Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[17]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[45]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[17]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-10-09 16:09:26.987
	1	+2016-10-09 16:09:26.0

Caselist.CitesClass[45]

Cites

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	1	+US manufacturing is sky high thanks to low electricity prices
	2	+Mark Perry, 7/13/2016. Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus. “American Manufacturing, Re-energized,” US News. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-07-13/how-shale-gas-is-re-energizing-american-manufacturing
	3	+Those claims that America doesn't produce anything anymore just aren't true. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. manufacturing output reached an all-time high of $2.17 trillion in 2015, making last year the best in at least a generation by all relevant measures of economic performance: output growth, employment gains and profits. In fact, today the U.S is the world's number two manufacturing nation, ranking behind only China. Also, consider that in 2014, the U.S. produced more manufacturing output than the combined output of Germany, South Korea, India, Italy and France.
	4	+Another reason for the resurgence of U.S. manufacturing: lower electricity prices. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of electricity to industrial users in the U.S. is lower this year than almost any year in history. Compared to 2008 in the early days of the shale revolution, industrial electricity prices are 17 percent lower today. That's because virtually every new power plant constructed in recent years has been fueled with natural gas. Gas plants are relatively inexpensive to build, and gas prices are projected to remain low for many decades.
	5	+
	6	+Death of the nuclear industry causes massive price volatility
	7	+Spencer 7 (Jack, Research Fellow in Nuclear Energy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, “Competitive Nuclear Energy Investment: Avoiding Past Policy Mistakes,” November 15th, 2007, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/11/competitive-nuclear-energy-investment-avoiding-past-policy-mistakes)
	8	+The Effect on Ratepayers The near death of the U.S. nuclear energy industry has harmed both investors and consumers. First, ratepayers eventually pay for the increased costs of generating electricity. More important, by removing nuclear energy from America's energy portfolio, anti-nuclear activists have limited the choices available to America's energy producers and consumers. Limiting choice has two inevitable results: higher prices and lower quality. Without nuclear energy as an option and with coal being frowned upon, utilities started moving toward natural gas power plants. This growing reliance on natural gas has caused electricity prices to follow the volatility of natural gas prices. As demand for natural gas has increased, prices have become even more volatile.
	9	+
	10	+Renewable ramp up takes time – crucial Rare earth Metals are a limiting factor.
	11	+Davidsson et al. ’14: (Davidsson, Simon, et al. "Growth curves and sustained commissioning modelling of renewable energy: Investigating resource constraints for wind energy." Energy Policy 73 (2014): 767-776//FT)
	12	+Substituting the entire current energy system based on fossil fuels with renewable energy technologies involves up-scaling a disparate set of small scale industries, and the timeframe to do this within only a couple of decades, can appear optimistic. The implications of the fast growth of the renewable energy technologies needed to do this are often not adequately addressed in the studies proposing future energy systems based on renewable energy. The question of how these energy systems are then to be sustained over a longer time scale are usually not considered. This study aims to add the perspectives of time and scale to evaluating the feasibility of fast energy transitions by taking account of annual growth rates needed to reach proposed future energy systems as well as investigating how an energy system based on renewable energy technologies could be sustained in the long run. This is mainly done by modelling growth patterns needed to reach the installed capacities of wind energy proposed in other studies, taking account of the life expectancies and need for replacement of technology, using wind energy as an example. The requirement of natural resources for the construction of wind energy is quantified on an annual basis to examine the impact on views of potential material constraints. The growth of renewable energy technologies needed for an energy transition must inevitably come with the growth of an industry capable of manufacturing and installing that technology, capital to finance these investments, as well as an increased demand for certain natural resources. Renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar energy are more metal intensive than current energy sources and a transition to renewable energy would increase demand for many different metals (Kleijn et al., 2011). Several different critical metals have been identified as potential bottlenecks in the deployment of “low-carbon energy technologies” (Moss et al., 2011). It has also been argued that a shift to an energy system based on renewable energy would inevitably be largely driven by fossil fuels, and a fast growth of renewables would actually add new fossil fuel demand to current demand during a transition period (Moriarty and Honnery, 2009).
	13	+
	14	+That causes a global depression
	15	+Jon Entine, 2/4/2009. Adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, “U.S. and Climate Change~-~-Rescue of the Planet Postponed?”, AEI. http://aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.29333/pub_detail.asp)
	16	+
	17	+The correlation between economic growth and energy costs is high and negative; when energy costs go up, productivity takes a nosedive. In these extraordinary times, arguably the top priority must be to ensure that a secular financial downturn doesn't turn into a worldwide structural depression. If that happens, both the economy and the environment will be losers.
	18	+
	19	+Independently, the agriculture industry is uniquely sensitive to electricity costs
	20	+WALLACE 2—CSU Chico Research Foundation Staff Henry Wallace, Agricultural Electricity Rates in California, Consultant Report, http://www.energy.ca.gov/reports/2002-05-13_400-01-020.PDF
	21	+
	22	+Today, agricultural commodity prices have been driven down by worldwide competition, greatly reducing the net returns to all California agricultural operations. Growers and food processors are now more vulnerable to increased costs, such as higher electricity rates, that cannot be passed along in higher prices. Significant reductions in profitability could lead to bankruptcies, and concomitant reductions in agricultural output. The recent spate of cooperative failures (e.g., Tri Valley and Farmers’ Rice) and processing plant closures are examples of the current weakness in the agricultural economy.
	23	+
	24	+Causes global wars and instability
	25	+Femia 12 (Francesco and Caitlin Werrell, Write for The Center For Climate and Security, When National Climate Disasters Go Global: On Drought, Food, And Global Insecurity, July, Accessed Online at Think Progress)
	26	+
	27	+The security implications of food price spikes
	28	+What we’ve also seen is that spikes in world food prices have increased the likelihood of instability and riots. In some instances, crop failure in one part of the world associated with instability halfway around the globe, can contribute to serious diplomatic crises between the U.S. and its allies, as occurred with Egypt, and could conceivably result in U.S. military involvement.
	29	+This is part of a larger phenomenon Dr. Troy Sternberg calls “the globalization of hazards,” where natural hazards in one region can have a significant impact on regions halfway across the globe. This is not to say that the current U.S. drought will necessarily lead to unrest. However, it is not unprecedented for droughts, and other climatic events that damage crop production, to do so.
	30	+Collective impact of crop failure across the globe
	31	+It is also important to consider that the drought and crop failures in the U.S. are not happening in isolation. In recent years, extreme hot and dry weather has forced Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan to reduce their harvest forecasts (and two studies explicitly link the devastating Russian heat wave of 2010 to climate change). European Union wheat yields this year will be smaller, in part, because Spain is suffering from the second worst drought in fifty years. North and South Korea are facing the worst drought in a century. Shifts in glacial melt and rainfall are threatening crops in Pakistan. The proliferation of locusts throughout West Africa is threatening household food security. Recent floods in Japan, India and Bangladesh are threatening rice crops. Argentina’s soy crops were severely depleted because of a shortage of rain. And in Mali, drought combined with other factors led to a major humanitarian disaster in the region. The list goes on.
	32	+Many of these conditions are record-setting, or the worst of their kind in decades and sometimes centuries. And climate projections threaten to make matters worse. What this means is that it is possible that the global food market is about to witness an unusual amount of stress. It is not entirely clear if the market is prepared for it, or even if nations have the capacity to adequately respond.
	33	+Impact on U.S. assistance and diplomacy
	34	+Food, for better or worse, is also used as a form of diplomacy. For example, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Food for Peace program has sent 106 million metric tons to the hungry of the world, feeding billions of people and saving countless lives. The program depends on the unparalleled productivity of American farmers and the American agricultural system. Without this vast system there would be no Food for Peace program, or any of the other food assistance programs either run by the U.S. government, or heavily supported by the U.S. such as the UN’s World Food Program.
	35	+On average, American food aid provides 60 percent of the world’s food aid, feeding millions of desperately hungry people every year. This means that in addition to facing an increasing risk from lower crop and animal stock yields and global food market shocks, the U.S. may also be limiting its ability to respond rapidly to global disasters, including global food crises. This is bad news for the global poor, and for U.S. diplomacy.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-10-09 16:09:29.85

Judge

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	1	+Christine Tsai

Opponent

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	1	+Harvard Westlake IP

ParentRound

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	1	+17

Round

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	1	+3

Team

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	1	+La Canada Zhao Neg

Title

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	1	+SEPOCT - DA - Electricity Prices

Tournament

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	1	+Voices