Tournament: Meadows | Round: 2 | Opponent: Westview RS | Judge: Sierra Inglet
K
The 1AC focus of prohibiting nuclear power is one of energy policy. Your focus of fixing the problems of the political energy sector in society entrenches capitalism by not focusing on the historical usage of energy as a means to solve. Cap will continue to cause your problems. Huber 13
In the 1970s we saw the rise of a peculiar concept: “energy policy.” Since that volatile decade it has become conventional wisdom that we need a new, transformative policy with regard to energy production and consumption. In the United States, for example, every President since Richard Nixon has promised a policy change toward “energy independence.” Depending on political affiliation, this energy transformation would be achieved by either investing in “alternative” energy or ramping up production of conventional fossil fuel – drill, baby, drill! – by removing ‘burdensome’ environmental regulation.
More broadly, “energy” is thought of as a specific and contained “sector” of the economy – in the U.S., the domain of the Secretary of Energy; the concern of engineers and scientists with expertise in energy technology; the field of investment for countless ‘cleantech’ startup companies and, of course, the entrenched industries of fossil fuel based accumulation. Emerging out of this contained “energy sector” is a whole host of political forms of contestation. There are the wonkish, energy technocrats who want to harness the power of the profit motive to embed clean energy within a greener form of capitalism – Amory Lovins and friends being the most notable example. 1 There are the movements around environmental justice focused on the often devastating impact of the energy extraction and processing – from the Niger Delta to the Tar Sands to Mountain Top Coal Removal. 2 There is the burgeoning climate movement with its focus on the fossil fuel industry as “public enemy number one”. 3 In many ways, “energy” (and perhaps its conjoined issue of “climate”) has become just another topic in the world of “single issue” politics focused on a set of fixed and contained “causes” whether it be, immigration, abortion, prisons, or environment. The problem with this contained view of “energy policy”, “energy politics” and the “energy sector”, is it belies the way energy (not to mention any other single issue or cause) is embedded within capitalist society as a whole. Most profoundly, energy cannot really be contained in any “sector”, but is ubiquitous within everyday practices of social reproduction. In his attempt to diffuse the controversy over Marx’s “base-superstructure” metaphor, Freidrich Engels laid out the “mission” of historical materialism as such: “According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life.” 4 Engels’s description harkens back to the original formulations in The German Ideology which posited “the real-life process” and the social relations that make life possible as the foundation of a historical materialist analysis. 5 From this perspective, energy is not simply a “sector” or a “policy domain” but the material foundation of life itself (no matter what the historical circumstances). From the calories expending in gathering and hunting, to the sweat and toil of slave labor; from the coal, soot, and smoke of the coal-fired steam engine, to the decentralized geographies made possible through electricity and oil-based transport, every “mode of production” harnesses energy in particular ways. And, the historically specific modes of energy extraction and delivery often reproduce sociopolitical relations of power and domination. Indeed, the development of the coal fired steam engine was just as much an attempt to limit the working class power of manual laborers as it was about “efficiency”. 6 The expansion of oil-based suburbanization in the postwar United States laid the basis for the right wing’s mobilization of an often suburban form of neoliberal populism based on a an ideology of privatism opposed to government, taxes, and indeed, toward urban city life itself. 7

Missing the point and ignoring the capitalist problem gets rid of any serious challenge to the status quo and only creates a ruse of solvency. This independently turns the aff since they only cover up the problem and is a reason why the aff can never solve the problems of the K. McLaren 1
Eager to take a wide detour around political economy, post-Marxists tend to assume that the principal political points of departure in the current ‘postmodern’ world must necessarily be ‘cultural.’ As such, most, but not all post-Marxists have gravitated towards a politics of ‘difference’ which is largely premised on uncovering relations of power that reside in the arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological practices (cf. Jordan and Weedon, 1995). Advocates of ‘difference’ politics therefore posit their ideas as bold steps forward in advancing the interests of those historically marginalized by ‘dominant’ social and cultural narratives. There is no doubt that post-Marxism has advanced our knowledge of the hidden trajectories of power within the processes of representation and that it remains useful in adumbrating the formation of subjectivity and its expressive dimensions as well as complementing our understandings of the relationships between ‘difference,’ language, and cultural configurations. However, post-Marxists have been woefully remiss in addressing the constitution of class formations and the machinations of capitalist social organization. In some instances, capitalism and class relations have been thoroughly ‘otherized;’ in others, class is summoned only as part of the triumvirate of ‘race, class, and gender’ in which class is reduced to merely another form of ‘difference.’ Enamored with the ‘cultural’ and seemingly blind to the ‘economic,’ the rhetorical excesses of post-Marxists have also prevented them from considering the stark reality of contemporary class conditions under global capitalism. As we hope to show, the radical displacement of class analysis in contemporary theoretical narratives and the concomitant decentering of capitalism, the anointing of ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory construct, and the ‘culturalization’ of politics, have had detrimental effects on ‘left’ theory and practice. Reconceptualizing ‘Difference’ The manner in which ‘difference’ has been taken up within ‘post-al’ frameworks has tended to stress its cultural dimensions while marginalizing and, in some cases, completely ignoring the economic and material dimensions of difference. This posturing has been quite evident in many ‘post-al’ theories of ‘race’ and in the realm of ‘ludic’1 cultural studies that have valorized an account of difference—particularly ‘racial difference’—in almost exclusively ‘superstructuralist’ terms (Sahay, 1998). But this treatment of ‘difference’ and claims about ‘the “relative autonomy” of “race”’ have been ‘enabled by a reduction and distortion of Marxian class analysis’ which ‘involves equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism.’ The key move in this distorting gesture depends on the ‘view that the economic is the base, the cultural/political/ideological the superstructure.’ It is then ‘relatively easy to show that the (presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the political/cultural/ideological superstructure, that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but relatively autonomous or autonomous causal categories’ (Meyerson, 2000, p. 2). In such formulations the ‘cultural’ is treated as a separate and autonomous sphere, severed from its embeddedness within sociopolitical and economic arrangements. As a result, many of these ‘culturalist’ narratives have produced autonomist and reified conceptualizations of difference which ‘far from enabling those subjects most marginalized by racial difference’ have, in effect, reduced ‘difference to a question of knowledge/power relations’ that can presumably be ‘dealt with (negotiated) on a discursive level without a fundamental change in the relations of production’ (Sahay, 1998). At this juncture, it is necessary to point out that arguing that ‘culture’ is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces does not reinscribe the simplistic and presumably ‘deterministic’ base/superstructure metaphor which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory. Rather, we invoke Marx's own writings from both the Grundrisse and Capital in which he contends that there is a consolidating logic in the relations of production that permeates society in the complex variety of its ‘empirical’ reality. This emphasizes Marx's understanding of capitalism and capital as a ‘social’ relation—one which stresses the interpenetration of these categories, the realities which they reflect, and one which therefore offers a unified and dialectical analysis of history, ideology, culture, politics, economics and society (see also Marx, 1972, 1976, 1977).2 Foregrounding the limitations of ‘difference’ and ‘representational’ politics does not suggest a disavowal of the importance of cultural and/or discursive arena(s) as sites of contestation and struggle. We readily acknowledge the significance of contemporary theorizations that have sought to valorize precisely those forms of ‘difference’ that have historically been denigrated. This has undoubtedly been an important development since they have enabled subordinated groups to reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities. However, they have also tended to redefine politics as a signifying activity generally confined to the realm of ‘representation’ while displacing a politics grounded in the mobilization of forces against the material sources of political and economic marginalization. In their rush to avoid the ‘capital’ sin of ‘economism,’ many post-Marxists (who often ignore their own class privilege) have fallen prey to an ahistorical form of culturalism which holds, among other things, that cultural struggles external to class organizing provide the cutting edge of emancipatory politics.3 In many respects, this posturing, has yielded an ‘intellectual pseudopolitics’ that has served to empower ‘the theorist while explicitly disempowering’ real citizens.

The alternative is to engage in a class analysis and unite the proletariat. This is a necessary first step in advancing toward an effective revolution against the bourgeoisie and the capitalist system. The perm is impossible since the aff fails to achieve any revolution under its mindset, which only the alt does. Kissel 

Indeed, the underlying problems cannot be suitably treated as capitalism contains within it the seeds of its own demise, seeds which it itself nurtures through the necessary creation and ultimate exploitation of a new class, the proletariat. The proletariat are the workforce of bourgeois enterprise, "a class of laborers who live only so long as they can find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital". The proletarians are themselves commodities and are likewise subject to the vicissitudes of the market. And as with any other commodity, businesses want to minimize their cost of production, in this case, the wage that must be paid in order to make use of the worker's labor power. According to Marx, this wage is the cost of bare subsistence for the proletariat and his family. Because of the division of labor, the work of the proletariat is assimilated to the great industrial machinery, of which they are no more than cogs. As the division of labor and the mechanization of industry increases necessary conditions of efficient production so does the drudgery of the proletariat's work. As slaves to their bourgeois masters, the proletariat is in a constant state of antagonism with the bourgeoisie. This antagonism, though, leads to the mass mobilization helped by ever improving communication technologies of the proletariat, increasingly aware of their collective power to affect changes in wages and working conditions. Indeed, the proletariat is helped in this by the bourgeoisie, who educate the proletariat in order to mobilize the masses of workers in favor of their own political goals. As the proletariat become more numerous and organized, though, members of the bourgeoisie begin to realize that their class will fall and the proletariat will triumph. These foresighted bourgeoisie, of which Marx is a member, increase class consciousness among the proletariat and hurry their historically ordained victory. Eventually, the proletariat erupt into rebellion, casting off the shackles which bound them to the bourgeoisie. They condemn all the bourgeois laws, morality, and religions as facades for bourgeois economic interests. They rend society apart, destroying the most fundamental condition of their own bondage, the institution of private property. All this is the necessary result of the rapacious bourgeois appetite for profit which brought the proletariat into existence and continually diminished his welfare. Thus, the bourgeoisie undermine the conditions of their own existence. As Marx concludes, "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable".

The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who better rejects capitalism. 

The judge is in a position to be an inclusive educator, and has an obligation to open up the space for multiple pedagogies, or polyvocal debate. Koh and Niemi

For as long as there has been debate, there has been the debate about what debate is. We are not against a discussion of what constitutes debate. In fact we are absolutely for it. We argue that this is a crucial debate within debates. The question should not be “what is debate?” The proper question is “what can debate do?” The constitutive feature of debate that we are most abstractly interested in is the precise one that is so often banished by debate pundits – the possibilities of what it can do. We do not yet know what debate can do. All are welcome to accept the challenge of forcing debate into a linear and instrumental framework, but be warned it will certainly fail. Debate is a process and a field, not a mechanism. This is the case for polyvocal debate. Our current definition (which is open to redefinition) is that debate should be thought of as a complex assemblage of voices (the debaters, the judge, audiences, coaches, the authors quoted, and so on), and that it is wrong to limit the possible voices or the possible enunciations of those voices. Debate is always about multiple voices – multiple ways of sensing/expressing. Even non-sense and non-expression have their own voices. This is not a paradigm. It is a hypothesis about the system of relations that co-creates debate. The power and potential of polyvocal debate is not located in some far-off future. It is right here right now, and it is also capable of contact with the outsides of one perspective on time and space. To paraphrase June Tyson – Don’t you know? It’s after the end of the world. Within the system of relations composed by polyvocal debate, we always have the ability to ask “should we believe in something in the first place?” as well as “if we believe it, what are its normative implications?” These questions, in whatever form they take, are some of the most primal elements of debate. Restricting the scope of debate to only some of these questions is a serious loss. More absurd is the justification for restriction based on the value of being able to ask and engage with these questions in the first place. It is wrong to assume that chaos and doubt are bad. It is even worse to argue for a progressive fallacy that chaos and doubt can be removed from debate without debate ceasing to be debate at all. Debate is not soccer, or chess, or playing the trumpet. Perhaps it can do similar things to those activities, but if so it is because it does not feature the limits that define soccer or chess or playing the trumpet. It is apparently very easy to make assumptions about what education is. Most often this is accomplished without citing a single theorist on the subject of education OR a robust understanding of what education could be outside of “commonsensical” assumptions (which are less common and relatable that they initially seem). As we often like to tell our students – read the literature. We call the kind of education that is often assumed “banking-style education” after Paulo Friere. This is the notion that education is about accumulating knowledge. 100 facts are better than 99 facts. People devalue education because they think of it only in these calculated terms. To the banking conception, the end game of education would not be an increase in self-respect, a commitment to social justice, or a development of communication and empathetic powers. It would be the resume statement of “things I’ve learned.” We must not buy into this conception of education. In debate, the collaborative way voices intertwine builds a world of speech and frames it. No debate performance can be perfectly reproduced. The judge’s interpretation and voice are then added. The desire for absolutely objective or procedurally exact judging is a desire for an impossibility. We should not be afraid of the judge’s voice. We recognize it as one among many. Some judges speak loudly and have particular desires. We do not begrudge them this. What is important is that they acknowledge that theirs is only one voice among the many and one way of sensing among all sense and nonsense. It is not a question of excluding the chaos or controlling it, but understanding the value in hearing the clash of multiple voices. For nowhere else in school are we given the vibrant opportunity to be as real in the academic space as is in debate; where we are able to read multiple arguments from multiple views from multiple bases. We must encourage debate to be an outlet for the chaotic and doubtful elements of our beliefs for it’s an opportunity to bridge debate’s separation from the real world into our own world. Our lives aren’t always smooth unwavering stories. They are often a chaos that is hard to grasp outside the lens of community. Polyvocal debate is inclusive and encouraging of this chaos, of the hard questions and life changing moments of realization. A form of debate that acts as if it can omit doubt is not a true form of debate at all. This isn’t just an argument for “unique educational value” in the banking-sense. Debate should not be thought of as an esoteric extracurricular designed to spice up the resume. Paradigms of debate that stop at the moment of rational justification treat the issue of what world we create for ourselves as an unnecessary step, but this conversation is what must happen in our lives and further what must happen in debate. Polyvocal debate allows for this discussion. We should not just ask “is deontology true” but further “is it good for me to believe in deontology” or util or contractarianism, etc. Rationality cannot be trusted to judge itself, but abandoning logic altogether isn’t necessary just yet. It is too easy to take up one side or the other (only truth matters or only the good matters). Debate is harder. The tenets of logic and justification can create questionable conclusions, and a truly valuable form of debate must allow us to criticize and reevaluate these conclusions to live our lives to the fullest. We must be able to ask if beliefs empower or disempower our lives. We always have the power to ask should we believe it or is it correct, and exercising this capacity is the practice of debate. There are two ways in which we can understand and consider what we ought to believe – what is rationally justifiable, and what is good for us to believe for ourselves. In our lives we cannot just ask “what do I think is true.” We must always end up asking “is it good for me to believe in what I believe?” This is how we must act in our own lives outside of just the debate space. When we are faced with a difficult situation be it in our personal lives, work, etc., we are inevitably going to be confronted with moments of seemingly undeniable hopelessness; where despite our best efforts and our thinking, we cannot justify or rationally see a way to be happy or push ourselves through to the other side. Is it good for me to believe that no matter what I will do, that I will get a bad grade in this class? Is it good for me to believe that I will fail in my work? Is it good for me to believe in hopelessness? Our answer is no. Our answer is that debate helps you learn new questions as well as new answers. Again and again we’ve heard the articles and arguments that collapse everything to the old questions: education versus fairness, the rules versus innovation and expansion, correct ways of being versus incorrect ones. Bizarrely there are some who like to play with the same questions forever, perpetually flipping bits between one and zero, never writing new code. We are tired of these questions. Perhaps they would be enlivened by new voices. Polyvocality is the necessary and explosive generation of new questions. The practice of debate is an educational activity because it is generative and interrogative of voices. Use it for what it’s used for. Education can be praxis – where the abstraction of theory becomes lived abstractness inside the fabric of everyday experience. Where a radical new way of thinking-feeling the world becomes possible. Where you don’t just learn about quantum physics, but cry at how beautiful the expression of quantum interactions can be and feel blessed to be a part of them, and then teach them to your friends and family. But this is only part of what education is. Education is a becoming that is necessarily political. Often times it is anti-reactionary or anti-conservative, not because it includes some biased political position, but because it is impossible to actually experience learning without it changing you – what you think is right and wrong, what you want to do, and who you think of yourself as. On our view, this makes education necessarily anti-fascist (where fascism is defined as the tendency to over-represent and prefer certain ways of being to others based on normative, intuitive, or ontological claims). No matter your petty political affiliations, too many people in our world must attempt escape everyday, live as targets, suffer, and experience domination. If education is not a force to help us address this, it is not a properly empathetic education. Even if the educational space of debate allows for slightly more opportunities to escape the everyday and find new connections and places to dwell, this is a greater benefit to everyone than any obedience to respectability politics, norms of conduct, or “correct ways of being” could ever achieve. This is how the world works. We should not abandon the cause of empathy just because we can have that elsewhere. It’s not as if we should not care about others at certain times because we do so in others. Debate is foundationally about empathy. Arguments are only persuasive in the ability for their to be foster a shared experience of understanding. Judges vote for arguments that have a particular effect on them – the effect of “being convincing.” Arguments that win send the judge on a path of becoming-convinced. In order for this to happen, the debater must actually get through to the judge on some level, whether intuitively, emotively, via rhetoric, the flow, or explanation. The best debating promotes empathy. Not empathy defined by biased terms – empathy defined by actual contact with actual others, perspectives, and ways of expressing oneself. It is not that young people are in need of moral training or must be told what is right and wrong or that debate should erase and conquer disagreement. Rather, it is that we should strive to learn to live with disagreement. For it is too simple and brute to believe in a monovocal system of thought – that your language is the only Rosetta Stone to translate the world through. Debate must be a place to see how to live with ourselves and live among others. If being the better debater means being the worse person, we should NOT endorse this conception of better debating.

The judge has an obligation to reject capitalism as an educator. Neoliberalism ideology forces pedagogies of maintaining the capitalist state among students. The K comes prior to any epistemic knowledge since capitalism asserts control over our systems of thought. Mclaren 2
The epistemological presuppositions that undergird neoliberal capitalism can be unraveled like an unspooled film; each application of neoliberal prescriptions to knowledge formation can be scrutinized in the context of the larger mise-en-scène. Cultural theorists have done an excellent job of understanding the impact of neoliberal ideology on the production of space, place, scale, historical time, and race, gender and class identity and human agency. I agree that this is important work and we need to look at such production in relation to the commodification of everyday life. Among other things, neoliberal logic is a logic of the lowest common denominator, a technocratic rationality in which value is accorded to how much surplus value can be extracted and accumulated..¶ While well-meaning progressive educators might be willing to criticize the manner in which humans are turned into dead objects that Marxists refer to as fetishized commodities, they are often loathe to consider the fact that within capitalist society, all value originates in the sphere of production and that one of the primary roles of schools is to serve as agents or functionaries of capital. Furthermore, they fail to understand that education is more reproductive of an exploitative social order than a constitutive challenge to it precisely because it rests on the foundations of capitalist exchange value. Reading Marx and Freire may not alchemize us into revolutionaries capable of transcending capitalism but ignoring what they had to say about transforming education in the context of class struggle would be a huge loss to our

Capitalism is the root cause of all oppression, meaning it is the ultimate restrictor of voices. Thus, combatting capitalist structures logically comes prior to all other frameworks. This independently turns the aff. You pretend to solve for oppression while shifting to other forms of it. McLaren 3

For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the world's population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the ‘politics of difference.’ It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc.

We don’t need to reject all of capitalism in once instance – moving in the right direction is key and the alternative is the best way to approach it. Herod 04
Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves of capitalism; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws  destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work.  Itðs quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse by this process by. We must beginning toreacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods.

Case
Their advocacy causes a shift to coal not renewables. Bosselman 9
This article concentrates only on one issue related to that decision—an issue that often receives less attention than it deserves: How will the decision affect ecological processes and systems, both in the United States and globally?14 The article makes three arguments: (1) if nuclear power plants are not built, the gap will be filled by more coal-fired power plants; (2) the impact of coal-fired power plants on ecological processes and systems is likely to be increasingly disastrous; and (3) nuclear power’s ecological impacts are likely to be neutral or even positive. I. COAL AND NUCLEAR POWER ARE THE REALISTIC CHOICES TO MEET THE NEED FOR RELIABLE BASE-LOAD ELECTRIC GENERATION IN THE UNITED STATES Predicting the amount of demand for new electricity generation is difficult, but it is easy to predict that there will be at least some demand over the next decade.15 In this section, I argue that: (A) electricity demand requires that electric utilities have access to several different types of power plants, including plants that can provide reliable “base-load” capacity; (B) even with dramatic improvements in energy conservation and efficiency, there will be a need for some substantial amount of new generating capacity; (C) generating plants powered by natural gas, wind, solar, or water will not be able to produce reliable base-load power within that time; and (D) no new technologies are likely to change these conclusions within the next decade. To meet the demand for base-load power, the choice is between coal and nuclear power. A. Electric Utilities Need Access to an Assortment of Different Types of Power Plants Electric utilities need to be able to have access to a “portfolio” of different types of generating plants. Because electricity cannot be stored on a large scale, power generators must continually produce power as it is consumed.16 Some users of electric power produce a relatively constant and predictable demand for electricity, and this amount is known as “base-load.”17 Electric utilities need reliable generation sources with low operating costs for meeting base-load needs.18 Base-load power plants run virtually without interruption to supply the continuous portion of electricity needs, as compared to the needs that expand and contract seasonally or diurnally.19 Base-load plants are often called “must-run” plants, because they will run for as long as possible at full load, and will produce the lowest overall power- generating costs for this type of use.20 Today, many observers consider coal and nuclear power to be the only reliable future sources of base-load power.21 An electric utility’s portfolio will also include different sources of power that meet other, equally important, needs. While base-load is fairly constant, electric utilities must be prepared for the times of the day and year when the demand for electricity increases. Generating plants that cycle on and off to address those variations are known as “intermediate load” plants.22 They usually have a higher operating cost but can be started up and shut down relatively quickly.23 The third category of plants is “peak load” plants, saved for the times when seasonal weather changes or outages within the network make it essential to be able to start a generator almost instantaneously to meet peaks in demand. For these plants, starting speed takes precedence over operating cost.24 These plants, typically burning natural gas, have high operating costs but can come off the bench and get up and running quickly.25 Another category of generation that is very cheap to operate once built, but can only operate under certain conditions, is the “variable must-run plants,” because when the right conditions occur it is economical to use them to meet either base, intermediate or peak load needs. Because their availability is relatively unpredictable, they must be backed up by reliable generation sources. Hydroelectric, wind, and solar power plants are the primary examples.26 B. Conservation Will Not Prevent the Need for New Power Generating Capacity Demand for electricity is influenced by many different factors, including the weather, the strength of the economy, the price of electricity, and the use of high-demand equipment and buildings. The history of the last fifty years has provided many examples of over- and under-estimation of demand growth, but no evidence of any decline in demand for any multi-year period.27 The hot summer of 2006 provided a test of the ability to make even short-run predictions of energy demand. California, having experienced severe shortages of electricity in 2000–2001, had instituted programs to cut back on demand and increase supply that decision makers thought equipped the state to face future hot summers, but the summer of 2006 forced various businesses to close at peak periods and severely strained the transmission network.28 Conservation programs to reduce electricity demand can be divided into two categories: (1) conservation programs that shift more electricity usage out of periods of peak usage and into times when demand is less (often called “peak-shaving”); and (2) efficiency-enhancing programs that reduce the total amount of electricity used, such as programs to require more efficient appliances or to mandate higher temperatures in air-conditioned buildings. Both types of demand management are being used in various places. Insofar as the choice of the type of power plant to build is concerned, the peak-shaving programs and the efficient usage programs have differing effects on that decision. Both should reduce the overall amount of new generating capacity needed, but peak-shaving will result in an increase in base-load plants’ share of overall generating capacity, because the usage removed from peak periods will be transferred to times when base-load plants are needed. Other efficient-usage programs may not have any major impact on the choice of the type of power plant to be constructed. Because Congress has mandated peak-shaving,29 and many industries are eager to adopt it,30 peak-shaving programs are likely to help tilt the choice of new facilities toward base-load plants. California’s efforts to encourage energy conservation focused on incentives for the more efficient use of electricity on a daily and yearly basis by smoothing out the demand for electricity and reducing peak needs.31 These have succeeded in persuading some users of electrical equipment to shift from using it on hot summer afternoons, when demand for air conditioning is at its peak, to night time when demand is low, substantially reducing the ratio of peak to base-load demand.32 In the short run, much of this conservation will be created by the trend toward the use of “smart meters.” A “smart meter” knows how much power you are using each hour of each day, and communicates the information back to the power company.33 This makes it practical for an electric utility to charge higher rates for the use of electricity during peak hours, which in turn gives the customer an incentive to schedule the use of electricity at times of lower demand—an incentive that is lacking when meters register only gross monthly use.34 The Energy Policy Act of 2005 requires all electric utilities to make time-of-use rates available to all customers by 2007.35 As electricity rates increase, the use of equipment that uses less electricity overall, not just at peak periods, will likely increase. When energy prices rose in the 1970s, an increased demand for such equipment was a definite factor in reducing the rate of increase in annual demand for electricity.36 Even larger price increases might induce the government to impose mandatory requirements for more efficient refrigeration and air conditioning, but it is hard to envision such requirements having a major impact during the next decade, given the time needed to set standards, manufacture the equipment, and begin selling and using it. Within that period, energy efficiency regulation is likely to focus on the easier and quicker methods of reducing peak use. Finally, even if demand for electricity stayed the same for the next decade, there would be a need for new generating plants. Tighter air pollution controls are scheduled to be phased in within that period, and the prospect of controls on greenhouse gas emissions will force plant owners to give more serious consideration to replacing aging plants with new ones.37 In sum, for the purposes of this article, I am not concerned with demonstrating how many new power plants will be needed, but only that some substantial number will be needed. Wall Street seems to agree because 159 new coal-fired generating plants are being proposed at various places in the United States.38 C. Natural Gas Does Not Currently Appear to be a Viable Source of Base-Load Electrical Power Only a few years ago, the general consensus among the institutions that were building and financing energy facilities was that natural-gas-fired power plants would be the most efficient future source of all electrical power needs.39 In the five-year period from 2000 through 2004, there was a sharp spike in construction of natural-gas-fired power plants.40 Today, however, the future of natural-gas-fired plants seems cloudy for a number of reasons: (1) high prices; (2) doubts about future supplies; and (3) fears of future greenhouse gas controls. 1. The Price of Natural Gas is High and Volatile As this is being written, the consensus of opinion has swung violently away from reliance on natural gas for base-load electricity generation.41 The market price of natural gas increased sharply beginning in 2003 and has been highly volatile ever since.42 As a result, many of the natural-gas-fired power plants that were built during the boom years have operated at a small fraction of their capacity and at much less than the anticipated profitability.43 Many of these plants were built in the expectation that electricity markets throughout the nation would be deregulated and interstate transmission at free market prices would be an everyday occurrence. In a deregulated market, the price of electricity would presumably rise to high levels in periods of peak demand, which would mean that a power plant could be profitable, even if it were only operated during peak periods.44 However, after California deregulated its electricity market, the state experienced very high electricity prices and poor supply in 2000 and 2001.45 “From May 22, 2000 until June 2001, the California electricity market was characterized by emergency alerts, rolling blackouts and huge price spikes.”46 “Electricity prices during the summer of 2000 had soared to unimaginable heights of $200, $400, $500, and even $800 per megawatt-hour (compared to a normal price of about $35 per megawatt-hour).”47 Companies that saw these prices quickly concluded that a natural-gas-fired power plant could be profitable even if it only operated on hot summer days, and the rush to build such plants was accelerated.48 But the profitability of these plants depended not only on the assumption of a deregulated market for electricity, but on continuing stable prices of natural gas. For a variety of reasons, however, during this period the price for natural gas rose to unprecedented levels.49 Support for deregulation waned, especially in the wake of the Enron bankruptcy.50 Consequently, many of the states that had begun to deregulate their electricity markets backed off, including California itself, leaving only a handful of states with truly open markets for electricity, and some of those are thinking about re-regulation.51 In a regulated market, electricity prices are expected to lack big seasonal spikes. Although retail electricity prices have risen in most states, they have tended to rise on a year-round basis.52 The result has been that nuclear and coal-fired power plants, which have already recovered their capital investment and have much lower operating costs than the newer natural-gas-fired plants, have become profitable while many of the natural-gas-fired plants have been reduced to providing peaking power at rates that do not reflect market conditions.53 This situation is likely to continue unless the price of natural gas drops back to 1990s levels.54 2. Natural Gas Supplies Are Increasingly Unreliable Until recently, the United States obtained most of its natural gas from within the lower forty-eight states.55 Gradually, supplies have been supplemented by imports from Canada, which now make up a significant part of the United States’ supply.56 In addition, we have begun to import relatively small amounts of natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), brought in by special tankers from countries such as Algeria and Trinidad to five LNG terminals located in various parts of the United States.57 Supplies of gas from domestic well fields have been declining.58 Production of gas from coal beds (“coalbed methane” or CBM) has helped, but the rapidly growing demand for natural gas has convinced the industry that our future supplies require new sources.59 One potential source is the natural gas now being stored in the oil fields of Alaska’s North Slope for lack of a pipeline.60 In 2004, “Congress approved the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline Act, which included an $18 billion loan guaranty, streamlined permitting, provisions for environmental review, . . . expedited court review” and other incentives.61 In addition, the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 provided seven-year tax depreciation for the pipeline and confirmed that an enhanced oil recovery credit applied to the gas processing facilities that will be associated with the pipeline.62 This huge and expensive project is at least ten years from completion, if it will even be built.63 Therefore, substantially increased imports of LNG are projected for the foreseeable future.64 Congress has streamlined the process of approval of new LNG terminals, and many such terminals are working their way through the process,65 but these terminals will need to rely on the ability to import natural gas from a wide range of countries at prices compatible with the market for domestic gas.66 At present, there are substantial amounts of “stranded gas” in foreign countries that are available at relatively favorable prices because they are located far from large markets,67 but the worldwide demand for LNG is increasing and may grow even more rapidly if China and India begin to import LNG on a large scale.68 In addition, some Persian Gulf nations with very large gas supplies are using gas-to-liquids technology to convert natural gas into diesel fuel, for which prices are now very favorable to sellers.69 All of these factors make the future price and supply of natural gas much less predictable than ever before.70 3. Natural Gas Combustion Emits Greenhouse Gases That May Be Subject to Increased Controls Natural gas is primarily methane mixed with smaller amounts of other hydrocarbons.71 When hydrocarbons are burned, carbon dioxide is emitted into the air; carbon dioxide is the most prevalent of the “greenhouse gases,” which have the effect of trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.72 Methane itself is a greenhouse gas.73 The gradually increasing emission of such gases has begun to affect the global climate to a significant degree,74 and most scientists believe that such effects are likely to accelerate unless greenhouse gas emissions are controlled.75 Natural gas has an advantage over coal in that the amount of carbon dioxide produced by natural gas combustion is roughly one-half of the amount produced by the combustion of an amount of coal creating an equivalent amount of energy.76 Nevertheless, the combustion of natural gas for electricity generation is providing a significant share of the nation’s total carbon dioxide emissions.77 The bottom line is that many financial institutions today expect the government to create economic disincentives to the emission of greenhouse gases within the lifetime of any new capital project, reducing the expected profitability of any facility that omits greenhouse gases. Although any calculation of the amount of such disincentives would be speculative, a prudent investor would take the possibility of these costs into account in considering the long term profitability of long-range projects.78 In summary, the high price of gas, the uncertainty of the supply and price of future imports, and the fear of financial disincentives to greenhouse gas emission have brought the production of new natural-gas-fired power plants in the United States to a virtual halt. There may still be a place for more plants to meet peak needs in certain areas, particularly for small plants near sources of high demand, but the construction of new natural- gas-fired plants for base-load power generation seems quite unlikely at this time.79 D. Renewables Can Play a Valuable but Limited Role The goal of a completely renewable system of electric generation appeals to almost anyone who does not have vested interests in the continued use of non-renewable energy sources. The currently available renewable sources of electrical energy on a large scale are primarily hydroelectric power (hydro),80 wind,81 and solar.82 The United States and individual states have provided some incentives for the creation of renewable generating systems, and some European countries have provided even more,83 but renewable energy resources can meet only a small fraction of reliable base-load electricity needs within the next decade because: (1) their availability depends on external factors beyond human control, requiring backup by reliable generation; (2) their potential location is also dependent on factors beyond our control; and (3) new renewable technologies, although promising, are more than ten years away from large scale production. 1. Renewables Must Be Backed up by Reliable Generation Existing renewables are not reliably dispatchable,84 so they must be backed up by reliable sources that can be counted on to meet base-load needs.85 For solar and wind energy, the reasons for their lack of reliability are obvious: the sun never shines at night, and does not always shine during the day, while wind’s speed and consistency is highly variable in almost all locations.86 Although windmills have been used on a small scale for millennia, the modern technology for building aggregations of dozens or hundreds of wind turbines is relatively recent.87 As the scale of the equipment has grown, developers are now producing wind turbines on towers many hundreds of feet tall.88 The long- term reliability of this kind of equipment has never been tested.89 The fact that government subsidies in the U.S. make it possible for investors in windfarms to cash out their investment quickly also reduce the developers’ incentive to emphasize long-range reliability.90 Federal subsidies for windpower were extended in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.91 The unreliability of hydroelectric power is slightly less obvious, but equally important. Hydro is created when water in a reservoir flows through tunnels in or around the dam that created the reservoir. Hydro is considered to be renewable because the hydrologic cycle will continue to create at least some rain indefinitely. The kinetic pressure of the flowing water turns the turbine directly, allowing electricity to be generated without any combustion, thus qualifying hydro as a renewable.92 The reliability of hydro is qualified by two factors: (1) the amount of water in the reservoir or river flow, which depends on the amount of precipitation in the watershed, a quantity that varies seasonally and from year to year; (2) the extent to which the water in the reservoir is in demand for other uses for which few alternative water sources are available.93 Much of the hydro in the United States is located in the high mountain regions of the western states.94 Climatologists are forecasting that future precipitation during the winter wet season is likely to include more rain and less snow in these mountains, and the snow that falls will melt earlier in the year.95 If this proves to be true, the water that is now made available by the annual snowmelt will not be available during the hot weather when both electric companies and agricultural users need it the most.96 Disputes between these two interests are already common, and likely to get worse, reducing the reliability of hydro as a source for electric generation.97 Supplementing existing hydro sources with new ones would require the construction of many large dams.98 From an engineering standpoint, the number of locations in the United States in which such dams could be built are quite limited.99 Building on these sites would often create serious issues related to relocation, aquatic wildlife, disruption of existing recreation patterns, and destruction of protected parks and other sites of major ecological value.100 Consequently, few energy analysts project substantial increases in hydro supplies.101 Hydro, wind, and solar energy all require high initial capital investment but have very low operating costs.102 Anyone making the investments needed to build these facilities has a strong incentive to use the power they generate whenever it is available. But because storage of electricity is possible only at very small scales and at high costs, when there is a demand for electricity, the electric utility must be able to supply it instantaneously, and if the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining or it hasn’t rained much, other reliable sources must be there to replace the unreliable sources.103 This means that any estimate of the true cost of wind, solar, and hydro should factor in a share of the capital cost of the needed backup facilities.104 2. All Currently Used Renewables Are Geographically Constrained Another handicap that most sources of renewable energy face as potential supplies of base-load electrical power is that they are immobile—they must be created where the wind blows, the sun shines, or the dam can be built.105 Most other energy sources, such as coal, uranium, oil, or natural gas, can be delivered to a site of a generating plant that will be conveniently located in relation to sources of electricity demand and to the transmission network. Electricity is and always can be transmitted long distances over high-voltage transmission lines, but because people who live near the site of a proposed transmission line typically oppose its construction, state and local officials have “strong incentives to protect their own incumbent firms or citizens, rather than supporting interstate cooperative market norms.”106 Consequently, such lines are costly and very difficult to build.107 A percentage of the energy is lost with each mile of distance.108 To get a true cost for power from remote sources, the cost and difficulty of providing transmission must be factored into the equation. In some parts of the world, such as Denmark and Northern Germany, the reliability of offshore winds in the Baltic Sea near major population centers has encouraged large-scale offshore windfarm construction,109 but its true cost-effectiveness is hard to determine because the extent of subsidies involved is complex.110 Whether similar conditions exist in many parts of the United States, and whether the opposition to such farms can be overcome, remains to be seen.111 Proposals to build windfarms in the United States “have often met resistance from individuals claiming that the turbines are stark intrusions in the natural landscape.”112 Another location problem with windfarms is that many of the places where winds are most reliable are also, for that very reason, sites used by migratory birds and bats that use wind currents to speed their migration in enormous numbers.113 It is known that wind farms can kill flying animals, but the extent of the problem is not yet fully known.114 These concerns may constrain the ability to place a windfarm where one might otherwise be warranted by demand and high winds. 3. Development of New Renewable Sources Is Not Imminent Few people would disagree with the idea that renewable energy research and development is desirable, and support for such work continues to come from both the public and private sectors. Virtually every day brings news of a new proposal somewhere in the world to develop another system of producing electricity renewably,115 but few energy analysts believe that new systems of large-scale renewable generation are likely in the next few decades.116 One other existing renewable source of electricity is the burning of vegetative material.117 In the United States, the burning of wood chips in cogeneration plants has been producing electricity for the lumber and paper industries,118 and there have been scattered successful examples of the use of municipal solid waste to produce electricity,119 but most of the current interest in biomass relates to converting it to transportation fuel in the form of ethanol or biodiesel fuel.120 There is little likelihood that biomass combustion will be a significant source of electric energy for the future. If the production and storage of hydrogen ever proves to be the first efficient way of storing large amounts of electrical energy, as many people hope, this will provide another effective way of reducing the need for peaking facilities. Electricity from such sources as wind and solar energy could be stored and used to meet base-load needs. However, more basic research and development is needed before a “hydrogen economy” will be realized.121 In summary, renewable sources of electricity are likely to play an important role in supplying electricity for intermediate and peaking needs in the United States, but their unreliability, their often inconvenient location, and the potential problems of new technology development, make it unlikely that they will compete with coal and nuclear as sources of base-load power except under unusual circumstances.

Additionally, your evidence says that it will shift to renewables, but not every country has renewables and access to it. And your evidence says renewables are only available in 2050 as a full energy source which means that we must depend on coal.  

Also, I do not defend that nuclear power should be used to stopped global warming which means that I do not link into your arguments. 

Coal hurts indigenous communities by disturbing cultural sites and harming health. Peeples 14
Many activists currently fighting the plan see the impacts of burning coal on the global climate as their primary motivation. But for the Yakama, Lummi and other tribes, as well as communities in the path of these shipments, it’s the local effects that worry them most. There are the potential traffic delays and disturbances to cultural sites. Then there’s the very face real prospect of toxic coal dust wafting off the passing trains, fouling the air, poisoning local waterways and even contaminating key food resources — such as the salmon on which many local tribes, including those living in the tiny Celilo Indian Village, depend. While the U.S. has seen a steady decline in coal use in recent years thanks to tighter federal regulations and the expanded viability of natural gas and renewable energy, the rise of burgeoning, coal-hungry economies in China, India and other fast-developing nations means the Celilo tribes — like many communities across the Pacific Northwest — now they find themselves wedged squarely between a domestic abundance of the combustible rock and its most promising the international market. The potential expansion of coal exports elicits differing opinions among tribes and communities here. What may be an environmental or public health imposition for one is seen as a desperately needed opportunity for another. The coal industry, for example, argues that exports could inject welcome economic activity into struggling Northwest towns and reservations. By itself, the Gateway Pacific Terminal proposed at Cherry Point on the Puget Sound would add approximately 1,250 permanent jobs, including induced jobs such as restaurant and healthcare workers, as well as 4,400 temporary construction jobs, according to an analysis by an industry consultant. Annual local and state tax revenues would amount to about $11 million. The dispute over the coal trains is playing out in television advertisements, on the streets and inside boardrooms, town halls and courthouses from Washington, D.C., to Seattle. A series of hearings and protests over the last few months have attracted thousands of people — some donning makeshift respirators, others wearing “Beyond Coal” T-shirts, and some even rappelling from a bridge over the Columbia River as a symbolic blockade to the shipments. Still, nowhere are the tensions so acute as on the hardscrabble reservations that either sit atop valuable coal — an estimated 30 percent of U.S. coal reserves west of the Mississippi are located on native lands — or lie in the path of the trains that would haul it to port. Just outside the walls of the longhouse where Washines and his fellow drummers were singing out in opposition to the coal shipments, a 22-foot totem pole lay on the bed of a white truck. The carving, which depicted five salmon, two kneeling men and a hungry child, was touring towns, churches and reservations across the Pacific Northwest as part of an effort to consolidate tribal opposition to the proposed coal shipments. (The totem’s last stop, in late September, would be across the border in the Tsleil-Waututh Nation of British Columbia, where it now stands erected as a display of solidarity with that tribe’s parallel struggle over a tar sands oil pipeline.) “Mother Earth doesn’t have a voice,” said Karen Jim Whitford, a tribal elder, as she stepped shoeless into the center of the longhouse floor. A couple of her tears disappeared into the dirt. “So we must speak for her.” “I vote we stand up,” exclaimed another elder, Lorintha Umtuch, referring to the totem’s symbolic call for Native Americans to get off their knees and “Warrior Up!” for future generations. “Indian people need to stop this, or else corporations will trample us.” Not all tribes stand on the same side of the coal-export battle line. CJ Stewart, a senator of the Crow Nation, said in a phone interview in October that his tribe desperately needs to develop its coal reserves to improve its economic fortunes and lift its people out of poverty. In November, the Crow Nation signed a joint resolution with the Navajo Nation in support of each other’s coal development. “We rely on coal just as they rely on salmon,” Stewart said, referring to the Yakama and other tribes represented in Celilo. “All tribes share one common enemy, and that enemy is poverty.” Many tribes along the rail corridor, however, feel it’s not just livelihoods at stake — it’s lives. Jewell Praying Wolf James, the carver of the well-traveled totem and member of the Lummi Nation, expressed sympathy with the coal-dependent tribes during a later stop on the totem’s journey in Olympia, Wash. “We feel bad for the Crow Nation, the Navajo, the Hopi. That’s all they got,” he said. “But we want clean air, clean water. We want salmon restored and our children healthy.”

AT Racism Impacts
Coal causes environmental racism that outweighs and turns case. GEP 15

The problem of racial profiling in America relates to more than just police brutality and the senseless acts of violence that have recently captured the national spotlight. Race also plays a determining role in environmental policies regarding land use, zoning and regulations. As a result, African American, Latino, indigenous and low-income communities are more likely to live next to a coal-fired power plant, landfill, refinery or other highly polluting facility. These communities bear a disproportionate burden of toxic contamination as a result of pollution in and around their neighborhoods. Moreover, these communities have historically had a diminished response capacity to fight back against such policies. A recent report from the NAACP entitled “Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People,” found that among the nearly six million Americans living within three miles of a coal plant, 39 are people of color – a figure that is higher than the 36 proportion of people of color in the total US population. The report also found that 78 of all African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal fired power plant. In an interview for Yale Environment 360, Jacqueline Patterson, the Environmental and Climate Justice Director for the NAACP commented on the disproportionate burden faced by communities of color:
“An African American child is three times more likely to go into the emergency room for have an asthma attack than a white child, and twice as likely to die from asthma attacks as a white child. African Americans are more likely to die from lung disease, but less likely to smoke. When we did a road tour to visit the communities that were impacted by coal pollution, we found there are many anecdotal stories of people saying, yes, my husband, my father, my wife people died of lung cancer and never smoked a day in their her lives life. And these are people who are living within three miles of the coal-fired power plants we visited.”
AT Environmental Harms
Environmental harm from coal outweighs – it’s as radioactive as pollution from nuclear facilities, but lasts much longer. Cocks 9 

Major waste products from fossil fuel power plants are carbon dioxide ash and sulfur dioxide. The major waste products from nuclear power plants are used fuel rods. Used fuel rods are extremely radioactive, especially initially, and contain unburned uranium and plutonium as well as lots of other radioactive isotopes. In electricity generating power reactors fuel rods must be replaced after 2 to 3 years of operation. In reactors that use natural uranium, a smaller fraction of the uranium 235 can be consumed before replacement is required. Why is this so? Because the level of the fissionable material drops below the level needed to maintain power production. That condition happens sooner for reactors using natural uranium than for those using enriched uranium. As a reactor operates fuel rods well in part due to the generation of new elements some of which are gases. Swelling is also caused by the generation of defects like vacant spot judge has vacancies invoice which are produced by neutrons knocking the atoms in some rods around. Under normal conditions a nuclear power plant does release some radioactive isotopes primarily as radioactive gas such as tritium or water vapor containing tritium into the environment. The radioactivity released in this way is actually about the same as that released by coal fired power plants of the same size. The half-life of tritium from nuclear power plants is far far lower than the half lives of the isotopes release by coal fired fired power plants and so it is virtually eliminated from the environment in a few decades. Both radioactive uranium and thorium are present at parts per million level in pool and burning clover Lisa small amounts of the substance into the biosphere, where they last for eons.

Turn: coal propaganda is worse Brown 12:
For over a decade the coal industry has funded campaigns designed to convince Americans that coal can be burned without adverse environmental impacts. These campaigns raise troubling ethical issues. In fact, as we shall see, these campaigns have often been misleading and deceptive in several different ways. This deception is classic propaganda because propaganda presents facts selectively to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information presented. Although many entities on both sides of an issue who are trying to persuade the general public to think a certain way will frequently resort to the use of propaganda, as we shall see, deceptive propaganda is particularly morally odious when it engages in lying or lying by omission. A lie by omission occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. The clean coal propaganda has frequently engaged in propaganda that must be understood as lying by omission, if not outright lying. It is also lying by omission about something which is potentially very harmful, making the lies even more morally abhorrent

The changes needed for a renewable grid take decades. That’s too long. Biello ’11 cites Wellinghoff

 “We are talking about a transformation across the entire country,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Jon Wellinghoff said in an interview with Yale Environment 360. “We are talking about potentially tens of thousands of new transmission lines to ultimately move large amounts of wind, solar, and other resources to loads. We are talking about in the scale of billions of dollars of investments in smart-grid technologies, all the way from the consumer level up through to the transmission and generation level.”
Assuming the U.S. will require roughly 4 terrawatts of power by 2050 (a conservative estimate, given that we already use more than three), replacing all that fossil fuel would require at least 4 million wind turbines — necessitating building 12, three-megawatt wind turbines every hour for the next 30 years, according to Griffiths. The numbers are similar for solar — 160 billion square meters of photovoltaic cells or concentrating mirrors. “We need to be making a square yard of solar cells or mirrors every second for the next 40 years to install that much in North America,” Griffiths calculates.
It’s not just a matter of making the necessary equipment, it’s also a question of finding the space for it. A coal-fired power plant produces 100 to 1,000 watts per square meter, depending on the type of coal it burns and how that coal is mined. A typical photovoltaic system for turning sunlight into electricity produces just 9 watts per square meter, and wind provides only 1.5 watts per square meter.
The challenge is worse for smaller countries: the United Kingdom would have to cover its entire landmass with wind turbines to provide enough electricity for the current Briton’s average consumption — roughly 200 kilowatt-hours per day, according to MacKay, the Cambridge expert.
Although daunting, the challenges of installing new energy technologies on a mass scale are by no means impossible. In the first half of the 20th century, it took the U.S. 45 years to increase its use of oil until that fossil fuel represented 20 percent of the total energy used. At the same time, the U.S. built a sprawling gasoline-fueling station infrastructure, the rudiments of a national electricity grid, thousands of miles of telephone lines, airplanes and airports, interstate natural gas pipelines, and local delivery infrastructure for home heating — and rolled out all the appliances (refrigerators, radios, televisions, etc.) of the modern age — all in the same few decades, at the same time. In other words, the U.S. seems to have “scaled up,” in the parlance of engineers, pretty rapidly in the past.
Transforming the global economy to run on renewable energy would require a similarly massive effort. For example, to provide the energy equivalent of present global consumption would require covering 1 percent of the Earth’s surface with photovoltaic devices, according to chemist Nathan Lewis of the California Institute of Technology. That’s less than the land area currently covered by cities, but a huge chunk of territory nonetheless.
“You can actually farm, you can actually graze, you can actually do things around that wind turbine versus if you are taking the top off a mountain to produce some coal,” FERC’s Wellinghoff notes. “Ultimately, we are going to have to accept the fact that wind turbines and solar systems are going to take up fairly large pieces of land. But, fortunately, we have a lot of land in this country and we have the ability to have dual use of that land.”
But the U.S. also leads the major nations of the world in per capita consumption of energy. The average American used 7.2 metric tons of oil-equivalent in 2009 (a number that, to be fair, has gotten slightly better of late, down from 8.5 in 2005.) That’s double the amount used by the average citizen in Europe, and five times the global average.
To put it another way, the average American uses 250 kilowatt-hours per day for “transportation, heating, manufacturing, electricity, and so forth,” writes MacKay. “That’s equivalent to every person having 250 40-watt light bulbs switched on all the time.” Energy efficiency might bring that consumption as low as 168 kwh per day, according to MacKay. But that still means each American would require 80 square meters of photovoltaic panels, plus biofuels from energy crops on 4,000 square meters of land. In addition, the U.S would need to build one 2-megawatt wind turbine for every 300 Americans, plus one 1-gigawatt nuclear power plant for every city the size of Boston.
On the grander scale, more than half of the energy used in the U.S. — 56.3 percent — is wasted. That’s a result of the essential inefficiency of burning coal in a power plant or gasoline in an automobile engine, or even transmitting electricity over vast distances.
Industry is beginning to make use of this waste — a steel plant in Indiana employs the waste heat from a coal coking plant to generate electricity, enough to help run its steel rolling machines in another adjacent facility. And while U.S. energy use has grown over the past four decades, three-quarters of that growth has been met through gains in energy efficiency, not by burning additional fossil fuels, according to a 2008 report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). The energy used to produce every dollar of U.S. gross domestic product fell from 18,000 Btus in 1970 to just 8,900 Btus in 2008.
“The energy-related challenges of the 21st century require a dramatic shift in direction — from an emphasis on energy supply to an emphasis on energy efficiency,” says Jon “Skip” Laitner, ACEEE director of economic analysis. “The greatest American success story in dealing with energy in recent decades is also the least understood and the most invisible.”
In fact, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimate that waste heat from factories, oil refineries and other industrial facilities holds the potential for as much as 95 gigawatts (the equivalent of 95 nuclear power plants) of new electricity, which is cheaper to capture than building a new coal-fired power plant.
If this great energy transformation eventually comes, it will take decades to complete. But, as FERC’s Wellinghoff notes, “The scale is very large but, fortunately, it is something we can do incrementally and it is something that we have already started.”

Prefer this – it cites the chairman of FERC, he has a better understanding of the logistics and infrastructure situation rather than just energy systems in the abstract.

Renewables are intermittent, but the grid needs a steady supply of base-load power – nuclear is the only clean option for that. York and Wardle ‘16

Coal, natural gas, nuclear, biomass, geothermal and hydroelectric power are all capable of providing energy 24/7, what energy experts refer to as "base load" energy. Of those, geothermal and hydroelectric are restrained to specific geographical areas, many of which have already been tapped. Biomass is inefficient and only environmentally friendly to a point. Only coal, natural gas, and nuclear provide constant and reliable energy to any significant portion of the United States. Notably missing from this list are solar and wind. As base-load energy sources are phased out in favor of intermittent renewables, grid reliability suffers. It's clear that solar and wind provide clean and renewable energy when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. But when the sun is down or the air is still, they sit, not producing much of anything. In those moments, other sources must fill the gap. Without base-load producers, there simply is not enough energy to sufficiently supply the grid at all times of day, no matter how many solar or wind facilities get tacked on. Traditional base-load providers (coal and nuclear) take a long time to turn on and off. Natural gas, while capable of being built to ramp up quickly, is often built in slower, combined-cycle systems to reduce costs. For this reason, even at peak production for solar and wind, base-load plants are kept running so they are ready to provide energy when the renewables no longer can. The delicate balance between base load and intermittent generation can be seen in California, where closure of the Diablo Canyon nuclear facility threatens 9 percent of California's energy production. While the stated plan is to replace that capacity with "energy efficiency, renewables and energy storage," that may not be feasible. California is already reliant on huge amounts of solar, enough that they actually had to shut down some solar producers for fear of overloading the grid this March. Practicality indicates that it is more likely that the lost capacity will be made up with natural gas generators. Despite the need for consistent base-load power, coal plants across the country continue to be shuttered due to the mounting regulatory burden they face. Seventy-two GWs of base load coal generation are set to go offline in coming years. (For context, 72 GWs is enough to power "every home in every state west of the Mississippi River, excluding Texas," as the Institute for Energy Research notes.) The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) predicted in 2013 that "insufficient reserves during peak hours could lead to increased risk of entering emergency operating conditions, including the possibility of ... rotating outages." To make matters worse, even more coal plants have announced shutdowns than NERC assumed when making that prediction. Keeping a well-functioning grid that provides every American with power on demand requires substantial base-load power capacity. While intermittent renewables like wind and solar can make good supplements, they cannot provide for the energy needs of modern society alone.

Tournament: Meadows | Round: 2 | Opponent: Westview RS | Judge: Sierra Inglet
1NC against nuclear renaissance
T
A. Interpretation: On the 2016 September October topic, the affirmative must specify in the AC advocacy text which countries ought to ban nuclear power. 

B. Violation: Your advocacy text is all countries, you do not specify which countries should ban. 

C. Standards: The nuclear power debate focuses on country-specific approaches to solve issues due to the past failure and lack of research of international means. Berry
Taking a broad view of recent literature, several trends emerge:
 
First, while focusing heavily on ways to prevent the emergence of new nuclear weapons states and further proliferation, there has been a renewed focus—particularly since the abortive 2005 NPT Review Conference (RevCon)—on the perceived shortcomings of the original nuclear weapons states (NWS) in meeting their NPT obligations. In this regard there has been a perceptible focus on the perceived dangers of the unilateral policies pursued by the current US Administration, in contrast to the lead position in consolidating the NPT regime which most observers argue it should be playing. There are, however, divergent views on whether the time is ripe for a more serious effort to move towards full nuclear disarmament. However, serious movement towards this objective has been encouraged in the past two years by authoritative statements from a number of former statesmen from a number of countries, led by four prominent Elder Statesmen from the United States.
Second, there is a growing tendency to focus on the claimed rights and wrongs of states seeking application of their claimed unfettered rights under Article IV of the NPT to civilian nuclear energy and the associated technology and equipment. The literature also examines the increasing resistance to efforts, led principally by Western NWS and other leading civilian nuclear powers, to restrict the spread of such technology, which is cast in an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy similar to the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ division of the original nuclear weapons debates.
Third, few recent studies advocate the drafting of new multilateral treaties, although there are suggestions for more regional and bilateral agreements and arrangements which might plug some of the existing and emerging gaps in the current regime. There is wide agreement that amending the NPT is not feasible, though reinforcing it with additional protocols is not ruled out by some. Otherwise, the focus of recent literature is on identification of violations of existing treaties and agreements, how to respond to such violations, and ways of improving verification and compliance more generally.
Fourth, perhaps unsurprisingly, given the concentrated debate in the past five or so years on the nuclear programs of North Korea, Iran and Syria, and the cessation of WMD programs by Libya, there is an increasing tendency for the literature to take a country-specific approach to some nuclear issues, particularly relating to proliferation and civilian nuclear energy programs. Case studies abound, and there are increasing numbers of regionally-focused studies, concentrating principally on civilian nuclear energy programs which raise broader proliferation concerns. These cover mainly the Middle East, but also increasingly South East Asia, and to a very much lesser extent Latin America.

A. Debateability- Not specing who ought to prohibit nuclear power makes the debate irresolvable since if the aff is winning under the specific approach of one country and the neg is winning under a different country’s approach there’s no way for the judge to determine who wins since different actors would be able to prohibit nuclear power under our conceptions. Speccing solves since we know which groups of people we’re talking about.  Resolvibility key since every debate needs a winner. Debatability is an independent voter because it is a prior question to education or fairness whether we can debate.
B. Stable Advocacy- Their interp makes 1AR advocacy shifts inevitable and skews my strat since the aff will always try to reclarify which country-specific approach they are using based on whatever strat I pick. Strat is key to fairness since I need a strategy to have a coherent ballot story. And, the aff must have carded evidence showing that the nuclear debate does not focus on country specific approaches: otherwise you must reject the counter-interp because they obviously aren’t being topical if no authors in the lit support them. Turns the aff—your AC advocacy destroys accountability because it allows you to shift.
C. Clash- by retaining the ability to shift out of the responses on the aff they are mooting the possibility of having any substantive clash. That is the strongest link to education because it is the only unique thing we get from having a debate round- otherwise we would just read philosophy and topic literature.
CX can’t solve-1) judges don’t flow CX so there’s no way to verify what exactly they said 2) even if they do there’s still a risk I forget to ask or that it’s unclear.

Fairness is a voter because debate would determine the better cheater and not the better debater without it. Education is a voter because it is the only long-term impact from debate. 

Drop the Debater: 1. This will discourage my opponent from running such types of arguments in future rounds and create better norms. 2. I was forced to spend time on this to check back the in round abuse. 3. My opponent has made the round impossible for me to win by implicating an abusive definition and pertaining to a scope of arguments, which are not in the topic literature. 4. Dropping the argument allows the aff to sever his AC in the 1AR and collapse to another issue. 

Competing Interps over Reasonability: 1. It’s very easy to put defense on the topicality shells. This makes debate worse because doesn’t force debaters to answer to the topicality shell. 2. Reasonability is arbitrary and invites judge intervention. 

No RVIs: 1. Never have an RVI on topicality because just proving that you were fair and being topical is a required action is debate. It doesn’t justify why you deserve an RVI. 2.  Topicality is exclusive to the neg. It is created to check back abuse on the aff, not the other way around. 3. It deters legitimate topicality debate since they can always bait topicality.

T comes first:

1. T determines whether or not you have access to arguments so it comes first.
   2. Being topical is a required action in debate regardless of the arguments made within the debate space.
   3. Abuse from topicality outweighs: if you are not topical you moot all clash and arguments that the negative has prepared for.
   4. The judge has no jurisdiction to vote on a debater that is not topical.