Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[1]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[5]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[1]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-09-15 13:47:34.12
	1	+2016-09-15 13:47:34.0

Caselist.CitesClass[5]

Cites

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	1	+Carbon Link—Nuclear Power key to Prevent Warming
	2	+Magill 15 Bobby; Senior Science Writer for Climate Central; Scientific American; 1/30/2015; “Nuclear Power Needs to Double to Curb Global Warming”; http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-needs-to-double-to-curb-global-warming/; JLB (8/8/2016)
	3	+The International Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency suggest in a report released Thursday that nuclear will have such a significant role to play in climate strategy that nuclear power generation capacity will have to double by 2050 in order for the world to meet the international 2°C (3.6°F) warming goal.
	4	+With fossil fuels growing as sources of electricity across the globe, the IEA sees nuclear power as a stable source of low-carbon power helping to take polluting coal-fired plants offline.
	5	+To accomplish the needed CO2 emissions cuts to keep warming no greater than 2°C, the IEA says global nuclear power generation capacity needs to increase to 930 gigawatts from 396 gigawatts by 2050. With nearly 100 nuclear reactors, the U.S. has more nuclear power plants than any other country, representing 105 gigawatts of production. France, Japan, Russia and China round out the top five countries using nuclear power.
	6	+Globally, nuclear energy is already making a comeback with 72 nuclear reactors now under construction worldwide, mainly in Asia.
	7	+“This marked the greatest number of reactors being built in 25 years,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement. “Nuclear energy also remains the second-largest source of low-carbon electricity worldwide. And, indeed, if we are to meet our collective climate goals, nuclear energy is critical.”
	8	+All forms of low-carbon energy must be employed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, she said.
	9	+That conclusion is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings last year that global carbon dioxide emissions need to be capped at 450 parts per million in order to prevent warming greater than 2°C, Robert N. Stavins, director of the Project on Climate Agreements at Harvard University and a drafting author of the IPCC’s Working Group III Report, said.
	10	+“It is virtually inconceivable that the 2 degree or 450 parts per million target as a cap can be achieved in this century without a variety of factors, among which are substantially greater reliance on nuclear power than current trajectories would suggest,” Stavins, who is unaffiliated with the IEA’s report, said.
	11	+Charles Kolstad, professor of economic policy research at Stanford University, suggested the IEA’s conclusions may be too strident.
	12	+“Nuclear is not necessary to meet any target except the most stringent,” he said. “The IPCC relies heavily on CCS (carbon capture and storage). Nuclear would certainly help, though.”
	13	+That’s because global power demand is growing and nuclear is a good alternative to coal, the main source of power in parts of the world where cheap natural gas is unavailable to replace coal, he said.
	14	+The IEA said nuclear reactor safety issues raised by Fukushima can be addressed by strong regulations, independent regulators, a culture of safety surrounding nuclear plants and the development of new safety technology, the report says.
	15	+Shift Link—Japan proves; nuclear substitutes will increase emissions.
	16	+Korosec 11
	17	+KIRSTEN KOROSEC, Fortune journalism, “Germany's Nuclear Ban: The Global Effect” Money Watch, May 31, 2011, 4:28 PM http://www.cbsnews.com/news/germanys-nuclear-ban-the-global-effect/ Bob
	18	+Japan also has ditched plans to build 14 more reactors. The power capacity lost by retiring old plants and canceling the 14 new ones would be about 399 billion kilowatt-hours by 2030, according to the Breakthrough Institute. To replace that lost generation would require a nearly 49-fold increase in electricity generated by wind, solar and geothermal. The impact: Japan is left with imported coal, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and renewable energy for its power needs. But in all likelihood Japan will rely primarily on imported coal and LNG, two options that will increase emissions. Renewable energy will ramp up, but the obstacles are too numerous to allow it to completely replace the lost nuclear power capacity.
	19	+Renewables Link—Renewables need NP to be effective.
	20	+Plumer 8/2 Brad; enior editor at Vox.com, previously a reporter at the Washington Post; Vox; “Nuclear power and renewables don’t have to be enemies. New York just showed how.”; 8/2/16; http://www.vox.com/2016/8/2/12345572/new-york-nuclear-wind-solar; JLB (9/11/16)
	21	+Consider, if you will, two basic facts about clean energy in the United States. Nuclear power is the country’s largest source of carbon-free energy, supplying about 19 percent of our electricity, but it’s barely growing. Wind and solar are smaller, at about 8 percent, but they’re growing much more rapidly. Put those together, and you get an intuitive blueprint for reducing US carbon dioxide emissions: Protect the nuclear base, and then scale up wind and solar on top of that, displacing fossil fuels as you go. Seems reasonable, no? Yet, oddly enough, many states have struggled with this simple concept. Even as policymakers have stepped up subsidies for renewable energy, they’ve been letting their nuclear plants shut down prematurely — to be replaced by dirtier natural gas. We’ve already seen this in California, Vermont, Wisconsin. And it’s going to keep happening in the years ahead without serious policy changes. These early nuclear retirements are poised to wipe out many of the impressive gains made by renewables. So it’s significant news that, this week, New York state offered a fresh approach to this problem. On Monday, the state’s public service commission approved an extremely aggressive clean energy standard that will require utilities to get 50 percent of their electricity from wind, solar, hydro, and other renewable sources by 2030. But — importantly — New York will also offer subsidies to keep open three large existing nuclear power plants that are suffering economically in this shifting energy landscape and were in danger of shutting down prematurely. This way, the state isn’t just taking one step forward, two steps back, on climate change. (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) The James A. Fitzpatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Scriba, New York, was in danger of closing at the end of the year. It’s a potential template for other states with reactors in danger of closing before the end of their life span. New York’s move contrasts sharply with California, where regulators are mulling a proposal to close the state’s last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, and replace it entirely with renewables and efficiency. It will be interesting to compare the two states in the years ahead and see which approach yields better results. More broadly, New York’s plan offers a model of how renewables and nuclear might work together to fight global warming. This notion has been surprisingly controversial of late, particularly after the Diablo Canyon fight. Eduardo Porter of The New York Times recently wrote a column arguing that the growth of subsidized renewables is hurting nuclear in energy markets — a perverse outcome. Yet as Jesse Jenkins, an energy researcher studying low-carbon electricity systems at MIT, put it to me: “It’s important to unpack this. It’s not renewables killing nuclear. It’s policies that fail to recognize the contributions of both renewables and nuclear. But those policies can change — as they did this week in New York.” Why New York state wants both renewables and nukes Let’s start with a graph of New York’s electricity mix, circa 2014. It’s mostly natural gas, nuclear power, and hydro — with a bit of coal, solar, and wind mixed in: (Nuclear Energy Institute) Under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the state is trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 and become a leader on climate change. With the cost of solar and wind falling dramatically, renewables were a natural focus. The state is embarking on a radical plan to revamp utility models to accommodate renewables. Hence the proposal to grow hydro, wind, solar, and biomass from 27 percent today to 50 percent by 2030. That’s a daunting goal, and we’ll see if it’s doable. (You can read a skeptical take here.) At the same time, New York’s other big source of clean energy — nuclear — was in danger. A combination of cheap natural gas from the US fracking boom and stagnating electricity demand has caused nuclear revenues to plummet. As a result, reactors at three upstate plants — Fitzpatrick, Ginna, and Nine Mile — were in danger of shutting down prematurely, squeezed between high fixed costs and declining revenues: (Nuclear Energy Institute) (I’ll get to the fourth plant, Indian Point, below: it’s in better financial shape due to higher revenues from downstate markets, but it’s facing political pressure to close.) One reaction here might be: “Fine, let the dinosaur reactors die. If they can’t compete in the market, who needs ’em?” But as it turns out, the state does need them if it wants to cut emissions. Among other things, New York’s Public Service Commission concluded that wind and solar wouldn’t be able to scale up fast enough to replace the lost reactors. If nuclear vanished, the state would end up burning more natural gas and greenhouse gas emissions would rise. What’s more, replacing the steady baseload power from reactors with intermittent renewables could create reliability problems in upstate regions.
	22	+
	23	+Fear mongering link—Coal Kills 4,000 times more people than nuclear power; focus on NP prohibition ignores the developing world.
	24	+Roos 11 Jerome; The Breakthrough Institute (researcher); 4/11/11; "Coal Kills 4,000 Times More People Per Unit of Energy than Nuclear"; http://thebreakthrough.org/archive/coal_kills_4000_times_more_peo; JLB (9/11/16)
	25	+When you actually do the math, coal kills somewhere on the order of 4,000 times more people per unit of energy produced than nuclear power. Or to put it another way, outdoor air pollution, caused principally by the combustion of fossil fuels, kills as many people every 29 hours as will eventually die due to radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, according to World Health Organization figures (Source: nuclear; air pollution).¶ Yet since coal-related deaths have a much lower profile than nuclear disasters, and because they largely occur in the conveniently far-away obscurity of the developing world, they tend to be severely underreported by the mainstream media in the West. ¶ So while all eyes turned to Fukushima, the grinding, every-day death and illness caused by the air pollution, toxic contamination, and mercury poisoning leaching from the world's coal plants and oil refineries and the tailpipes of roughly a billion cars and trucks continued unabated ~-~- and continued to go largely unmentioned.¶ For some reason, as the formerly anti-nuclear environmentalist George Monbiot has argued, greens seem to care a great deal about scientific consensus when it's about climate change, but when it comes to nuclear energy far too many are very willing to dismiss factual evidence and spread dishonest information. The reality we will have to deal with is that fossil fuels, and coal in particular, kill many times more people than nuclear.
	26	+
	27	+Global warming definitively causes extinction
	28	+Sharp and Kennedy 14 – (Associate Professor Robert (Bob) A. Sharp is the UAE National Defense College Associate Dean for Academic Programs and College Quality Assurance Advisor. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Strategic Security Studies at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA) in the U.S. National Defense University (NDU), Washington D.C. and then as Associate Professor at the Near East South Asia (NESA) Center for Strategic Studies, collocated with NDU. Most recently at NESA, he focused on security sector reform in Yemen and Lebanon, and also supported regional security engagement events into Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and Qatar; Edward Kennedy is a renewable energy and climate change specialist who has worked for the World Bank and the Spanish Electric Utility ENDESA on carbon policy and markets; 8/22/14, “Climate Change and Implications for National Security,” International Policy Digest, http://intpolicydigest.org/2014/08/22/climate-change-implications-national-security/, Accessed 7/11/16, HWilson)
	29	+Our planet is 4.5 billion years old. If that whole time was to be reflected on a single one-year calendar then the dinosaurs died off sometime late in the afternoon of December 27th and modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago, or at around lunchtime on December 28th. Therefore, human life on earth is very recent. Sometime on December 28th humans made the first fires – wood fires – neutral in the carbon balance. Now reflect on those most recent 200,000 years again on a single one-year calendar and you might be surprised to learn that the industrial revolution began only a few hours ago during the middle of the afternoon on December 31st, 250 years ago, coinciding with the discovery of underground carbon fuels. Over the 250 years carbon fuels have enabled tremendous technological advances including a population growth from about 800 million then to 7.5 billion today and the consequent demand to extract even more carbon. This has occurred during a handful of generations, which is hardly noticeable on our imaginary one-year calendar. The release of this carbon – however – is changing our climate at such a rapid rate that it threatens our survival and presence on earth. It defies imagination that so much damage has been done in such a relatively short time. The implications of climate change is the single most significant threat to life on earth and, put simply, we are not doing enough to rectify the damage. This relatively very recent ability to change our climate is an inconvenient truth; the science is sound. We know of the complex set of interrelated national and global security risks that are a result of global warming and the velocity at which climate change is occurring. We worry it may already be too late. Climate change writ large has informed few, interested some, confused many, and polarized politics. It has already led to an increase in natural disasters including but not limited to droughts, storms, floods, fires etc. The year 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record according to an American Meteorological Society (AMS) report. Research suggests that climate change is already affecting human displacement; reportedly 36 million people were displaced in 2008 alone because of sudden natural disasters. Figures for 2010 and 2011 paint a grimmer picture of people displaced because of rising sea levels, heat and storms. Climate change affects all natural systems. It impacts temperature and consequently it affects water and weather patterns. It contributes to desertification, deforestation and acidification of the oceans. Changes in weather patterns may mean droughts in one area and floods in another. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, sea levels rise but perennial river water supplies are reduced because glaciers are retreating. As glaciers and polar ice caps melt, there is an albedo effect, which is a double whammy of less temperature regulation because of less surface area of ice present. This means that less absorption occurs and also there is less reflection of the sun’s light. A potentially critical wild card could be runaway climate change due to the release of methane from melting tundra. Worldwide permafrost soils contain about 1,700 Giga Tons of carbon, which is about four times more than all the carbon released through human activity thus far. The planet has already adapted itself to dramatic climate change including a wide range of distinct geologic periods and multiple extinctions, and at a pace that it can be managed. It is human intervention that has accelerated the pace dramatically: An increased surface temperature, coupled with more severe weather and changes in water distribution will create uneven threats to our agricultural systems and will foster and support the spread of insect borne diseases like Malaria, Dengue and the West Nile virus. Rising sea levels will increasingly threaten our coastal population and infrastructure centers and with more than 3.5 billion people – half the planet – depending on the ocean for their primary source of food, ocean acidification may dangerously undercut critical natural food systems which would result in reduced rations. Climate change also carries significant inertia. Even if emissions were completely halted today, temperature increases would continue for some time. Thus the impact is not only to the environment, water, coastal homes, agriculture and fisheries as mentioned, but also would lead to conflict and thus impact national security. Resource wars are inevitable as countries respond, adapt and compete for the shrinking set of those available resources. These wars have arguably already started and will continue in the future because climate change will force countries to act for national survival; the so-called Climate Wars. As early as 2003 Greenpeace alluded to a report which it claimed was commissioned by the Pentagon titled: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for U.S. National Security. It painted a picture of a world in turmoil because global warming had accelerated. The scenario outlined was both abrupt and alarming. The report offered recommendations but backed away from declaring climate change an immediate problem, concluding that it would actually be more incremental and measured; as such it would be an irritant, not a shock for national security systems. In 2006 the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) – Institute of Public Research – convened a board of 11 senior retired generals and admirals to assess National Security and the Threat to Climate Change. Their initial report was published in April 2007 and made no mention of the potential acceleration of climate change. The team found that climate change was a serious threat to national security and that it was: “most likely to happen in regions of the world that are already fertile ground for extremism.” The team made recommendations from their analysis of regional impacts which suggested the following. Europe would experience some fracturing because of border migration. Africa would need more stability and humanitarian operations provided by the United States. The Middle East would experience a “loss of food and water security (which) will increase pressure to emigrate across borders.” Asia would suffer from “threats to water and the spread of infectious disease. ” In 2009 the CIA opened a Center on Climate Change and National Security to coordinate across the intelligence community and to focus policy. In May 2014, CNA again convened a Military Advisory Board but this time to assess National Security and the Accelerating Risk of Climate Change. The report concludes that climate change is no longer a future threat but occurring right now and the authors appeal to the security community, the entire government and the American people to not only build resilience against projected climate change impacts but to form agreements to stabilize climate change and also to integrate climate change across all strategy and planning. The calm of the 2007 report is replaced by a tone of anxiety concerning the future coupled with calls for public discourse and debate because “time and tide wait for no man.” The report notes a key distinction between resilience (mitigating the impact of climate change) and agreements (ways to stabilize climate change) and states that: Actions by the United States and the international community have been insufficient to adapt to the challenges associated with projected climate change. Strengthening resilience to climate impacts already locked into the system is critical, but this will reduce long-term risk only if improvements in resilience are accompanied by actionable agreements on ways to stabilize climate change. The 9/11 Report framed the terrorist attacks as less of a failure of intelligence than a failure of imagination. Greenpeace’s 2003 account of the Pentagon’s alleged report describes a coming climate Armageddon which to readers was unimaginable and hence the report was not really taken seriously. It described: A world thrown into turmoil by drought, floods, typhoons. Whole countries rendered uninhabitable. The capital of the Netherlands submerged. The borders of the U.S. and Australia patrolled by armies firing into waves of starving boat people desperate to find a new home. Fishing boats armed with cannon to drive off competitors. Demands for access to water and farmland backed up with nuclear weapons. The CNA and Greenpeace/Pentagon reports are both mirrored by similar analysis by the World Bank which highlighted not only the physical manifestations of climate change, but also the significant human impacts that threaten to unravel decades of economic development, which will ultimately foster conflict. Climate change is the quintessential “Tragedy of the Commons,” where the cumulative impact of many individual actions (carbon emission in this case) is not seen as linked to the marginal gains available to each individual action and not seen as cause and effect. It is simultaneously huge, yet amorphous and nearly invisible from day to day. It is occurring very fast in geologic time terms, but in human time it is (was) slow and incremental. Among environmental problems, it is uniquely global. With our planet and culture figuratively and literally honeycombed with a reliance on fossil fuels, we face systemic challenges in changing the reliance across multiple layers of consumption, investment patterns, and political decisions; it will be hard to fix!

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-09-15 13:47:35.316

Judge

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	1	+Joseph Barquin, Fred Ditzian, Nick Steele

Opponent

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	1	+Polytechnic JL

ParentRound

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	1	+1

Round

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	1	+Doubles

Team

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	1	+Palos Verdes Le Barillec Neg

Title

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	1	+SEPTOCT - Warming DA

Tournament

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	1	+Loyola