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Cites

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1		-U.S. carbon emissions are getting lower and are on track to meet environmental goals
2		-McMahon 6/23 Jeff McMahon, contributor at Forbes, “U.S. On Track To Achieve 2030 Emissions Goals In 2016,” Forbes Magazine, June 23, 2016, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2016/06/23/u-s-on-track-to-achieve-2030-emissions-goals-in-2016/#fa3d9fa42c8e
3		-A dramatic slump in coal production has pushed U.S. carbon emissions so low that, were the trend to continue, the U.S. would achieve its 2030 emissions goals this year, according to one professor’s analysis of data from the Energy Information Administration. Coal production has plummeted 29 percent in 2016 compared to the same period last year, crushed in part by cheap natural gas, which emits about half as much carbon. Unless coal rebounds, the U.S. could achieve a 32 percent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels, according to Daniel Cohan, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at Rice University. That happens to match the final goal set for the year 2030 in the Clean Power Plan (CPP). “It’s still conceivable to meet CPP this year, depending on the weather and how much further natural gas prices rise,” Cohan told me via email. EIA doesn’t expect that to happen. The agency forecasts a colder winter and rising natural gas prices, which would make coal attractive again to power producers. But the notoriously fossil-friendly agency may be overestimating coal’s prospects, and Cohan notes that EIA repeatedly lowered its carbon emissions estimates as actual data on First Quarter coal use arrived in recent editions of its Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO). “We’re unlikely to sustain the Q1 trend, which benefited from warm weather and cheap gas. But I’m skeptical of EIA’s forecast of a Q4 rebound, given that its STEO’s have been consistently overestimating coal use. A rebound would have to overcome coal plant retirements, coal mining bankruptcies, and the possibility of another warm winter.” In its June Outlook, the EIA noted an unusually large stockpile of coal left on hand at the end of last winter: “Warmer-than-normal temperatures experienced throughout the United States in March 2016 (and the winter as a whole) and coal’s continuing loss of market share to natural gas for electric power generation contributed to the increase in coal stockpiles,” the document says. In addition to warm weather and low natural gas prices, Cohan credits ”a broad array of emerging and cheapening technologies” for transforming power markets, including inexpensive renewables and increasing efficiency. In scrutinizing EIA’s data, Cohan noticed its emissions estimates were increasingly approaching the Clean Power Plan goal. He realized that if the coal rebound fails to materialize, the goal could be attained. “Yes, you read that correctly: The U.S. could achieve the 2030 emission cuts this year,” Cohan wrote in a blog post he penned for Bloomberg Governance. Even if the U.S. doesn’t achieve its 2030 goal this year, the EIA’s more conservative estimates still bring the country most of the distance. Carbon emissions had already fallen 15 percent from 2005 to 2014, the last year for which reliable figures are available. EIA estimates another 4.5 percent drop across 2015 and 2016. Cohan thinks recent emissions will fall more than 4.5 percent, because the EIA tends to overestimate coal use, and overestimate the cost of renewables. Those EIA estimates also cover energy emissions in all sectors of the economy. Focusing just on the power sector covered by the Clean Power Plan, the cuts are more dramatic, according to Cohan: a 12 percent decline in power sector emissions from 2014 to 2016, adding up to a 25 percent decline from 2005 to 2016. “If we end up just a few percent away from the 2030 target this year, it becomes tough to argue that CPP is unattainable or too costly,” Cohan said. It could be argued, however, that the Clean Power Plan is unnecessary, because its long-term goal has come into view while the regulation remains idled in a court-imposed stay of execution. But without the Clean Power Plan, there’s nothing to prevent a protracted coal rebound in the future that could wipe out the emissions gains. “EIA’s longer term Annual Energy Outlook forecasts an ongoing rebound in coal consumption,” Cohan said, ”if the Clean Power Plan is not implemented.”
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5		-Closing nuclear plants forces increased fossil fuel use
6		-Roston 15 Eric Roston, writer for Bloomberg, “Why Nuclear Power Is All but Dead in the U.S.” Bloomberg News, April 15, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-15/soon-it-may-be-easier-to-build-a-nuclear-plant-in-iran-than-in-the-u-s-
7		-*ellipsis from original text
8		-Say what? The U.S. achieved fission before anybody else. It learned before anybody else to control nuclear power, train it to boil water, to spin turbines, to generate electricity. There are 99 nuclear reactors across the U.S., providing about 19 percent of Americans’ electricity. They account for about 30 percent of global nuclear capacity. No new U.S. nuclear plant has opened since Watts Bar 1, in Tennessee, in 1996. And 20 more may close, “which makes no sense at all, from a common sense standpoint, or anything else,” Gregg said. Not because there’s something dramatically wrong with them. They’re victims of the success of natural gas, a shortage of power lines, eternal environmental enmity, and the eternally unresolved issue of where to store nuclear waste. Natural gas has driven power prices lower than nuclear’s operating costs. If bad economic trends persist for nuclear, more and more of the U.S. fleet may retire in coming years, leaving the communities they serve at the tyranny of plants powered by fossil fuels. That’s a huge problem for climate activists who oppose nuclear power. Nuclear plants would likely be replaced by natural gas or (shudder) coal plants, which would drive up carbon dioxide emissions. It’s happening in Germany, where the government decided to abandon nuclear power after the March 2011 catastrophe at Fukushima. In Vermont, where a 600-megawatt plant closed in December, carbon-free nuclear power is being replaced largely by fossil-powered electricity from the grid. That makes nuclear an energy source that could help nations meet the goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius. We're already about 0.8 degree there. “I can’t see a scenario where we can stick to the 2 degree warming commitment ... without a substantial contribution from nuclear,” said Michael Liebreich, the founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, at its annual conference yesterday. “We have got to figure out nuclear if that envelope is to mean anything to us."
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10		-Meeting the 2 degrees Celsius change is key to stopping climate change catastrophe
11		-Mastroianni 15 Brian Mastroianni, “Why 2 degrees are so important to the climate,” CBS News, November 30, 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-un-climate-talks-why-2-degrees-are-so-important/
12		-As the United Nations conference on climate change gets underway Monday in Paris, one temperature that will be on everyone's minds is 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Although it might not sound like a big number, climatologists predict that if the planet warms a total of 2 degrees more than its average temperature before the Industrial Revolution ~-~- when humans started burning fossil fuels ~-~- the results could be catastrophic. What could happen? Think events like greater sea level rise submerging the coasts, more pervasive droughts and wildfires, and plant and animal extinctions across the board. Scientists say this amount of temperature increase could leave us with a significantly different Earth. And unless something changes, we're heading in that direction: U.N. and U.K. climate analysts recently concluded that the Earth has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius, with 2015 the hottest year ever recorded. Yale economist William Nordhaus first defined the 2-degree benchmark in a 1977 paper, "Economic Growth and Climate: The Carbon Dioxide Problem." Since then, the figure has stood as a rallying cry for those advocating for cutting back on carbon emissions. For others, 2 degrees is still too high ~-~- to allow the Earth to warm even that much would be dire for life on the planet. "Those who study the possible impacts of warming think that there is a threshold before we can start to get much more changed in the world ~-~- like the flooding of low-lying countries, and things like that," said Eric Larson, a senior scientist at Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that provides analysis and information on climate science. "Science has established for quite a while that we need to respect a threshold of 2 degrees, that being the limit of the temperature increase that we can afford from a human, economic and infrastructure point of view," the top U.N. official on climate change, Christiana Figueres, told CBS News in an interview earlier this fall. Beyond that, "we would be moving into exceedingly dangerous zones of abrupt interruptions to our economy, to our livelihood, to our infrastructure that frankly we wouldn't even know how to deal with." Moreover, she noted, "quite recently the insurance industry has come out to say that a world that goes beyond a 2-degree increase is not insurable." At the Paris summit ~-~- known as COP21 since it is the 21st annual Conference of the Parties (COP) on the U.N. Convention on Climate Change ~-~- delegates from more than 190 countries will seek a legally binding agreement to reduce global carbon emissions enough so that the 2-degree threshold is not crossed.

EntryDate

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1		-2016-09-27 18:37:58.0

Judge

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1		-Kim Hsun

Opponent

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1		-Prosper MK

ParentRound

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1		-12

Round

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1		-4

Team

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1		-Strake Jesuit Li Neg

Title

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1		-SO - Warming DA

Tournament

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1		-Grapevine