Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[30]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[34]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[30]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-10-29 21:55:47.740
	1	+2016-10-29 21:55:47.0

Caselist.CitesClass[34]

Cites

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	1	+Decentralization is a neoliberal tactic designed to promote networks of diffuse power capable of rendering the welfare redundant ~-~- alternative energy policy which follows this pattern is part and parcel of a broader ideological project of anti-regulationism designed to empower corporate forces
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	3	+MacNeil '12 Robert, Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the PhD degree in Political Science School of Political Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa © Robert MacNeil, Ottawa, Canada, 2012 "Neoliberal Climate Policy in the United States: From Market Fetishism to the Developmental State" http://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/en/bitstream/handle/10393/23587/Macneil_Robert_2012_thesis.pdf?sequence=1
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	5	+On the pull side, the project looks at four particularly prominent selectivities used by actors to implement greenhouse gas (GHG) regulation, in cluding the use of a) sub national regulation within the fifty states, b) civil litigation to impose structural legal requirements upon the federal government to impose climate regulation c) favourable tax policies and government subsidies through appropriations riders, and d) the use of executive authority by the administration to create and enforce new emissions laws outside of Congress. On the push side, the project argues that the actors pushing for developmental state policies have also been forced to heed alternative implementation strategies because of the harsh neoliberal climate . The main way that this has been accomplished is by building the developmental state as a radically decentralized entity. That is, u nlike the developmental states o f East As ia and Western Europe – referred to as Developmental Bureaucratic States – which are often housed in a single location , with a single agency title, and a single budget, Washington has established what is commonly referred to as a Developmental Network State. This form of developmental apparatus is, by contrast, highly decentralized, with its activities being carried out across literally thousands of labs, coordinated across a labyrinth of hundreds of different office s and state level agencies, and its budge ts being extremely diffuse . This decentralization has helped to render the American developmental state considerably less visible than others found in Western Europe and East Asia, and has allowed it to develop and mature throughout the heart of neoliberal ism’s ideological ascendency. Following in this tradition, much of the alternative energy innovation policy in question has been forced to adopt this somewhat ‘hidden’ or stealthy characteristic in order to avoid political scrutiny. Finally, the project attempts to demonstrate that, in spite of their continued progress, the policies and institutions that promote and underpin this state led development of alternative technologies are always rather precarious and fragile, and that as these two competing logics continue to do battle with each other, the future of a technology centric American climate policy remains highly uncertain. The project thus traces the ebb and flow of this political battle over the past three decades, with a particular focus on the dev elopments taking place since 2009. Contributions to the existing literature In undertaking this type of analysis, the thesis aims to make at least three important contributions to the existing literature. The first is a critical rethinking of the implications of conceptualizing climate policy (and perhaps environmental policy more generally, though I do not extend the empirics beyond climate policy in this work) in terms of neoliberalism’s influence. By focusing specifically on neoliberalism’s tenuous relationship with the state’s broad requirement to foster accumulation, the project attempts to walk back the common depiction of neoliberal climate policy as being either anti state in its orientation, or otherwise solely focused on markets in abstract environmental commodities. In so doing, it further aims to generally reframe the common conception of the neoliberal state as an ‘absentee state’, and underscore the extent to which these pressure to promote accumulation may serve to enhance state capacity under conditions of market fundamentalism. Second, this thesis appears to be the first body of work to focus on conceptualizing US climate policy in terms of a developmental state logic. In so doing, it seeks to provide a new understanding of the federal government’s role in promoting and acting upon a technology centric climate policy, as well as contribute to the limited existing literature on the American developmental state. Finally, as there are actually very few book length studies of US climate policy from any perspective, the project aims to make an important contribution to stud ies of American climate policy in general, particularly underscoring the increasingly dynamic and robust shape of the country’s climate policy arena. Methods The policy process within large states (the US federal government not least of which) is a profoun dly complex subject of analysis, and thus direct and/or unambiguous relationships between objects and variables are extremely difficult to determine with certainty. As this body of work is largely an analysis of how existing structures shape the strategies of actors within the climate policy process, there are, in effect, three primary research tasks. The first is to develop an understanding of the historical evolution of the structures and selectivities in question and how they have come to play the roles that they have within the policy process. This has been accomplished through critical analysis of a range of secondary texts focused on each of the structures and selectivities in question. With regard to the developmental network state apparatus, Chapter 4 is the primary site of this analysis, while the four primary alternative policy pathways used to execute this logic are taken up primarily in Chapter 6 . In so doing, I am attempting to understand the factors that helped to consolidate them over time, as well as how and why actors within the policy process have felt compelled to recursively reselect for them. Beyond the use of secondary texts, government documents and reports (particularly from the Committee for Climate Change Science and Technology Integr ation) have been used to obtain and incorporate additional contemporary developments related to these structures. The second task is to attempt to understand the specific role of these structures and selectivities in the development of contemporary climate policies – specifically how they have shaped, refracted, and facilitated the goal of fostering accumulation under conditions of neoliberalism. With regard to the four specific alternative pathways, this task is taken up in Chapter 6, while the research on the developmental state is subject of Chapter 7. This has been accomplished through analysis of a combination of governmental documents (Congressional reports, federal agency reports and budgets, Congressional Research Service primers and reports , docume nts disclosed by federal RandD programs and agencies – particularly the National Climate Change Technology Initiative and Climate Change Technology Program), laboratory reports from the Federal Laboratory Consortium and Department of Energy National Laborato ry Network (budgets, objectives, project manifests, etc.), and the limited existing secondary academic literature on these structures and selectivities. Finally, I am attempting to understand how these structures and selectivities can be subject to change and alteration in the context of anti regulationist ideology and the changing strength of neoliberal actors in the policy process. This task shifts the analysis into the contemporary moment , as it assesses the major rollbacks that unfolded between 2010 an d 2012 as anti regulationist actors enhanced their relative positions in the policy process and sought to reshape the selectivities used to achieve progressive climate policy. This task, which is the subject of Chapter 8, relies primarily on analysis of US newspapers, Congressional bill proposals , policy platforms, and (in particular) analysis of the 2012 budget passed by the Republican controlled House of Representatives, formally titled The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise. Pl an of the dissertation In Chapter 2, the existing literature against which the project situates itself is laid out and described in detail. The chapter is concerned specifically with the three main bodies of literature briefly described above – those focus ed on the so called ‘neoliberalization’ of contemporary environmental and climate policy, and the ‘Ecological Modernization’ literature’s assumptions regarding the political and legislative conditions necessary for progressive socio technical transitions w ithin a given polity. In so doing, the chapter attempts to set the predicate for understanding why these frameworks have largely misdiagnosed neoliberalism’s influence on American climate policy (as later suggested by this project’s empirical findings), and suggest why the theoretical framework presented in the subsequent chapter provides a more accurate starting place for thinking about the relationship between neoliberalism and climate policy. Chapter 3 then delineates the project’s main theoretical sup positions. This framework aims to both offset the claims of the existing literature, as well as provide a theoretical rationale for the empirical evidence presented in subsequent chapters. This section takes the form of four main theses which seek to provide both a synoptic understanding of the role of the state in the response to climate and energy crisis, as well as an on the ground explanation of how such policies are developed within neoliberal states like the US. Upon making the argument that states aim first and foremost to foster economic accumulation and self legitimacy, the role of neoliberal ideology is reconceptualized as an incidental (if highly influential) element of this much broader process – one which operates in tension with these first principle objectives. The concept of neoliberalism is, moreover, highly disaggregated in an attempt to both walk back its essentialist and homogenous depiction in much of the literature, as well as understand its dialectical relationship with the policy process.
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	7	+The 1AC is a privatization of the planning process of energy production via laissez-faire decentralization ~-~- that is par excellence the idea of neoliberalism at work. Their aversion to central planning is part and partial of an ideological preference for "de-centralized" or, more accurately market-based solutions
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	9	+MacNeil '12 Robert, Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the PhD degree in Political Science School of Political Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa © Robert MacNeil, Ottawa, Canada, 2012 "Neoliberal Climate Policy in the United States: From Market Fetishism to the Developmental State" http://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/en/bitstream/handle/10393/23587/Macneil_Robert_2012_thesis.pdf?sequence=1
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	11	+A second and related preoccupation in the literature focuses on increased efforts to privatize and deregulate forms of environmental and resource management previously governed as common public utilities under the state (e.g. Bakker 2003; Robertson 2000, 2004; Mansfield 2004). As McCarthy and Prudham (2004) note, the intensification of efforts to privatize environmental management over the past three decades can be understood as part of a broader attack on the state-based regulatory approach to environmental protection developed and entrenched throughout the Keynesian welfare-state era. The result has been dramatic increases in “socially produced scarcity, growing inequality, and often accelerated depletion or degradation of the very resources market mechanisms were supposed to protect” (McCarthy 2005: 9). Authors in this tradition have focused primarily on the ways in which these efforts serve to undermine democratic accountability, ecological sustainability, and basic processes of social reproduction. Specific examples of this include water ownership and provision (Smith 2004; Swyngedouw 2005; Bakker 2003), wetlands (Robertson 2000, 2004), fisheries (St. Martin 2001; Mansfield 2004), wildlife (Robbins and Luginbuhl 2005); and forests (Correia 2005; McCarthy 2005). Neoliberalism and climate governance Extending the general logic outlined above, critical political economy literatures attempting to explain neoliberalism’s influence on climate policy have generally followed the neoliberal environments literature’s intense focus on the rise of privatization and commodification policies over the past few decades. Indeed, the primary theme in this literature is that, having emerged as a major political issue in the midst of neoliberalism’s ideological ascendency, policy responses to climate change have naturally been framed in terms of neoliberal ideology’s preference for market mechanisms and aversion to command-and-control policies (Liverman 2004; Newell and Paterson 2010; Lohmann 2005, 2006; Smith et al. 2005; Brunnengraber 2007; Bond and Data 2004; Begg et al. 2005). As Newell and Paterson describe, From early on, the debate about climate policy reflected the broad shift in the global economy towards the power of neoliberal ideology. In environmental policy debates more generally, there were changes during the 1980s towards the idea of using economic analysis and markets to achieve environmental goals… Cost-benefit analysis, it was argued, could allow governments to weigh the pros and cons of particular paths to pollution control and allocate values to them accordingly… promoting the idea that rather than develop policies which specified what technologies business and individuals must use, or to simply ban particular substances or processes (so-called ‘command and control’ policies) it would be better to use ‘market mechanisms’ to achieve environmental goals (2010: 24).
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	13	+State policy aimed at private increases of alternative energy only function to preserve the unequal logic of accumulation at the heart of neoliberal ideology
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	15	+MacNeil '12 Robert, Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the PhD degree in Political Science School of Political Studies Faculty of Social Sciences University of Ottawa © Robert MacNeil, Ottawa, Canada, 2012 "Neoliberal Climate Policy in the United States: From Market Fetishism to the Developmental State" http://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/en/bitstream/handle/10393/23587/Macneil_Robert_2012_thesis.pdf?sequence=1
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	17	+Most salient with regard to regulatory modes, however, is the role of access to energy as a condition of growth in capitalist economies. While much can be said on this topic, it should suffice to note that not only did the harnessing of inexpensive fossil energy launch the Industrial Revolution in its earliest days, but the course of economic growth and capitalist development ever since has been intimately tied to cheap energy access. This access to evercheap energy has served not only to increase the productivity of labour and surplus value more than any other commodity in human history – thus liberating capital from its dependence on human labour and accumulation strategies based on absolute surplus value26 – but has also underpinned the massive increases in standards of living and consumerism that form the backbone of contemporary capitalism’s economic growth and social legitimacy. As O’Connor (1991) notes, if a capitalist economy loses access to stable energy inputs, it effectively grinds to a halt in a classic instance of underproduction crisis. “Without such access, there is no productivity, no growth, no markets, no jobs, and no profits. There is no capitalism as we know it. This cannot be said of any other commodity or industry” (1991: 54). As Austin and Phoenix (2005) note, it is this endless hunt for energy resources to fuel domestic economic expansion that has historically led states to actively involve themselves in energy policy.27 In the US, this pattern dates back as far as the mid-nineteenth century when federal policymakers nurtured the fossil fuel industry by, for example: propping up prices for coal and petroleum to support producers in their early years; not allowing too much product into the market at any one time; protecting property and drilling rights through creative proration and utilization rules28; and later providing massive subsidies and deploying aggressive foreign policies designed to keep stable, secure, and cheap fossil energy resources flowing (Tomain 2010; Clark 1987). Yet with the combined prospect of a) total US energy consumption increasing from 100 quadrillion British Thermal Units (QBtu) in 2004 to in excess of 130 QBtu by 2030; b) world energy consumption growing from 447 QBtu to 702 QBtu over the same time period (USEIA 2011); c) the need to import greater quantities of petrol from politically unstable regions (Center for American Progress 2011); and d) the looming specter of global peak oil creating consistently high and unstable barrel prices29 and geopolitical rivalries over remaining resources, the notion that a stable regime of accumulation can continue to rest on the assumption of cheap and secure access to fossil energy has largely disappeared, and the search for new modes of regulation for energy provision become a key driving logic of climate policy.30 Sectoral accumulation: creating new markets through climate policy While regulation theory provides a helpful framework for understanding how the promotion of accumulation implies state intervention in a macro sense, the same logic of accumulation further informs the development of the specific policies used to create these new regulatory modes, as states have consistently sought to use climate policy as a means to promote growth in specific economic sectors. This is largely because, as discussed in Chapter 1, neoliberalism has helped to change the rationale of environmental policy broadly over the past three decades by reframing the relationship between ecological sustainability and economic growth as a non- zero sum game (Bailey 2003).31 In this context, policies designed to protect the earth’s climate are only viewed as legitimate if they are framed in terms of their capacity to promote economic growth in a given sector. State intervention, in this context, does not aim toward the simple regulation or reduction of GHG emissions, but rather the creation of novel markets in sectors like financial services (stemming initially from emissions trading and offset schemes themselves, but also from the development of futures and options markets in emissions allowances, as well as downstream markets in insurance where contracts between permit buyers and sellers are insured), or new markets in alternative energy technologies and industrial processes (Paterson 2001; Matthews and Paterson 2005; Cromwell and Levene 2007; Newell and Paterson 1998; Fletcher 2009; Rauch 2007).32
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	20	+We must entirely withdraw the logic of capital—individual criticism is key to solve. They can’t win a permutation—my link arguments say the aff uniquely coopts this movement.
	21	+Johnston 04
	22	+(Adrian interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University, “The Cynic’s Fetish: Slavoj Žižek and the Dynamics of Belief” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, December p259)
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	24	+Perhaps the absence of a detailed political roadmap in Zizek's recent writings isn't a major shortcoming. Maybe, at least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby to truly open up the space for imagining authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of materialism offered by Zizek is that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or hindrance (Zizek, 2001d, pp 22-23) (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the illusory projection of an inner obstacle, Zizek, 2000a, p 16). From this perspective, seeing through ideological fantasies by learning how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the potential to operate as a form of real revolutionary practice (rather than remaining merely an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the analysis of commodity fetishism, the social efficacy of money as the universal medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately relies upon nothing more than a kind of "magic," that is, the belief in money's social efficacy by those using it in the processes of exchange. Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substance's powers. The "external" obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, "internally" believe in it.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-10-29 21:55:50.60

Judge

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	1	+Sierra Inglet

Opponent

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	1	+Loyola NT

ParentRound

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	1	+30

Round

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	1	+1

Team

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Chaudhary Neg

Title

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	1	+SEPT-OCT Cap K

Tournament

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	1	+Meadows