, it is deprioritising its Greenland operations after not having made a single commercial find as of yet. Many believe the inadequate infrastructure and tumultuous weather conditions, combined with the falling price of oil and gas, to be the perfect storm when it comes to Arctic exploration. These circumstances mean that short-term financial benefits can only be marginal at best, until stratospheric sums of capital are poured into developing the region. Charlie Kronick, Senior Climate Advisor at Greenpeace UK, is sceptical. “[It] is impossible to drill safely for oil in the ice covered waters of the Arctic – the potential impacts on local livelihoods and biodiversity are uncostable. It would be literally impossible – for both technical and environmental reasons – to clean up after the inevitable

spill, while the level of climate change that would result from successful (in economic terms) drilling there would be catastrophic.” A report conducted by Lloyd’s and Chatham House found that investment in the Arctic could reach $100bn by 2022, as companies scramble to gain a foothold. “Business activity in the Arctic region is undeniably increasing, and the impact of climate change means that this is likely to grow significantly in the future. But as new opportunities open up, decisions on exploiting them need to be made on the basis of as full an understanding of the risks as possible,” said Richard Ward, Chief Executive at Lloyd’s. At present, any areas of the Arctic that are unrepresented are being hotly contested by the bordering countries. Regardless, it is crucial that businesses granted permission to work in the region align their goals with those of local governments, communities and the environment, as the territory proceeds to transform. In addition, those partaking in Arctic exploration should put in place strict measures to avoid any environmental disasters, and have procedures in place should the worst case scenario occur. “The businesses which will succeed will be those which take their responsibilities to the region’s communities and environment seriously, working with other stakeholders to manage the wide range of Arctic risks and ensuring that future

development is sustainable,” says Ward.

1NC - No Internal LinkNo internal link – no naval presence is possible in the arctic and countries will cooperate over resourcesEvans 13 (Gareth, PhD, “As the Arctic melts – who has the most formidable ice-going naval fleet?”, 1/3/13, http://www.naval-technology.com/features/featurearctic-ice-melting-naval-fleet-us-norway-vessel-russia/)

Reducing on average by just over 11% a decade, according to US National Snow and Ice Data Center, receding arctic ice offers huge reserves of oil, manganese, copper, cobalt, zinc and gold, untouched fisheries and a potential polar sea-lane that could halve the voyage-time between

Europe and Asia. Basically, the High North is a place of growing strategic importance. Naval presence "In such a hostile operating environment, warships are not the only way to make an effective national statement." While a race to claim the arctic is unlikely, even so, to herald a sudden return to 'gunboat diplomacy' or the massed northern deployment of capital ships in a display of prestige and power . As Norwegian Institute for

Defence Studies' research fellow Amund Lundesgaard points out: "No navies have ice capable combat ships, and as far as I know, there are no plans to build such ships either. Consequently, naval presence in the arctic will be seasonal for decades to come." However, in such a hostile operating environment, warships are not the only way to make an

effective national statement. "Power projection in the Arctic won't be about battle-groups and weapons systems, it'll be about support and rescue," says defence blogger Newton Hunter. "Sure, you'll see battleships zipping in an out during the ice-free times for show, but it's the ice-going capability of the non-combatant fleets that gives you a pretty clear idea of how stakeholders see the future strategic importance of the region. Who's up on the game, and who needs to play catch-up." Russia: embracing the challenge Russia is one nation clearly embracing the challenge. The region was declared a major strategic interest in the "National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation until 2020" and with Arctic naval capabilities prioritised by President Putin himself, Moscow has started a major programme of investment in both submarines and ice-breakers to back it up. "Moscow has started a major programme of investment in both submarines and ice-breakers to back it up." State-owned Rosatomflot already runs the only nuclear-powered ice-breakers in the world, but that existing fleet is soon to be bolstered, most notably by the addition of the first of the next-generation LK-60 Class. At 173m (568ft) long and 34m (112ft) wide, it will be 14 metres longer and four metres broader than current ships, and capable of powering its way through around three metres of ice, driven by its two 'RITM-200' compact pressurized water reactors. With a RUB 37bn ($1.1 bn) budget, construction is scheduled to begin next year, and the vessel will enter service in 2017. In the interim, the Coast Guard will receive new ice-class patrol ships, while Moscow continues to emphasise its ambitions with annual Northern Fleet exercises in the Kara Sea, this year involving more than 7,000 personnel and 20 vessels, including the 250-metre nuclear-powered flag ship, 'Peter the Great'. US: ill-equipped and "inadequately prepared" Washington has, at least until recently, viewed things rather differently, as a 2012 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies makes clear. "A New Security Architecture for the Arctic; An American Perspective" describes a US approach that "has largely been to outsource any requirements to foreign-flagged commercial vessels or borrow ice-strengthened vessels from Canada, Russia or Sweden." "A 2011 war game simulation highlighted just how ill-equipped the world's foremost naval power seemed to be." The nuclear submarine fleet obviously remains a major asset, but the navy seems distinctly wanting in terms of surface ships, having signed over its last ice-breaker to the US Coast Guard in 1966. The Coast Guard itself currently has only one operational ice-breaker, the medium-sized 'Healy'. By the start of 2013, 'Healy' will be joined by a heavy ice-breaker - returning to service after repairs and upgrades - and work on the design of a new heavy vessel is underway, with the contract expected to be awarded within five years. Northern Edge exercises every two years in the Gulf of Alaska aside, US vessels rarely venture into Arctic waters - and that lack of capability is now sounding alarm bells, particularly after a 2011 war game simulation highlighted just how ill-equipped the world's foremost naval power seemed to be. A summary from the Naval War College revealed that the US Navy's lack of ice-capable ships, support facilities and adequate communications left it "inadequately prepared to conduct sustained maritime operations in the Arctic." Nevertheless, according to Lundesgaard: "The US Navy does not seem overly concerned about a military build-up in

the area. The US Navy has made no great efforts at increasing its presence in the area, and I have seen no evidence to suggest that this will change anytime soon." Canada: a clear policy Canada, like Russia, affords the Arctic a high priority, with its policy for the region focussed on the four stated goals of sovereignty, social and economic development, governance and environmental protection. In practical terms, this translates into a major programme of investment in modernising the Canadian Navy and Coast Guard and revitalising the fleet - including allocating around $33bn across 30 years to build 28 new vessels. Between six and eight Arctic patrol ships and a new ice-breaker will be included in the project, bolstering the country's existing ice-going capabilities. Norway: a display of naval power According to Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre: "The High North is the most important strategic priority in Norwegian foreign policy" - and Oslo has allocated the resources and increased the military presence in the region to back up his words. Arguably the most high-profile example of this is the annual visit by at least one of the navy's largest vessels - this year, its most modern warship, 'KNM Thor Heyerdahl' - to the territorial waters around Svalbard and Bear Island, intentionally to demonstrate Norwegian sovereignty in the area. The last of five frigates built between 2006 and 2010, at a cost of NOK 21bn ($3.7bn), the vessel and its sister-ships represented the largest investment in Norwegian defence to date, and maintaining dominion in the High North is said to have played a large part in the procurement decision. A different kind of Cold War "It's a different kind of 'Cold War' this time, and so far, Russia's winning." The military build-up has fuelled some

media speculation about the prospect of international conflict, particularly after Russia famously planted a flag on the seabed in 2007, but Hunter sees it as nothing more sinister than the Arctic nations keeping an eye on their newly open waters. Lundesgaard agrees. Three years

ago, he reasoned that the potential for an armed conflict in the region was "rather limited", principally because there is little actual dispute over resource ownership and he still holds that opinion today. He points to the historic agreement between Norway and Russia in September 2010, which settled a longstanding maritime boundary dispute to the satisfaction of both countries. "It shows that Russia is willing to settle disagreements peacefully." That willingness

is, of course, backed up by Moscow's impressive ice-capable fleet. "It's a different kind of 'Cold War' this time," Hunter says, "and so far, Russia's winning."

Alt causes to Arctic exploration – lack of icebreakersYazev No Date [Valery Yazev, First Vice-Chairman of the State Duma Committee for Natural Resources, the Environment and Ecology, and the President of the Russian Gas Society, The exploration of the Arctic is impossible without the development of the nuclear icebreaker fleet, http://www.arctic-info.com/ExpertOpinion/Page/the-exploration-of-the-arctic-is-impossible-without-the-development-of-the-nuclear-icebreaker-fleet, NO DATE]

The signing of a cooperation agreement between OAO Novatek and Rosatom state corporation is an important step in implementing the national strategic objective, the exploration of the Arctic. This document formalized the parties' intent to develop a mutually beneficial partnership to coordinate investment and innovation activities. The agreement is related to safe and efficient navigation in Arctic Waters, White and Baltic Seas; the coordination of inter-related investment projects, the development of new technologies and competitive products (including import substitution) to raise the efficiency of geological exploration, production, transportation, storage and processing of natural gas and gas condensate. The signed agreement also envisages conclusion of a long-term service contract for the support of icebreakers escorting vessels carrying LNG plant products, through the Northern Sea Route for a period of at least 15 years. This guarantees stable workload for the Russian nuclear icebreaker fleet for 15 years ahead. Two years ago the first large transit tanker of Novatek was escorted along the Northern Sea Route, whose utilization back then was 120 thousand tons. Today, we are talking about the increase of transit shipments’ volumes up to 2 million tons. This is a very significant growth indicating the increased utilization rate of this route and growing efficiency of the nuclear icebreaker fleet management. I would like to note very positive changes since the transfer of the nuclear icebreaker fleet into Rosatom charge three years ago. We are hopeful therefore, that by the year 2020 Atomflot would provide the transit of 17.5 million tons of cargo annually, which would exceed the shipment volumes on the Northern Sea Route more that ten-fold, compared to three years ago. The exploration of the Arctic is impossible without the development of the nuclear icebreaker fleet, and one of the Rosatom strategic steps was the signing in the August of this year, of a contract with Baltiysky zavod, JSC (Baltic Shipyard) for the construction of the first icebreaker of a new generation. The state atomic energy company has already allocated funds for this large-scale project. The plans also include construction of two more nuclear icebreakers.

2NC – No Internal LinkRatification of LOST is a pre-requisite to Arctic Presence and LeadershipGray 13 (Daniel W., Lieutenant Commander, United States Coast Guard, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIV NORFOLK VA JOINT ADVANCED WARFIGHTING SCHOOL, “CHANGING ARCTIC: A STRATEGIC ANALYSIS OF UNITED STATES ARCTIC POLICY AND THE UNITED NATIONS CONVENTION ON THE LAW OF THE SEA”, 5/2/13, http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA581139)//WL

During testimony to the ¶ Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 2012, the Chief of Naval Operations, ¶ Admiral Jonathan Greenert, asserted that an assurance of codified international law and ¶ an institutionalized process for dispute resolution greatly enhances the ability of the ¶ United States to deter aggression, contain conflict, and win the nation’s wars . UNCLOS ¶ guarantees freedom of navigation in areas of strategic interest. The freedom of ¶ navigation established in UNCLOS is essential in keeping important sea lines of ¶ communication open.15¶ General Charles Jacoby, commander of USNORTHCOM, ¶ explained that the future of U.S. security would rely heavily on cooperative partnerships . ¶ “From an Arctic perspective, our accession to the convention is important to encouraging ¶ cooperative relationships among Arctic states . . . . Future defense and civil support ¶ scenarios in the Arctic maritime domain will require closely coordinated, multinational ¶ operations .”16¶ ¶ The Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Robert Papp, also

testified before ¶ Congress in support of U.S. accession into UNCLOS. In addition to maritime security ¶ and freedom of navigation, ADM Papp conveyed the need for accession to set ¶ international provisions on law enforcement, especially drug smuggling. Arguing that a ¶ non-party status hurts U.S. efforts in gaining cooperation via bi-lateral agreements with ¶ its international

partners, ADM Papp explained that the provisions embedded in ¶ UNCLOS would “cement a common cooperative framework, language, and operating framework . . . in securing expeditious boarding, search enforcement, and disposition ¶ decisions” of law enforcement cases .17¶ ADM Papp stated his belief that accession into ¶ UNCLOS was essential for the U.S. to pursue an Arctic strategy . He described UNCLOS ¶ as the “umbrella” necessary to the Coast Guard’s statutory missions of environmental ¶ protection, maritime security, and law enforcement in the Arctic. Accession into ¶ UNCLOS, he said, “provides the legal framework we need to take advantage of ¶ opportunities .”18¶ ¶ Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

in 2012, Thomas J. ¶ Donohue, the President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, testified that ¶ “joining the convention will provide the U.S. a critical voice on maritime issues from ¶ mineral claims in the Arctic to how International Seabed Authority funds are distributed ¶ . . . . Contrary to some opponents claims, joining the Treaty promotes American ¶ sovereignty. LOS strengthens our sovereignty by codifying our property claims in the ¶ Arctic and on our ECS [extended continental shelf].” 19¶ The business community claims ¶ that technology is at the point where it is financially feasible to exploit these resources; ¶ however “companies need the certainty the Convention provides in order to explore ¶ beyond 200 miles and to place experts on international bodies that will delineate claims ¶ in the Arctic.”¶ 20¶ The Chairman and CEO of Exxon, R. W. Tillerson, in a 2012 letter to¶ the Senate Foreign Service Committee, expressed his company’s support for the ¶ ratification of UNCLOS as a necessity to financially and efficiently operate in the Arctic. ¶ He elaborated that there are currently overlapping claims in the Arctic and that UNCLOS ¶ provides the legal basis necessary for resolving claims and establishing stability ¶ necessary to support development. Otherwise, “the lack of legal certainty unnecessarily ¶ clouds our investment motivation.”21¶ Thomas J. Donahue of the U.S. Chamber of ¶ Commerce echoed Tillerson’s statement in a January 2012 letter to Senators John Kerry ¶ and Richard Lugar, pointing out that without UNCLOS “no U.S. company will make the ¶ multi-billion dollar investments required to recover these resources without the legal ¶ certainty the Convention provides.”22¶ ¶ In addition to exploiting the resources in a respective economic exclusion zone, ¶ Arctic countries are scrambling to map out their extended continental shelves. For the ¶ United States, this could produce billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars in profits from oil, ¶ natural gas, and minerals. Of great concern is the harvesting of seabed minerals in the ¶ form of rare earth metals: namely manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt. In discussing ¶ rare earth metals and the need for ratification, the National Association of Manufacturers ¶ claims that “China produces more than 90 percent of the world’s supply and also ¶ consumes roughly 60 percent . . . . China recently imposed significant export restrictions on its rare earth production. In 2010, it announced it would cut exports by 40 percent in ¶ 2012.”23¶ These minerals are extremely important to the production of ¶ telecommunications, defense systems, and manufacturing. Without being a ratified ¶ member of UNCLOS, proponents of the treaty point out that the United States will not be ¶ heard in the policy making process. As a non-party the U.S. does not have a ¶ representative on the International Seabed Authority (ISA) or Commission on the Limits ¶ of the Continental Shelf

(CLCS). ¶ These same arguments extend to the exploitation of Arctic oil and natural gas as ¶ well. If the United States were to gain all of the undersea area that many believe it is ¶ entitled to through its extended continental shelf, that area could extend up to 600nm ¶ from the Alaska coastline. In addition, the U.S. could gain upwards of 4.1 million square ¶ miles of ocean floor, an area greater than the 48 contiguous states, the largest jurisdiction ¶ grant of any nation in the world.24¶ Just the area within the EEZ around Alaska may hold ¶ as much as 27 billion barrels of oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.25¶ In total, ¶ the United States would have the largest EEZ/ECS area of any country in the world, one ¶ that extends into three separate oceans. ¶ Shipping is another concern for UNCLOS advocates. With the opening of the ¶ Arctic, the international community is looking at the possibilities of shortened commerce ¶ transit routes that could save millions in time and money. Supporters argue that relying ¶ on existing customary maritime laws does not provide enough legal certainty for business to grow. Over 95 percent of U.S. commerce is transported by water. UNCLOS ¶ supporters point to the benefits of legally established territorial seas, the right of innocent ¶ passage, and unimpeded transit through archipelagos and international straits. Stable, ¶ long-term laws benefit business worldwide. In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary ¶ Clinton, the President of the Maritime Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, Michael ¶ Sacco, presented the argument that U.S. accession to UNCLOS creates a safer ¶ atmosphere for international shipping, as it “places an obligation on its signatories to do ¶ everything in their power to preserve high seas for innocent use.”26¶ Without ratifying ¶ UNCLOS, other countries could potentially have a voice in crafting international laws ¶ that are unfavorable to U.S. business. ¶ UNCLOS has been a contentious issue in the U.S. since its creation. No one in ¶ the U.S. political arena appears to be wavering in their beliefs for or against UNCLOS; ¶ hence there are no signs

of resolution on the horizon. America’s wait-and-see approach ¶ to the Arctic continues to be at odds with the certainty of a changing Arctic environment. ¶ The U.S’s inability to create concrete policy for the Arctic could eventually force the ¶ U.S. to make decisions on service capabilities that are undesirable . For instance,

lack of ¶ policy may eliminate or defer acquisition projects for needed Arctic capabilities . What is ¶ not

uncertain is that other countries are moving forward with succinct Arctic policies that ¶ will prepare them for upcoming military, economic, and political Arctic contingencies.

Icebreakers are a prerequisite to resource developmentRestino 14 [Carey Restino, Arctic sounder reporter, Icebreaker fleet in U.S. lags behind, January 13, 2014, http://www.thearcticsounder.com/article/1202icebreaker_fleet_in_us_lags_behind]

There is also the issue of national security, as well as territorial rights in the Arctic. With many countries eyeing the newly ice-free waters, how the division will occur is somewhat up in the air. The congressional report outlines the sometimes-strained relationship between the United States and Russia, not to mention the potential for modern-day piracy and fishing rights as issues that will require increased security in the Arctic in the future. Congressional delegates fly icebreaker flag high Sen. Lisa Murkowski has long been a proponent of a beefier icebreaker fleet

in the north. Quoted as saying that resource development in the Arctic cannot occur without icebreaker capacity, she said the lack of funding in support of the effort has stood in the way of such ventures . Sen. Mark Begich, chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard, has also been working hard to secure funding, but it's been slow in coming. The Senate passed a bill that included $8.9 billion for the Coast Guard for 2010, while Begich introduced the Coast Guard Reauthorization Act, which is expected to be taken up this winter. That bill authorizes $8.7 billion for the fiscal years 2012 and 2013 and makes the Coast Guard the sole provider of polar ice-breaking services to agencies of the federal government. The bill also requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to ensure that the Coast Guard continues to operate a minimum of two heavy polar icebreakers as part of

its fleet. It also calls for a feasibility study for a deep-water sea port in the Arctic "to protect and advance United States interests within the Arctic region." There is also a recommendation from the Coast Guard based on several years of study, which is still making its way through the channels, said Keogh. Past recommendations dating back to 2008 have called for as

many as six new icebreakers. Keogh noted that while private companies may acquire their own icebreaker capacity because of their interest in developing resources in Arctic waters, those ships cannot be depended upon to respond in an emergency. Keogh said the Coast Guard intends to set up some initial infrastructure in the

North Slope this summer and icebreaker funding will hopefully find its way through the various channels and into actual vessels. "Obviously, we wish we had an updated fleet," Keogh said. "We are there for everyone — not for our own means or for industry."

1NC – No Arctic WarNo armed conflict in the Arctic – legal frameworks and attitude shiftVieru 10 [January 4th, 2010, By Tudor Vieru, News editor at softpedia, No Armed Conflict Over the Arctic, http://news.softpedia.com/news/No-Armed-Conflict-Over-the-Arctic-131043.shtml]

Over recent years, a war of statements concerning the Arctic region broke out, with numerous countries bordering the area claiming large swaths of it for their own. With the effects of global warming making themselves felt

more and more, new shipping lanes are opened in northern waters, and maritime companies and governments want to make the best of this. Still, in spite of so many countries taking a stand on the issue, the possibility of them going to war over it is fairly remote, AlphaGalileo reports. In addition to control over new and profitable shipping lanes, the Arctic also offers large oil reserves, which companies are eager to explore but cannot touch at this time . Governments have also taken a keen interest in these reserves. Russian authorities are at the forefront of this movement, staking their claims to large swaths of land in the Arctic, and even conducting military exercises in the region to show their strength. Add to the situation the fact that a number of Arctic borders are under dispute, and you could

have the recipe for an armed conflict, analysts said last year. In a new analysis of the situation, Norwegian scientists from

the Fridtjof Nansens Institute (FNI) assert that dispassionate diplomacy is a solution far more likely to resolve any potential deadlock than military aggression by one or more countries against others. “Contrary to the general picture drawn by the media and some commentators over the last couple of years , the Arctic region does not suffer under a state of virtual anarchy . The era when states could claim rights to territory and resourcesby simply planting their flag is long gone,” FNI sea expert and study researcher Oystein Jensen explains. “The basic

fact here is that the Arctic Ocean is an ocean, and as such, regulated by the law of the sea. Previous tendencies to question the legal status of the Arctic Ocean as a sea area – due to it being predominantly ice-covered – stand no chance of being accepted today. At the outset, there is thus no support in international law to treat the waters of the frozen North differently from other maritime spaces,” the scientist adds. “Notably, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – the relevant legal framework for national legislation in most state-to-state relations today – contains a clause reserved especially to ice-covered waters. The Convention thus leaves little doubt that a broad consensus exists as to the question of the applicability of the law of the sea to all parts of the Arctic Ocean ,” Jensen reveals. The

researchers focused mostly on Norwegian-Russian relationships and found that, while there were indeed animosities in some regards, there was no chance of armed conflict between the two countries.

2NC – No Arctic WarNo risk of Arctic war – energy resources lie within territorial boundariesKraska 10 [JAMES KRASKA, is a Commander in the United States Navy and professor of international law at the U.S. Naval War College (NWC), teaching in the areas of international law, law of armed conflict, international humanitarian law, oceans law and policy and Arctic law and policy, The widening competition for Arctic resources and access begs U.S. policy coherence. Published on May 1, 2010, http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2010/05/01/northern-exposures/]

Why does anyone care about such legal claims? It’s not just national pride. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the region holds 13 percent of the undiscovered oil and 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas in the world, and these figures do not include potentially vast reserves of methane gas hydrates.6Areas of the Beaufort Sea, waters north of Siberia and the seabed of the Sverdrup Basin are all probable areas of interest. Most Arctic energy resources, however, are located within coastal states’ recognized 200-mile exclusive economic zones—not subject to controversy or potential to incite conflict. The talk of a war over energy resources is mostly hype—red meat for Canadian and Russian nationalists. It’s not the only economic factor in play, however, and more than economics is involved as well.

No Arctic warfare – posturing Merchant 12 [So Who's Going to Start the Oil War in the Arctic?, BRIAN MERCHANT, SENIOR EDITOR, November 14, 2012, http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/so-who-s-going-to-start-the-oil-war-in-the-arctic]

Who’s it going to be? Who’s going to kick off the armed conflict over all those precious oil and gas reserves in the Arctic? Russia? Nah , Putin’s steely villainy is just a show. Norway? Denmark? Nope—too Scandinavian, too neutral, too peaceful. Canada? Please. So how about the ol U.S. of A.? We do like to toss our military might around, and our trigger finger’s probably getting pretty itchy, what with the drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Chances are, it’s not going to be anybody; there will likely be no warfare in the Arctic anytime soon , despite Russia’s insistence on pissing everyone off by lowering its flag onto the ocean floor there, “proving” it has a claim to the land. And that’s valuable land. Some 13% of the world’s proven oil reserves remain stored away up there, and a full 30% of the gas. As climate change melts away the sea ice and opens up access, corporations and governments are increasingly bullish in their efforts to secure the rights to that land. And so far, there’s no unified framework in place to sort out who gets to drill where—the U.N. wants northern countries to agree on one by 2013..

Arctic conflict is unlikely – not a source of major tensionCNN Money 12 (Steve Hargreaves -, “U.S. missing out on Arctic land grab”, 7/18/12, http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/18/news/economy/Arctic-land-grab/index.htm)

Canada and Russia claim the passages are part of their inland waterways, subject to the rules, restrictions, surveillance and possible imposition of hefty transit fees by the host country . Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the Northern Sea Route could one day rival the Suez Canal in terms of ship traffic. The Suez generates $5 billion a year in

revenue for Egypt. Much has been made of these Arctic disputes, as well as what appears to be a military build-up in the region. In 2008, shortly after planting a Russian flag on the bottom of the ocean at the North Pole, Russia conducted long-rage strategic bomber flights over the Arctic -- the first such exercises since the end of the Cold War, according to the CRS report. Meanwhile Canada has constructed a cold-weather training base in its Arctic territory, and ordered the construction of six ice-capable ships to

patrol the Northwest Passage. Yet despite these moves, most analyst say a military confrontation in the region is

unlikely. Four of the five Arctic states with competing claims are NATO members. And if the United States and Russia were able to survive 40-plus years of Cold War antagonism, it's unlikely they'd go to war over shipping fees or drilling rights.

Their impacts are wrong – conflict in the Arctic is caused my misinterpreted signals ISN 11 (International Relations and Security Network, “Colliding Geopolitics and the Arctic”, 12/8/11, http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Security-Watch/Articles/Detail/?ots783=4888caa0-b3db-1461-98b9-e20e7b9c13d4&lng=en&id=134823)

Borgerson’s highly geopolitical tale is illustrative of a common narrative about the Arctic. It invariably stresses climate change, increasing competition for resources, and the potential for conflict. Last week’s discussion of critical geopolitics , however, should remind us that this narrative is far from the only one that can tell us about the Arctic today. Today’s

second article, “Have you heard the one about the disappearing ice? Recasting Arctic Geopolitics,” challenges this conventional narrative. Far from accepting it as an inevitable reflection of global warming or climate change, it argues that the prospect of military conflict in the Arctic is largely a manufactured one. According to the authors, this orthodox construction of Arctic geopolitics has two main elements, neither of which are legitimate – 1) the construction of Arctic space in general as open, indeterminate and therefore dangerous, and 2) the political construction of Arctic space in the neo-realist terms of structural anarchy and territorial competition associated with a ‘great game.’ Together these two groups of representational choices conspire to misread Arctic geography – and the recent events of Arctic history. In particular, they contribute to an almost complete misunderstanding of the 2007 Russian Polar expedition as a geopolitically motivated Arctic resource grab, instead of a routine scientific endeavor that was only retroactively (and self-

consciously) exploited by Moscow. To begin with, the authors argue, the Arctic is represented as a region of new ‘openness’, which signifies indeterminacy, which then signifies danger. “Melting ice,” they write, “is correlated with enhanced accessibility,” and this new accessibility is correlated with the use of the Arctic for hostile purposes. In addition to hostility from traditional states, the authors take Borgerson to task for warning us about Arctic-based illegal immigration and terrorism, to include a scenario in which a future Arctic oil infrastructure becomes a target for terrorist attacks that could undermine North American energy security. “Arctic openness,” argue Dittmer et

al “is central to the performance of Arctic geopolitics, enabling sabre-rattling by the five Arctic Ocean coastal states.” All of this, they remind us, ignores the reality in much of the Arctic – e.g., that the movement of goods and persons remains prohibitively expensive for most actors and that actual military combat there is almost unimaginable (as Russian strategic analyst Pavel Baev pointed out at the time). The second representational move that has become

characteristic of orthodox geopolitical portrayals of the Arctic is the idea of it – in general, but in the case of Arctic governance regimes in

particular – as weak, frail and vulnerable. In conjunction with the idea of ‘openness,’ this promotes a geopolitics of the Arctic understood as a territorial scramble under conditions of international ‘anarchy’—very much a proverbial ‘great game’. For Dittmer et al, Borgerson’s article is typical of accounts that exaggerate the ‘anarchic’ character of the Arctic by misrepresenting (and underestimating) the strength of international institutions and agreements in the region. In addition to seriously mischaracterizing the workings of UNCLOS, Borgerson, as already noted, describes the Arctic Council as ‘emasculated’ by its inability to address military issues and therefore unable to set

‘ground rules’ for the region. Yet this implicitly assumes that the region has a militarized future rather than providing evidence of the greater likelihood of that future. Indeed, the authors argue, empirical indications that such a future is likely are few and generally ambiguous. The Arctic Council, they suggest, is a vehicle for greater cooperation, peace and security in the Arctic, and not a liability that threatens its future. This skewed representational climate is most typified by its misreading of the Russian ‘flag- planting’ expedition of 2007. According to Pavel Baev, Moscow was barely even aware of the expedition in advance. Its depiction, therefore, as the opening move in an Arctic ‘great game’ was little more than bald

political opportunism by “Putin’s spin masters” who immediately realized how well it might suit “the ‘Putin project’ of

consolidating Russian State authority on the basis of a supposedly threatening international environment.” Nevertheless, the expedition was widely interpreted in the West as “prima facie evidence of Russian realpolitik” in trying to annex the Arctic. Instead of attributing the above expedition to “some sovereign geopolitical master-logic ,” argue

Dittmer et al, Arctic geographies should instead provide “a more complex picture that highlights how the expedition was improvised, with its supposed geopolitical meaning and significance emerging afterwards.” Borgerson and his fellow travelers, in other words, draw a dubious straight line from the “realistically irreversible” melting of polar ice to an inevitable military-political conflict for the region’s resources. There are, argue Dittmer and co, alternatives to this type of lockstep geopolitical determinism.

No risk of escalationSnurbiv 9 [Akexeu Snurbiv 1/23 ,2009, “the arctic is hot”, The Russian Oil and Gas Report, lexis]

The Arctic faces the threat of armed conflicts, possibly involving Russia, in the years ahead. This conclusion has been arrived at independently by the Danish Institute of Military Studies and Australian Armed Forces analysts. The open part of a classified report from the Australian military says: "The Arctic is melting, and mining on the sea bed is becoming profitable. If disputes over mining rights cannot be resolved by peaceful means, armed force may be used." Similar concerns are expressed in the Danish report. Five countries are claiming areas close to the North Pole:

Denmark, Russia, the United States, Canada, and Norway. Four of them are NATO members. "It is hard to imagine them fighting each other," said Major

Henrik Edig Jorgensen, a co-author of the Danish military report. "Based on available maps of the Arctic regions that Moscow is claiming, up to 70% of their oil and gas reserves would end up in the hands of the Russians. The stakes are too high - they have too much to lose. If the Arctic is full of warships monitoring each other, no oil platforms could be built there. So militarization of the North is not in Moscow's interests." But if there is another situation like the recent five-day war in the Caucasus, and a NATO country is involved, the Arctic could go up in flames.

Zero chance of Arctic war---expertsMahony 13 (Honor, EU Observer, "Fear of Arctic conflict are 'overblown'", 2013, euobserver.com/foreign/119479)

The Arctic has become a new frontier in international relations, but fear of potential conflict in the resource-rich region is overblown, say experts.¶ For long a mystery because of its general impenetrability, melting ice caps are revealing more and more of the Arctic region to scientists, researchers and industry.¶ Climate change experts can take a more precise look at a what global warming is doing to the planet, shipping trade routes once considered unthinkable are now possible, and governments and businesses are in thrall to the potential exploitation of coal, iron, rare earths and oil.¶ The interest is reflected in the growing list of those wanting to have a foot in the Arctic council, a forum of eight countries with territory in the polar region.¶ While the US, Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and Canada form the council, the EU commission, China, India, South Korea and Japan have all expressed an

interest in having a permanent observer status.¶ "The Arctic has become a new meeting place for America, Europe and the Asia Pacific," says Damien Degeorges, founder of the Arctic Policy and Economic Forum.¶ During a recent conference on Arctic shipping routes in the European Parliament, Degeorges noted that "China has been the most active by far in the last years."¶ He points to its red-carpet treatment of politicians from Greenland, a territory that recently got full control over its wealth of natural resources. Bejing also cosied up to Iceland after the island's financial meltdown. The two undertook a joint expedition to the North Pole and the Chinese have the largest foreign embassy in Reykjavik.¶ Meanwhile, South Korea's president visited Greenland last year and shipping hubs like Singapore are holding Arctic conferences.¶ The interest is being spurred by melting icebergs.¶ Last year saw a record low of multi-year ice - permanent ice - in the polar sea. This means greater shipping and mineral exploitation potential. There were 37 transits of the North East Passage (NEP), running from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the top of Russia, in 2011. This rose to 47 in 2012.¶ For a ship travelling from the Netherlands to China, the route around 40 percent shorter than using the traditional Suez Canal. A huge saving for China, where 50 percent of its GDP is connected to shipping. Russia is also keen to exploit the route as the rise in temperatures is melting the permafrost in its northern territory, playing havoc with its roads and railways.¶ According to Jan Fritz Hansen, deputy director of the Danish shipowners’ association, the real breakthrough will come when there is a cross polar route. At the moment there are are two options - the North East Passge for which Russia asks high fees for transiting ships - or the much-less developed North West Passage along Canada.¶ His chief concern is that "trade up there is free. We don't want protectionism. Everyone should be allowed to compete up there."¶ And he believes the biggest story of the Arctic is not how it is traversed but what will be taken out of it. According to the US Geological Survey (2009), the Arctic holds 13 percent of undiscovered oil and 30 percent of undiscovered gas supplies.¶ Greenland is already at the centre of political tussle between the EU and China over future exploitation of its rare earths - used in a range of technologies such as hybrid cars or smart phones.¶ "The biggest adventure will be the Arctic destination.

There is a lot of valuable goods that should be taken out of nature up there," he said.¶ This resource potential - although

tempered by the fact that much of it is not economically viable to exploit - has led to fears that the Arctic region is ripe for conflict.¶ But this is nonsense, says Nil Wang, a former Danish admiral and Arctic expert.¶ Most resources have an owner¶ "There is a general public perception that the Arctic region holds great potential for conflict because it is an ungoverned region where all these resources are waiting to be picked up by the one who gets there first. That is completely false," he said.¶ He notes that it is an "extremely well-regulated region ," with international rules saying that coastal states have territorial jurisdiction up to 12 nautical miles off their coast.¶ On top of that is a further 200 nautical miles of exclusive economic zone "where you own every value in the water and under the seabed."¶ "Up to 97 percent of energy resources is

actually belonging to someone already," says Wang.¶ He suggest the actors in the region all want to create a business environment, which requires stable politics and security.

Newly deployed capabilities are defensive---incentives for cooperation are likely to increase over time, conflicts won’t be shooting wars Grätz 12 (Jonas, researcher at the Center for Security Studies, July 2012, “The Geopolitics of the Arctic Commons,” http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Articles/Special-Feature/Detail/?lng=en&id=157901&tabid=1453469894&contextid774=157901&contextid775=157922)

Following the disarmament of the 1990s, new military capabilities are again being deployed in the Arctic. In many instances, these capabilities are defensive in nature and linked to intensified activities concerning either the

extraction of raw materials or new “soft” security issues. Due to the weather conditions, only military or coast guard assets tend to be able to safely operate under Arctic conditions. In light of the new possibilities, there is also a growing awareness of the lack of surveillance capabilities for the territory and the enforcement of sovereignty. Particularly for countries like Canada and Denmark, building up policing and military capabilities serves to avoid the impression that the Arctic is of little national interest.¶ However, offensive capabilities are also being built up in the Arctic, reflecting global ambitions rather than changing regional dynamics. Since the Arctic Ocean provides Russia’s best access to the world’s main oceans, two thirds of its navy are already stationed in the Arctic. Instead of upgrading border protection capabilities, Moscow so far has focused on modernising its offensive capabilities for the purpose of power projection. What is more, Russia has resumed patrol flights over the Arctic and submarine patrols previously carried out during the Cold War, albeit at a lower frequency. This

testifies to the persistence of a rather traditional Russian threat perception.¶ Today, the Arctic is characterised by a mixture of cooperation, competition, and conflicts of interest. There are indications that the growing presence of non-Arctic players prompts more cooperation among the coastal states. Open conflicts are unlikely to break out in the foreseeable future: While existing mechanisms for cooperation may be too weak to resolve some conflicts of interest, the costs of military conflict will likely be considered too high in light of uncertain gains. If conflicts were to occur, they would probably be limited in both time and space, aiming at the enforcement of interpretations of international law. Having said that, as the involvement of all key political players increases, the Arctic is also the scene of overarching geo-strategic competition and conflict. The extent to which the thawing of the Arctic means conflict or rapprochement and cooperation will therefore also depend on the shape of the future world order and the relationships between the different power centres.

Past trends prove – cooperation is more likelyFries 12 [Tom Fries, Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Arctic Institute, Apr 18 2012, “Perspective Correction: How We Misinterpret Arctic Conflict,” http://www.thearcticinstitute.org/2012/04/perspective-correction-how-we.html]

It’s not only the handcuffs of many colors worn by the Arctic states that will keep them from getting aggressive,

it is also the good precedents that exist for cooperation here. Russia and Norway recently resolved a forty

year-old dispute over territory in the Barents. There are regular examples of military cooperation among the four littoral NATO states and between Norway and Russia. Even the US and Russia are finding opportunities to work together. Meanwhile, the need to develop search-and-rescue capabilities is making cross-border cooperation a necessity for all Arctic actors. There are numerous international research and private-sector ventures, even in

areas other than hydrocarbons. These will only grow in importance with time. In fact, it would seem that for many of these

countries, the Arctic is a welcome relief - a site where international collaboration is comparatively amicable.

1NC – Science Diplomacy DefenseScience diplomacy doesn’t create effective cooperation on geopolitical issuesDickson 9 (David Dickson, Founding Director of the Science-Development Network, June 4, 2009, "The limits of science diplomacy," online: http://www.scidev.net/en/editorials/the-limits-of-science-diplomacy.html)

Using science for diplomatic purposes has obvious attractions and several benefits. But there are limits to what it can achieve. The scientific community has a deserved reputation for its international perspective — scientists often ignore national boundaries and interests when it comes to exchanging ideas or collaborating on global problems. So it is not surprising that science attracts the interest of politicians keen to open channels of communication with other states. Signing agreements on scientific and technological cooperation is often the first step for countries wanting to forge closer working relationships. More significantly, scientists have formed key links behind-the-scenes when more overt dialogue has been impossible. At the height of the Cold War, for example, scientific organisations

provided a conduit for discussing nuclear weapons control. Only so much science can do Recently, the Obama administration has given this field a new push, in its desire to pursue "soft diplomacy" in regions such as the Middle East. Scientific agreements have been at the forefront of the administration's activities in countries such as Iraq and Pakistan.

But — as emerged from a meeting entitled New Frontiers in Science Diplomacy, held in London this week (1–2 June) — using science for diplomatic purposes is not as straightforward as it seems. Some scientific collaboration clearly demonstrates what countries can achieve by working together. For example, a new synchrotron under construction in Jordan is rapidly becoming a symbol of

the potential for teamwork in the Middle East. But whether scientific cooperation can become a precursor for political collaboration is less evident. For example, despite hopes that the Middle East synchrotron would help bring peace to the region, several countries have been reluctant to support it until the Palestine problem is resolved. Indeed, one speaker at the London meeting (organised by the UK's Royal Society and the

American Association for the Advancement of Science) even suggested that the changes scientific innovations bring

inevitably lead to turbulence and upheaval. In such a context, viewing science as a driver for peace may be wishful thinking.

2NC – Science Diplomacy DefenseSQ solves science diplomacy Johnson 10 (Jenny. American Association for the Advancement of Science, 8 April. http://www.scidev.net/en/news/usaid-appointment-boosts-science-diplomacy-focus.html)

The US government's international development agency is stepping up its focus on science and technology with a key appointment intended to enhance the agency's programmes in the Middle East and bolster the Obama administration's push for science diplomacy. Alex Dehgan was appointed USAID's science and technology advisor last month (11 March). The agency described him in a statement as "the focal point for implementing the Administrator's vision to restore science and technology to its rightful place within USAID". An agency spokeswoman said that Dehgan will work closely with USAID's senior counselor and director of innovation, Maura O'Neill,

and will help shape development strategies, as well as create "novel science-based initiatives". Dehgan's appointment is widely seen as strengthening the administration's commitment to science diplomacy — the use of scientific programmes, such as efforts to forge international cooperation among scientists and engineers, to achieve broader political objectives. Dehgan, a conservation biologist and an attorney in international law, has worked for the US State Department in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. He also has experience working on large-scale conservation projects in the non-governmental sector. The appointment is "very encouraging",

said Caroline Wagner, author of The New Invisible College: Science for Development. " Dehgan has a long background in science diplomacy, he is a bench-trained scientist, and he is young — he has energy and drive." She said that this appointment adds to a growing list of high-level experts currently promoting US science diplomacy . "There is a lot of interest and experience that's being brought to this issue." Al Teich, director of science and policy programmes at the

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), said that the appointment of Dehgan — who has worked as an AAAS

fellow, helping to set up an electronic library of scientific journals in Iraq — shows that science diplomacy is "an idea whose time has come".

No Solvency: Can’t overcome divergent international interests Dickson 9 (David Dickson, Founding Director of the Science-Development Network, June 4, 2009, "The limits of science diplomacy," online: http://www.scidev.net/en/editorials/the-limits-of-science-diplomacy.html)

Perhaps the most contentious area discussed at the meeting was how science diplomacy can frame developed countries' efforts to help build scientific capacity in the developing world. There is little to quarrel with in collaborative efforts that are put forward with a genuine desire for partnership. Indeed, partnership — whether between individuals, institutions or countries — is the new buzzword in the "science for development"

community. But true partnership requires transparent relations between partners who are prepared to meet as equals. And that goes against diplomats' implicit role: to promote and defend their own countries' interests. John Beddington, the British government's chief scientific adviser, may have been a bit harsh when he told the meeting that a diplomat is someone who is "sent abroad to lie for his country". But he touched a raw nerve. Worlds apart yet co-dependent The truth is that science and politics make an uneasy alliance. Both need the other. Politicians need science to achieve their goals, whether social, economic or — unfortunately — military; scientists need political support to fund their research. But they also occupy different universes. Politics is, at root, about exercising power by one means or another. Science is — or should be — about pursuing robust knowledge that can be put to useful purposes. A strategy for promoting science diplomacy that respects these differences deserves support. Particularly so if it focuses on ways to leverage political and financial backing for science's more humanitarian goals, such as tackling climate change or reducing world poverty. But a commitment to science diplomacy that ignores the differences — acting for

example as if science can substitute politics (or perhaps more worryingly, vice versa), is dangerous. The Obama administration's commitment to "soft power" is already faltering. It faces challenges ranging from North Korea's nuclear weapons test to domestic opposition to limits on oil consumption. A taste of reality may be no bad thing.

Science can never get past political barriers – no change is actually ever createdDickson 10 (David, director of SciDev, June 28 http://scidevnet.wordpress.com/category/science-diplomacy-conference-2010/ 7/9/11)//NR

There’s a general consensus in both the scientific and political worlds that the principle of science diplomacy, at least in the somewhat restricted sense of the need to get more and better science into international negotiations, is a desirable objective. There is less agreement, however, on how far the concept can – or indeed should – be extended to embrace broader goals and objectives, in particular

attempts to use science to achieve political or diplomatic goals at the international level. Science, despite its international

characteristics, is no substitute for effective diplomacy. Any more than diplomatic initiatives necessarily lead to good science. These seem to have been the broad conclusions to emerge from a three-day meeting at Wilton Park in Sussex, UK, organised by the British Foreign Office and the Royal Society, and attended by scientists, government officials and politicians from 17 countries around the world. The definition of science diplomacy varied widely among participants. Some saw it as a subcategory of “public diplomacy”, or what US diplomats have recently been promoting as “soft power” (“the carrot rather than the stick approach”, as a participant described it). Others preferred to see it as a core element of the broader concept of “innovation diplomacy”, covering the politics of engagement in the familiar fields of international scientific exchange and technology transfer, but raising these to a higher level as a diplomatic objective. Whatever definition is used, three particular aspects of the debate became the focus of attention during the Wilton Park meeting: how science can inform the diplomatic process; how diplomacy can assist science in achieving its objectives; and, finally, how science can provide a channel for quasi-diplomatic exchanges by forming an apparently neutral bridge between countries.

There was little disagreement on the first of these. Indeed for many, given the increasing number of international issues with a scientific dimension that politicians have to deal with, this is essentially what the core of science diplomacy should be about. Chris Whitty, for example, chief scientist at the UK’s Department for International Development, described how knowledge about the threat raised by the spread of the highly damaging plant disease stem rust had been an important input by researchers into discussions by politicians and diplomats over strategies for persuading Afghan farmers to shift from the production of opium to wheat. Others pointed out that the scientific community had played a major role in drawing attention to issues such as the links between chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere and the growth of the ozone hole, or between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. Each has made essential contributions to policy decisions. Acknowledging this role for science has some important implications. No-one dissented when Rohinton Medhora, from Canada’s International Development Research Centre, complained of the lack of adequate scientific expertise in the embassies of many countries of the developed and developing world alike. Nor – perhaps predictably – was there any major disagreement that diplomatic initiatives can both help and occasionally hinder the process of science. On

the positive side, such diplomacy can play a significant role in facilitating science exchange and the launch of international science projects, both essential for the development of modern science. Europe’s framework programme of research programmes was quoted as a successful advantage of the first of these. Examples of the second range from the establishment of the European Organisation of Nuclear Research (usually known as CERN) in Switzerland after the Second World War, to

current efforts to build a large new nuclear fusion facility (ITER). Less positively, increasing restrictions on entry to certain countries, and in particular the United States after the 9/11 attacks in New York and elsewhere, have significantly impeded scientific exchange programmes. Here the challenge for diplomats was seen as helping to find ways to ease the burdens of such restrictions. The broadest gaps in understanding the potential of scientific diplomacy lay in the third category, namely the use of science as a channel of international diplomacy, either as a way of helping to forge consensus on contentious issues, or as a catalyst for peace in situations of conflict. On the first of these, some pointed to recent climate change negotiations, and in particular the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as a good example, of the way that the

scientific community can provide a strong rationale for joint international action. But others referred to the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit last December to come up with a meaningful agreement on action as a demonstration of the

limitations of this way of thinking. It was argued that this failure had been partly due to a misplaced belief that scientific consensus would be sufficient to generate a commitment to collective action, without taking into account the political impact that scientific ideas would have. Another example that received considerable attention was the current construction of a synchrotron facility SESAME in Jordan, a project that is already is bringing together researchers in a range of scientific disciplines from various countries in the Middle East (including Israel, Egypt and Palestine, as well as both Greece and Turkey). The promoters of SESAME hope that – as with the building of CERN 60 years ago, and its operation as a research centre involving, for example, physicists from both Russia and the United States – SESAME will become a symbol of what regional collaboration can achieve. In that sense, it would become what one participant described as a “beacon of hope” for the region. But others cautioned that, however successful SESAME may turn out to be in purely scientific terms, its potential impact on the Middle East peace

process should not be exaggerated. Political conflicts have deep roots that cannot easily be papered over, however open-minded scientists may be to professional colleagues coming from other political contexts.

Indeed, there was even a warning that in the developing world, high profile scientific projects, particular those with

explicit political backing, could end up doing damage by inadvertently favouring one social group over another. Scientists should be wary of having their prestige used in this way; those who did so could come over as patronising, appearing unaware of political realities. Similarly, those who hold science in esteem as a practice committed to promoting the causes of peace and

development were reminded of the need to take into account how advances in science – whether nuclear physics or genetic

technology – have also led to new types of weaponry. Nor did science automatically lead to the reduction of global inequalities. “Science for diplomacy” therefore ended up with a highly mixed review. The consensus seemed to be that science can prepare the ground for diplomatic initiatives – and benefit from diplomatic agreements – but cannot provide the solutions to either.

Energy Security Adv

1NC - Dependence LowUS is decreasing its dependence on oil – domestic productionSalhani 13 [US to Become Less Dependent on Foreign Oil -- be Careful What you Wish for, Claude Salhani, oil prices reporter – American’s number one source for energy news, 18 December 2013, http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/US-to-Become-Less-Dependent-on-Foreign-Oil-but-Careful-What-you-Wish-for.html]

The US Energy Information Administration released on Tuesday an early version of its Annual Energy Outlook for 2014. The main item being

that the United States will continue to develop its own oil and to press for more efficient cars in order to reduce demand on oil. The report from the federal government forecasts a rise in US oil production of another 800,000 barrels per day for the coming two years, but sees a rise by 2016 with the US reaching about 9.5 million barrels per day. The previous high was attained in 1970 when production had reached 9.6 million bpd. Predictions are that the oil boom is temporary and is expected to level off around 2020, but by then there should be a lot more fuel efficient cars on the roads that the drop in production will not be felt.

2NC – Dependence LowOil dependence declining – our evidence speaks to current trendsDOE 12 (United States Department of Energy, “Our Dependence on Foreign Oil Is Declining”, 3/1/12, http://energy.gov/articles/our-dependence-foreign-oil-declining, EK)

America’s dependence on foreign oil has gone down every single year since President Obama took office. In

2010, we imported less than 50 percent of the oil our nation consumed—the first time that’s happened in 13 years—

and the trend continued in 2011. We’re relying less on imported oil for a number of reasons, not least that production is up here in the United States. In fact, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years. As part

of his strategy to increase safe, responsible oil production in the United States, President Obama has opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration and we now have more working oil and gas rigs than the rest of the world—combined.

US is about to surpass Saudi Arabia as largest producer of oil – squo solvesYeo 14 (Sophie, Staff Writer for RTCC News “US committed to cutting fossil fuel use despite shale oil boom”, 1/20/14, http://www.rtcc.org/2014/01/20/us-committed-to-cutting-fossil-fuels-use-despite-shale-oil-boom/)//WL

Booming levels of oil production from shale formations will not affect the country’s commitment to cutting its carbon footprint, US energy

secretary Ernest Moniz has told a London audience. “Producing more oil should not be confused with increasing oil dependence. We are decreasing oil dependence even as we produce more oil ,” he said. In November, the International Energy Agency predicted that the US would surpass Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s top oil producer by 2015, and be close to self-sufficiency in the next two decades. Alongside the recent boom in shale gas, which has been largely credited with pushing down US emissions by 12% between 2005 and 2012, oil production has soared over the last five years. In 2011, the US became a net exporter of refined petroleum products for the first time since 1949. Moniz said efficiency, alternative fuel use and electrification were the “three prongs” the USA would employ to wean itself off oil. He added that, historically, innovation in the field of energy production tends to arrive at a time when production is booming: “It’s a lot easier to be introducing new

technologies and new players when the pie is growing,” he said. “At the same time as we celebrate our domestic production with all its benefits, we do not lose sight of in any way our commitment to lowering our oil dependency,” said Moniz. He added that natural gas was a “bridge to a low carbon future” envisaged by President Barack Obama in his Climate Action Plan, though it would at some stage require carbon capture and storage technology. “Producing more oil should not be confused with increasing oil dependence. We are decreasing oil dependence even as we produce more oil.” The glut of oil has led to an increasing debate over whether the US should lift its ban on the export of crude oil, which was put in place following the 1970s decision by Arab countries not to export to America. Moniz reinforced that, while this decision rested with the Department of Commerce, “There are many, many issues that need a relook from the 1970-1975 period.”

Ethanol solves oil dependenceRFA 12 (Renewable Fuels Association, “RFA Chief Highlights Ethanol’s Role in Decreasing Foreign Oil Dependence at MIT Conference”, 3/16/12, http://www.ethanolrfa.org/news/entry/rfa-chief-highlights-ethanols-role-in-decreasing-foreign-oil-dependence-at-/)//WL

This afternoon, RFA President and CEO Bob Dinneen will participate on a panel, The Future of Transportation Fuels, from 1:00pm-3:45pm EST as

a part of the 2012 MIT Energy Conference in Cambridge, MA. The production and use of U.S. ethanol has contributed significantly to the reduction of our foreign oil dependence. In 2011, the use of 13.9 billion gallons of American ethanol helped reduce the need for imported oil by 485 million barrels . That is roughly equivalent to

13% of total U.S. crude oil imports, saving the American economy $49.7 billion. “Our nation’s reliance on foreign oil imports is continuing to decrease because of ethanol,” said RFA President and CEO Bob Dinneen. “Since 2005, the year

the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was first enacted, America’s oil demand has decreased and national oil import dependence has fallen from 60% to 45%. In 2010, U.S. oil imports fell below 50% for the first time since 1997. Without ethanol, without the foundation of the RFS, our oil imports would have been 52% last year . Maintaining

critical policies like the RFS is essential to increasing our national energy security.” While gasoline demand is currently at its lowest point in

more than a decade, prices at the pump continue to run-up due to the increasing costs of barrels of crude oil. Nevertheless, prices of gasoline would be undoubtedly higher without the enormous contribution of ethanol in our fuel . A study by

Iowa State University and the University of Wisconsin found that in 2010, domestic ethanol production helped keep gasoline prices $0.89 lower per gallon than they otherwise would have been. American-produced ethanol now constitutes 10% of our nation’s gasoline supply, and it is the only energy source available today that can meaningfully keep gasoline prices in check. The RFA has developed a brochure, Oil Dependence: A National Threat, which features quotations from high ranking U.S. officials emphasizing the threat of our dependence on foreign oil with explanations and charts to prove ethanol’s success in reducing our reliance on petroleum. View the brochure on Ethanol and National Security here.

Domestic oil production increases now solveNorris 14 (Floyd, chief financial correspondent of The New York Times, “U.S. Oil Production Keeps Rising Beyond the Forecasts”, 1/24/14, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/25/business/us-oil-production-keeps-rising-beyond-the-forecasts.html)//WL

OIL production in the United States rose by a record 992,000 barrels a day in 2013 , the International Energy

Agency estimated this week. “We keep raising our forecasts, and we keep underestimating production,” said Lejla

Alic, a Paris-based analyst with the agency. The increase left United States production at 7.5 million barrels a day, with both November and December production estimated to have been over eight million barrels a day. American consumption of oil also rose last year, by 390,000 barrels a day, or 2.1 percent, to 18.9 million barrels a day. The agency increased its estimate of American oil use in the final quarter of the year, although it lowered its estimate of the increase in some other countries, including China. Over all, world consumption rose 1.4 percent, making 2013 the first year since 1999 that the use of oil in the United States rose more rapidly than in the rest of the world. The agency said that demand was strong in the petrochemical industry in the United States, which has benefited from the fact that rising supply has left American crude oil prices lower than those in many other countries. The agency estimated that demand for gasoline in the United States rose as a result of increasing consumer confidence and more sales of sport utility vehicles. Despite the 2013 increases, oil use in most

developed countries remains well below the levels of 2007, the last pre-recession year. The United States is estimated to have used 8.5 percent less oil in 2013 than it did in 2007, while demand is down by about 25 percent in Italy and Spain, European countries that were hard hit by the euro area’s problems. Germany stands out, with 2013 usage equal to that of 2007. In the developing world, oil use has been rising steadily. Demand in China and Brazil is up more than 30 percent since 2007, and India’s consumption is 17 percent higher. The agency estimates that in 2014, the 34 mostly rich countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development will consume less than half the oil used in the world. That would be a first: As recently as 2004, their share was over 60 percent, and in 2013, it was estimated to be 50.5 percent. Over the same period, the United States’ share of the market fell to 21 percent from 25 percent, while China’s share rose to 11 percent from less than 8 percent. But the American share was estimated to have risen

slightly in 2013, the first annual increase since 1999. The increase in United States production in 2013 exceeded the increase of 836,000 barrels a day in 2012. The largest increase before that, of 751,000 barrels, was in 1951, according to the United States Energy Information Administration. In percentage terms, the 15.3 percent increase in 2013 was the largest since an 18.9 percent gain in 1940. American oil production fell steadily from the early 1990s through 2008, but has since risen for five consecutive years, largely because of increased production of shale oil. Not since the late 1960s, when production in Texas was peaking and Alaska oil was beginning to come on stream, has there been such a string of annual increases. As a result, United States oil production climbed to the highest level since 1989,

although it remains well below the record production of 9.6 million barrels a day, set in 1970. The agency forecast that American production would continue to rise in 2014, adding 782,000 barrels, to 8.3 million barrels a day . If that

forecast proves to be accurate, United States oil production will have increased 46 percent over the three years from 2011 to 2014. There has not been a three-year increase that large since the years 1921-24, exactly nine decades earlier.

1NC - Energy Independence FailsEnergy independence fails – they misread historyLuft and Korin 13(Gal and Anne, co-directors of the IAGS and Senior Advisers to the United States Energy Security Council “The Myth of U.S. Energy Dependence – What We Got Wrong About OPEC's Oil Embargo”, Foreign Affairs, 10/15/13, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140172/gal-luft-and-anne-korin/the-myth-of-us-energy-dependence) EK

The first U.S. energy secretary, James Schlesinger, observed in 1977 that when it comes to energy, the United States has “only two modes -- complacency and panic.” Today, with the country in the middle of an oil and gas boom that could one day crown it the world’s largest oil

producer, the pendulum has swung toward complacency. But 40 years ago this week, panic ruled the day, as petroleum prices quadrupled in a matter of months and Americans endured a traumatic gasoline shortage, waiting for hours in long lines only to be

greeted by signs reading “Sorry, no gas.” The cause of these ills, Americans explained to themselves, was the Arab oil embargo -- the decision by Iran and the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut off oil exports to the United States and its allies as punishment for their support of Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And the lessons they drew were far-

reaching. The fear that, at any given moment, the United States’ oil supply could be interrupted by a foreign country convinced Washington that its entire approach to energy security should center on one goal: reducing oil imports from that volatile region. But Americans were wrong on both counts. The embargo itself was not the root cause of the energy crisis. Contrary to popular belief, the United States has never really been dependent on the Middle East for its supply of oil -- today only nine percent of the U.S. oil supply comes from the region .

At no point in history did that figure surpass 15 percent. Rather, the crux of the United States’ energy vulnerability was its inability to keep the price of oil under control , given the Arab oil kingdoms’ stranglehold on the global petroleum supply.

Nonetheless, for the last four decades, Washington’s energy policy has been based on the faulty conclusion that the country could solve all its energy woes by reducing its reliance on Middle Eastern oil . Where did this conclusion come from? By the time the six-month embargo was lifted, in March 1974, the global economy lay in ruins. In the United States, unemployment had doubled and GNP had fallen by six percent. Europe and Japan had fared no better, and struggling, newly created countries in Asia and Africa took the worst hits. Countries completely dependent on energy imports found themselves heavily in debt, and millions of unemployed poor had to migrate from the cities back to their villages. The crisis also dealt a blow to American prestige. At the height of the Cold War, the United States essentially proved that without oil it was a paper tiger. The worried secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, indicated that the United States was prepared to send military forces to the Persian Gulf to take over whatever country was needed to keep the oil flowing. Since 1973, the United States has sent forces to the Middle East time and again in the name of energy security. Moreover, the embargo created a deep sense of vulnerability from which the United States has never recovered. The country has been portrayed that way by its own leaders: in 2006, Senator Joseph Lieberman called it “a pitiful giant, like Gulliver in Lilliput, tied down and subject to the whim of smaller

nations.” The only proper response, it seemed, was to stop importing so much Middle Eastern oil. Every U.S. president since the embargo, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, has sought the elusive goal of “energy independence,” either by increasing domestic oil supply (Republicans) or by constraining demand through a gasoline tax and improving the standards for cars’ fuel

efficiency (Democrats). Americans have been led to believe that the vulnerabilities associated with oil dependence would be alleviated if only oil imports decreased. Furthermore, they have been promised that import reduction would yield lower crude prices and thus lower prices at the pump. Those assertions were wrong 40 years ago and they are even further off the mark today. The long race for energy self- sufficiency reflects a systematic failure to grasp the meaning of the events of 1973 -- specifically the exact role

that OPEC played during this episode and over the subsequent four decades. It is time to take a fresh look at those events, to rethink the U.S. national fixation with energy self-sufficiency , and to focus on solutions that actually have a chance of getting the United States -- not to mention the rest of the world -- out of the mire.

2NC – Energy Independence FailsEnergy Independence still leaves us vulnerable to future price swings – first step in petrocracy processPlumer 14 (Brad, reporter focusing on energy and environmental issues, “How the oil boom could change U.S. foreign policy”, 1/16/14, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/16/how-the-u-s-oil-boom-is-changing-the-world-in-6-charts/)//WL

The United States is suddenly awash in crude oil. From 2008 to 2013, domestic oil production rose by 2.5 million barrels per day — the biggest five-year increase in the country's history . Last year, U.S. produced more oil

than it imported for the first time since 1995. So what does that mean for the rest of the world? Or for U.S. foreign policy? Well, for starters, it probably doesn't mean that Americans can now safely ignore the Middle East. The U.S. economy is still heavily reliant on oil, and prices are still largely swayed by what goes on in the global markets .

Disruptions in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran or Iraq still have a big impact. That's one conclusion of a major new

report by a commission of former generals and senior officials, backed by Securing America's Energy Future (SAFE). "The oil boom has sparked a lot of loose talk about how we can now ignore what goes on in the Middle East ," said Adm. Dennis

Blair, a former director of National Intelligence who led the commission, in an interview Tuesday. "But that's just not true." Blair pointed out that the oil boom has already had some impact on U.S. foreign policy. For example, increased North American oil production likely allowed the United States and Europe to impose stricter sanctions on Iran without worrying as much about resulting price spikes. There are also early, tentative signs that China could become more cooperative on Middle East issues now that the fast-growing nation has displaced the

United States as the biggest oil importer from the region. But what's arguably more telling is how much hasn't changed. Even with the boom, the United States is still quite vulnerable to oil shocks. As such, the SAFE report proposes a number of policy steps to deal with that, from working with China to protect global oil shipping lanes to developing more predictable guidelines for using strategic petroleum reserves. It also calls for a renewed push to curtail the U.S. economy's dependence on oil, such as shifting to alternative vehicle fuels

such as electricity and natural gas. After all, even with the shale boom, U.S. production is still expected to peak by 2020 or so. The report also offers a detailed look at how the U.S. oil boom is upending the world energy markets and affecting everyone

from African oil producers to China and Russia. Here are six highlights: 1) Even as imports dwindle and efficiency improves, the U.S. is still spending as much on oil as it did in the 1970s: The United States has seen a colossal surge in oil production over the past five years. And Americans are becoming increasingly oil-efficient (that's what the orange dotted line shows). As a result, U.S. imports keep

dwindling. Nonetheless, the United States is still spending as much on oil, as a share of its economy, as it did back in the late 1970s.

Even as we use less and less crude oil to get by, global prices keep surging — in part because of growing demand from China and

India. That means the United States is still very exposed to what happens in global energy markets. 2) The world is losing its capacity to deal with serious supply disruptions: Oil prices are a function of global supply and demand . And one way to gauge the balance between supply and demand is to look at the "spare capacity" that Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries have on hand. This is the oil production that these countries essentially keep in reserve. It's

a way to manipulate markets. But it's also extra oil that can be released in the event of a sudden shortage. Historically, OPEC has tried to keep spare capacity at about 4 percent of global oil demand. But as the world's thirst for oil has increased, and supply has struggled to keep pace, that spare capacity has dwindled. That means that

disruptions in places such as the Middle East — say, a war in Syria or violence in Iraq or labor unrest in Libya — can cause sharp lurches in global oil prices. (And, in fact, those sorts of disruptions became much more common between 2011 and 2013.) The two charts above help illustrate why the SAFE report argues that the United States isn't yet in a position where it can just stop worrying about what goes on in the Middle East and elsewhere. 3) China is now the biggest importer of oil from the Middle East: Thanks to the North American oil boom and dwindling U.S. imports, the United States is now less directly dependent on Middle East oil than China. Right now, however, the U.S. still shoulders much of the burden for maintaining the flow of oil in the Middle East — such as using its Navy to protect the Strait of Hormuz, which about one-fifth of the world's petroleum passes through. This role reversal is likely to continue in the years ahead. China became the world's biggest oil importer in 2013. And by some projections, Chinese oil demand could account for 40

percent of demand growth by 2025. "Increasingly vulnerable to oil supply disruptions," the report notes, "China could grow more assertive as a global power." In response, the report suggests that U.S. policymakers try to find points of cooperation on energy issues while possibly finding ways for China to share more of the burden for operations to protect oil shipping. 4) Africa is becoming

increasingly less important to the U.S. as an oil source: The biggest geopolitical shift from the U.S. oil boom? The United States now imports far less oil from Africa than it used to. Case in point: Nigeria used to send a dozen supertankers worth of crude each month to the U.S. That's shrunk down to about three. Many of these African oil producers are now struggling to find buyers — Europe is a temporary solution for countries such as Angola and Nigeria, but that may not last. As a result, many of these countries' economies will be extremely vulnerable to downward swings in oil prices for the foreseeable future. And, the report argues, they're likely to deepen ties with Asian countries like China as they try to find new markets.

1NC – China War DefenseNo risk of US-China war- nuclear weapons and geographyKeek 13 (Zachary, Writer for the Diplomat, “Why China and the US (Probably) Won’t Go to War”, The Diplomat, 2013, http://thediplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2013/07/12/why-china-and-the-us-probably-wont-go-to-war/)

As I noted earlier in the week, the diplomatic summits between China and the U.S. over the past month has renewed conversation on whether Beijing and Washington, as rising and established power, can defy history by not going to war . Xinhua was the latest to weigh in on this question ahead of the Strategic and Economic Dialogue this week, in an article titled, “China, U.S. Can Avoid ‘Thucydides Trap.’” Like many others, Xinhua’s argument that a U.S.-China war can be avoided is based largely on their strong economic relationship. This logic is deeply flawed both historically and logically. Strong economic partners have gone to war in the past, most notably in WWI, when Britain and Germany fought on opposite sides despite being each other’s largest trading partners. More generally, the notion of a “capitalist peace” is problematic at best. Close trading ties can raise the cost of war for each side, but any great power conflict is so costly already that the addition of a temporarily loss of trade with one’s leading partner is a small consideration at best. And while trade can create powerful stakeholders in each society who oppose war, just as often trading ties can be an important source of friction. Indeed, the fact that Japan relied on the U.S. and British colonies for its oil supplies was actually the reason it opted for war against

them. Even today, China’s allegedly unfair trade policies have created resentment among large political constituencies in the United States. But while trade cannot be relied upon to keep the peace, a U.S.-China war is virtually unthinkable because of two other factors: nuclear weapons and geography. The fact that both the U.S. and China have nuclear weapons is the most obvious reasons why they won’t clash, even if they remain fiercely competitive. This is because war is the continuation of politics by other means, and nuclear weapons make war extremely bad politics. Put differently, war is fought in pursuit of policy ends, which cannot be achieved through a total war between nuclear-armed states. This is not only because of nuclear weapons destructive

power. As Thomas Schelling outlined brilliantly, nuclear weapons have not actually increased humans destructive capabilities. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that wars between nomads usually ended with the victors slaughtering all of the individuals on the losing side, because of the economics of holding slaves in nomadic “societies.” What makes nuclear weapons different, then, is not just their destructive power but also the certainty and immediacy of it. While extremely ambitious or desperate leaders can delude themselves into believing they can prevail

in a conventional conflict with a stronger adversary because of any number of factors—superior will, superior doctrine, the weather

etc.— none of this matters in nuclear war. With nuclear weapons, countries don’t have to prevail on the battlefield or defeat an opposing army to destroy an entire country, and since there are no adequate defenses for a large-scale nuclear attack, every leader can be absolute certain that most of their country can be destroyed in short-order in the event of a total conflict . Since no policy goal is worth this level of sacrifice, the only possible way for an all-out conflict to ensue is for a miscalculation of some sort to occur. Most of these can and should be dealt by Chinese and the U.S. leaders holding regularly senior level dialogues like the ones of the past month, in which frank and direct talk about redlines are discussed. These can and should be supplemented with clear and open communication channels, which can be especially useful when unexpected crises arise, like an exchange of fire between low-level naval officers in the increasingly crowded waters in

the region. While this possibility is real and frightening, it’s hard to imagine a plausible scenario where it leads to a nuclear exchange between China and the United States. After all, at each stage of the crisis leaders know that if it is not properly contained, a nuclear war could ensue, and the complete destruction of a leader’s country is a more frightening possibility than losing credibility among hawkish elements of society. In any case, measured means of retaliation would be available to the party wronged, and

behind-the-scenes diplomacy could help facilitate the process of finding mutually acceptable retaliatory measures. Geography is the less appreciated factor that will mitigate the chances of a U.S.-China war, but it could be nearly as important as nuclear weapons. Indeed, geography has a history of allowing countries to avoid the Thucydides Trap, and works against a U.S.-China war in a couple of ways. First, both the United States and China are immensely large countries—according to the Central Intelligence Agency, the U.S. and China are the third and fourth

largest countries in the world by area, at 9,826,675 and 9,596,961 square km respectively. They also have difficult topographical

features and complex populations. As such, they are virtually unconquerable by another power. This is an important point and differentiates the current strategic environment from historical cases where power transitions led to war. For example, in Europe where many of the historical cases derive from, each state genuinely had to worry that the other side could increase their power capabilities to such a degree that they could credibly threaten the other side’s national survival. Neither China nor the U.S. has to realistically entertain such fears, and this will lessen their insecurity and therefore the security dilemma they operate within . Besides being immensely large countries, China and the U.S. are also separated by the Pacific Ocean, which will also weaken their sense of insecurity and threat perception towards one another. In many of the violent power transitions of the past, starting with Sparta and Athens but also including the European ones, the rival states were located in

close proximity to one another. By contrast, when great power conflict has been avoided, the states have often had considerable distance between them, as was the case for the U.S. and British power transition and the peaceful end to the Cold War. The reason is simple and similar to the one above: the difficulty of projecting power across large distances—particularly bodies of waters— reduces each side’s concern that the other will threaten its national survival and most important strategic interests. True, the U.S. operates extensively in China’s backyard, and maintains numerous alliances and partnerships with Beijing’s neighbors. This undeniably heightens the risk of conflict. At the same time, the British were active throughout the Western Hemisphere, most notably in Canada, and the Americans maintained a robust alliance system in Western Europe throughout the Cold

War. Even with the U.S. presence in Asia, then, the fact that the Chinese and American homelands are separated by the largest body of water in the world is enormously important in reducing their conflict potential, if history is any guide at least. Thus, while every effort should be made to avoid a U.S.-China war, it is nearly unthinkable one will occur.

2NC – China War DefenseNo US-China war- economic codependence Garrett 13 (Geoff, Dean of the University of Sydney Business School and a professor of politics at the United States Studies Centre, “No Cold War- US Will Ensure China Follows the ‘Road Rules’”, November 13, http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/no-cold-war--us-will-ensure-china-follows-the-road-rules-20121112-298f1.html)

Of course, like the rest of the world, the US's economic future depends on China's rise. The US benefits from cheap Chinese imports, cheap

Chinese credit and the explosive growth of the Chinese market. But China needs the US equally, not only to buy its goods but also for

the technology and know-how it gets from American multinationals operating there. It is this economic codependence that means China and the US will never enter into a second cold war. But Sino-American relations will always be stressful

because of the very different world views of the two superpowers. Obama's rebalancing to Asia is really about shaping the environment in which China will rise in ways that the US prefers. And the US thinks it still has a strong hand to play. What do Australia, Korea and Japan have in common? One answer is that China is their leading economic partner. But the

other answer is that their alliances with the US are the core of their national security. Obama's strategy is to remind China that while it has lots of big trade partners, the US has lots of good friends as well as allies. This the best way to understand more marines in Darwin, joint naval exercises with Japan and getting the South China Sea on the East Asia Summit

agenda. It also explains why the US has taken up the mantle of creating a proto Asia-Pacific free trade area through the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The US cannot contain China and isn't trying to. It wants to continue to engage with China and worries it will need to hedge in case China's rise turns malign. But most of all, the US wants to shape China's rise, so that it follows the US-led but widely shared ''rules of the road'' Obama talked about in his speech to the Australian Parliament almost a year ago.

US-China cooperation high nowHonghbin 13 (Wang, Zhang Yongxing, and Zhao Xiaoqing, Writers for People’s Daily Online “China-U.S. cooperation at local level abounds with opportunities: senior Chinese diplomat”, People’s Daily Online, July 19, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90883/8332772.html)

HOUSTON, July 18 (Xinhua) -- Cooperation and exchanges at the local level between China and the United States are blessed with opportunities and have a huge potential to tap, a senior Chinese diplomat said here. In a recent

exclusive interview with Xinhua, Chinese Consul General in Houston Xu Erwen said that the resource-rich southern U. S. states share good momentum in cooperation with China's provinces and cities, which is beneficial for both sides and

will cement basis for a new type of major-country relationship. Xu made an analogy with her area of jurisdiction which covers eight southern states including Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and U.S. territory Puerto Rico. "If we compare the United States to a sandwich, the states along the east and west coasts are two slices of bread while the southern states are the fillings, the most nutritious part," she said. With an increasing number of enterprises and population moving south in recent years, Xu observed, the importance of the southern states are just showing itself. States like Texas are among the least affected places amid the economic recession and large shale

oil reserves gave another boost to the booming economy here, she said. Cooperation and exchanges in various fields between the southern U.S. states and China have registered good results and keep expanding, Xu said. The trade volume between China and Xu's area of jurisdiction scored over 100 billion U.S. dollars last year, up 9.85 percent over the previous year,

far above the national average 6.54 percent. The southern U.S. states become the biggest destination of Chinese investment. More than 80 percent of Chinese direct investment in the United States are in the southern states, Xu said. More than 100 Chinese enterprises have reached the southern states with a total investment of 8.5 billion dollars, creating thousands of job opportunities for

locals. The cooperation and exchanges maintain good momentum not only in economy and trade but also in politics, culture, and education, Xu said. High-level visits of governors and mayors to China have brought about more investment opportunities to the United States while pairs of friendly states, provinces and cities were set up to enhance people-to-people exchanges. Last

year, central China's Henan Province and Arkansas State were paired to forge a friendly relationship, while three such links have been

established between cities, Xu said. More than 50,000 Chinese students are now studying in the southern U.S. states while 19 Confucius institutes here are offering Chinese courses to Americans , she said. Xu said she noticed in her contact with people from all walks of life that southern U.S. states are eager for greater cooperation with China and are offering

favorable policies like tax cut to attract more Chinese investment. The thriving energy sector in the southern states, boosted by discovery of shale oil reserves, and the Panama Canal expansion project , scheduled to be completed in 2015, mean tremendous opportunities for Chinese companies, Xu said. The project will double the capacity of the canal and facilitate trade between the U.S. states along the Gulf of Mexico and China, she said, adding that many port expansion projects and channel dredging plans could bring a lot of business opportunities for Chinese companies. Xu warned that protectionism is a major hurdle that hampers Chinese

investment here. She urged the United States to ward off protectionism of all kinds so as to provide a just and sound environment for Chinese investors. The U.S. part should recognize that Chinese investment here is not a zero-sum game but rather a mutually beneficial cooperation, she said. The diplomat emphasized that

cooperation between the United States and China, the world's two largest economies, is not only very important for themselves but also for the rest of the world. She said that the consensus reached recently by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his U.S. counterpart Barack Obama on building a new pattern of major power relationship based on mutual trust and reciprocal cooperation charted a new course for future China-U.S. ties. Xu

stressed that as President Xi pointed out, the advancement of China-U.S. relations not only requires high-level efforts but also needs local cooperation and people-to-people exchanges. Cooperation and exchanges at the local level could cement the basis for bilateral ties at large and become a source of strength for further development. "The potential of cooperation at the local level between the two countries is huge and is yet to be fully tapped. I believe that hard work from both sides will make more headway in this regard and help our bilateral cooperative partnership take a deeper root," she said.

No China conflict – no military useAlison and Blackwill 13 (Graham and Robert, Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Douglas Dillon Professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government AND Senior Fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations “Beijing Still Prefers Diplomacy Over Force," January 28, http://www.cfr.org/china/beijing-still-prefers-diplomacy-over-force/p29892)

As China has become a leading export market for its neighbours, it expects them to be " more respectful ", in Mr Lee's

words. In public statements, China usually downplays the advantages its size begets, but in a heated moment at a 2010 regional security meeting, its foreign minister had a different message: "China is a big country and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact." Mr Lee has a phrase for this message: "Please know your place." Unlike free-market democracies, in which governments are unable or unwilling to squeeze imports of bananas from the Philippines or cars from Japan, China's government can use its economic muscle. As tensions mount over competing claims for contested territories, should we expect Beijing to use military force to advance its

claims? From the perspective of the grand strategist, the answer is no – unless it is provoked by others. "China understands that its growth depends on imports, including energy, and that it needs open sea lanes. They are determined to avoid the mistakes made by Germany and Japan," Mr Lee says. In his view, it is highly unlikely that China would choose to confront the US military at this

point, since it is still at a clear technological and military disadvantage. This means that, in the near term, it will be more concerned with using diplomacy, not force, in foreign policy. Henry Kissinger, the western statesman who has spent most quality

time with Chinese leaders in the past four decades, offers a complementary perspective. As he has written, their approach to the outside world is best understood through the lens of Sun Tzu, the ancient strategist who focused on the psychological weaknesses

of the adversary. "China seeks its objectives," Mr Kissinger says, "by careful study, patience and the accumulation of nuances –

only rarely does China risk a winner-take-all showdown." In Mr Lee's view, China is playing a long game driven by a compelling

vision. "It is China's intention," Mr Lee says, "to be the greatest power in the world." Success in that quest will require not only sustaining

historically unsustainable economic growth rates but also exercising greater caution and subtlety than it has shown recently, in order to avoid an accident or blunder that sparks military conflict over the Senkakus, which would serve no one's interests.

No risk of escalation- China will only retaliate if US strikes firstTilford 12 (Robert, Wichita Military Affairs Examiner, “Chinese General warns US ‘we will not attack - unless we are attacked’!”, The Examiner, June 5, http://www.examiner.com/article/chinese-general-warns-us-we-will-not-attack-unless-we-are-attacked)

"We will also improve our military strategy, our national defense and the PLA's fighting ability. We will not attack unless we are attacked," the General told reporters. "We have the measures to strike back when fundamental national interests are under threat," he said. "We still face a very complex, sometimes severe, situation. We will be prepared for all complexities. There's a saying: work for the best and prepare for the worst," said Lt. General Haiquan. These comments are seen as a warning to certain members of Congress and the entire US military industrial establishment - "don't mess with us in

China." In the China Daily report, Chinese officials indicated it would "improve" the capability of its forces and has the capacity

to "strike back" when its "fundamental interests" are under threat.

No US-China war – oil and South China Sea are barriersDiaz 13 (Perry, Writer for the Global Balita, “Why China Won’t Go to War VS US”, Global Balita, April 23, 2013, http://globalbalita.com/2013/04/23/why-china-wouldnt-go-to-war-vs-u-s/)

If China attacked the United States, she had better knock her out in the first strike. Otherwise, the U.S. would unleash 1,654 nuclear warheads on 792 deployed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), Submarine-launched

Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs), B-52 bombers, and B-2 stealth bombers. China has approximately 240 warheads and an undetermined number of ICBMs. But who would fire the first ICBM? China had always stuck to her “No First

Use” policy. However, in January 2011, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) reportedly had indicated that it would consider launching a preemptive

nuclear strike “if the country finds itself faced with a critical situation in a war with another nuclear state.” By adopting a “First-strike” policy, China is changing the geopolitical game. In March 2013, in an apparent reaction to China’s “First-strike” policy, the Obama administration sought to create the “capability to launch a first strike against Russia and/or China without fear of nuclear retaliation.” To accomplish this, the U.S. military plans to have 1,500 to 1,800 sea- and air-based first-strike cruise missiles by 2015 and 2,500 to 3,000 by 2020. Many believe that to launch a preemptive first-strike could lead to Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), a Cold War doctrine in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons of mass destruction by two opposing sides would effectively “result in the complete, utter and irrevocable annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.” But that doesn’t mean to say that a conventional war could not erupt in the Asia-Pacific region. Actually, it could happen anytime soon. North Korea’s threat to launch ballistic missiles against the U.S., Japan, and South Korea could spark a war that could presumably bring China to come to her aid. And this is where the conflict could become a battle between the world’s two economic powers:

U.S. and China. But like any other war in modern times, oil — or the absence of oil — could determine the outcome of the war. During World War II, the Allies launched precision bombing of oil fields and refineries in Germany, Austria, Romania, Norway, and other German-occupied countries. The success of the Allies’ “Oil Campaign” contributed to the weakening of Germany’s

defenses. Thus, when D-Day came, Germany’s vaunted panzer divisions were rendered inutile. China faces a similar problem. She has less than 30 days of strategic oil reserves, which could be reduced to 10 days in time of war. If the flow of imported oil from the Middle East and Africa were blocked at the Strait of Malacca, it would deprive China of 80% of her oil imports . At the east end of the Strait of Malacca, Singapore controls the “bottleneck” – the narrowest point in the strait with a width of only 1.7 miles. And conveniently located there is Changi Naval Base where Singapore maintains a fleet of submarines, frigates, and missile gunboats. Recently, President Barack Obama and Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong met in Washington D.C. and agreed on a plan to rotate deployments of U.S. Navy ships to Singapore as part of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” – rebalancing of forces by transferring 60% of the U.S.’s naval assets to the Asia-Pacific region by 2020. The backbone of the U.S.’s Asia-Pacific strategy is her military presence in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Philippines, and Australia. Of utmost importance is the U.S.’s ability to block the chokepoint at the Strait of Malacca, which connects the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea. With the supercarrier USS George Washington strike group permanently based in Yokosuka, Japan, two other supercarrier strike groups were recently deployed to the 7th Fleet, the USS John C. Stennis strike group operating in the South China Sea and the USS Nimitz strike group operating in the Western Pacific. The three strike groups have combined aircraft strength of more than 240 jet fighters. At the west end of the Strait of Malacca, in the Indian Ocean, the supercarrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower strike group is deployed. To protect Guam from potential missile attacks from North Korea, the U.S. is deploying a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD) to Guam to strengthen the strategic island’s defenses. Already deployed at Guam’s Anderson Air Force Base is a squadron of 12 B-52 nuclear-armed bombers, two squadrons of the advanced F-22 Raptor stealth jet fighters, and three nuclear attack submarines. And from Japan to South Korea to Taiwan through nations in the South China Sea to India and Afghanistan, the U.S. has deployed a ring of the anti-missile Aegis Combat System and batteries of Patriot anti-ballistic missiles around China’s periphery. In terms of military personnel, the U.S. Pacific Area Command (PACOM) — which is responsible for the Pacific and Indian Oceans — has more than

320,000 American troops under its command of which 85,000 are stationed in Japan and South Korea. It’s interesting to note that two senior posts were assigned to Australian officers, one of which is Deputy of PACOM Intelligence. Australia appears to play an important role in the U.S.’s Asia-Pacific strategy. In 2011, Australia agreed to host 250 to 2,500 American Marines at Darwin, which is strategically positioned to control the Timor Sea, a possible new route for China’s oil imports in the event the Strait of Malacca and the Sunda Strait in Indonesia were blocked. Obama called the troop deployment to Australia, “necessary to maintain the security architecture of the region.” “This will allow us to be able to respond in a more timely fashion and to meet the demands of a lot of partners in the region,”

he added. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), almost a third of global crude oil and over half of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) passes through the South China Sea each year. That makes the South China Sea the most important energy trade route in the world. It did not then come as a surprise that China claims virtually all of the South China Sea as an extension of her continental shelf; thus, her territory. But five other countries also claim a good portion of South China Sea as their 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The U.S.’s position is that freedom of navigation should not be impeded in the South China Sea. With no other source for oil, China is planning to tap the oil-rich South China Sea . But the

bad news is that a recent EIA report said that while the South China Sea is rich in oil and gas, they mostly reside in undisputed territory, close to each country’s shores. As for the disputed regions of the South China Sea, the report said: “EIA estimates the region around the Spratly Islands [and the Paracel Islands] to have virtually no proved or probable oil reserves.” That is a major setback for China. Evidently, China is not prepared militarily to go to war against the U.S. Logistically, it would be a nightmare if China ran out of oil in the midst of a war. And with all her neighbors – including Vietnam – warming up to the U.S., China is seen as a bully who would grab her neighbors’ land by brute force and intimidation. China should learn that getting along with her neighbors would earn her their respect, not their enmity. She just can’t go about and say,

“This is mine! That is mine!” At the end of the day, China’s aggressive behavior would hurt her image and credibility for a long time to come.

US and China won’t go to war- interdependence and history provesFeldman 13 (Noah, Writer for Foreign Policy Magazine, “The Unstoppable Force vs. the Immovable Object”, Foreign Policy, May 16, 2013, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/16/china_united_states_cool_war_power?page=0,1)

A powerful argument can be made that despite its economic rise, China will not try to challenge the position of the United States as the preeminent global leader because of the profound economic interdependence between the two countries. This is the essence of the official, though dated, Chinese slogan of "peaceful rise." Trade accounts for half of China's GDP, with exports significantly outstripping imports. The United States alone accounts for roughly 25 percent of Chinese sales. Total trade between the countries amounts to a stunning $500 billion a year. The Chinese government holds some $1.2 trillion in U.S. Treasury debt, or 8 percent of the outstanding total. Only the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Social Security trust fund hold more; all American households combined hold less. As of the most

recent count, 194,000 Chinese students attend U.S. universities; some 70,000 Americans live and study and work in mainland China. We are no longer in the realm of ping-pong diplomacy: We are in the world of economic and cultural partnership. These many cooperative projects require trust, credibility, and commitment -- all of which were lacking between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the long run, China would like to rely less on exports and expand its customer base to include a bigger domestic market. The United States, for its part,

would clearly prefer a more dispersed ownership of its debt. But for now, each side is stuck. For the foreseeable future, the U.S.-China economic relationship is going to remain a tight mutual embrace. The argument that the United States and China will not find themselves in a struggle for global power depends on one historical fact: Never before has the dominant world power been so economically interdependent with the rising challenger it must confront . Under these conditions, trade and debt provide overwhelming

economic incentives to avoid conflict that would be costly to all. Over time, the two countries' mutual interests will outweigh any tensions that arise between them.

1NC - Military Readiness DefenseImpact Non-Unique – sequestration kills military readinessCronk 14 (Terri, Armed Forces Press Service, “Military Officials Testify on Sequestration, Readiness”, 3/31/14, http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=121937)//WL

Sequestration would degrade military readiness, senior military officials recently told a Senate panel. Army Gen. John F. Campbell, vice chief of staff; Marine Corps Gen. John M. Paxton Jr., assistant commandant; Air Force Gen. Larry O. Spencer, vice chief of staff; and Navy Vice Adm. Philip H. Cullom, deputy chief of naval operations for fleet readiness and logistics, testified March 26 before the Senate Armed Forces Committee’s subcommittee on readiness and management support. “Today, the Army remains globally engaged with more than 66,000 soldiers deployed, including about 32,200 in Afghanistan and about 85,000 forward-stationed in over 150 different countries,” Campbell

told the Senate panel. While restoration of some funding for fiscal 2014 helps the Army restore readiness, he said, it is not sufficient to fully eliminate the shortfall in core capabilities created from the past decade of counterinsurgency operations, and made greater by sequestration. “The current level of [fiscal 2015] funding will allow the Army to sustain the readiness levels achieved in [fiscal] '14, but will only generate minimum readiness required to meet the defense strategic guidance,” Campbell added. “We anticipate sequestration reductions in [fiscal 2016] and beyond [will] severely degrade manning, readiness and modernization efforts and would not allow us to execute the defense strategic guidance.” The Army is in the process of a drawdown to 490,000 active-duty

soldiers, 350,000 Army National Guardsmen, and 202,000 reservists by the end of fiscal '15, Campbell said. By the end of fiscal 2017, the Army will decrease its end strength to 450,000 active-duty, 335,000 Army National Guardsmen and 195,000 reservists, he said. “This cuts disproportionally on the active Army and they will reverse the force mix ratio going 51 percent active and 49 percent reserve in [fiscal] 2012 to 46 percent active and 54 percent in our reserve component in [fiscal] '17. So we have a greater preponderance in our reserve components, in both our National Guard and our reserve,” Campbell added. As the Army continues to draw down and restructure over the next three to four years, “readiness and modernization deficiencies” will exist, he said. “Fiscal realities have caused us to implement tiered readiness as a bridging strategy [by] … maintaining different parts of the Army at varying levels of preparation,” he added.

“This year is critical to deciding the fate of what is the greatest army in the world and could have significant implications on our nation's security for years to come,” Campbell said. “Cuts implemented under the Budget Control Act and sequestration instantly impaired our readiness.” About 30,000 Marines are now forward-deployed around the world, promoting peace, protecting the national interest and securing U.S. defense, Paxton said. Marine readiness has been proven many times, he added, and “significantly” twice in the last year with humanitarian missions during a typhoon in the Philippines and the rescue of American citizens in South Sudan. Both missions “demonstrated the reality and the necessity for maintaining a combat-ready force that's capable of handling crisis today,” Paxton said. “Such an investment is essential to maintaining our national security and our prosperity in the future.” As the nation continues to face fiscal uncertainty, the Marine Corps is making necessary choices to protect its near-term readiness and to place the service on the best trajectory to meet future defense requirements, Paxton said. Marine Corps’ leadership, he said, looks at issues through five pillars: to recruit and retain high-quality people, maintain the highest state of unit readiness, meet the combatant commanders' requirements for Marines, maintain appropriate infrastructure investments, and “keep an eye on the future” by investing in capabilities for tomorrow's challenges. In the Air Force, decades of sustained combat operations stressed the ranks and decreased its readiness to unacceptable levels, although airmen performed “exceptionally well” in the counterinsurgency and counterterrorism fights in the U.S. Central Command area of

responsibility, Spencer told the Senate panel. “We will continue to maintain our ability to respond to today's requirements, but we must also regain and maintain our ability to effectively operate in the most demanding threat environment,” he said. The bottom line on readiness, Spencer added, is the Air Force knows the “[fiscal year] '15 [proposed] submission sets the conditions that enable us to begin the road to recovery in the years ahead, but we will need your help to get there.” Sequestration “has cut the Air Force budget by billions of dollars. Our only option is to reduce our force structure. We cannot retain more force structure than we can afford to keep ready,” Spencer said. Properly trained and equipped, the Air Force can set the conditions “for success in any conflict in any region of the world whenever we're called upon,” he said. The Navy continues to deliver ready, certified forces forward and will not compromise, Cullom said, calling it a responsibility to sailors, their families and combatant commanders. “With the budget you provided for this [fiscal] year '14, we're meeting our forward-presence commitment to the combatant commanders,” the admiral said. “We are able to execute the deeper maintenance plan for our ships and aircraft, and we have restored a normal training and readiness progression within the fleet.. “Our maintenance plan continues to execute the reset of surface ship material condition after a decade of high temporal operations,” Cullom continued. “But because of the need to drive our ships for much of this work, it must continue for at least five more years.” The Navy accepted “increased risk” into the mission areas of defense strategic guidance because of slowed modernization and restricted ordinance procurement, and the risk continues into the long-term viability of shore infrastructure, Cullom said. “If we must return to sequestration levels in [fiscal] '16

and beyond, we will continue to strive to have a ready Navy, but it would require us to become smaller and less capable,” he said. “Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are the finest we have ever had and they're going into harm's way every day … . We must continue to provide them the right training and capable equipment to meet the challenges they face today and will face in the future,” Cullom said.

Even with readiness the military solves nothingKagan 2012 [Robert Kagan, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe, 1/5/12, http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2012/0105_international_relations_kagan.aspx]

If the United States is not suffering decline in these basic measures of power, isn’t it true that its influence has diminished, that

it is having a harder time getting its way in the world? The almost universal assumption is that the United States has indeed lost influence. Whatever the explanation may be—American decline, the “rise of the rest,” the apparent failure of

the American capitalist model, the dysfunctional nature of American politics, the increasing complexity of the international system—it is broadly accepted that the United States can no longer shape the world to suit its interests and ideals as it once did. Every day seems to bring more proof, as things happen in the world that seem both contrary to American interests and beyond American control. And of course it is true that the United States is not able to get what it wants much of the time . But then it never could. Much of today’s impressions about declining American influence are based on a nostalgic fallacy: that there was once a time when the United States could shape the whole world to suit its desires, and could get other nations to do what it wanted them to do, and, as the political scientist Stephen M. Walt put it, “manage the

politics, economics and security arrangements for nearly the entire globe.” If we are to gauge America’s relative position today, it is important to recognize that this image of the past is an illusion . There never was such a time. We tend to think back on the early years of the Cold War as a moment of complete American global dominance. They were nothing of the sort. The United States did accomplish extraordinary things in that era: the Marshall Plan,

the NATO alliance, the United Nations, and the Bretton Woods economic system all shaped the world we know today. Yet for every great achievement in the early Cold War, there was at least one equally monumental setback. During the Truman years, there was the triumph of the Communist Revolution in China in 1949, which American officials regarded as a disaster for American interests in the region and which did indeed prove costly; if nothing else, it was a major factor in spurring North Korea to attack the South in 1950. But as Dean Acheson concluded, “the ominous result of the civil war in China” had proved “beyond the control of the ... United States,” the product of “forces which this country tried to influence but could not.” A year later came the unanticipated and unprepared-for North Korean attack on South Korea, and America’s intervention, which, after more than 35,000 American dead and almost 100,000 wounded, left the situation almost exactly as it had been before the war. In 1949, there came perhaps the worst news of all: the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb and the end of the nuclear monopoly on which American military strategy and defense budgeting had been predicated. A year later, NSC-68, the famous strategy document, warned of the growing gap between America’s military strength and its global strategic commitments. If current trends continued, it declared, the result would be “a serious decline in the strength of the free world relative to the Soviet Union and its satellites.” The “integrity and vitality of our system,” the document stated, was “in greater jeopardy than ever before in our history.” Douglas MacArthur, giving the keynote address at the Republican National Convention in 1952, lamented the “alarming change in the balance of world power,” “the rising burden of our fiscal commitments,” the ascendant power of the Soviet Union, “and our own relative decline.” In 1957, the Gaither Commission reported that the Russian economy was growing at a much faster pace than that of the United States and that by 1959 Russia would be able to hit American soil with one hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, prompting Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the House, to ask, “What good are a sound economy and a balanced budget if we lose our national lives and Russian rubles become the coin of the

land?” Nor was the United States always able to persuade others, even its closest allies, to do what it wanted, or to refrain from doing what it did not want. In 1949, Acheson tried and failed to prevent European allies, including the British, from recognizing Communist China. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration failed to get its way at the Geneva Conference on Vietnam and refused to sign the final accords. Two years later it tried to prevent the British, the French, and the Israelis from invading Egypt over the closure of the Suez Canal, only to see them launch an invasion without so much as a heads-up to Washington. When the United States confronted China over the islands of Quemoy and Matsu, the Eisenhower administration tried and failed to get a show of support from European allies, prompting John Foster Dulles to fear that NATO was “beginning to fall apart.” By the late 1950s, Mao believed the United States was a superpower in decline, “afraid of taking on new involvements in the Third World and increasingly incapable of maintaining its hegemony over the capitalist countries.” But what about “soft power”? Wasn’t it true, as the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. has argued, that the United States used to be able to “get what it wanted in the world” because of the “values expressed” by American culture as reflected

through television, movies, and music, and because of the attractiveness of America’s domestic and foreign policies? These elements of soft power made other peoples around the world want to follow the United States, “admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its

level of prosperity and openness.” Again, the historical truth is more complicated. During the first three decades after World

War II, great portions of the world neither admired the United States nor sought to emulate it, and were not especially pleased at the way it conducted itself in international affairs . Yes, American media were

spreading American culture, but they were spreading images that were not always flattering. In the 1950s the world could watch televised images of Joseph McCarthy and the hunt for Communists in the State Department and Hollywood. American movies

depicted the suffocating capitalist conformism of the new American corporate culture. Best-selling novels such as The Ugly American painted a picture of American bullying and boorishness. There were the battles over segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, the globally transmitted images of whites spitting at black schoolchildren and police setting their dogs on black demonstrators. (That “used to

be us,” too.) The racism of America was practically “ruining” the American global image, Dulles feared, especially in the so-called Third World. In the late 1960s and early 1970s came the Watts riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the shootings at Kent State, and then the government-shaking scandal of Watergate. These were not the kinds of images likely to endear the United States to the world, no matter how many Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen movies were playing in Parisian cinemas. Nor did much of the world find American foreign policy especially attractive during these years. Eisenhower yearned “to get some of the people in these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us,” but the CIA-orchestrated overthrows of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala did not help. In 1957, demonstrators attacked the vice president’s motorcade in Venezuela, shouting, “Go away, Nixon!” “Out, dog!” “We won’t forget Guatemala!” In 1960, Khrushchev humiliated Eisenhower by canceling a summit when an American spy plane was shot down over Russia. Later that year, on his way to a “goodwill” visit in Tokyo, Eisenhower had to turn back in mid-flight when the Japanese government warned it could not guarantee his security against students protesting American “imperialism.” Eisenhower’s Democratic successors fared little better. John F. Kennedy and his wife were beloved for a time, but America’s glow faded after his assassination. Lyndon Johnson’s invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965 was widely condemned not only in Latin America but also by European allies. De Gaulle warned American officials that the United States, like “all countries that had overwhelming power,” had come “to believe that force would solve everything” and would soon learn this was “not the case.” And then, of course, came Vietnam—the destruction, the scenes of napalm, the My Lai massacre, the secret incursion into Cambodia, the bombing of Hanoi, and the general perception of a Western colonialist superpower pounding a small but defiant Third World country into submission. When Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, visited West Berlin in 1967, the American cultural center was attacked, thousands of students protested American policies, and rumors swirled of assassination attempts. In 1968, when millions of Europe’s youth took to the streets, they were not expressing their admiration for American culture. Nor were the great majority of nations around the world trying to emulate the American system. In the first decades of the Cold War, many were attracted to the state-controlled economies of the Soviet Union and China, which seemed to promise growth without the messy problems of democracy. The economies of the Soviet bloc had growth rates as high as those in the West throughout much of this period, largely due to a state-directed surge in heavy industry. According to Allen Dulles, the CIA director, many leaders in the Third World believed that the Soviet system “might have more to offer in the way of quick results than the U.S. system.” Dictators such as Egypt’s Nasser and Indonesia’s Sukarno found the state-dominated model especially attractive, but so did India’s Nehru. Leaders of the emerging Non-Aligned Movement—Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno, Nkrumah—expressed little admiration for American ways. After the death of Stalin, moreover, both the Soviet Union and China engaged in hot competition to win over the Third World, taking “goodwill tours” and providing aid programs of their own. Eisenhower reflected that “the new Communist line of sweetness and light was perhaps more dangerous than their propaganda in Stalin’s time.” The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations worried constantly about the leftward tilt of all these nations, and lavished

development aid on them in the hope of winning hearts and minds. They found that the aid, while eagerly accepted, guaranteed neither allegiance nor appreciation. One result of Third World animosity was that the United States steadily lost influence at the United Nations after 1960. Once the place where the American war in Korea was legitimized, from the 1960s until the end of the Cold War the U.N. General Assembly became a forum for constant expressions of anti-Americanism. In the late 1960s, Henry Kissinger despaired of the future. The “increased fragmentation of power, the greater diffusion of political activity, and the more complicated patterns of international conflict and alignment,” he wrote to Nixon, had sharply reduced the capacity of both superpowers to influence “the actions of other governments.” And things only seemed to get more difficult as the 1970s unfolded. The United States withdrew from Vietnam in defeat, and the world watched the first-ever resignation of an American president mired in scandal. And then, perhaps as significant as all the

rest, world oil prices went through the roof. The last problem pointed to a significant new difficulty: the inability of the United States to wield influence effectively in the Middle East. Today people point to America’s failure to bring Israelis and Palestinians to a negotiated settlement, or to manage the tumultuous Arab Awakening, as a sign of weakness and decline. But in 1973 the United States could not even prevent the major powers in the Middle East from engaging in all-out war. When Egypt and Syria launched their surprise attack on Israel, it was a surprise to Washington as well. The United States eventually had to go on nuclear alert to deter Soviet intervention in the conflict. The war led to the oil embargo, the establishment of OPEC as a major force in world affairs, and the sudden revelation that, as historian Daniel Yergin put it, “the United States itself was now, finally, vulnerable.” The “world’s foremost superpower” had been “thrown on the defensive, humiliated, by a handful of small nations.” Many Americans “feared that the end of an era was at hand.”

2NC – Military Readiness Defense

Alternative energy doesn’t benefit the military and there’s already investment in the status quoZeller 11 (Tom Jr., American reporter and writer who has covered poverty, technology, energy policy and the environment, among other topics, for The New York Times “Alternative Fuels Don’t Benefit the Military, a RAND Report Says”, New York Times, 1/25/11, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/business/energy-environment/25fuel.html) EK

The United States would derive no meaningful military benefit from increased use of alternative fuels to power its jets, ships and other weapons systems, according to a government-commissioned study by the RAND Corporation scheduled for release Tuesday. The report also argued that most alternative-fuel technologies were unproven, too expensive or too far from commercial scale to meet the military’s needs over the next decade. In particular, the report argued that the Defense Department was spending too much time and money exploring experimental biofuels derived from sources like algae or the flowering plant camelina, and that more focus should be placed on energy efficiency as a way of combating greenhouse gas emissions. The report urged Congress to reconsider the military’s budget for alternative-fuel projects. But if such fuels are to be pursued, the report concluded, the most economic, environmentally sound and near-term candidate would be a liquid fuel produced using a combination of coal and biomass, as well as some method for capturing and storing carbon emissions released during production. The findings by the nonprofit research group, which grew out of a directive in the 2009 Defense Authorization Act calling for further study of alternative

fuels in military vehicles and aircraft, are likely to provoke much debate in Washington. The Obama administration has directed billions of dollars to support emerging clean-energy technologies even as Congress has been unwilling to pass any sort of climate or renewable energy legislation. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is seeking to improve the military’s efficiency and reduce its reliance on fossil fuels over the coming decade, devoting $300 million in economic stimulus financing and other research money toward those goals .

Sequestration cuts decimate military readiness from the top down – energy supplies can’t alleviate these cutsTerkel 13 (Amanda, Huffington Post Author, “Sequestration Damaging To Military Readiness, Chuck Hagel Says”, 7/22/13, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/22/sequestration-military-readiness_n_3635686.html)//WL

Sequestration will quietly chip away at the military's readiness capabilities, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel argued on Monday, urging members of Congress to work together to come up with a solution. "To implement the steep and abrupt reductions that have been required under sequestration, we've had to make very difficult decisions to reduce, stop and defer many activities and programs that keep our military prepared to fight -- including training, maintenance, and modernization investments ," Hagel said. "Readiness cuts aren't always visible, but these cuts are having and will continue to have very damaging effects ," he added. Hagel made his remarks in Louisville, Ky., at the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He said that while visiting Fort Bragg last week,

he heard from infantrymen whose units didn't have enough training rounds for their weapons because of the budget cuts. The Defense Secretary has held scores of town halls around the country in recent weeks, and at each one, sequestration has been the top concern among members of the military and their families, as well as civilian Defense Department employees. Furloughs started on July 8 for civilians. About 90 percent of the department's workforce -- 650,000 people -- will have to take 11 days of

unpaid leave before the end of September, amounting to a 20 percent pay cut. The furloughs are expected to save the Pentagon $1.8 billion, as it works to trim $37 billion by September due to sequestration's across-the-board cuts. "Each of the services have curtailed activities -- flying hours have been reduced, ships are not sailing, and Army training has been halted," said Hagel on Monday. "These kinds of gaps and shortages could lead to a force that is inadequately trained, ill-equipped, and unable to fulfill required missions. Hagel is

not someone who reflexively opposes Pentagon budget cuts. Long before he was nominated for Defense Secretary, he was calling for reduced spending at the Defense Department. But as he reiterated on Monday, he believes that sequestration is not the answer to the nation's budgetary problems. "Sequestration is an irresponsible process, and it is terribly damaging. I hope that our leaders in Washington will eventually come to policy resolution, a resolution that stops sequestration," he said to applause from the audience. "But all of us who have the responsibility of leading our Defense Department cannot lead the Department of Defense based on hope, based on 'we think,'

based on 'maybe.' We have to prepare our institution for whatever comes." Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, also recently said that unless Congress addresses sequestration, there will be "a dramatic impact in our readiness." On Tuesday, the Senate Budget Committee, chaired by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), will be holding a hearing examining the impact of sequestration and national security. One of the witnesses will be Jennifer-Cari Green, a Madigan Army Medical Center employee and single mother who is being furloughed.

Even a strong military can’t resolve global problemsHaass 10 (Richard N., President of the Council on Foreign Relations and Ph.D. from Oxford University 2/25/10, "The Weakest Link", http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/02/25/the-weakest-link.html)

That we should care so much about weak states marks a major change. Much of 20th-century history was driven by the actions of

strong states—the attempts by Germany, Japan, and, in the century's second half, the Soviet Union to establish global primacy, and the corresponding efforts of the United States and a shifting coalition of partners to resist. Those

struggles produced two world wars and a Cold War. In the 21st century the principal threat to the global order will not be a push for dominance by any great power. For one thing, today's great powers are not all that great:

Russia has a one-dimensional economy and is hobbled by corruption and a shrinking population; China is constrained by its enormous population and a top-heavy political system. Just as important, China and the other major or rising powers seek less to overthrow the existing global order than to shape it. They are more interested in integration than in revolution. Instead, the central challenge will be posed by weak states—Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Haiti, Mexico, Congo, and others. What they have in common (in addition to the fact that many, like Iraq, are located in the greater Middle East) are governments that lack the capacity, the will, or both to rule. They are unable to exercise what is expected of sovereign governments—namely, control over what goes on within their own territory. In the past, this would have been mostly a humanitarian concern. But as we all know, thanks to globalization, people and things travel. Terrorists, diseases, illegal migrants, weapons of

mass destruction—for all of them, international boundaries are often little more than formalities. On the other hand, we cannot resolve

these problems solely by using the U.S. military. As we learned in Iraq, replacing governments is easier sought than done, and in

many cases there is no clear—much less preferable—alternative to the current authority. Even in a supporting role, foreign soldiers can provoke a nationalist backlash against the government they're trying to bolster, making the weak-state problem even worse. Nor is it always clear that doing more militarily will result in lasting improvements that are commensurate with the investment in blood and treasure. This could well be America's fate in Afghanistan.

Solvency

1NC No Modeling No international modeling—US tech doesn’t apply to hydrate regions across the world Pacific Forum CSIS 13 (Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Innovate or Enervate:The future of US-Japan alliance collaboration”, March 2013, http://csis.org/files/publication/issuesinsights_vol13no8.pdf)

Third, the type of methane hydrate extraction technologies that are currently ¶ available may not be fully utilized because not all methane hydrate deposits are similar in ¶ nature . This means that the same technology may not be applicable in all deposits around ¶ the world . For example, some of the largest methane hydrate deposits in India, most ¶ notably the ones in the K-G Basin, have been found in fractured shales, whereas those in ¶ Japan and the United States have mostly been found in sandstone.34¶ This means that the ¶ extraction technology that has been developed in Japan and the United States would not ¶ be usable for the extraction of methane hydrate deposits in India unless they are somehow ¶ modified .35¶ Countries like India cannot, therefore, simply purchase the Japanese and ¶ American technology for methane hydrate extraction for use in its own deposits .36

AT: Japan Add-OnJapanese relations strong and resilient – longtime alliance and Chinese threat Chanlett-Avery and Rinehart 13 (Emma and Ian E., Specialist, Asian Affairs Congressional Research Service AND Analyst in Asian Affairs at the Congressional Research Service and was a 2013 Japan Studies Visiting Fellow. “The U.S.-Japan Alliance” 12/12/13, http://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33740.pdf)//WL

The U.S.-Japan alliance has long been an anchor of the U.S. security role in Asia . Forged in the U.S. occupation of Japan after its defeat in World War II, the alliance provides a platform for U.S. military readiness in the Pacific. About 53,000 U.S. troops are

stationed in Japan and have the exclusive use of 89 facilities. In exchange, the United States guarantees Japan's security.

Security challenges in the region, particularly nuclear and missile tests by North Korea and increased Chinese maritime activities, have reinforced U.S.-Japan cooperation in recent years. The vitality of the alliance is particularly salient as the Obama Administration renews its focus on the Asia- Pacific region through a strategic "rebalancing." The U.S.-Japan alliance, missing a strategic anchor since the end of the Cold War, may have found a new guiding rationale in shaping the environment for China's rise . Since the early 2000s, the United States and Japan have taken significant strides in improving the operational capability of the alliance as a combined force, despite constraints. In addition to serving as hub for forward-deployed U.S. forces, Japan provides its own advanced military

assets, many of which complement U.S. forces. The joint response to a 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Japan demonstrated the interoperability of the two. Cooperation on ballistic missile defense and new attention to the cyber and space domains has also been strong. Japan's own defense policy has continued to evolve, and major strategic documents reflect a new attention to operational readiness and flexibility. Steady progress on an initiative to realign U.S. forces based in Japan has been overshadowed by the failure to resolve difficult basing issues on Okinawa, the major U.S. forward logistics base in the Asia-Pacific. Congressional leaders have raised concerns about the cost of relocating Marines to Guam and, as a result, imposed stringent restrictions on U.S. funding for the realignment. The sustainability of the U.S. military presence on Okinawa remains a critical challenge for the alliance.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is a strong supporter of the alliance and has an ambitious agenda to increase the

capability and flexibility of Japan's military. Japanese politics have stabilized after five years of divided rule, creating opportunity for more predictable alliance planning. However, constitutional, legal, fiscal, and political barriers exist to significantly expand defense cooperation. The most prominent debate involves relaxing or removing the self-imposed ban on Japanese forces participating in collective self-defense. Such measures face opposition from the public and from political parties. In addition, leaders in China and South Korea distrust Abe because of his past statements on Japanese actions in the World War II era. Suspicion from Beijing and Seoul also complicates Japan's efforts to expand its security role. Japan faces a complex security landscape in the region. North Korea's increased asymmetric capabilities pose a direct threat to Japan. A territorial dispute with China over a set of islets in the East China Sea raises the risk of military escalation, a scenario that could trigger U.S. treaty obligations to defend Japan. Japan has pursued security cooperation with others in the region, including Australia and several Southeast Asian countries. Of increasing concern to the United States is the tense relationship with South Korea that has prevented effective trilateral coordination and, in the views of some, degraded U.S. credibility in the region. Without cooperation among its allies, the United States may find itself less able to respond to North Korean missile threats and to influence China’s behavior.

AT: Econ Add-On

2NC - Internal Link DefenseCross Apply Archer evidence from the environment advantage – no catastrophic methane release is likely to occur and methane only lasts in the atmosphere for a short timeframe – means no long term economic impact.

2NC - Econ Impact DefenseNo chance of war from economic decline---best and most recent data Drezner 12 (Daniel W., Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, October 2012, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked,” http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week-5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf)

The final outcome addresses a dog that hasn’t barked: the effect of the Great Recession on cross-border conflict and violence. During the initial stages of the crisis, multiple analysts asserted that the financial crisis would lead states to increase their use of force as a tool for staying in power.37 Whether through greater internal repression, diversionary wars, arms races, or a ratcheting up of great power conflict , there were genuine concerns that the global economic downturn would lead to an increase in conflict. Violence in the Middle East, border disputes in the South China Sea, and even the

disruptions of the Occupy movement fuel impressions of surge in global public disorder. ¶ The aggregate data suggests otherwise , however. The Institute for Economics and Peace has constructed a “Global Peace Index” annually since 2007. A key conclusion they draw from

the 2012 report is that “The average level of peacefulness in 2012 is approximately the same as it was in 2007.”38

Interstate violence in particular has declined since the start of the financial crisis – as have military expenditures in most sampled countries. Other studies confirm that the Great Recession has not triggered any increase in violent conflict ; the secular decline in violence that started with the end of the Cold War has not been reversed.39 Rogers

Brubaker concludes, “the crisis has not to date generated the surge in protectionist nationalism or ethnic exclusion that might have been expected.”40¶ None of these data suggest that the global economy is operating swimmingly. Growth remains unbalanced and fragile, and has clearly slowed in 2012. Transnational capital flows remain depressed compared to pre-crisis levels, primarily due to a drying up of cross-border interbank lending in Europe. Currency volatility remains an ongoing concern. Compared to the aftermath of other postwar recessions, growth in output, investment, and employment in the developed world have all lagged behind. But the Great Recession is not like other postwar recessions in either scope or kind; expecting a standard “V”-shaped recovery was unreasonable. One financial analyst characterized the post-2008 global economy as in a state of “contained depression.”41 The key word is “contained,” however.

Given the severity, reach and depth of the 2008 financial crisis , the proper comparison is with Great Depression. And by that standard, the outcome variables look impressive . As Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff concluded in This Time is Different: “that its macroeconomic outcome has been only the most severe global recession since World War II – and not even worse – must be regarded as fortunate.”42

Global economic governance institutions guarantee resiliency Drezner 12 (Daniel W., Professor, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, October 2012, “The Irony of Global Economic Governance: The System Worked,” http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/wp-content/uploads/IR-Colloquium-MT12-Week-5_The-Irony-of-Global-Economic-Governance.pdf)

Prior to 2008, numerous foreign policy analysts had predicted a looming crisis in global economic governance. Analysts only reinforced this perception since the financial crisis, declaring that we live in a “G-Zero” world. This paper takes a closer look at

the global response to the financial crisis. It reveals a more optimistic picture . Despite initial shocks that

were actually more severe than the 1929 financial crisis, global economic governance structures responded quickly and robustly. Whether one measures results by economic outcomes, policy outputs, or institutional flexibility, g lobal e conomic g overnance has displayed surprising resiliency since 2008. Multilateral economic institutions performed well in crisis situations to reinforce open economic policies, especially in contrast to the 1930s. While there are areas where

governance has either faltered or failed, on the whole, the system has worked. Misperceptions about global economic governance persist because the Great Recession has disproportionately affected the core economies – and because the efficiency of past periods of global economic governance has been badly overestimated. Why the system has worked better than expected remains an open

question. The rest of this paper explores the possible role that the distribution of power, the robustness of international regimes, and the resilience of economic ideas might have played.

No empirical support for diversionary theory Tir 2010 [Jaroslav Tir - Ph.D. in Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia, “Territorial Diversion: Diversionary Theory of War and Territorial Conflict”, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 72, No. 2, April 2010, Pp. 413–425, Chetan]

According to the diversionary theory of war, the cause of some militarized conflicts is not a clash of salient interests between

countries, but rather problematic domestic circumstances. Under conditions such as economic adversity or political unrest, the country’s leader may attempt to generate a foreign policy crisis in order both to divert domestic discontent and bolster their political fortunes through a rally around the flag effect (Russett 1990). Yet, despite the wide-

ranging popularity of this idea and some evidence of U.S. diversionary behavior (e.g., DeRouen 1995, 2000; Fordham 1998a, 1998b; Hess and

Orphanides 1995; James and Hristolouas 1994; James and Oneal 1991; Ostrom and Job 1986), after five decades of research broader

empirical support for the theory remains elusive (e.g., Gelpi 1997; Gowa; 1998; Leeds and Davis 1997; Levy 1998; Lian and Oneal

1993; Meernik and Waterman 1996). This has prompted one scholar to conclude that ‘‘seldom has so much common sense in theory found so little support in practice’’ (James 1987, 22), a view reflected in the more recent research (e.g., Chiozza and Goemans 2003, 2004; Meernick 2004; Moore and Lanoue 2003; Oneal and Tir 2006). I argue that this puzzling lack of support could be addressed by considering the possibility that the embattled leader may anticipate achieving their diversionary aims specifically through the initiation of territorial conflict2—a phenomenon I call territorial diversion.

AT: Ukraine Add-On

2NC - Presence DCross apply the 1NC Brinkerhoff evidence – the navy is already increasing its military presence in the arctic – solves their generic internal link.

2NC - No Internal LinkUS and Russia are cooperating in the Arctic now Stars and Stripes 12 (Seth Robson, “US uses Russian icebreaker to get fuel supplies to Antarctica”, 2/12/12, http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan/us-uses-russian-icebreaker-to-get-fuel-supplies-to-antarctica-1.168398)

McMURDO STATION, Antarctica — The U.S. is relying on a Russian icebreaker to deliver supplies to its main base in

Antarctica thanks to continued problems with its own shrinking fleet of the cold-water vessels. Late last month, the Russian icebreaker Vladimir Ignatyuk cut a channel through Antarctic sea ice so that a Military Sealift Command tanker — the Maersk Peary —

could deliver millions of gallons of fuel to McMurdo Station. A second MSC ship, the Green Wave, also is bound for McMurdo and will need the Russian icebreaker’s help to deliver supplies and equipment that will sustain the station through the harsh Antarctic winter. The job of cutting supply channels through the ice has traditionally fallen to the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. However, the military’s inaction on updating its fleet has led to an increased reliance on foreign

vessels. The U.S. has only one operational icebreaker, the Coast Guard Cutter Healy, which has been busy escorting a Russian-flagged tanker through the iced-over waters in the Bering Sea to supply Nome, Alaska. The Coast Guard owns two other icebreakers, but the Polar Sea is being decommissioned, and the Polar Star is being refitted at a cost of $62.8 million, according to Lt. Eric Quigley, a capabilities manager with the Coast Guard. The shortage of U.S. icebreakers, which cost $1 billion each to build, contrasts with a large Russian fleet that comprises more than two dozen of the massive ships, including several nuclear-powered vessels.

Russian icebreakers are in high demand to escort commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route that follows Russia’s northern coast through Arctic waters between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, according to Cmdr. Steve Wittrock, a Coast Guard budget officer. The route is open for only two months each year, and moving sea ice means ships risk being trapped. However, the route is far shorter than traditional sea lanes connecting Europe and Asia, he said

Cooperation in the Arctic now solvesByers 9 [Michael, holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Global Politics and International Law at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia, Prior to 2004, he was a Professor of Law and Director of Canadian Studies at Duke University; from 1996-1999, he was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University “Cold Peace: International Cooperation Takes Hold in the Arctic”, http://www.cceia.org/resources/articles_papers_reports/0040.html, 12-16-09]

One occasionally hears talk of the need for an Arctic treaty modeled on the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, or for an Arctic-wide nuclear-weapons-free zone. Achieving multilateral agreement on such matters will not be easy, given the continued strategic importance of the Arctic for the United States and Russia; the significant populations that live there, especially in Alaska and Russia; and

the considerable jurisdiction already vested in the Arctic Ocean coastal states under the law of the sea. Fortunately, a great deal of cooperation and international law already exists in the Arctic, beginning with UNCLOS and extending through the Arctic Council, the International Maritime Organization, and the very many ad hoc meetings between different governments. Treaties exist—and are complied with—on icebreaker transits, the protection of species at risk, the prevention and cleanup of

pollution, and many other subjects. The few remaining boundary disputes are relatively minor and susceptible to negotiated solutions. Much of the cooperation is based on the sovereign rights that Arctic countries hold over their territories, adjoining waters, and continental shelf. This

should come as no surprise, for the international legal system is the result of centuries of cooperation between sovereigns, as countries defined the boundaries between their respective jurisdictions and worked together in pursuit of common goals. In the Arctic, sovereign rights can facilitate cooperation by providing clear jurisdiction for regulating shipping and the extraction of natural resources, and for guarding against nonstate security

threats. Thanks to international law, there is no race for Arctic resources. Nor is there any appetite for military confrontation. The Arctic, instead, has become a zone of quiet cooperation, as countries work together to map the seabed, protect the environment, and guard against new, non-state security threats.

2NC - No ImpactEven with tensions there is zero risk of warIvanov 13 (Oleg, Chair of the Political Science Department, Diplomatic Academy, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs “Russia-US relations tense, but no return to Cold War on the cards”, Global Times, 2013, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/767601.shtml#.Ue7rjGTwKKE)

Today Russian-US relations are going through hard times, and may reach the lowest point again like during the armed conflict with Georgia in South Ossetia (Caucasus) in 2008. Now one of the most controversial issues is the death of the Russian child Max Shatto (whose Russian name is Maxim Kuzmin) adopted by a US family and who was allegedly abused by his stepmother. Why did this tragedy hit the headlines both in the Western and in Russian mass media and cause heated debates in Russia? Over the past two decades, the US families have adopted more than 60,000 Russian children, and 20 of them died in the US. Most of them were either orphans or their parents were deprived of their rights to raise children due to unsocial behavior, alcoholism or drug addiction. For the children it was an opportunity to have a family, instead of staying in the orphanage where living conditions are not always good. Nevertheless, the death of Max Shatto turned out to be the last straw, after it was widely covered by the Russian mass media and taken up by politicians. There were also problems in the lack of

information given by the US side to the Russian authorities. It can be viewed as another test for the reset of relations declared during US President Barack Obama's first term. The echo of the tragedy stirred up anti-US sentiments in the Russian parliament and public, and became the part of the agenda of the first meeting between the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the

newly appointed US Secretary of State John Kerry in Berlin. At the press conference Lavrov stressed, "Kerry has admitted that these are real and not imaginative problems and assured me that he will personally take all necessary measures to make full transparency and reporting between Russia and the US in this sphere possible." It is significant that both sides kept away from giving a political coloring to the problem but are trying to find a solution. Max Shatto's tragedy is not the only source of irritation in Russian-US relations, and it did not overshadow other thorny issues that both sides are facing today. After the adoption of the Magnitsky Act, which forbids Russian officials accused of human rights abuses from enjoying visits to the US and other privileges, Russia approved a similar act aimed at the US officials it accuses of human rights abuses. Chris Smit, the US Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Human Rights, was the first victim of the retaliatory Russian legal action. He was denied Russian visa. According to him, he traveled to the Soviet Union repeatedly in the past and is now shocked by this denial. In his opinion, the Magnitsky Act was the reason why he didn't get the visa. Missile defense in Europe is another apple of discord in Russian-US relations. The US rejected Russian proposal to build a joint missile defense system. And the Russian side refused to sign any political declaration put forward by the US stating that the missile defense is not aimed at the Russian nuclear deterrent. The Russian approach is based on the necessity to have legally binding guarantees that missile defense is aimed outside Europe but not inside, and the belief that these guarantees

should be checked by objective military and technical criteria.Russia and the US also take a different stance on the situation in Syria. After Lavrov and Kerry discussed the issue in Berlin, these positions did not draw closer. Nevertheless,

despite all disagreements, it would be wrong to come to the conclusion that Russia and the US are on the track back to the Cold War. It should not escape our notice that Russia and the US still have many areas where our interests coincide and where we can and should cooperate, such as the economy, humanitarianism, nonproliferation, arms control and fighting terrorism. Both countries can work together to resolve conflicts in which our positions are similar or close. It is important to iron out our differences, and it would be unreasonable not to cooperate because we disagree on some issues. Hopefully, Russia-US relations will benefit from Kerry's appointment. After his meeting with the US counterpart Lavrov, he stated, "It feels like the second administration of Obama will aim to play a more constructive role when it comes to its foreign policy agenda led by Kerry." If we do not find common ground and our cooperation fails, neither Russia nor the US will benefit but terrorists and extremists will.

Russian relations resilient – relationship defined by divergent cyclesFenenko 11 (6/21/11, Alexei, leading researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for International Security, “The Cyclical Nature of Russian-American Relations,” http://en.rian.ru/valdai_op/20110621/164739508.html)

There is nothing special or unusual about the current difficulties. Over the past twenty years, both Russia and the United States have experienced several cycles of convergence and divergence in their bilateral relations. It

seems that Moscow and Washington are doomed to repeat these cycles time and again. Such changes in bilateral relations are no mere coincidence. Russia and the United States base their relations on mutual nuclear deterrence. The material and technical foundations for Russian-American relations differ little from those underpinning the Soviet-American relations of the

1980s. Thus, these cycles of Russian-American rapprochement are due to two factors. First comes the desire to consistently reduce aging nuclear systems so that during disarmament neither party risked destroying the military-strategic parity. Second, the reaction to a major military-political crisis after which the parties seek to reduce confrontation and update the rules of conduct in the military-political sphere . After confronting these tasks, Russia and the United States returned to a state of low intensity confrontation. The first rapprochement cycle was observed in the early 1990s. Yeltsin’s government needed U.S. support in recognizing Russia within the 1991 borders of the RSFSR. Boris Yeltsin also needed U.S. assistance in addressing the problem of the Soviet “nuclear legacy” and taking on the Supreme Council. The administrations of George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton were willing to help the Kremlin solve these problems. However, the Americans demanded major strategic concessions from Russia in return, outlined in START-III: making the elimination of heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles a priority. The parties reached an unofficial compromise: U.S. recognition of the Russian leadership in exchange for the rapid decrease in Russia’s strategic nuclear forces (SNF). However, the stronger Russian state institutions became, the weaker the impetus to the rapprochement. In autumn 1994, Russia refused to

ratify the original version of START-II and declared NATO’s eastward expansion unacceptable. The United States adopted the concept of “mutually assured safety” (January 1995) under which Russia’s democratic reforms qualified as inseparable from continued armament reduction. The “Overview of U.S. nuclear policy” in 1994 also confirmed that America deemed Russian strategic nuclear forces a priority threat. The crises that unfolded during the late 1990s in Iran and Yugoslavia were, like NATO expansion, the logical results of a restoration of the old approach to Soviet-American

relations. It was actually the events of 1994, not 2000, that in fact predetermined the subsequent development of Russian-American relations. The second cycle of Russian-American rapprochement was also rooted in strategic considerations. In 2000 START-II and the ABM Treaty collapsed. Both Washington and Moscow were faced with the problem of their agreed decommissioning of nuclear systems dating back to the 1970s. These events pushed presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush to reach a strategic compromise at a meeting in Crawford (12 November 2001). The United States agreed to sign a new Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), and Russia did not object to Washington’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Instead of the ABM Treaty, the parties signed the Moscow Declaration on May 24, 2002, under which the United States pledged to consult with Russia on all issues pertaining to missile defense

deployment. However, after the “compromise at Crawford,” the agenda for Russian-American rapprochement was exhausted. The disputes between Moscow and Washington over Iraq, Iran, Georgia, Ukraine and Beslan, which had been gathering steam since 2003, necessitated a return to the traditional format for Russian-American relations. At the Bratislava meeting (February 24, 2005) President Vladimir Putin refused to accept George W. Bush’s suggestion of including

issues of fissile material safety in the agenda. Since then, the “rapprochement” between Russia and the U.S. has reached a dead end, including at the official level.

No nuclear threat- Russia’s weapons are uselessLieber and Press 6 (Keir is a professor of political science at Notre Dame and Daryl G. is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania Foreign Affairs, “The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy” March/April 2006)

EVEN AS the United States' nuclear forces have grown stronger since the end of the Cold War, Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal has sharply deteriorated. Russia has 39 percent fewer long-range bombers, S8 percent fewer ICBMs, and 8o percent fewer SSBNS than the Soviet Union fielded during its last days. The true extent of the Russian arsenal's decay, however, is much greater than these cuts suggest.

What nuclear forces Russia retains are hardly ready for use. Russia's strategic bombers , now located at only

two bases and thus vulnerable to a surprise attack, rarely conduct training exercises, and their warheads are stored off-base. Over 8o percent of Russia's silo-based ICBMS have exceeded their original service lives, and plans to replace them with new missiles have been stymied by failed tests and low rates of production. Russia's mobile ICBMS rarely patrol, and although they could fire their missiles from inside their bases if given sufficient warning of an attack, it appears unlikely that they would have the time to do so. The third leg of Russia's nuclear triad has weakened the most. Since 2000, Russia's SSBNS have conducted approximately two patrols per year, down from 6o in 1990. (By contrast, the U.S. SSBN patrol rate today is about 40 per year.) Most of the time, all nine of Russia's ballistic missile submarines are sitting in port, where they make easy targets. Moreover, submarines require well-trained crews to be effective. Operating a ballistic missile submarine-and silently coordinating its operations with surface ships and attack submarines to evade an enemy's

forces-is not simple. Without frequent patrols, the skills of Russian submariners, like the submarines themselves, are decaying. Revealingly, a 2004 test (attended by President Vladimir Putin) of several submarine-launched ballistic missiles was a total fiasco: all either failed to launch or veered off course. The fact that there were similar failures in the summer and fall of 2005 completes this unflat tering picture of Russia's

nuclear forces. Compounding these problems, Russia's early warning system is a mess. Neither Soviet nor Russian satellites have ever been capa ble of reliably detecting missiles launched from U.S. submarines. (In a recent public statement, a top Russian general described his country's early warning satellite constellation as "hopelessly out dated.")

AT: Wrangel Add-On

2NC - Presence DCross apply the 1NC Brinkerhoff evidence – the navy is already increasing its military presence in the arctic – solves their generic internal link.

2NC - No Internal LinkUS and Russia are cooperating in the Arctic now Stars and Stripes 12 (Seth Robson, “US uses Russian icebreaker to get fuel supplies to Antarctica”, 2/12/12, http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan/us-uses-russian-icebreaker-to-get-fuel-supplies-to-antarctica-1.168398)

McMURDO STATION, Antarctica — The U.S. is relying on a Russian icebreaker to deliver supplies to its main base in

Antarctica thanks to continued problems with its own shrinking fleet of the cold-water vessels. Late last month, the Russian icebreaker Vladimir Ignatyuk cut a channel through Antarctic sea ice so that a Military Sealift Command tanker — the Maersk Peary —

could deliver millions of gallons of fuel to McMurdo Station. A second MSC ship, the Green Wave, also is bound for McMurdo and will need the Russian icebreaker’s help to deliver supplies and equipment that will sustain the station through the harsh Antarctic winter. The job of cutting supply channels through the ice has traditionally fallen to the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. However, the military’s inaction on updating its fleet has led to an increased reliance on foreign

vessels. The U.S. has only one operational icebreaker, the Coast Guard Cutter Healy, which has been busy escorting a Russian-flagged tanker through the iced-over waters in the Bering Sea to supply Nome, Alaska. The Coast Guard owns two other icebreakers, but the Polar Sea is being decommissioned, and the Polar Star is being refitted at a cost of $62.8 million, according to Lt. Eric Quigley, a capabilities manager with the Coast Guard. The shortage of U.S. icebreakers, which cost $1 billion each to build, contrasts with a large Russian fleet that comprises more than two dozen of the massive ships, including several nuclear-powered vessels.

Russian icebreakers are in high demand to escort commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route that follows Russia’s northern coast through Arctic waters between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, according to Cmdr. Steve Wittrock, a Coast Guard budget officer. The route is open for only two months each year, and moving sea ice means ships risk being trapped. However, the route is far shorter than traditional sea lanes connecting Europe and Asia, he said

Cooperation in the Arctic now solvesByers 9 [Michael, holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Global Politics and International Law at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia, Prior to 2004, he was a Professor of Law and Director of Canadian Studies at Duke University; from 1996-1999, he was a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University “Cold Peace: International Cooperation Takes Hold in the Arctic”, http://www.cceia.org/resources/articles_papers_reports/0040.html, 12-16-09]

One occasionally hears talk of the need for an Arctic treaty modeled on the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, or for an Arctic-wide nuclear-weapons-free zone. Achieving multilateral agreement on such matters will not be easy, given the continued strategic importance of the Arctic for the United States and Russia; the significant populations that live there, especially in Alaska and Russia; and

the considerable jurisdiction already vested in the Arctic Ocean coastal states under the law of the sea. Fortunately, a great deal of cooperation and international law already exists in the Arctic, beginning with UNCLOS and extending through the Arctic Council, the International Maritime Organization, and the very many ad hoc meetings between different governments. Treaties exist—and are complied with—on icebreaker transits, the protection of species at risk, the prevention and cleanup of

pollution, and many other subjects. The few remaining boundary disputes are relatively minor and susceptible to negotiated solutions. Much of the cooperation is based on the sovereign rights that Arctic countries hold over their territories, adjoining waters, and continental shelf. This

should come as no surprise, for the international legal system is the result of centuries of cooperation between sovereigns, as countries defined the boundaries between their respective jurisdictions and worked together in pursuit of common goals. In the Arctic, sovereign rights can facilitate cooperation by providing clear jurisdiction for regulating shipping and the extraction of natural resources, and for guarding against nonstate security

threats. Thanks to international law, there is no race for Arctic resources. Nor is there any appetite for military confrontation. The Arctic, instead, has become a zone of quiet cooperation, as countries work together to map the seabed, protect the environment, and guard against new, non-state security threats.

Counterplans

***Japan CP***

1NC ShellCP Text: The government of Japan should substantially increase its exploration of Arctic deep-water methane hydrates.

Japanese solves better than the aff- incentivized by lack of other energy routes Johnson 14 (Keith, senior reporter covering energy for Foreign Policy, “Burning Ice and the Future of Energy”, Foreign Policy, 4/25/14, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/04/25/a_song_of_ice_and_fire_and_methane_hydrates) EK

During their three-day meeting this week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe again asked U.S. President Barack Obama to speed up exports of American natural gas to help his beleaguered and energy-poor economy. But the big energy revolution that could ride to Tokyo's rescue may not come on tankers from U.S. ports, but rather from deep underneath the sandy seabed off Japan's own shores. Methane hydrates , which are chunky packets of ice

that trap huge amounts of natural gas in the form of methane, are looming ever larger in Japan's plans to meet its needs for energy in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and skyrocketing bills for imported fuel. Other Asian countries facing an energy crunch, including South Korea, China, and India, are also hoping to tap into the apparently abundant reserves of methane hydrates, also known as "fire ice." That could help fuel growing economies -- but it could also fuel further tensions in regional seas that are already the stage for

geopolitical saber rattling and brinkmanship over natural resources. Totally unknown until the 1960s, methane hydrates could theoretically store more gas than all the world's conventional gas fields today. The amount that scientists figure should be gettable comes to about 43,000 trillion cubic feet, or nearly double the 22,800 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable traditional

natural gas resources around the world. (The United States consumed 26 trillion cubic feet of gas last year.) That raises the possibility of an energy revolution that could dwarf even the shale gale that has transformed America's fortunes in a few short years. It could also potentially have big implications for countries, including the United States,

Australia, Qatar, and even Russia, which are banking on unbridled growth in the global trade of liquefied natural gas. The trick will be to figure out exactly how to profitably tap vast deposits of the stuff buried inside the seafloor. "There's no doubt that the resource potential is enormous," said Michael Stoppard, managing director, global gas, at energy consultancy IHS. "I

think it's the ultimate rebuttal to the peak oil and peak gas concept, but of course that's not much good unless you can develop it." To that end, last week a 499-ton survey vessel nosed out of the port of Sakai, once home to fabled gunsmiths and the finest makers of samurai swords in medieval Japan and today the prospective launching pad for a new technological revolution. For the next two months, the Kaiyo Maru No. 7 will survey the seafloor right off Japan's west coast, the first step in a years-long process that could end with significant production of natural gas in Japanese waters. A promising methane hydrate site off the southeast coast was the subject of earlier surveys. Japan is the epicenter of methane hydrates today not because it has so much of the resource -- quite the opposite, most methane hydrates appear to be in gas-rich North America -- but because it needs the resource so badly and is working faster than any other country to make fire

ice a commercial proposition. The United States and Canada are awash in methane hydrate resources, found both under

the seabed such as in the Gulf of Mexico and in sub-Arctic permafrost. But both countries also have loads of conventional and shale gas, dampening industry enthusiasm for a complicated, lengthy research process. Although some

companies, such as Chevron, work alongside the U.S. government on methane hydrate research, "there's a little less space in the industry for enabling field experiments and data collection than there was 10 years ago ," said Ray Boswell,

technology manager for methane hydrates at the U.S. Energy Department's National Energy Technology Laboratory. Not so in Japan. This

spring, researchers in Japan reached a technical breakthrough, figuring out exactly how the gassy bundles of ice release 160 times their

volume in methane as they are taken out of low-temperature, high-pressure environments. That could make commercial extraction, which experts estimate is at least 10 to 15 years off, an easier proposition. Japan has sought to come up with a new energy blueprint in the wake of the 2011 nuclear disaster that shuttered the country's nuclear reactors,

which led to a spike in imports of pricey fuel, especially natural gas. Japan's new energy plan, approved in April, puts nuclear

energy back on the table. But Japanese officials concede that nuclear output will likely never reach the 30 percent or so of Japan's electricity output that it was before the disaster. As a result, the government included methane

hydrate development in its top five priorities for new energy supplies . Japanese officials say they are working on methane hydrates because they need an alternative to liquefied natural gas (LNG), which costs about three times as much as natural gas in the

United States. "It's very easy to understand the Japanese motivation, and with China, India, and South Korea you have very similar situations," said Tim Collett, a gas hydrate expert at the U.S. Geological Survey. Because Japan and South Korea are the first- and second-largest importers of LNG globally, methane hydrate development "is potentially a significant long-term threat to the LNG industry," said IHS's Stoppard. "Even small-scale development of methane hydrate would slow down any growth in LNG sales there." To be sure, the kinds of shale gas reserves that have made the United States an energy superpower exist overseas too. China is loaded with shale resources, as are parts of Europe and Latin America. But the shale gas revolution depends on a lot of things other countries don't have: small, nimble energy companies,

thousands of drilling rigs, private ownership of land, and up-to-date financial and regulatory systems. Getting methane hydrates out of the seafloor should be a more straightforward proposition, and because for now it requires close cooperation between industry and governments, it seems well suited to economies in the Pacific Rim .

Japanese tech and funding solves- Successful extraction of Canadian hydrates Japan Times 13 [New fossil fuel resources, The Japan times, January 3rd, 2013, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/01/03/editorials/new-fossil-fuel-resources/#.U7tC0E_ViSo]

It is not easy to extract methane from methane hydrate because the latter exists in the form of solid matter. But Japan has succeeded in getting methane from an underground methane hydrate layer in a test in Canada. In the test, the pressure inside the layer was lowered to let methane vaporize. Around mid-February in 2013, Japan, Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp. plans to start a test to dissolve methane hydrate in a layer some 1,300 meters below the sea surface off Atsumi Peninsula of Aichi Prefecture. Japan should develop methane hydrate resources in earnest. In doing so, it should work out an efficient method for extracting methane without causing environmental problems. Because Japan’s territorial waters plus its exclusive economic zone are the world’s sixth largest, serious efforts to exploit methane hydrate resources may help to give it an advantageous position in negotiations on imports of crude oil and liquefied natural gas. At present, Japan’s power companies must import a large amount of LNG as fuel for thermal power plants. The government should accelerate the development of methane hydrate resources by providing sufficient financial support to the entities concerned.

2NC Modeling Japan causes US modeling- proves feasibility- solves all aff impacts—delay avoids link to politics Ruppel 11 (Carolyn, Coordinator of the Georgia Tech Focused Research Program on Methane Hydrates “Methane Hydrates and the Future of Natural Gas”, Gas Hydrates Project – U.S. Geological Survey, 2011, http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Supplementary_Paper_SP_2_4_Hydrates.pdf) EK

The next step for proving that gas hydrates in permeable marine sediments can be a resource for natural gas is testing to determine the optimal processes and conditions for extracting the gas. There are few technical barriers to conducting such a test, but the cost and relative immaturity of routine deepwater operations mean that it will probably be at least a few years before even a short-term test can be undertaken. Japan’s national methane hydrates R&D program (MH21) currently plans to conduct one to two such tests on Nankai Trough gas hydrates

by 2014 and is on track to be the first to demonstrate gas production from deepwater marine hydrate deposits. The U.S. R&D program, through the DOE/Chevron Joint Industry Project, plans pressure coring (i.e., coring that

retains the sediments at in situ pressure conditions) of gas hydrate-rich sandy sediments in the northern Gulf of Mexico in 2012.

Such a program would be the next step along the trajectory towards a U.S. deepwater research production test within the next decade.

2NC Internal NB CP Solves Japan Energy Independence- no alternatives in the Squo Pfeifer 14 (Silvia, Energy Editor, Financial Times “Methane hydrates could be energy of the future”, Financial Times, 1/17/14, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/8925cbb4-7157-11e3-8f92-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2qfjtQxRv) EK

Forget the shale gas revolution that has transformed North America’s energy landscape. The energy of the future could lie buried deep underneath the world’s oceans and the Arctic permafrost: giant reservoirs of gas trapped in ice crystals.

Sometimes called flammable ice, these methane hydrates also hold out the potential to alter trade flows and the geopolitics of energy. Countries such as Japan and India, which rely heavily on energy imports, could suddenly find themselves important energy suppliers. Late last year, China announced it had identified a big gas hydrate reserve in the northern part of the South China Sea. It is very early days. Test drillings have so far taken place only in Canada and Japan, but

the International Energy Agency, the western world’s energy watchdog, does not rule out the possibility of another energy revolution to rival that of the shale boom in North America. Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA’s executive director,

said in an interview last year: “There may be other surprises in store. For example, the methane hydrates off the coasts of Japan and Canada ... This is still at a very early stage. But shale gas was in the same position 10 year ago. So we cannot rule out that new revolutions may take place through technological developments.” Methane hydrates are deposits of natural gas trapped with water in a crystalline structure that forms at low temperatures and moderate pressures. Although estimates of the resources vary widely, experts agree they are extremely large. According to the IEA’s most recent World Energy Outlook published last autumn, even the lower estimates give resources larger “than all other natural gas resources combined”. Many estimates fall between 1,000tn and 5,000tn cubic metres, or between 300 and 1,500 years of production at current rates. The US Geological Survey estimates that gas hydrates worldwide are between 10 to 100 times as plentiful as US shale gas reserves. However,

although several governments have investigated methane hydrates since the early 1980s, no country has been especially focused on developing them. Exploiting them has to make sense from a cost perspective. There have also been other sources of fossil fuels – notably conventional oil and gas and more recently shale – that have been

easier and cheaper to access. Things changed early last year. In March, Japan became the first country to get gas flowing successfully from

methane hydrate deposits under the Pacific Ocean. The country has a big reason to pursue methane hydrates . After shutting down most of its nuclear power stations three years ago after the crisis at its Fukushima nuclear plants, the country has relied on expensive imports of liquefied natural gas from countries such as Qatar. Before the Fukushima disaster, nuclear provided about 30 per cent of Japan’s power generation, compared with LNG at 25 per cent. Since that time, LNG’s share has soared to 45 per cent. The increasing energy imports have helped drive the country’s trade balance into deficit. According to Paul Duerloo,

partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group in Japan, the country tops the list of those with an incentive to develop their methane hydrate deposits. Japan, he says, is paying about $15 per million British thermal units (mBTU), compared

with the US Henry Hub price of just $4-$5.5 per mBTU and a price of well below $10 per mBTU in Europe. The country, adds Mr Duerloo,

has few alternatives in terms of energy sources and is keen to become self-sufficient . The resource could be enormous. Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, the state oil group, estimated in 2008 that 1.1tn cubic metres of methane hydrates

lay beneath the eastern Nankai Trough, enough to offset at least a decade’s worth of foreign gas imports. Even so, huge challenges remain before natural gas can be produced from these reserves and the relevant extraction technology is still in its infancy. Hydrates form under high pressure caused by the weight of the seawater or rock above them. That pressure needs to be maintained when the sediment cores are analysed or else the hydrates within quickly dissociate into water and gas. There are also concerns about what the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, could do to the atmosphere. To extract the gas last March, the Japanese team used conventional methods. These involved first lowering a drill about 1,000m to the bottom of the Nankai Trough. They then had to drill another 300m into the rock, drain the water out of the hydrate layer to lower the pressure in the deposit and free the methane gas

which was then pumped to the surface. Nevertheless, more work needs to be done. Researchers in Japan hope to develop production technology that achieves controlled release of the methane from the ice into the production well, thereby minimising the risk of gas escaping into the atmosphere . According to the IEA, “the

longer-term role of methane hydrates will depend on climate change policies as well as technological advances, as meeting ambitious goals to reduce emissions could require a reduction in demand from all fossil fuels, certainly in the

longer term”. Japan has set itself the target of bringing methane hydrates into the mainstream by the early 2020s. Despite the significant challenges, Mr Duerloo believes the world should not underestimate its dedication, inventiveness and willingness. “I think the chances they pull it off are more than half.”

Japan energy dependence drains their economy- trade imbalancePagliarulo 13 (Ned, Global Risk Insights “Fukushima Amplifies Japanese Energy Import Dependence”, Zero Hedge, 10/30/13, http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-10-30/fukushima-amplifies-japanese-energy-import-dependence) EK

When Typhoon Wipha flooded Japan with heavy rains last week, the operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant ordered precautionary

measures to prevent leakage of contaminated water. Ever since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami caused a reactor meltdown at the plant, Fukushima has become a symbol of a Japanese nuclear strategy and energy supply in disarray. As the clean-up from the disaster continues, all fifty of Japan’s nuclear reactors have been taken offline, creating a large shortfall in energy production that Japan has had to fill from abroad. Growing dependence on imports

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Japan falls far short of providing enough energy for its domestic uses, with only 16% domestic energy production. Not surprisingly, Japan needs to import heavily — it is the world largest importer of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Before the disaster at Fukushima and the following reevaluation of nuclear

power in Japan, nuclear sources supplied 13% of Japan’s energy consumption. The EIA notes in another report that “Japan’s electric power utilities have been consuming more natural gas and petroleum to make up for the shortfall in nuclear output…” With this shift, fossil fuel use has jumped 21% in 2012 compared to 2011 levels. High energy costs in the near term (the IMF forecasts that the spot price for crude will remain above $100/barrel for 2014) pose a problem for Japan’s trade balance . As Japan imports more fossil fuels, its trade deficit widens (Japan ran a

surplus before 2011). This hurts its current account , which has shrunk considerably . While the depreciation of the yen

would usually helps by making exports competitive, the IMF’s Article 4 consultation with Japan noted that the weaker yen has yet to improve the current account.

Japanese econ collapse causes Asian InstabilityAuslin 9 (Michael, Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute “Japan’s Downturn Is Bad News for the World”, The Wall Street Journal, 2/17/09, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123483257056995903.html)

Recently, many economists and scholars in the U.S. have been looking backward to Japan's banking disaster of the 1990s, hoping to learn lessons for America's current crisis. Instead, they should be looking ahead to what might occur if Japan goes into a full-fledged

depression. If Japan's economy collapses, supply chains across the globe will be affected and numerous economies will face severe disruptions, most notably China's. China is currently Japan's largest import provider, and the Japanese slowdown is creating tremendous pressure on Chinese factories. Just last

week, the Chinese government announced that 20 million rural migrants had lost their jobs. Closer to home, Japan may also start running out of surplus cash, which it has used to purchase U.S. securities for years. For the first time in a generation, Tokyo is

running trade deficits -- five months in a row so far. The political and social fallout from a Japanese depression also

would be devastating. In the face of economic instability, other Asian nations may feel forced to turn to more centralized -- even authoritarian -- control to try to limit the damage. Free-trade agreements may be rolled back and political freedom curtailed. Social stability in emerging, middle-class societies will be severely tested, and newly democratized states may find it impossible to maintain power. Progress toward a more open, integrated Asia is at risk, with the potential for increased political tension in the world's most heavily armed region. This is the backdrop upon which the U.S.government is set to expand the national debt by a trillion dollars or more. Without massive debt purchases by Japan and China, the U.S. may not be able to finance the cost of the stimulus package, creating a trapdoor under the U.S. economy.

Asian Instability causes nuclear war Dibb 1 (Paul, Professor at the Australian National University “Strategic Trends: Asia at a Crossroads”, Naval War College Review, Winter 2001, http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2001/Winter/art2-w01.htm)

The areas of maximum danger and instability in the world today are in Asia , followed by the Middle East and parts

of the former Soviet Union. The strategic situation in Asia is more uncertain and potentially threatening than anywhere in Europe. Unlike in Europe, it is possible to envisage war in Asia involving the major powers : remnants

of Cold War ideological confrontation still exist across the Taiwan Straits and on the Korean Peninsula; India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and these two countries are more confrontational than at any time since the

early 1970s; in Southeast Asia, Indonesia—which is the world’s fourth-largest country—faces a highly uncertain future that

could lead to its breakup. The Asia-Pacific region spends more on defense (about $150 billion a year) than any other part of the world except the United States and Nato Europe. China and Japan are amongst the top four or five global military spenders. Asia also has more nuclear powers than any other region of the world. Asia’s security is at a

crossroads: th e region could go in the direction of peace and cooperation, or it could slide into confrontation and

military conflict . There are positive tendencies, including the resurgence of economic growth and the spread of democracy, which would

encourage an optimistic view. But there are a number of negative tendencies that must be of serious concern. There are deep-seated historical, territorial, ideological, and religious differences in Asia . Also, the region has no history of successful multilateral security cooperation or arms control. Such multilateral institutions as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the ASEAN Regional Forum have shown themselves to be ineffective when confronted with major crises.

2NC Solvency Japanese extraction solves- pioneered production and extractionTabuchi 13[Hiroko, Staff writer about Japan for the New York Times, “An Energy Coup for Japan: ‘Flammable Ice’” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/business/global/japan-says-it-is-first-to-tap-methane-hydrate-deposit.html?pagewanted=all 3/12/13 DG]

TOKYO — Japan said Tuesday that it had extracted gas from offshore deposits of methane hydrate — sometimes called “flammable ice” — a breakthrough that officials and experts said could be a step toward tapping a promising but still little-understood energy source. The gas, whose extraction from the undersea hydrate reservoir was thought to be a world first, could provide an alternative source of energy to known oil and gas reserves. That could be crucial especially for Japan , which is the world’s biggest importer of liquefied natural gas and is engaged in a public debate about whether to resume the country’s heavy reliance on nuclear power. Experts estimate that the carbon found in gas hydrates worldwide totals at least twice the amount of carbon in all of the earth’s other fossil

fuels, making it a potential game-changer for energy-poor countries like Japan. Researchers had already successfully extracted gas from onshore methane hydrate reservoirs, but not from beneath the seabed, where much of the world’s deposits are thought to lie. The exact properties of undersea hydrates and how they might affect the environment are still poorly understood, given that methane is a greenhouse gas. Japan has invested hundreds of millions of dollars since the early 2000s to explore offshore methane hydrate reserves in both the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. That task has become all the more pressing after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis, which has all but halted Japan’s nuclear energy program and caused a sharp increase in the country’s fossil fuel imports. Japan’s rising energy bill has weighed heavily on its economy, helping to push it to a trade deficit and reducing the benefits of the recently weaker yen to Japanese exporters. The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said a team aboard the scientific drilling ship Chikyu had started a trial extraction of gas from a layer of methane hydrates about 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, below the seabed Tuesday morning. The ship has been drilling since January in an area of the Pacific about 1,000 meters deep and 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, south of the Atsumi Peninsula in central

Japan. With specialized equipment, the team drilled into and then lowered the pressure in the undersea methane hydrate reserve, causing the methane and ice to separate. It then piped the natural gas to the surface, the ministry said in a statement. Hours later, a flare on the ship’s stern showed that gas was being produced, the ministry said.

“Japan could finally have an energy source to call its own,” said Takami Kawamoto, a spokesman for the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, or Jogmec, the state-run company leading the trial extraction. The team will continue the trial extraction for about two weeks before analyzing how much gas has been produced, Jogmec said. Japan hopes to make the extraction technology

commercially viable in about five years. “This is the world’s first trial production of gas from oceanic methane hydrates, and I hope we will be able to confirm stable gas production,” Toshimitsu Motegi, the Japanese trade minister, said at a news conference in Tokyo. He acknowledged that the extraction process would still face technical hurdles and other problems. Still, “shale gas was considered technologically difficult to extract but is now produced on a large scale,” he said. “By tackling these challenges one by one, we could soon start tapping the resources that surround Japan.” It is unclear how much the tapping of methane hydrate would affect Japan’s emissions or global warming. On one hand, natural gas would provide a cleaner alternative to coal, which still provides Japan with a fifth of its primary energy needs. But new energy sources could also prompt Japan to slow its development of renewable energies or green technologies, hurting its emissions in the long run. Any accidental release of large amounts of methane during the extraction process would also be harmful. Jogmec estimates that the surrounding area in the Nankai submarine trough holds at least 1.1 trillion cubic meters, or 39 trillion cubic feet, of methane hydrate, enough to meet 11 years’ worth of gas imports to Japan. A separate rough estimate by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology has put the total amount of methane hydrate in the waters surrounding Japan at more than 7 trillion cubic meters, or

what researchers have long said is closer to 100 years’ worth of Japan’s natural gas needs. “Now we know that extraction is possible,” said Mikio Satoh, a senior researcher in marine geology at the institute who was not involved in the Nankai trough expedition. “The next step is to see how far Japan can get costs down to make the technology economically viable.” Methane hydrate is a sherbetlike substance that can form when methane gas is trapped in ice below the seabed or underground. Though it looks like ice, it burns when it is heated. Experts say there are abundant deposits of gas hydrates in the seabed and in some Arctic regions. Japan, together with Canada, has already succeeded in extracting gas from methane hydrate trapped in permafrost soil. American researchers are carrying out similar test projects on the North Slope of Alaska. The difficulty had long been how to extract gas from the methane hydrate far below the seabed, where much of the deposits lie. In onshore tests, Japanese researchers explored using hot water to warm the methane hydrate, and tried lowering pressure to free the methane molecules. Japan decided to use depressurization, partly because pumping warm water under the seabed would itself require a lot of energy. “Gas hydrates have always been seen as a potentially vast energy source, but the question was, how do we extract gas from under the ocean?” said Ryo Matsumoto, a professor in geology at Meiji University in Tokyo who has led research into Japan’s hydrate deposits. “Now we’ve cleared one big hurdle.” According to the United States Geological Survey, recent mapping off the North Carolina and

South Carolina coasts shows large offshore accumulations of methane hydrates. Canada, China, Norway and the United States are also exploring hydrate deposits. Scientists at the geological survey note, however, that there is still a limited understanding of how drilling for hydrates might affect the environment, particularly the possible release of methane into the atmosphere, and are calling for continued research and monitoring.

Japan solves- Joint venture with Canada to extract hydratesArango 13 [Canada drops out of race to tap methane hydrates, Funding ended for research into how to exploit world's largest fossil energy resource, By Santiago Ortega Arango, a freelance contributor for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, is a Colombian engineer and freelance journalist interested in climate change, May 7th, 2013, http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/canada-drops-out-of-race-to-tap-methane-hydrates-1.1358966]

Canada and Japan have been partners in the quest to extract methane from hydrates. Since 2000, Natural

Resources Canada has invested more than $16 million in the venture. Japan spent around $60 million between 2002 and 2008 to finance production tests in the Canadian Arctic. On March 18 this year the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals

National Corp. reached a milestone, successfully completing a test to produce methane gas from offshore hydrate formations for the first time, using extraction techniques pioneered in Canada. Despite the success,

Canadian federal funding from Natural Resources Canada for research into exploiting methane hydrates was cut as of March 31 — just a couple of weeks after the offshore production tests in Japan. The ministry told CBC News the decision was made in 2012.

AT: Perm Both Strong U.S. Japan Ties cause East Asian instability and kills Chinese Democracy Nye and Armitage 7 [Joseph Nye University Distinguished Service Professor and Richard Armitage Deputy Secretary of State, “The U.S. Japan Alliance”, Feburary 2007, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/070216_asia2020.pdf ]At the same time, however, a bipolar structure with only the United States and Japan facing China would be ineffective, because it would force other regional powers to choose between two competing poles .

Some might side with the United States and Japan, but most regional powers would choose strict neutrality or align with China. Ultimately, this would weaken the powerful example of American and Japanese democracy and return the region to a Cold War or nineteenth century balance-of-power logic that does not favor stability in the region or contribute to China’s potential for positive change. Stability in East Asia will rest on the quality of U.S.-Japan-China relations, and even though the United States is closely allied with Japan, Washington should encourage good relations among all three.

Asian Instability causes war Dibb 1 (Papul, Prof. and Head of Strategic and Defense Studies Centre – Research School of the Asia Pacific of Australian National U., Former Defense Sec. for Strategic Policy and Intelligence – Australian DOD, Naval War College Review, “Strategic trends: Asia at a crossroads”, 54:1, Winter, Proquest)

The areas of maximum danger and instability in the world today are in Asia , followed by the Middle East and parts

of the former Soviet Union. The strategic situation in Asia is more uncertain and potentially threatening than anywhere in Europe. Unlike in Europe, it is possible to envisage war in Asia involving the major powers: remnants of Cold War

ideological confrontation still exist across the Taiwan Straits and on the Korean Peninsula; India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and these two countries are more confrontational than at any time since the early 1970s; in Southeast Asia, Indonesia-which is the world's fourth-largest country-faces a highly uncertain future that could lead to its breakup. The Asia-Pacific region spends more on defense

(about $150 billion a year) than any other part of the world except the United States and Nato Europe. China and

Japan are amongst the top four or five global military spenders. Asia also has more nuclear powers than any other region of the world. Asia's security is at a crossroads: the region could go in the direction of peace and cooperation, or it could slide into confrontation and military conflict. There are positive tendencies, including the resurgence of economic growth and the spread of democracy, which would encourage an optimistic view. But there are a number of negative tendencies that must be of serious concern. There are deep-seated historical, territorial, ideological, and religious differences in Asia. Also, the region has no history of successful multilateral security cooperation or arms control. Such multilateral institutions as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the ASEAN Regional Forum have shown themselves to be ineffective when confronted with major crises.

AT: Japan Drilling BadJapan is key- recent extractions proveThe Guardian 13 [Japan becomes first nation to extract 'frozen gas' from seabed, Successful extraction from frozen methane hydrate deposits is the first example of production of the gas offshore, Staff and agencies, theguardian.com, Tuesday 12 March 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/12/japan-extract-frozen-gas-seabed]

Japan has successfully extracted natural gas from frozen methane hydrate deposits under the sea, in the first example of production of the gas offshore, officials said on Tuesday. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry showed

what it said was gas flaming from a pipe at the project in the Pacific Ocean 80 kilometres (50 miles) off the coast of central Japan. The breakthrough could be a step toward eventual commercial production, though the costs of extracting gas from the seabed are much higher than for other forms of production . Methane hydrate is a form of methane gas frozen below the seabed or in permanently frozen ground. Japan earlier succeeded in producing such gas from permafrost in Canada in 2007-

08. Resource-scarce Japan, which imports most of its energy, hopes to develop ways to produce natural gas from its own reserves. The Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corp and a government research institute, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, used a technology they developed to reduce pressure in the underground layers holding the methane hydrate 1,330 metres (4,363 feet) below the sea surface, and then dissolved it into gas and water, collecting the gas through a well, the ministry said. Speaking to the Financial Times, Ryo Minami, director of the oil and gas division at Japan's Agency for Natural Resources, compared methane hydrate to shale gas, a once-marginal resource which is transforming the US energy market. "Ten years ago, everybody knew there was shale gas in the ground, but to extract it was too costly. Yet now it's commercialised," he said. Methane hydrate looks like ice but burns like a candle if a flame is applied. With the boom in production of natural gas from the fracking of shale gas boosting supplies in the US in particular,

there is little need to resort to the more costly extraction of the frozen gas in those regions. But it is considered a future potential resource by some, and studies show substantial reserves in various regions, including the Nankai trough off Japan's eastern coast, the northern Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's North Slope.

Japanese extraction is the best- successful depressurizing processFitzpatrick 10 [Japan to drill for controversial 'fire ice' Japan seeks to improve energy security by drilling for frozen methane but environmentalists fear a leak of the greenhouse gas, which is 21 times as damaging as carbon dioxide, Michael Fitzpatrick, reporter at theguardian.com, Monday 27 September 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/sep/27/energy-industry-energy]

In a bid to shore up its precarious energy security Japan is to start commercial test drilling for controversial frozen methane gas along its coast next year. The gas is methane hydrate, a sherbet-like substance consisting of methane trapped in water ice – sometimes called "fire ice" or MH – that is locked deep underwater or under permafrost by the cold and under pressure 23 times

that of normal atmosphere. A consortium led by the Japanese government and the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (Jogmec) will be sinking several wells off the south-eastern coast of Japan to assess the commercial viability of extracting gas from frozen methane deep beneath local waters . Surveys suggest Japan has enough methane hydrate for 100 years at the current rate of usage. Lying hundreds of metres below the sea and deeper still below

sediments, fire ice is exceedingly difficult to extract. Japan is claiming successful tests using a method that gently depressurises the frozen gas. Tokyo plans to start commercial output of methane hydrates by 2018. At present, Japan imports nearly all its gas – about 58.6m tonnes of liquified gas annually – and is heavily dependent on oil imports. In a desperate attempt to secure more oil, for example, Japan recently did a deal with the United Arab Emirates. In exchange for using Japan as a base for Asian oil trading, Japan now has priority to purchase rights to up to 4m barrels of immediately accessible crude. Lucia van Geuns, an energy analyst at the international

energy programme of the Clingendael Institute, said: "Methane hydrates could make Japan energy independent. Japan put a lot of R&D into this project because of course the less energy it imports the better . Whether they can

commercialise methane hydrates remains to be seen. "If it does succeed, and that's very much a long shot, it will have a huge impact – equivalent to the use of gas shales in the US."

AT: Energy Deficit CP solves energy independence- Japan commercializes hydrates—makes them available for the US Max et. Al 13[Michael d., world's leading consultancies for unconventional gas resources, “Natural Gas Hydrate - Arctic Ocean Deepwater Resource Potential” chapter 6, http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/760/chp%253A10.1007%252F978-3-319-02508-7_6.pdf?auth66=1405009459_e105112ca2e5e2501764c04c4bb61a85&ext=.pdf 2013 DG]

As will be discussed elsewhere in this volume, very great progress has been made in understanding the NGH system and developing exploration

tools that can bring discoveries to the level of a prospect. The world's first technical production test of oceanic NGH was carried out on the 40 TCF Nankai NGH deposit according to a planned timeline (Kurihara et al. 2011) during March 2013 by IOGMEC (2013). Part of the Nankai deposit is scheduled for production in 2018, which is only 5 years from the first production test. This is a near-term development timeline consistent with conventional deepwater field development. Commercial production of NGH off Japan is likely because natural gas produced from the Nankai NGH deposit should compete well with the rather high delivered price of

liquefied natural gas (LNG) that has been in the $15-$18 MMcf range in the 2011-2013 time period. With improvement of the development cost of NGH exploration and production techniques, it is entirely possible that oceanic NGH may compete on a produced cost with other natural gas resources.

AT: Presence Deficit The arctic is Russia’s SOI- Ice BreakersBennett 12 (Mia, Associate, Recruiting & Human Resources at Tower Research Capital and writer for The Arctic: Foreign Policy Blog “New icebreaker bolsters Russian supremacy in Arctic,” Alaska Dispatch’s Eye on the Arctic Feature, September 19, 2012; http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/new-icebreaker-bolsters-russian-supremacy-arctic)

Russia oversees the world's largest fleet of nuclear icebreakers, and it will soon add the largest one yet to its tally. Rosatom, which currently manages Russia's fleet of new icebreakers through its subsidiary, Atomflot, has just signed a contract with the St. Petersburg-based shipbuilding company Baltisky Zavod to construct a 556-foot-long behemoth -- about 42 feet longer than the next biggest ship. It is so big that it does not fit in any existing docks, so a new one will need to be constructed. The new icebreaker is budgeted to cost about $1.2 billion. Once it is ready in 2017, the ship will grant Russia extra capability to ensure safe shipping along the Northern Sea Route (NSR), which it is working strenuously to develop into a major transportation corridor. Although the ice is melting, each ship transiting through the NSR will still need to be escorted by an icebreaker in the short to medium term, so having an adequate number of icebreakers is crucial.

The Russian fleet currently stands at six nuclear icebreakers. Four of the icebreakers are powerful enough to break ice in the open ocean, while two are designed for ramming through the more shallow icy waters of frozen rivers. The new, seventh icebreaker will reportedly be able to cut through ice up to twelve feet thick. In addition,

since it is a dual-draft ship, it will be able to operate in both the ocean and in rivers. The massive icebreaker will be able to navigate through the often ice-bound Ob and Yenisei Rivers, which spill out into the Arctic Ocean . Scientific

American has the details on the specs behind the ship. Russia is not stopping with the addition of one nuclear icebreaker. President Vladimir Putin has said that he wants Russia to have three new nuclear icebreakers by 2020. Canada surely envies these plans. Its new icebreaker, the CCGS John G. Diefenbaker, slated for delivery in 2017, will only be able to break through 7-1/2 feet of ice. It will be replacing the 42-year-old CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, too, meaning that Canada will still only have one icebreaker – and not even a nuclear one at that. Granted, the Northwest Passage has much poorer prospects for turning into a global trade link

due to its shallower, narrower passages and greater amount of ice. Therefore, since the most promising route in the Arctic hugs Russia's coast, it is up to the Kremlin to meet the challenge of bringing it within world-class standards. The volume of cargo shipped along the NSR should hit a record high this year, besting last year's total of 34 ships and 820,000 tons of cargo, so long as the shipping season endures as long as last year's did (through November). So far, Russia is showing political and economic commitment to development of the Arctic unmatched by any other seafaring Arctic nation.

Encroachment into Russia’s SOI turns Russia into a hostile challenger of the USAllison and Blackwill 11 (Graham and Robert, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School AND ** Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations “Russia and U.S. National Interests Why Should Americans Care?”, Task Force on Russia and U.S. National Interests Report, October, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Russia-and-US-NI_final-web.pdf)

Americans often tend to focus on either Russia’s strengths or its weaknesses without seeking an integrated understanding of the real Russia.

This is problematic, because it leads to dangerous assumptions about Russia’s motives and conduct. For example, those who focus on Moscow’s strengths frequently see an assertive and dangerous rival without recognizing Russia’s profound insecurity. Conversely, those who concentrate on Russia’s shortcomings see a defeated power ill-prepared to resist American pressure or preferences. While these descriptions are clearly caricatures, views like those described above can produce damaging misjudgments.

Russia is grappling with the contradictions between imperial nostalgia, on the one hand, and the dramatic decline in its power after the Soviet

collapse, on the other. The Russian government’s failure to present a credible plan to reverse Russia’s decline or to develop a successful foreign policy strategy that strengthens the country’s international role makes this only more

difficult and contributes to a sense of insecurity. Nevertheless, the United States has the opportunity to manage its relations with an

evolving Russia in a manner that advances America’s vital national interests. The stakes are high. Russia is more than sufficiently powerful to create a host of costly—and even devastating—problems for the United States if Russian leaders believe that Washington has a hostile, or casual, disregard for Russian national interests and priorities. This is true even though most in Russia’s elite recognize that today’s Russia is not sufficiently strong to challenge American global leadership without the support of other major powers.

This causes war and will escalate globallyWeitz 11 (Richard, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a World Politics Review senior editor “Can We Manage a Declining Russia?” November, http://www.aei.org/files/2011/12/08/-can-we-manage-a-declining-russia_152701899417.pdf)

Conversely, a Russia relatively weaker to the United States would have less capability to challenge the United States but can provide less assistance for realizing common U.S.-Russian goals. A weaker Russia may also find it harder to control its WMD assets and become vulnerable to external predators not friendly to the United States (e. g.. China and Iran). But in all probability Russia will still have sufficiently strong nuclear

forces to ward off external threats. Most worrisome, a Russian leadership that perceived Russia on a slope toward protracted decline might feel compelled to take drastic measures, internally and externally, to reverse its descent. The German Empire, Imperial Japan, and other great powers in the 20th century attempted to reverse their feared decline in ways that helped precipitate disastrous global wars.

Disadvantages

1NC - Arctic War TurnPlan’s aggressive attempt to extract hydrates causes arctic warEnergySkeptic 10 [Blogger, whole article is quotes from an actually qualified source, “Armed Forces, Capabilities and Technologies in the 21st Century Environmental Dimensions of Security,” Bundeswher Transportation Centre, Bundeswher is the German military apparatus, http://energyskeptic.com/2011/german-military-peak-oil-summary/]

War Ownership of the arctic isn’t settled which could lead to conflicts. The strategic significance in securing resources and the exploration of new and controversial oil-producing areas may increase the probability of a further build-up of military arsenals to enforce those claims . Efforts aimed at expanding military capacities for the protection of own claims on the Arctic can already be seen today. Similar considerations apply to international waters. The growing possibility of deep-sea resources exploration would increasingly bring unsettled territorial claims as a potential cause of conflict to the

fore, as can currently be seen in the territorial conflicts over the South China Sea. With the exploitation of high sea deposits, the significance of blue water navies would also increase. Natural gas (NG) as an extension of the oil era NG is seen as a

substitute for oil in many fields and is expected to last longer than oil. [Note: in the USA, reserves of NG have been greatly exaggerated ]. Natural gas will therefore be one of the most important fossil fuels of the future and will have to replace oil to a considerable extent. NG cannot simply be shipped but must be transported as gas via a pipeline or, after compression or liquefaction (liquefied natural gas (LNG)), with special-purpose tankers. Pipeline systems, however, which currently carry the major part of natural gas produced to the consumers, are regionally restricted. Instead of one world market for natural gas are several regional markets with limited numbers of suppliers. The pipelines that carry NG span countries as well political, economic, and cultural regions, which is likely to lead to conflict over the routes, construction, and a need for increased protection of the pipelines. Methane Hydrates Furthermore,

there are substantial non-conventional deposits of natural gas. One of them is methane hydrate – a gaseous methane enclosed in an ice-like compound – that lies in the seabed or in permafrost soil. Under peak oil

conditions, the use of these reserves will probably become more attractive commercially.

1NC - Energy Independent States TurnSwitch to methane hydrates causes global instability and wars – creates world full of warring fractious autonomous statesMann 13 (Charles C., Atlantic contributing editor since 1984, author of 1491 and 1493 “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?”, 4/24/13, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil/309294/?single_page=true) EK

“To keep feeding the infrastructure, you have to maintain a certain return. Otherwise, you’ll abandon it ,”

he told me. “For the individual manager of a large installation with a multimillion-dollar budget, it might be well within your interest, as you go into decline on deepwater production, to start looking at gas hydrate.” If one nation succeeds in producing commercial quantities of undersea methane, others will follow. U.S.-style energy independence, or something like it, may become a reality in much of Asia and West Africa, parts of Europe, most of the

Americas. To achieve this dream, history suggests, subsidies to domestic producers will be generous and governments will slap fees on petroleum imports—especially in Asia, where dependence on foreign energy is even more irksome than it is here. In addition to North America, the main sources of conventionally extracted natural gas are Russia, Iran, and Qatar (Saudi

Arabia is also an important producer). All will feel the pinch in a methane-hydrate world. If natural gas from methane hydrate becomes plentiful and cheap enough to encourage nations to switch from oil , as the Japanese hope, the risk pool

will expand to include Brunei, Iraq, Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, and other petro-states. The results in those nations would be turbulent. Petroleum revenues, if they are large, exercise curious and malign effects on their recipients. In 1959, the Netherlands found petroleum on the shores of the North Sea. Money gurgled into the country. To general surprise, the flood of cash led to an economic freeze. Afterward, economists realized that salaries in the new petroleum industry were so high that nobody wanted to work anywhere else. To keep employees, companies in other parts of the economy had to jack up wages, in turn driving up costs. Meanwhile, the surge of foreign money into the Netherlands raised the exchange rate. Soaring costs and currency made it harder for Dutch firms to compete; manufacturing and agriculture faltered; unemployment climbed, except in the oil industry. The windfall led to stagnation—a phenomenon that petroleum cognoscenti now call “Dutch disease.” Some scholars today doubt how much the Netherlands was

actually affected by Dutch disease. Still, the general point is widely accepted. A good modern economy is like a roof with many robust supporting pillars, each a different economic sector. In Dutch-disease scenarios, oil weakens all the pillars but one—the petroleum industry, which bloats steroidally. Worse, that remaining pillar becomes so big and important that in almost every nation, the government takes it over . (“Almost,” because there is an exception: the United States, the only one of the 62 petroleum-producing nations that allows private entities to control large amounts of oil and gas reserves.) Because the national petroleum company, with its gush of oil revenues, is the center of national economic power, “the ruler typically puts a loyalist in charge,” says Michael Ross, a UCLA political scientist and the author of The Oil Curse

(2012). “The possibilities for corruption are endless.” Governments dip into the oil kitty to reward friends and buy off enemies. Sometimes the money goes to simple bribes; in the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of euros from France’s state oil company, Elf Aquitaine, lined the pockets of businessmen and politicians at home and abroad. Often, oil money is funneled into pharaonic development projects: highways and hotels, designer malls and desalination plants. Frequently, it is simply unaccounted for. How much of Venezuela’s oil wealth Hugo Chávez hijacked for his own political purposes is unknown, because his government stopped publishing the relevant income and expenditure figures. Similarly, Ross points out, Saddam Hussein allocated more than half the government’s funds to the Iraq National Oil Company; nobody has any idea what happened to the stash, though, because INOC never released a budget. (Saddam personally directed the nationalization of

Iraqi oil in 1972, then leveraged his control of petroleum revenues to seize power from his rivals.) Shortfalls in oil revenues thus kick away the sole, unsteady support of the state—a cataclysmic event, especially if it happens suddenly. “Think of Saudi Arabia,” says Daron Acemoglu, the MIT economist and a co-author of Why Nations Fail. “How will the royal family contain both the mullahs and

the unemployed youth without a slush fund?” And there is nowhere else to turn, because oil has withered all other industry, Dutch-disease-style. Similar questions could be asked of other petro-states in Africa, the Arab world, and central Asia. A methane-hydrate boom could lead to a southwest-to-northeast arc of instability stretching from Venezuela to Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to Kazakhstan to Siberia . It seems fair to say that if autocrats in these places were toppled, most Americans would not mourn. But it seems equally fair to say that they would not necessarily be enthusiastic about their

replacements. Augmenting the instability would be methane hydrate itself, much of which is inconveniently

located in areas of disputed sovereignty. “Whenever you find something under the water, you get into struggles over who it belongs to,” says Terry Karl, a Stanford political scientist and the author of the classic The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Think of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, she says, over which Britain and Argentina went to war 30 years ago and over which they are threatening to fight again. “One of the real reasons that they are such an issue is the belief that either oil or natural gas is offshore.” Methane-hydrate deposits run like crystalline bands through maritime flash points: the Arctic, and waters off West Africa and Southeast Asia. In a

working paper, Michael Ross and a colleague, Erik Voeten of Georgetown University, argue that the regular global flow of petroleum, the biggest commodity in world trade, is also a powerful stabilizing force. Nations dislike depending on

international oil, but they play nice and obey the rules because they don’t want to be cut off. By contrast, countries with plenty of energy reserves feel free to throw their weight around. They are “less likely than other states to sign major treaties or join intergovernmental organizations; and they often defy global norms—on human

rights, the expropriation of foreign companies, and the financing of foreign terrorism or rebellions.” The implication is sobering: an energy-independent planet would be a world of fractious, autonomous actors, none beholden to the others, with even less cooperation than exists today .

1NC – Oil DA LinkMethane Hydrates Switch collapses every oil exporting countryMann 13 (Charles C., Atlantic contributing editor since 1984, author of 1491 and 1493 “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?”, 4/24/13, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil/309294/?single_page=true) EK

In January, 18 years after the Japanese program began, the Chikyu left the Port of Shimizu, midway up the main island’s eastern coastline, to begin a “production” test—an attempt to harvest usefully large volumes of gas, rather than laboratory samples. Many questions remained to be answered, the project director, Koji Yamamoto, told me before the launch. JOGMEC hadn’t figured out the best way to mine hydrate, or how to ship the resultant natural gas to shore. Costs needed to be brought down. “It will not be ready for 10 years,” Yamamoto said. “But I believe it will be ready.” What would happen then, he allowed, would be “interesting.” Already the petroleum industry has been convulsed by hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking”—a technique for shooting water mixed with sand and chemicals into rock, splitting it open, and releasing previously inaccessible oil, referred to as “tight oil.” Still more important, fracking releases natural gas, which, when yielded from shale, is known as shale gas. (Petroleum is a grab-bag term for all nonsolid hydrocarbon resources—oil of various types, natural gas, propane, oil precursors, and so on—that companies draw from beneath the Earth’s surface. The stuff that catches fire around stove burners is known by a more precise term, natural gas, referring to methane, a colorless, odorless gas that has the same chemical makeup no matter what the source—ordinary petroleum wells, shale beds, or methane hydrate.) Fracking has been attacked as an environmental menace to underground water supplies, and may eventually be greatly restricted. But it has also unleashed so much petroleum in North America that the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based consortium of energy-consuming nations, predicted in November that by 2035, the United States will become “all but self-sufficient in net terms.” If the Chikyu researchers are successful, methane hydrate could have similar effects in Japan. And not just in Japan: China, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Norway are looking to unlock these crystal cages, as are Canada and the United States. Not everyone thinks JOGMEC will succeed. But methane hydrate is being developed in much the same methodical way that shale gas was developed before it, except by a bigger, more international group of researchers. Shale gas, too, was subject to skepticism wide and loud. The egg on naysayers’ faces suggests that it

would be foolish to ignore the prospects for methane hydrate—and more foolish still not to consider the potential consequences. If methane hydrate allows much of the world to switch from oil to gas, the conversion would undermine governments that depend on oil revenues , especially petro-autocracies like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Unless oil states are exceptionally well run, a gush of petroleum revenues can actually weaken their

economies by crowding out other business. Worse, most oil nations are so corrupt that social scientists argue over whether there is an inherent bond—a “resource curse”—between big petroleum deposits and political malfeasance. It seems safe to say that few Americans would be upset if a plunge in demand eliminated these countries’ hold over the U.S. economy. But those same people might not relish the global instability—a belt of financial and political turmoil from Venezuela to Turkmenistan—that their collapse could well unleash.

1NC – PoliticsMethane hydrates are politically divisive Harder 14 [AMY HARDER, energy policy report for WSJ, White House Calls for New Rules to Cut Methane Emissions Initiative Is Part of Strategy to Address Climate Change, March 28, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304688104579467361249626076]

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration on Friday directed several federal agencies to clamp down on emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas emitted from natural gas and other industries, fleshing out an initiative that attempts to address environmental concerns

without harming the nation's booming natural-gas industry. The White House move is part of President Barack Obama's broader plan

announced last June to tackle climate change. The administration's methane strategy reflects a reluctance to commit right now to new federal regulations targeting the natural-gas industry, which could be politically unpopular . New rules could also contradict the administration's rhetoric and actions supporting natural gas in the past few years, including the Energy Department's conditional approval earlier this week of the seventh U.S. project to export gas. Reaction from oil and natural-gas companies was

muted, while environmentalists cheered the news. Statements from senior officials at the two trade associations representing producers—America's Natural Gas Alliance and the American Petroleum Institute—didn't criticize the administration and instead pointed to how the industry was already and will continue cutting its methane emissions without new regulations. As U.S. natural-gas sources have ballooned, environmental groups

have worried more about the effects of natural-gas use on climate change. The primary component of natural gas is methane , which the administration said has a warming effect on the planet more than 20 times greater than carbon dioxide. Despite mounting skepticism from environmentalists, the administration has supported natural gas as an energy source in part because it puts out far fewer carbon emissions than coal or oil.

2NC – PoliticsPlan is unpopular – oil lobbies Weiss 10 [Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and Director Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress, Oil Dependence Is a Dangerous Habit, Center for American Progress, January 13, 2010, http://americanprogress.org/issues/green/report/2010/01/13/7200/oil-dependence-is-a-dangerous-habit/, 6/24/14]

Many major oil companies and their trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, are some of the most vocal opponents of increasing American energy independence and reducing global warming pollution.

This is likely because they profit by buying oil from “dangerous or unstable” states. This includes importing oil from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Mauritania, Iraq, Congo, Colombia, Chad, and Algeria. In 2008 Chevron made a profit of $23.9 billion while nearly half of its imports—138 million barrels of oil—came from these countries. ExxonMobil made $45.2 billion while getting 43 percent of its oil—205.6 million barrels—from these countries. About one-third of BP’s imports—110.6 million barrels—were from these countries in 2008, when the company’s profits were $25.6 billion. Approximately 25 percent of ConocoPhillips’ imports were from “dangerous or unstable” countries—116.7 million barrels—in 2008, contributing to its $52.7 billion profit. And Shell raked in $31.4 billion that year, also importing one-quarter of its oil—61.8 million barrels—from these countries. (Note: Shell includes Shell Chemical LP, Shell Chemical Yabucoa Inc, Shell US

Trading Co, Shell Oil Co, and Shell Oil Co Deer Park). With that kind of money it’s no wonder Big Oil is doing everything in its power to maintain the status quo. The companies are spending record amounts on lobbying to stop clean-energy and climate legislation. The American Petroleum Institute spent $75.2 million for public relations and advertising in 2008, and in the third quarter of 2009 the oil and gas industry outspent all other sectors lobbying on climate change, with Exxon Mobil leading the pack spending $7.2 million.

Methane hydrates is politically unpopularPollution Solutions 2013 [Burning ice could make fracking wastewater drinkable, Published in 2013, http://www.pollutionsolutions-online.com/news/water-wastewater/17/breaking_news/burning_ice_could_make_fracking_wastewater_drinkable/26651/]

Despite these recent advances, commercial production is still unlikely for at least 10 to 15 years. Japan believes that commercial production will

be possible by 2018, while the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that countries with the "political will" to pursue methane hydrates could see production by around 2025. Though expensive compared to conventional methods of recovering natural gas, the estimated cost of methane hydrate extraction is similar to other unconventional sources, such as shale gas. The International Energy Agency estimates that once developed, it will cost between $4.70-$8.60 to extract 1 million British thermal units of methane hydrates. The same studies estimate conventional costs as low as $0.50 per 1 million British thermal units. Developmental and capital costs are likely to be high, since the deposits are in difficult, harsh locations (e.g., Artic or deepwater environments) and depending on their location, new fields could also mean additional capital costs from infrastructure development.

1NC – Renewable Tradeoff DAMethane Hydrate extraction guarantees we never switch Mann 13 (Charles C., Atlantic contributing editor since 1984, author of 1491 and 1493 “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?”, 4/24/13, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil/309294/?single_page=true) EK

On a broader level still, cheap, plentiful natural gas throws a wrench into efforts to combat climate change. Avoiding the worst effects of climate change, scientists increasingly believe, will require “a complete phase-out of carbon emissions … over 50 years,” in the words of one widely touted scientific estimate that appeared in January. A big, necessary step toward that goal is moving away from coal, still the second-most-important energy source worldwide. Natural gas burns so much cleaner than coal that converting power plants from coal to gas—a switch promoted by the deluge of gas from fracking—has already reduced U.S.

greenhouse-gas emissions to their lowest levels since Newt Gingrich’s heyday. Yet natural gas isn’t that clean; burning it produces

carbon dioxide. Researchers view it as a temporary “bridge fuel,” something that can power nations while they make the

transition away from oil and coal. But if societies do not take advantage of that bridge to enact anti-carbon policies, says Michael Levi, the director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations, natural gas could be “a bridge from the coal-fired past to the coal-fired future.” “Methane hydrate could be a new energy revolution,” Christopher Knittel, a professor of energy economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me. “It

could help the world while we reduce greenhouse gases. Or it could undermine the economic rationale for investing in renewable, carbon-free energy around the world”—just as abundant shale gas from fracking has already begun to undermine

it in the United States. “The one path is a boon. The other—I’ve used words like catastrophe.” He paused; I thought I detected a sigh. “I wouldn’t bet on us making the right decisions.”

And renewable usage is the only way to solve global warming – we must fully switch our energy source soonWasserman 14 (Harvey, climate change journalist reporting on the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) from the IPCC, “UN Panel: Renewables, not Nukes, Can Solve Climate Crisis”, http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/04/187639/un-panel-renewables-not-nukes-can-solve-climate-crisis)

The authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has left zero doubt that we humans are wrecking our climate. It also effectively says the problem can be solved, and that renewable energy is the way to do it , and

that nuclear power is not. The United Nations’ IPCC is the world’s most respected authority on climate. This IPCC report was four years in the making. It embraces several hundred climate scientists and more than a thousand computerized scenarios of what might be happening to global weather patterns. The panel’s work has definitively

discredited the corporate contention that human-made carbon emissions are not affecting climate change. To avoid total catastrophe, says the IPCC, we must reduce the industrial spew of global warming gasses by 40-70 percent of 2010 levels. Though the warning is dire, the report offers three pieces of good news. First, we have about 15 years to slash these emissions. Second, renewable technologies are available to do the job. And

third, the cost is manageable. Though 2030 might seem a tight deadline for a definitive transition to Solartopia, green power technologies have become far simpler and quicker to install than their competitors, especially atomic reactors. They are also far cheaper, and we have the capital to do it. The fossil fuel industry has long scorned the idea that its emissions are disrupting our Earth’s weather. The oil companies and atomic reactor backers have dismissed the ability of renewables to provide humankind’s energy

needs. But the IPCC confirms that green technologies, including efficiency and conservation, can in fact handle the job---at a manageable price. “It doesn’t cost the world to save the planet,” says Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, an economist who led the IPCC team. The IPCC report cites nuclear power as a possible means of lowering industrial carbon emissions. But it also underscores considerable barriers involving finance and public opposition. Joined with widespread concerns about ecological impacts, length of implementation, production uncertainties and unsolved waste issues, the report’s positive emphasis on renewables virtually guarantees nuclear’s irrelevance. Some climate

scientists have recently advocated atomic energy as a solution to global warming. But their most prominent spokesman, Dr. James Hansen, also expresses serious doubts about the current generation of reactors, including Fukushima, which he calls “that old technology.” Instead Hansen advocates a new generation of reactors. But the designs are untested, with implementation schedules stretching out for decades. Financing is a major obstacle as is waste disposal and widespread public opposition, now certain to escalate with the IPCC’s confirmation that renewables can provide the power so much cheaper and faster. With its 15-year deadline for massive carbon reductions the IPCC has effectively timed out any

chance a new generation of reactors could help. And with its clear endorsement of green power as a tangible, doable, affordable solution for the climate crisis, the pro-nuke case has clearly suffered a multiple meltdown. With green

power, says IPCC co-chair Jim Skea, a British professor, a renewable solution is at hand. “It’s actually affordable to do it and people are not going to have to sacrifice their aspirations about improved standards of living.”

Cross apply their 1AC warming impact

2NC – Renewable Energy Solves WarmingRE can meet all of the world’s energy needsIPCC 12 (Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation http://srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report/IPCC_SRREN_Full_Report.pdf)

The global technical potential of RE sources will not limit continued growth in the use of RE . A wide range of

estimates is provided in the literature, but studies have consistently found that the total global technical potential for RE is substantially higher than global energy demand (Figure SPM.4) [1.2.2, 10.3, Annex II]. The technical potential for solar energy is the highest among the RE sources, but substantial technical potential exists for all six RE sources. Even in regions with relatively low levels of technical potential for any individual RE source, there are typically significant opportunities for increased deployment compared to current levels. [1.2.2, 2.2, 2.8, 3.2, 4.2, 5.2, 6.2, 6.4, 7.2, 8.2, 8.3, 10.3] In the longer term and at higher deployment levels, however, technical potentials indicate a limit to the contribution of some individual RE technologies. Factors such as sustainability concerns [9.3], public acceptance [9.5], system integration and infrastructure constraints [8.2], or economic factors [10.3] may also limit deployment of RE technologies

Solar Energy alone solvesKrugman 11 (Paul, nobel prize winner, economist, badass, “That's right: Solar power is now cost-effective” http://seattletimes.com/html/opinion/2016712561_krugman08.html)

For decades the story of technology has been dominated, in the popular mind and to a large extent in reality, by computing and the things you can do with it. Moore's Law — in which the price of computing power falls roughly 50 percent every 18 months — has powered an ever-expanding range of applications, from faxes to Facebook. Our mastery of the material world, on the other hand, has advanced much more slowly. The sources of energy, the way we move stuff around, are much the same

as they were a generation ago. But that may be about to change. We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That's right, solar power. If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil-fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives. Speaking of propaganda: Before I get to solar, let's talk briefly about hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking. Fracking — injecting high-pressure fluid into rocks deep underground, inducing the release of fossil fuels — is an impressive technology. But it's also a technology that imposes large costs on the public. We know that it produces toxic (and radioactive) wastewater that contaminates drinking water; there is reason to suspect, despite industry denials, that it also contaminates groundwater; and the heavy trucking required for fracking inflicts major damage on roads. Economics 101 tells us that an industry imposing large costs on third parties should be required to "internalize" those costs — that is, to pay for the damage it inflicts, treating that damage as a cost of production. Fracking might still be worth doing given those costs. But no industry should be held harmless from its impacts on the environment and the nation's infrastructure. Yet what the industry and its defenders demand is, of course, precisely that it be let off the hook for the damage it causes. Why? Because we need that energy! For example, the industry-backed organization energyfromshale.org declares that "there are only two sides in the debate: those who want our oil and natural resources developed in a safe and responsible way; and those who don't want our oil and natural gas resources developed at all." So it's worth pointing out that special treatment for fracking makes a mockery of free-market principles. Pro-fracking politicians claim to be against subsidies, yet letting an industry impose costs without paying compensation is in effect a huge subsidy. They say they oppose having the government "pick winners," yet they demand special treatment for this industry precisely because they claim it will be a winner. And now for

something completely different: The success story you haven't heard about. These days, mention solar power and you'll probably hear cries of "Solyndra!" Republicans have tried to make the failed solar-panel company both a symbol of government

waste — although claims of a major scandal are nonsense — and a stick with which to beat renewable energy. But Solyndra's failure was actually caused by technological success: The price of solar panels is dropping fast, and Solyndra couldn't keep up with the competition. In fact, progress in solar panels has been so dramatic and sustained that, as a blog post at Scientific American put it, "there's now frequent talk of a 'Moore's law' in solar energy," with prices adjusted for inflation falling around 7 percent a year . This has already led to rapid growth in solar installations, but even more change may be just around the corner. If the downward trend continues — and if anything it seems to be accelerating — we're just a few years from

the point at which electricity from solar panels becomes cheaper than electricity generated by burning coal. And if we priced coal-fired power right, taking into account the huge health and other costs it imposes, it's likely that we would already have passed that tipping point. But will our political system delay the energy transformation now within reach? Let's face it: A large part of our political class, including essentially the entire GOP, is deeply invested in an energy sector dominated by fossil fuels, and actively hostile to alternatives. This political class will do everything it can to ensure subsidies for the extraction and use of fossil fuels, directly with taxpayers' money and indirectly by letting the industry off the hook for environmental costs, while ridiculing technologies like solar. So what you need to know is that nothing you hear from these people is true. Fracking is not a

dream come true; solar is now cost-effective. Here comes the sun, if we're willing to let it in.

2NC – Hydrates Tradeoff w/ RenewablesMethane Hydrate usage removes all incentives to switch to renewable energyCamus 14 (Gabriel, Reporter at Energy Post, “A story of ice and fire: how methane hydrates could change the world”, 4/23/14, http://www.energypost.eu/story-ice-fire-methane-hydrates-change-world/)//WL

The truth of the matter is however that, while gas is indeed better than coal, it remains a fossil fuel. A rush into methane hydrates reserves could therefore hardly be considered a positive signal for the development of the carbon-free economy that the EU and the

UN champion. Methane hydrates would simply reveal once again that our economies favour sailing further and drilling deeper over developing alternatives. A methane hydrates frenzy would be further evidence that inertia and path dependency are still predominant and that the easier road is still the one that our growth-oriented economies invariably opt for, despite the well-known long-term consequences . This certainly applies to countries whose wealth is already largely based on the exploitation of their fossil fuel resources (such as the US, Canada,

Russia and Norway). Turning to this new godsend after conventional and shale reserves are exhausted would merely mean the continuation of their deeply entrenched economic model. But, as demonstrated earlier in this article, those countries would probably be latecomers as far as methane hydrates are concerned. The hydrate revolution would have an even more detrimental effect on those countries that will lead the way, i.e. the resource-poor ones, such as Japan, Korea and even India (whose coal mines do not suffice, by far, to quench its thirst for energy). Well aware of the danger of energy dependency, these countries have all engaged in extensive support programmes for the only domestic energy sources they have at their disposal: renewable and nuclear energy (at least until

recently in the case of Japan). The sudden availability of large amounts of natural gas on their territory, which, unlike renewable, would not require an overhaul of their power systems, would most certainly draw politicians’ and investors’ attention away from renewable energy. Thus, methane hydrates would drain the momentum from the construction of green economies and lead to significant steps backwards. In addition, it would undoubtedly have a negative impact on these countries’ so far rather progressive approach to the international negotiations on climate change. That cannot be good news for anyone who cares about the future of this planet.

1NC - SCS TurnA) New flood of methane hydrates spark energy wars in the South China SeaBK 5/2 (Business Korea “Methane Hydrate May Ignite New Energy War in Asia, 5/2/14, http://www.businesskorea.co.kr/article/4389/dream-energy-source-methane-hydrate-may-ignite-new-energy-war-asia)

Worries are mounting that methane hydrate, touted as a dream energy source, could spark a new energy war in Asia. U.S.-based magazine “Foreign Policy” recently pointed out that, “The fact that a bulk of methane hydrate is buried

under the center of Asia’s territorial dispute is a big misfortune for the surrounding nations,” meaning that the new energy source turns out to be a new factor that could exacerbate territorial conflicts among major energy-importing countries like Korea, China, and Japan. Methane hydrate is a solid crystal in the form of ice that is formed when water and gas meet at high pressure and low temperature . It is compressed gas, which in gaseous form would be 160-170 times that of its solid mass, making it an ideal future energy source. However, some data points to a rosier outlook in that its massive burial, up to 700,000 trillion cubic feet, is distributed evenly all around the world, dispelling concerns about the possible

international dispute. A burning chunk of methane hydrate gives off a substantial amount of energy. Inlay: The atomic structure of the methane hydrate (or clathrate) lattice. A burning chunk of methane hydrate gives off a substantial amount of energy.

Inlay: The atomic structure of the methane hydrate (or clathrate) lattice. However, the energy source, nicknamed fire ice, could fuel the conflict especially in Asia. This is because Korea, China, and Japan top the list of countries that import the greatest amount of energy sources. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), as of 2012 China is the number 2 crude oil importer, followed by number 3 Japan and number 5 Korea. In natural gas imports, Japan and Korea top the list as numbers 1 and 2. The 3 energy consumption giants are trying to be less dependent on energy imports by actively mining methane hydrate, but the big three and even other South East Asian countries are entangled in a territorial dispute. As for the major methane hydrate deposit

sites, experts cite the Senkaku Islands , the southern part of the South China Sea , and the East Sea as the epicenter of intense territorial tension. In fact, according to the Nihon Keizai newspaper, China’s marine department and geological survey department launched a full-fledged methane hydrate energy probe last month in the South China Sea, causing a big backlash from territorial disputing countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines.

B) That causes nuclear annihilationWittner 11 (Lawrence, Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany “Is a Nuclear War With China Possible?”, 11/30/11, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-wittner/nuclear-war-china_b_1116556.html)

While nuclear weapons exist, there remains a danger that they will be used. After all, for centuries international conflicts have led to wars, with nations employing their deadliest weapons. The current deterioration of U.S. relations with China might end up providing us with yet another example of this phenomenon. The gathering tension between the United States and China is clear enough. Disturbed by

China's growing economic and military strength, the U.S. government recently challenged China's claims in the South China Sea, increased the U.S. military presence in Australia, and deepened U.S. military ties with other nations in the Pacific region. According to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States was "asserting our own position as a Pacific power." But need this lead to nuclear war? Not necessarily. And yet, there are signs that it could. After all, both the United States and China possess large numbers of nuclear weapons. The U.S. government threatened to attack China with nuclear weapons during the Korean War and, later, during their conflict over the future of China's offshore islands, Quemoy and Matsu. In the midst of the latter

confrontation, President Dwight Eisenhower declared publicly, and chillingly, that U.S. nuclear weapons would "be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else." Of course, China didn't have nuclear weapons then. Now that it does,

perhaps the behavior of national leaders will be more temperate. But the loose nuclear threats of U.S. and Soviet government officials during the Cold War, when both nations had vast nuclear arsenals, should convince us that, even as the military ante is raised, nuclear saber-rattling persists . Some pundits argue that nuclear weapons prevent wars between nuclear-armed nations; and, admittedly, there haven't been very many -- at least not yet. But the Kargil War of

1999, between nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed Pakistan, should convince us that such wars can occur. Indeed, in that case, the conflict almost slipped into a nuclear war. Pakistan's foreign secretary threatened that, if the war escalated, his country felt free to use "any weapon" in its arsenal. During the conflict, Pakistan did move nuclear weapons toward its border, while India, it is claimed, readied its own nuclear missiles for an attack on Pakistan. At the least, though, don't nuclear weapons deter a nuclear attack? Do they? Obviously, NATO leaders didn't feel deterred, for, throughout the Cold War, NATO's strategy was to respond to a Soviet conventional military attack on Western Europe by launching a Western nuclear attack on the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Furthermore, if U.S. government officials really believed that nuclear deterrence worked, they would not have resorted to championing "Star Wars" and its modern variant, national missile defense. Why are these vastly expensive -- and probably unworkable -- military defense systems needed if other nuclear powers are deterred from attacking by U.S. nuclear might? Of course, the bottom line for those Americans convinced that nuclear weapons safeguard them from a Chinese nuclear attack might be that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is far greater than its Chinese counterpart. Today, it is estimated that the U.S. government possesses over 5,000 nuclear warheads, while the Chinese government has a total inventory of roughly 300. Moreover, only about 40 of these Chinese

nuclear weapons can reach the United States. Surely the United States would "win" any nuclear war with China. But what would that "victory" entail? An attack with these Chinese nuclear weapons would immediately slaughter at least 10 million Americans in a great storm of blast and fire, while leaving many more dying horribly of sickness and radiation poisoning . The Chinese death toll in a nuclear war would be far higher. Both nations would be reduced to smoldering, radioactive wastelands. Also, radioactive debris sent aloft by the nuclear explosions would blot out the sun and bring on a "nuclear winter" around the globe -- destroying agriculture, creating worldwide famine, and generating chaos and destruction. Moreover, in another decade the extent of this catastrophe would be far worse. The Chinese government is currently expanding its nuclear arsenal, and by the year 2020 it is expected to more than double its number of nuclear weapons that can hit the United States. The U.S. government, in turn, has plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars "modernizing" its nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities over the next decade. To avert the enormous disaster of a U.S.-China nuclear war, there are two obvious actions that can be taken. The first is to get rid of nuclear weapons, as the nuclear powers have agreed to do but thus far have resisted doing. The second, conducted while the nuclear disarmament process is occurring, is to improve U.S.-China relations. If the American and Chinese people are interested in ensuring their survival and that of the world, they should be working to encourage these policies.

2NC - SCS TurnMethane hydrates are in the center of territorial disputes in the South China Sea – extraction technology guarantees warKlare 12 (Michael T, Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College, defense correspondent of The Nation magazine, “Island Grabbing in Asia”, 9/4/12, http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138093/michael-t-klare/island-grabbing-in-asia)//WL

Last month, Japanese activists planted their country's flag on one of the Senkaku Islands (which the Chinese call the Diaoyu Islands), a chain claimed by China, Japan, and Taiwan. The move sparked protests in China and inspired headlines in the West, but the provocation was hardly

surprising. The three bodies of water in East Asia -- the Sea of Japan (bounded by Japan, North Korea, South Korea, and Russia), the East China Sea (bordered by China and Japan's Ryukyu Islands), and the South China Sea (surrounded by Borneo, China, the Philippines, and

Vietnam) -- are home to hundreds of disputed islands, atolls, and shoals. And in the last few years, the diplomatic and militaristic struggles to assert authority have become increasingly brazen. On one level, patriotism is making things worse. Japan's tussle with China over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, for example, is a touchstone for those in Japan who fear China's growing political and economic might. Likewise, South Korea's assertion of control over the Dokdo Islands (known as the

Takeshima Islands in Japan) is viewed at home as a patriotic riposte to Japan's 40-year occupation of the peninsula. Beyond symbolism, however, these three bodies of water flow over East Asia's Outer Continental Shelf and the submerged deltas of

many major river systems -- geological features that suggest the presence of vast deposits of oil and natural gas. Yet, although the resources have been there for millennia, it is only in the last decade that the energy sector has even started to develop extractive technologies that will eventually make these reserves accessible. The disagreement between Japan and South Korea over the Dokdo (Takeshima) Islands has sabotaged U.S. plans for improved defense ties with the two countries and hurt U.S. efforts to isolate North Korea. Nobody wants to lose out, especially because East Asia is energy hungry. The region is home to only three percent of the world's proven oil reserves and eight percent of its natural gas reserves. China, for example, already imports 58 percent of the oil and 22 percent of the gas it uses each year. Japan is far more dependent, importing nearly all of its oil and gas. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, in the next 25 years, Asia's energy consumption is expected to grow faster than anywhere else in the world. Eager for energy security, these countries have long sought to exploit their offshore oil and gas reserves. Until recently, however, given the difficulty of operating in the blue-water seas, that was all but impossible. But eager to take advantage of oil and gas reservoirs in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and offshore Africa, Western energy firms have developed drilling rigs capable of operating in a mile of water or more. Now that the necessary technology is within reach, powers in Asia are determined to assert what they argue are their rightful claims to vast amounts of energy. Just who owns the potential riches, however, is a matter of some contention. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), coastal states are allowed to claim a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone extending from their land borders. All of the countries in the region have done so. But China has also laid claim to virtually all of the South China Sea on the basis that it has periodically occupied the Spratly and Paracel islands, small clusters of atolls and shoals that take up the northern and southernmost reaches of the sea. China has further cited provisions of UNCLOS that allow it to develop exclusively its Outer Continental Shelf (even if the shelf extends beyond 200 miles) and stake out a large stretch of the East China Sea. Of course, many other countries have claims in those seas, too.

Chinese behavior is a good example of the trend. Beijing's claims on the South China Sea (and the islands

within it) are long-standing, as are its intentions to exploit the undersea hydrocarbon reserves there . In the past few years, however, it has stepped up its use of force. In June 2011, it harassed survey ships working for PetroVietnam in Vietnamese-claimed waters. Then, in April 2012, Chinese ships blocked efforts by the Philippine Navy to combat illegal fishing by Chinese ships in Philippine-claimed waters. Such belligerence is in line with hard-line elements of the Chinese military that have recently assumed a more assertive role in

foreign affairs. But the aggression also coincides with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation's acquisition of its first deepwater drilling rig and announcement of plans to operate in the South China Sea. The Chinese drilling rig, the CNOOC 981, was first deployed in May and sited some 200 miles southeast of Hong Kong, in an area also claimed by Taiwan and Vietnam. As the energy company's chairman, Wang Yilin, put it, "Large deepwater drilling rigs are our mobile national territory and strategic weapon for promoting the development of the country's offshore oil industry." The firm also chose the occasion to auction off to foreign and domestic corporations a number of exploration blocks in areas of the South China Sea situated close to Vietnam. Needless to say, the move infuriated Hanoi. The Vietnamese, too, want to drill in deeper waters, but their national oil company, PetroVietnam, lacks the technological capacity to do so on its own. In recent years, it has been teaming up with foreign firms -- including Chevron and ExxonMobil -- to explore farther offshore. Last October, ExxonMobil reported finding a large natural gas field off the coast of central Vietnam. The Vietnamese say the field lies within their 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone. The Chinese have countered by asserting that the land falls within their territory and warning non-Chinese companies to desist from operating there. To hammer home the message, Chinese ships

have, on several occasions, sliced PetroVietnam cables to underwater sensors. The dispute between South Korea and Japan over the Dokdo/ Takeshima Islands is a variation on the same theme. So far, the two sides have fought mainly over fishing rights in the area. But the

waters are also thought to harbor vast quantities of methane hydrates -- frozen bubbles of natural gas trapped in ice crystals on the ocean floor. If harvested safely (methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas, so any uncontrolled release would accelerate global warming),

the hydrates would be a huge cache of energy. South Korea and Japan have raced to develop the technology to mine the undersea gold and hope to begin commercial extraction by the end of this decade . Once that starts, the seabed around the Dokdo/Takeshima Islands would become extremely valuable, rendering the fight over them far more economically critical. The Obama administration has been caught off guard by the intensity of these disputes, which are threatening progress on a wide range of other issues. The disagreement between Japan and South Korea over the Dokdo (Takeshima) Islands, for example, has sabotaged plans for improved defense ties between the two countries and hurt U.S. efforts to isolate North Korea. Increased Chinese-Japanese tensions over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands are damaging efforts to boost trade in the region, another U.S. objective. In the South China Sea, the Obama administration has sought to bolster its ties with Vietnam, the Philippines, and other local powers by supporting their drive to negotiate en masse with China over the contested islands. Although welcomed in Hanoi and Manila, the

strategy has angered Beijing and put a damper on Sino-American relations. Meanwhile, there is little reason to suspect that Beijing, Hanoi, Manila, Seoul, or Tokyo will relent in the coming years . A desire for cheap and nearby energy will only increase, and as Asian economies grow, nationalistic impulses will become more assertive. Government officials have been quick to exploit these impulses for their own political advantage, but they also recognize that increased tensions and belligerency could undermine efforts to promote economic cooperation in the region, further slowing growth. Eventually, therefore, they are likely to seek an alternative to violent confrontation. This could involve joint development of the disputed areas (as Malaysia and Thailand have chosen to do in a disputed chunk of their own offshore waters) and accelerated development of renewable resources.

Military treaties guarantee US gets drawn inKlare 13 (Michael T, Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College, defense correspondent of The Nation magazine, “The Next War?”, 1/22/13, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175640/)//WL

Don’t look now, but conditions are deteriorating in the western Pacific. Things are turning ugly, with consequences that could prove deadly and spell catastrophe for the global economy. In Washington, it is widely assumed that a showdown with Iran over its nuclear ambitions will be the first major crisis to engulf the next secretary of defense -- whether it be former Senator Chuck Hagel, as President Obama desires, or someone else if he fails to win Senate confirmation. With few signs of an imminent breakthrough in talks aimed at peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, many analysts believe that military action -- if not by Israel, then by the United States -- could be on this year’s agenda. Lurking just behind the Iranian imbroglio, however, is a potential crisis of far greater magnitude, and potentially far more imminent than most of us

imagine. China’s determination to assert control over disputed islands in the potentially energy-rich waters of the East and South China Seas, in the face of stiffening resistance from Japan and the Philippines along with greater regional assertiveness by the United States, spells trouble not just regionally, but potentially globally. Islands, Islands, Everywhere The possibility of an Iranian crisis remains in the spotlight because of the obvious risk of

disorder in the Greater Middle East and its threat to global oil production and shipping. A crisis in the East or South China Seas (essentially, western extensions of the Pacific Ocean) would, however, pose a greater peril because of the possibility of a U.S.-China military confrontation and the threat to Asian economic stability . The United States is bound by treaty to come to the assistance of Japan or the Philippines if either country is attacked by a third party, so any armed clash between Chinese and Japanese or Filipino forces could trigger American military intervention. With so much of the world’s trade focused on Asia, and the American, Chinese, and Japanese economies tied so

closely together in ways too essential to ignore, a clash of almost any sort in these vital waterways might paralyze international commerce and trigger a global recession (or worse). All of this should be painfully obvious and so rule out

such a possibility -- and yet the likelihood of such a clash occurring has been on the rise in recent months , as China and its neighbors continue to ratchet up the bellicosity of their statements and bolster their military forces in the contested areas. Washington’s continuing statements about its ongoing plans for a “pivot” to, or “rebalancing” of, its forces in the Pacific have only fueled Chinese intransigence and intensified a rising sense of crisis in the region. Leaders on all sides continue to affirm their country’s inviolable rights to the contested islands and vow to use any means necessary to resist encroachment by rival claimants. In the meantime, China has increased the frequency and scale of its naval maneuvers in waters claimed by Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, further enflaming tensions in the region. Ostensibly, these disputes revolve around the question of who owns a constellation of largely uninhabited atolls and islets claimed by a variety of nations. In the East China Sea, the islands in contention are called the Diaoyus by China and the Senkakus by Japan. At present, they are administered by Japan, but both countries claim sovereignty over them. In the South China Sea, several island groups are in contention, including the Spratly chain and the Paracel Islands (known in China as the Nansha and Xisha Islands, respectively). China claims all of these

islets, while Vietnam claims some of the Spratlys and Paracels. Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines also claim some of the Spratlys. Far more is, of course, at stake than just the ownership of a few uninhabited islets. The seabeds surrounding them are believed to sit atop vast reserves

of oil and natural gas. Ownership of the islands would naturally confer ownership of the reserves -- something all of these countries desperately desire. Powerful forces of nationalism are also at work: with rising popular fervor, the Chinese believe that the islands are part of their national territory and any other claims represent a direct assault on China’s sovereign rights; the fact that Japan -- China’s brutal invader and occupier during World War II -- is a rival claimant to some of them only adds a powerful tinge of victimhood to Chinese nationalism and intransigence on the issue. By the same token, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos, already feeling threatened by China’s growing wealth and power, believe no less firmly that not bending on the island disputes is an essential expression of their nationhood. Long ongoing, these disputes have escalated recently. In May 2011, for instance, the Vietnamese reported that Chinese warships were harassing oil-exploration vessels operated by the state-owned energy company PetroVietnam in the South China Sea. In two instances, Vietnamese authorities claimed, cables attached to underwater survey equipment were purposely slashed. In April 2012, armed Chinese marine surveillance ships blocked efforts by Filipino vessels to inspect Chinese boats suspected of illegally fishing off Scarborough Shoal, an islet in the South China Sea claimed by both countries. The East China Sea has similarly witnessed tense encounters of late. Last September, for example, Japanese authorities arrested 14 Chinese citizens who had attempted to land on one of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands to press their country’s claims, provoking widespread anti-Japanese protests across China and a series of naval show-of-force operations by both sides in the disputed waters. Regional diplomacy, that classic way of settling disputes in a peaceful manner, has been under growing strain recently thanks to these maritime disputes and the accompanying military encounters. In July 2012, at the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asian leaders were unable to agree on a final communiqué, no matter how anodyne -- the first time that had happened in the organization’s 46-year history. Reportedly, consensus on a final document was thwarted when Cambodia, a close ally of China’s, refused to endorse compromise language on a proposed “code of conduct” for resolving disputes in the South China Sea. Two months later, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Beijing in an attempt to promote negotiations on the disputes, she was reviled in the Chinese press, while officials there refused to cede any ground at all. As 2012 ended and the New Year began, the situation only deteriorated. On December 1st, officials in Hainan Province, which administers the Chinese-claimed islands in the South China Sea, announced a new policy for 2013: Chinese warships would now be empowered to stop, search, or simply repel foreign ships that entered the claimed waters and were suspected of conducting illegal activities ranging, assumedly, from fishing to oil drilling. This move coincided with an increase in the size and frequency of Chinese naval deployments in the disputed areas. On December 13th, the Japanese military scrambled F-15 fighter jets when a Chinese marine surveillance plane flew into airspace near the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Another worrisome incident occurred on January 8th, when four Chinese surveillance ships entered Japanese-controlled waters around those islands for 13 hours. Two days later, Japanese fighter jets were again scrambled when a Chinese surveillance plane returned to the islands. Chinese fighters then came in pursuit, the first time supersonic jets from both sides flew over the disputed area. The Chinese clearly have little intention of backing down, having indicated that they will increase their air and naval deployments in the area, just as the Japanese are doing. Powder Keg in the Pacific While war clouds gather in the Pacific sky, the question remains: Why, pray tell, is this happening now? Several factors seem to be conspiring to heighten the risk of confrontation, including leadership changes in China and Japan, and a geopolitical reassessment by the United States. * In China, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and on what might be called national assertiveness. At the 18th Party

Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held last November in Beijing, Xi Jinping was named both party head and chairman of the Central Military Commission, making him, in effect, the nation’s foremost civilian and military official. Since then, Xi has made several heavily publicized visits to assorted Chinese military units, all clearly intended to demonstrate the Communist Party’s determination, under his leadership, to

boost the capabilities and prestige of the country’s army, navy, and air force. He has already linked this drive to his belief that his country should play a more vigorous and assertive role in the region and the world . In a speech to soldiers in the city of Huizhou, for example, Xi spoke of his “dream” of national rejuvenation: “This dream can be said to be a dream of a strong nation; and for the military, it is the dream of a strong military.” Significantly, he used the trip to visit the Haikou, a destroyer assigned to the fleet responsible for patrolling the disputed waters of the South China Sea. As he spoke, a Chinese surveillance plane entered disputed air space over

the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, prompting Japan to scramble those F-15 fighter jets. * In Japan, too, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and national assertiveness . On December 16th, arch-nationalist Shinzo Abe returned to power as the nation’s prime minister. Although he campaigned largely on economic issues,

promising to revive the country’s lagging economy, Abe has made no secret of his intent to bolster the Japanese military and assume a tougher stance on the East China Sea dispute . In his first few weeks in office, Abe has already announced plans to increase military spending and review an official apology made by a former government official to women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. These steps are sure to please Japan’s rightists, but certain to inflame anti-Japanese

sentiment in China, Korea, and other countries it once occupied. Equally worrisome, Abe promptly negotiated an agreement with the Philippines for greater cooperation on enhanced “maritime security” in the western Pacific, a move intended to counter growing Chinese assertiveness in the region. Inevitably, this will spark a harsh Chinese response -- and because the United States has mutual defense treaties with both countries, it will also increase the risk of U.S. involvement in future engagements at sea . *

War with China causes extinctionStraight Times 2k (Ching Cheong, Senior Writer at the Strait Times, “No one gains in a war over Taiwan,” June 25th, Lexis)

THE high-intensity scenario postulates a cross-strait war escalating into a full-scale war between the US and China . If Washington were to conclude that splitting China would better serve its national interests, then a full-scale war becomes unavoidable. Conflict on such a scale would embroil other countries far and near and -horror of horrors - raise the possibility of a nuclear war . Beijing has already told the US and Japan privately that it considers any country providing bases and logistics support to any US forces attacking China as belligerent parties open to its retaliation. In

the region, this means South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Singapore. If China were to retaliate, east Asia will be set on fire. And the conflagration may not end there as opportunistic powers elsewhere may try to overturn the existing world order . With the US distracted, Russia may seek to redefine Europe's political landscape. The balance of power in the Middle East may be similarly upset by the likes of Iraq. In south Asia, hostilities between India and Pakistan, each armed with its own nuclear arsenal, could enter a new and dangerous phase. Will a full-scale Sino-US war lead to a nuclear war? According to General Matthew Ridgeway, commander of the US Eighth Army which fought against the Chinese in the Korean War, the US had at the time thought of using nuclear weapons against China to save the US from military defeat. In his book The Korean War, a personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and its implications on future US foreign policy, Gen Ridgeway said that US was confronted with two choices in Korea -truce or a broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. If the US had to

resort to nuclear weaponry to defeat China long before the latter acquired a similar capability, there is little hope of winning a war against China, 50 years later, short of using nuclear weapons. The US estimates that China possesses about 20

nuclear warheads that can destroy major American cities. Beijing also seems prepared to go for the nuclear option . A Chinese military officer disclosed recently that Beijing was considering a review of its "non first use" principle regarding nuclear weapons. Major-General Pan Zhangqiang, president of the military-funded Institute for Strategic Studies, told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington that although the government still abided by that principle, there were strong pressures from the military to drop it. He said military leaders considered the use of nuclear weapons mandatory if the country risked

dismemberment as a result of foreign intervention. Gen Ridgeway said that should that come to pass, we would see the destruction of civilization .