Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Lexington KB | Judge: Rodrigo Paramo
I affirm.
Questions of public policy should be judged through a consequentialist lens. Woller,
Gary Woller Professor at Birgham Young University. “Policy Currents.” A Forum on the Role of Environmental Ethics. “An Overview by Gary Woller.” 1997.
Moreover, virtuallyall public policies entail some redistribution of economic or political resources, such that one group's gains must come at another group's expense. Consequently, public policies in ademocracy must be justified to the public, and especially to those who pay the costs of those policies. Such justification cannot simply be assumed a priori by invoking some higher-order moral principle. Appeals toa priori moral principles, such as environmental preservation, also often fail to acknowledge thatpublic policies inevitably entail trade-offs among competing values. Thus since policymakers cannot justify inherentvalue conflictsto the public in any philosophical sense, and since public policies inherently imply winners and losers, the policymakers'duty to the public interestare required them to demonstrate that the redistributive effects and value trade-offs implied by their polices are somehow to the overall advantage of society.At the same time, deontologically based ethical systems have severe practical limitations as a basis for public policy. At best, a priori moral principles provide only general guidance to ethical dilemmas in public affairs and do not themselves suggest appropriate public policies, and at worst, they create a regimen of regulatory unreasonableness while failing to adequately address the problem or actually making it worse. For example, a moral obligation to preserve the environment by no means implies the best way, or any way for that matter, to do so, just as there is no a priori reason to believe that any policy that claims to preserve the environment will actually do so. Any number of policies might work, and others, although seemingly consistent with the moral principle, will fail utterly. That deontological principles are an inadequate basis for environmental policy is evident in the rather significant irony that most forms of deontologically based environmental laws and regulations tend to be implemented in a very utilitarian manner by street-level enforcement officials. Moreover, ignoring the relevant costs and benefits of environmental policy and their attendant incentive structures can, as alluded to above, actually work at cross purposes to environmental preservation. (There exists an extensive literature on this aspect of regulatory enforcement and the often perverse outcomes of regulatory policy. See, for example, Ackerman, 1981; Bartrip and Fenn, 1983; Hawkins, 1983, 1984; Hawkins and Thomas, 1984.) Even the most die-hard preservationist/deontologist would, I believe, be troubled by this outcome. The above points are perhaps best expressed by Richard Flathman, The number of values typically involved in public policy decisions, the broad categories which must be employed and above all, the scope and complexity of the consequences to be anticipated militate against reasoning so conclusively that they generates an imperative to institute a specific policy.It is seldom the case that only one policy will meet the criteria of the public interest (1958, p. 12). It therefore follows that in a democracy,policymakers have an ethical duty to establish a plausible link between policy alternatives and the problems they address, and the public must be reasonably assured that a policy will actually do something about an existing problem;this requires themeans-end language andmethodology of utilitarianism ethics. Good intentions, lofty rhetoric, and moral piety are an insufficient though perhaps at times a necessary, basis for public policy in a democracy.
The standard is maximizing wellbeing.
I defend whole res- if you ask me to spec, I’ll spec in CX.
Advantage 1: Sustainability
Nuclear power is seen as an infinite resource.
The NYA, 11/18/13, University of Rochester, The New York Academy of Science Magazine
http://www.nyas.org/Publications/Detail.aspx?cid=d14cf5f2-34ba-43ba-9d7f-40dfa5af8e2c
Professor Robert L. McCrory calls it "bringing star power to Earth"—re-creating on our planet with the nuclear reactions that power the Sun, and thereby securing an inexhaustible source of energy is seen as one that emits no greenhouse gases, requires no environmentally destructive mining or drilling, and relies on fuel as abundant as seawater. This is the vision of the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), which is committed to making the dream of producing electricity from nuclear fusion, which makes the Sun shine, a reality.¶ Hydrogen bombs also get their energy from the fusion of atomic nuclei, of course, but for nuclear fusion to generate energy that can be tapped for electricity the reaction must scaled down more than a million times in energy. The LLE therefore investigates inertial confinement fusion, which explores the behavior of matter under conditions of extremely high energy density and temperature. In inertial confinement fusion, ultra-high power lasers emitting hundreds of terawatts of power (1 terawatt equals 1 trillion watts, and is comparable to the power produced by 1,000 electric power plants) irradiate a capsule containing the heavy hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium. The laser energy compresses and heats the hydrogen to conditions near those at the center of the Sun, causing it to undergo fusion. The result is helium fuel and other energetic particles.¶ If the compressed mass is large enough, the highpressure, high-temperature conditions last long enough to produce more energy than is used to power the laser, allowing inertial confinement fusion to be used to produce electric power. The field has made significant strides since it began in the early 1970s and is now within 10 years of demonstrating its scientific feasibility.¶ The LLE is the country's only large-scale facility for inertial confinement fusion at a university rather than a weapons lab. Its showcase facility is the 60-beam OMEGA laser, which can deliver more than 30 billion times the instantaneous power of sunlight that falls on one square meter of the Earth's surface, but concentrates it all on a target less than 1 millimeter across.¶ Inertial confinement fusion research has potential applications in other important areas of science and technology. The most immediate is in nuclear weapons security. By simulating the extreme temperatures and pressure of a thermonuclear burn, inertial confinement fusion can be used to, for instance, predict how nuclear warheads in the nation's stockpile degrade as they age; as a result, much of the LLE's research is funded by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. Research on inertial confinement fusion at the LLE has also opened up new areas of basic research ranging from laboratory astrophysics (simulating the nuclear reactions inside stars) to the investigation of the behavior of matter under ultra-high dynamic stress.¶ Rochester and its surrounding area has long been a technologically sophisticated region with significant resources in optics, physics, materials science, chemistry, nuclear physics, plasma physics, photonics, and laser technology. When the late Professor Moshe Lubin began the work that would lead to the official founding of the LLE in 1970, he started with lasers abandoned by the Eastman Kodak Company, another Rochester-based institution. The University of Rochester, too, has long had strong programs in optics, photonics, and physics.¶ The importance of the LLE in advancing inertial confinement fusion for energy production as well as national security and basic research is reflected in the breadth of its support. The lab, directed by McCrory since 1983, receives funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the New York State Energy Research Development Authority.¶ The next decade promises a number of historic milestones. The LLE is on track to demonstrate inertial confinement fusion ignition and burn, showing the way toward long-term applications of this approach to energy production. The OMEGA laser, by producing ultra-high-density states of matter, promises to solve many outstanding puzzles in materials science, fundamental atomic physics, fundamental nuclear science, and plasma physics.
Current rates of resource consumption are unsustainable- we need to change our praxis or risk extinction. Smith 1,
Nuclear Roulette: The Case against a Nuclear Renaissance. Gar SmithEditor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal. No.5 in the International Forum on Globalization on False Solutions to the global climate crisis. June 2011.
Even if all of the world’s current energy output could be produced by renewables, this level of energy consumption would still inflict terrible harm on Earth’s damaged ecosystems. In order to survive, we need to relearn how to use less. It is critical that we adopt a Conservation Imperative. Faced with the inevitable disappearance of the stockpiles of cheap energy we have used to move and transform matter, we need to identify society’s fundamental needs and invest our limited energy resources in those key areas.A Post-Oil/Post Coal/Post-Nuclear world can no longer sustain the one-time extravagances of luxury goods, designed-to-be-disposable products, and brain-numbing entertainment devices. The long-distance transport of raw materials, food and manufactured goods will need to decline in favor of local production geared to match local resources and needs.Warfare—the most capital-, resource- and pollution-intensive human activity—must also be diminished. Neither the costly inventory of nuclear arms nor the Pentagon’s imperial network of 700-plus foreign bases is sustainable.There will doubtless still be wars but, in the Post-oil World, they will be either be waged with solar-powered tanks or fought on horseback. Modern economies insist on powering ahead like competing steamboats in an upstream race.We have become addicted to over-consumption on a planet that was not designed for limitless exploitation.As the late environmental leader David Brower noted:“In the years since the Industrial Revolution, we humans have been partying pretty hard.We’ve ransacked most of the Earth for resources….We are living off the natural capital of the planet—the principal, and not the interest.The soil, the seas, the forests, the rivers, and the protective atmospheric cover—all are being depleted. It was a grand binge, but the hangover is now upon us, and it will soon be throbbing.” 224 On the eve of India’s independence, Mahatma Gandhi was asked whether his new nation could expect to attain Britain’s level of industrial development. Noting that “it took Britain half the resources of this planet to achieve its prosperity,” Gandhi famously estimated that raising the rest of the world to British levels of consumption would require “two more planets.”The United Nations Development Program recently reconsidered Gandhi’s equation as it applies towards “a world edging towards the brink of dangerous climate change.” Working from the assumed “sustainable” ceiling of climate-warming gases (14.5 Gt CO2 per year), UNEP confirmed that “if emissions were frozen at the current level of 29 Gt CO2, we would need two planets.” Unfortunately, UNEP noted, some countries are producing more CO2 than others. Fifteen percent of the world’s richest residents are using 90 percent of the planet’s sustainable budget of shared resources.According to UNEP’s calculations, just sustaining the current lifestyle of Canada and the U.S. would require the resources of 16 planets—eight planets each. 225 In this final chapter, we have bundled some of these ideas into four broad categories:Technological Efficiencies;Alternative-Renewable Energy systems; Public Policy Options; and most importantly,The Conservation Imperative—Powering Down. A combination of these efforts, enthusiastically embraced, will have a good chance of saving the world by embracing new, sustainable lifestyles that eschew the bizarre notion that happiness can only come from never-ending consumption and accumulation.A new level of appreciation for “sufficiency” and “equitability” will be the ultimate answer.
Err aff on this issue- the idea that we can infinitely sustain ourselves is the most likely scenario for extinction. Empirics prove. Kahn,
Richard Kahn. Core Faculty in Education at Antioch University, Los Angeles.“Paulo Freire and Eco-Justice: Updating Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the Age of Ecological Calamity.” 2007.
When Freire's work is engaged by the reality of the current ecological crisis, it provides immediate historical insight as to why the people of the Third World, along with other species of the Earth, have been consistently denied the rights and privileges accorded those living amidst the advanced capitalist nations -- there is a logic of domination at work. As Freire theorizes, it has always been the mindset of the oppressors to see themselves as “human,” while their that they prey upon are always less than such; like animals, they are barred from the prospects of history and the possibilities inherent in liberatory conduct. Therefore, it is of little surprise that people in the Third World and species everywhere currently bear the great burdens of “sustainable development,” uttered by the global oppressors as a cure-all for all those already suffering from the previous legacy of development and imposed transformation of their life worlds. According to Freire's own thinking, we who stand with the global oppressed should then be especially dubious, if not in outright objection, of such top-down policy initiatives as proposed by global states and federations -- policies that are formed by those who live in great opulence and ease but which are always directed at those surrounded by despair. Duly informed by the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, we might suggest that in contradistinction to the many terrors now foisted by states and state-minded organizations upon the world, we need not globalization-from-above, but globalization-from-below.The idea of mixing a thorough-going critique of power with a sort of Gramscian-inspired, counter-hegemonic alliance politics is certainly not new within the Freirean legacy. I think it is fair to point to movements as diverse as Critical Pedagogy, the Poststructural--Marxism promoted by Laclau and Mouffe, recent forms of Revolutionary Multiculturalism and to Borderland Feminism as promoting a sort of Freireanism fit for today's anti-globalization set. Yet, as bell hooks herself testifies, this updating of Freire's work was often achieved only with great anguish. Only after concerted effort were feminist, post-colonial, and multicultural criticisms of Pedagogy of the Oppressed allowed to stand and be heard within the Freirean corpus.Now, as we stand smack dab in the middle of a planetary eco-crisis, a catastrophe in which global powers will destroy the peoples and cultures of the Third World along with the species and habitats of their regions, I would like to ask: Is Freire's work in a position to mediate and speak with both those who stand beside the global poor and destitute and those whose deepest commitment is to the entirety of the natural kingdom? Can the Freirean corpus itself find agreement with the multi-faceted movement for eco-justice? II. The Present Moment as Such: Planetary Environmental Crisis, Mass Oppression and the Dizzy Heights of Global Capitalism In his book, The Enemy of Nature, Joel Kovel begins by documenting the terrible legacy of human resource degradation (and its consequence for humanity) that spans the thirty-odd years that have now elapsed since the first Earth Day and the release of the Club of Rome's benchmark economic treatise The Limits to Growth. Echoing the findings of eminent environmental and ecological groups and personages such as The Union of Concerned Scientists, Edward O. Wilson, and Peter Raven, the picture that emerges from Kovel's work is that of an institutionalized, transnational, phase-changing neo-liberalism this is loosed as a cancer upon the Earth, a form of “endless growth” political economy that is literally over-producing and consuming the planet to death in the attempt to stave offits own demise. Wholly without precedent, human population has nearly doubled during this time period, increasing by 2.5 billion people. Similarly, markets have continued to worship the gods of speed and quantity and refused to conserve themselves. The use and extraction of “fossil fuel” resources like oil, coal, and natural gas – the non-renewable energy stockpiles -- followed and exceeded the trends set by the population curve despite many years of warnings about the consequences inherent in their over-use and extraction, and this has led to a corresponding increase in the carbon emissions known to be responsible for global warming. Likewise, tree consumption for paper products doubled over the last thirty years, resulting in about half of the planet's forests disappearing, while in the oceans, global fishing also doubled. Further, since the end of the 1960's, half of the planet's wetlands have either been filled or drained for development, and nearly half of the Earth's soils have been agriculturally degraded.All these trends are increasing and most are accelerating.Even during what amounts to a current economic downturn, markets and development continue to flow and evolve, the globalization of technocapital fueling yet another vast reconstruction and hegemonic reintegration of the myriad planetary political, economic, and socio-cultural forces into a futuristic “network society.”Over the last thirty years then, humanity has exploded like a shock wave across the face of the Earth, one which has led to an exponential increase of transnational marketplaces and startling achievements in science and technology, but which has also had devastating effects upon the planetary eco-system. Perhaps most telling has been the parallel tendency over this time period towards mass extinction for the great diversity of species deemed non-human, including vast numbers of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Comparing the numbers involved in this catastrophe with the handful of other great extinctions existing within the prehistoric record has led the esteemed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey to coin this age of technocapitalism is the time of “the Sixth Extinction,” a great vanishing of creatures in the last thirty years such as we have not seen in the previous sixty-five million. But, lest we make the mistake of thinking that our present globalization crisis unfolds along the simple lines of human flourishing and resource wasting, it should be noted that even as world gross economic product has nearly tripled since 1970, these gains have been pocketed by a relatively few advanced capitalist nations at the expense of the poor.Recently, the United Nations Development Programme issued itsHuman Development Report 1999 which found that the top twenty percent of the people living in advanced capitalist nations have eighty-six percent of the world gross domestic product, control eighty-two percent of the world export markets, initiate sixty-eight percent of all foreign direct investment, and possess seventy-four percent of the communication wires. Meanwhile, the bottom twenty percent of the people hailing from the poorest nations represent only about one percent of each category respectively.The divide between rich and poor has been gravely exacerbated, with the gap between the two nearly doubling itself from an outrageous factor of 44:1 in 1973 to about 72:1 as of the year 2000. Much of this is directly related to a series of loans begun by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization in the 1990's, which ultimately increased Third World debt by a factor of eight compared with pre-globalization figures. So, as approximately 1.2 billion people live on less than $1 per day and nearly 3 billion live on less than $2 per day, the dizzy heights of global technocapitalism have been unfortunate indeed for nearly half of the human population.Globalization has been especially torturous upon poor women and children, who are denied basic human rights en masse and who, in the attempt to combat their situations of mass starvation and homelessness, enter by the millions each year into the relations of slave-labor and the horrors of the global sex trade. Even more tragically, millions of additional poor (many of whom are women and children) have been violently pressed into the circumstance of outright slavery! Thus, when this is properly related to the conditions fostered upon the Third World by the explosion of transnational capitalist development over the last few decades, we can agree with the critical feminist Rhonda Hammer that these very same cultural, economic and political practices by the hegemonic powers constitute a form of global “family terrorism” meant to oppress those most in need of help. New advances in capitalist lifestyle and practice are then directly responsible for grave exacerbations of widespread poverty and environmental destruction; and in many ways, the exploitation of the environment and of the poor by the rich has come to be integrated so as to be a part of one process -- the globalization of technocapitalsm.Interestingly, it was only very recently, in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the U.N.'s World Summit for Sustainable Development, that the plight of the poor and of species everywhere was again expressed as being a result of the sort of “unsustainable development” that has been the planetary norm over the last thirty years. However, sadly, due to pressure by the Bush administration and by other world powers,the conservation of the environment was essentially shelved as a policy agenda and the prescription for poor nations was, ironically, even more transnational capitalist development, market expansion, and resource extraction.Kofi Annan ended the summit by proclaiming, “This is not the end. It's the beginning.”But, in fact, the W.S.S.D. was but the latest in a 30-year lineage of world summits stretching back across the recent history of globalization, to the first of its kind in Stockholm. As we can see then, Annan's promise of change is more appropriately interpreted as a curse. The present standard of living enjoyed by those across the planet is estimated to utilize somewhere between two to four times the amount of sustainable resources provided by the planet. As population continues to rise toward 9 billion people and living standards increase in commensurate measure,it is calculated that to have a sustainable planet by the year 2070 would entail technical advances capable of enabling 60 times as much production and consumption as presently afforded, while only generating one-half to one-third the amount of present resource and environmental cost.Yet, according to the U.N.'s own UNEP GEO-3 report, released just prior to the summit,a vision of continued growth of this kind is consonant only with extinction; either great changes are made in global lifestyle now or an irrevocable crisis will descend upon the planet by 2032.
Only affirming solves- causes paradigm shift that orients us towards a more sustainable lifestyle. We need to do away with the promise of limitless energy. Smith 2,
Nuclear Roulette: The Case against a Nuclear Renaissance. Gar SmithEditor Emeritus of Earth Island Journal. No.5 in the International Forum on Globalization on False Solutions to the global climate crisis. June 2011.
We need decentralized solutions and ground-up, community-based alternatives. Instead of bailing out speculators, we should be investing to create small-scale, decentralized, sustainable and democratic communities supported by millions of small, local, organic farms. We will need to respond to massive changes and had better be flexible and agile. In the Brave New Post-Oil World, old ideas about energy will disappear.We will need to understand the economic advantages of owning a mule rather than a pick-up. Someone who knows how to make and repair a boot could become more valued than someone who knows how to boot up a computer. Many capital-intensive, extractive centralized industries will collapse, leaving us to care for our polluted air, damaged land, chemically poisoned croplands, and the broken oceanic food chain. Turning away from the false promises of nuclear power is not only good in itself, it will help us focus on the real necessities for a better future. We will have to redesign our technologies to be smarter and more efficient and our cities to be compact, convenient and congenial.We will need to learn to live within our means—doing without extravagance, just as our thrifty forebears did—living better with less, more in tune with each other and our shared planet. If we can escape the easy temptations of the consumerist mentality, we will be able to address the inequality that threatens the fundamental stability of our nation and our world.The old Combustion Economy promoted massive inequities in the distribution wealth and power.What the world needs now is a sustainable Compassion Economy that will usher in a new era of stewardship and sharing
Advantage 2 is Environment
Scenario 1 is Meltdowns
Meltdowns are inevitable – other models are flawed
Max - Planck- Gesselschaft 12 –The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institute (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Major Reactor, 5-22-2012, "Severe nuclear reactor accidents likely every 10 to 20 years, European study suggests," ScienceDaily, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120522134942.htm)
Fukushima are more likely to happen than previously assumed. Based on the operating hours of all civil nuclear reactors and the number of nuclear meltdowns that have occurred, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz have calculated that such events may occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors) -- some 200 times more often than estimated in the past. The researchers also determined that, in the event of such a major accident, half of the radioactive caesium-137 would be spread over an area of more than 1,000 kilometres away from the nuclear reactor. Their results show that Western Europe is likely to be contaminated about once in 50 years by more than 40 kilobecquerel of caesium-137 per square meter. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, an area is defined as being contaminated with radiation from this amount onwards. In view of their findings, the researchers call for an in-depth analysis and reassessment of the risks associated with nuclear power plants. The reactor accident in Fukushima has fuelled the discussion about nuclear energy and triggered Germany's exit from their nuclear power program. It appears that the global risk of such a catastrophe is higher than previously thought, a result of a study carried out by a research team led by Jos Lelieveld, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz: "After Fukushima, the prospect of such an incident occurring again came into question, and whether we can actually calculate the radioactive fallout using our atmospheric models." According to the results of the study, a nuclear meltdown in one of the reactors in operation worldwide is likely to occur once in 10 to 20 years. Currently, there are 440 nuclear reactors in operation, and 60 more are planned. To determine the likelihood of a nuclear meltdown, the researchers applied a simple calculation. They divided the operating hours of all civilian nuclear reactors in the world, from the commissioning of the first up to the present, by the number of reactor meltdowns that have actually occurred. The total number of operating hours is 14,500 years, the number of reactor meltdowns comes to four -- one in Chernobyl and three in Fukushima. This translates into one major accident, being defined according to the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), every 3,625 years. Even if this result is conservatively rounded to one major accident every 5,000 reactor years, the risk is 200 times higher than the estimate for catastrophic, non-contained core meltdowns made by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1990. The Mainz researchers did not distinguish ages and types of reactors, or whether they are located in regions of enhanced risks, for example by earthquakes. After all, nobody had anticipated the reactor catastrophe in Japan.
It’s the single greatest danger to the environment
Stapleton 9 - Richard M Stapleton Is the author of books such as Lead Is a Silent Hazard, writes for pollution issues (“Disasters: Nuclear Accidents” http://www.pollutionissues.com/Co-Ea/Disasters-Nuclear-Accidents.html)
Of all the environmental disaster events that humans are capable of causing, nuclear disasters have the greatest damage potential. The radiation release associated with a nuclear disaster poses significant acute and chronic risks in the immediate environs and chronic risk over a wide geographic area. Radioactive contamination, which typically becomes airborne, is long-lived, with half-lives guaranteeing contamination for hundreds of years. Concerns over potential nuclear disasters center on nuclear reactors, typically those used to generate electric power. Other concerns involve the transport of nuclear waste and the temporary storage of spent radioactive fuel at nuclear power plants. The fear that terrorists would target a radiation source or create a "dirty bomb" capable of dispersing radiation over a populated area was added to these concerns following the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Radioactive emissions of particular concern include strontium-90 and cesium-137, both having thirty-year-plus half-lives, and iodine-131, having a short half-life of eight days but known to cause thyroid cancer. In addition to being highly radioactive, cesium-137 is mistaken for potassium by living organisms. This means that it is passed on up the food chain and bioaccumulated by that process. Strontium-90 mimics the properties of calcium and is deposited in bones where it may either cause cancer or damage bone marrow cells.
Biod loss causes extinction---newest ev
Torres 16 – (Apr 11, Phil, is the founding director of the X-Risks Institute, a contributor for the Future of Life Institute, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and the author of The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse. His writing focuses on apocalyptic terrorism, emerging technologies, and existential risks. “Biodiversity loss: An existential risk comparable to climate change” http://thebulletin.org/biodiversity-loss-existential-risk-comparable-climate-change9329)
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the two greatest existential threats to human civilization stem from climate change and nuclear weapons. Both pose clear and present dangers to the perpetuation of our species, and the increasingly dire climate situation and nuclear arsenal modernizations in the United States and Russia were the most significant reasons why the Bulletin decided to keep the Doomsday Clock set at three minutes before midnight earlier this year. But there is another existential threat that the Bulletin overlooked in its Doomsday Clock announcement: biodiversity loss. This phenomenon is often identified as one of the many consequences of climate change, and this is of course correct. But biodiversity loss is also a contributing factor behind climate change. For example, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and elsewhere reduces the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere by plants, a natural process that mitigates the effects of climate change. So the causal relation between climate change and biodiversity loss is bidirectional. Furthermore, there are myriad phenomena that are driving biodiversity loss in addition to climate change. Other causes include ecosystem fragmentation, invasive species, pollution, oxygen depletion caused by fertilizers running off into ponds and streams, overfishing, human overpopulation, and overconsumption. All of these phenomena have a direct impact on the health of the biosphere, and all would conceivably persist even if the problem of climate change were somehow immediately solved. Such considerations warrant decoupling biodiversity loss from climate change, because the former has been consistently subsumed by the latter as a mere effect. Biodiversity loss is a distinct environmental crisis with its own unique syndrome of causes, consequences, and solutions—such as restoring habitats, creating protected areas (“biodiversity parks”), and practicing sustainable agriculture. The sixth extinction. The repercussions of biodiversity loss are potentially as severe as those anticipated from climate change, or even a nuclear conflict. For example, according to a 2015 study published in Science Advances, the best available evidence reveals “an exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way.” This conclusion holds, even on the most optimistic assumptions about the background rate of species losses and the current rate of vertebrate extinctions. The group classified as “vertebrates” includes mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, and all other creatures with a backbone. The article argues that, using its conservative figures, the average loss of vertebrate species was 100 times higher in the past century relative to the background rate of extinction. (Other scientists have suggested that the current extinction rate could be as much as 10,000 times higher than normal.) As the authors write, “The evidence is incontrovertible that recent extinction rates are unprecedented in human history and highly unusual in Earth’s history.” Perhaps the term “Big Six” should enter the popular lexicon—to add the current extinction to the previous “Big Five,” the last of which wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the concept of biodiversity encompasses more than just the total number of species on the planet. It also refers to the size of different populations of species. With respect to this phenomenon, multiple studies have confirmed that wild populations around the world are dwindling and disappearing at an alarming rate. For example, the 2010 Global Biodiversity Outlook report found that the population of wild vertebrates living in the tropics dropped by 59 percent between 1970 and 2006. The report also found that the population of farmland birds in Europe has dropped by 50 percent since 1980; bird populations in the grasslands of North America declined by almost 40 percent between 1968 and 2003; and the population of birds in North American arid lands has fallen by almost 30 percent since the 1960s. Similarly, 42 percent of all amphibian species (a type of vertebrate that is sometimes called an “ecological indicator”) are undergoing population declines, and 23 percent of all plant species “are estimated to be threatened with extinction.” Other studies have found that some 20 percent of all reptile species, 48 percent of the world’s primates, and 50 percent of freshwater turtles are threatened. Underwater, about 10 percent of all coral reefs are now dead, and another 60 percent are in danger of dying. Consistent with these data, the 2014 Living Planet Report shows that the global population of wild vertebrates dropped by 52 percent in only four decades—from 1970 to 2010. While biologists often avoid projecting historical trends into the future because of the complexity of ecological systems, it’s tempting to extrapolate this figure to, say, the year 2050, which is four decades from 2010. As it happens, a 2006 study published in Science does precisely this: It projects past trends of marine biodiversity loss into the 21st century, concluding that, unless significant changes are made to patterns of human activity, there will be virtually no more wild-caught seafood by 2048. Catastrophic consequences for civilization. The consequences of this rapid pruning of the evolutionary tree of life extend beyond the obvious. There could be surprising effects of biodiversity loss that scientists are unable to fully anticipate in advance. For example, prior research has shown that localized ecosystems can undergo abrupt and irreversible shifts when they reach a tipping point. According to a 2012 paper published in Nature, there are reasons for thinking that we may be approaching a tipping point of this sort in the global ecosystem, beyond which the consequences could be catastrophic for civilization. As the authors write, a planetary-scale transition could precipitate “substantial losses of ecosystem services required to sustain the human population.” An ecosystem service is any ecological process that benefits humanity, such as food production and crop pollination. If the global ecosystem were to cross a tipping point and substantial ecosystem services were lost, the results could be “widespread social unrest, economic instability, and loss of human life.” According to Missouri Botanical Garden ecologist Adam Smith, one of the paper’s co-authors, this could occur in a matter of decades—far more quickly than most of the expected consequences of climate change, yet equally destructive. Biodiversity loss is a “threat multiplier” that, by pushing societies to the brink of collapse, will exacerbate existing conflicts and introduce entirely new struggles between state and non-state actors. Indeed, it could even fuel the rise of terrorism. (After all, climate change has been linked to the emergence of ISIS in Syria, and multiple high-ranking US officials, such as former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and CIA director John Brennan, have affirmed that climate change and terrorism are connected.) The reality is that we are entering the sixth mass extinction in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, and the impact of this event could be felt by civilization “in as little as three human lifetimes,” as the aforementioned 2012 Nature paper notes. Furthermore, the widespread decline of biological populations could plausibly initiate a dramatic transformation of the global ecosystem on an even faster timescale: perhaps a single human lifetime. The unavoidable conclusion is that biodiversity loss constitutes an existential threat in its own right. As such, it ought to be considered alongside climate change and nuclear weapons as one of the most significant contemporary risks to human prosperity and survival.
Independently, inevitable solar flares cause nuclear holocausts, extinction---only total ban solves
Adams 11 – (Sept 13, Mike, Editor of NaturalNews.com, “Solar flare could unleash nuclear holocaust across planet Earth, forcing hundreds of nuclear power plants into total meltdowns”, http://www.naturalnews.com/033564_solar_flares_nuclear_power_plants.html)
(NaturalNews) Forget about the 2012 Mayan calendar, comet Elenin or the Rapture. The real threat to human civilization is far more mundane, and it's right in front of our noses. If Fukushima has taught us anything, it's that just one runaway meltdown of fissionable nuclear material can have wide-ranging and potentially devastating consequences for life on Earth. To date, Fukushima has already released 168 times the total radiation released from the Hiroshima nuclear bomb detonated in 1945, and the Fukushima catastrophe is now undeniably the worst nuclear disaster in the history of human civilization. But what if human civilization faced a far greater threat than a single tsunami destroying a nuclear power facility? What if a global tidal wave could destroy the power generating capacities of all the world's power plants, all at once? Such a scenario is not merely possible, but factually inevitable. And the global tidal wave threatening all the nuclear power plants of the world isn't made of water but solar emissions. The sun, you see, is acting up again. NASA recently warned that solar activity is surging, with a peak expected to happen in 2013 that could generate enormous radiation levels that sweep across planet Earth. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has even issued an urgent warning about solar flares due to strike in 2012 and 2013. IBtimes wrote, "With solar activity expected to peak around 2013, the Sun is entering a particularly active time and big flares like the recent one will likely be common during the next few years. ...A major flare in the mid-19th century blocked the nascent telegraph system, and some scientists believe that another such event is now overdue." (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194166/20110...) The story goes on to explain: "Several federal government studies suggest that this extreme solar activity and emissions may result in complete blackouts for years in some areas of the nation. Moreover, there may also be disruption of power supply for years, or even decades, as geomagnetic currents attracted by the storm could debilitate the transformers." Why does all this matter? To understand that, you have to understand how nuclear power plants function. Or, put another way, how is nuclear material prevented from "going nuclear" every single day across our planet? Every nuclear power plant operates in a near-meltdown state All nuclear power plants are operated in a near-meltdown status. They operate at very high heat, relying on nuclear fission to boil water that produces steam to drive the turbines that generate electricity. Critically, the nuclear fuel is prevented from melting down through the steady circulation of coolants which are pushed through the cooling system using very high powered electric pumps. If you stop the electric pumps, the coolant stops flowing and the fuel rods go critical (and then melt down). This is what happened in Fukushima, where the melted fuel rods dropped through the concrete floor of the containment vessels, unleashing enormous quantities of ionizing radiation into the surrounding environment. The full extent of the Fukushima contamination is not even known yet, as the facility is still emitting radiation. It's crucial to understand that nuclear coolant pumps are usually driven by power from the electrical grid. They are not normally driven by power generated locally from the nuclear power plant itself. Instead, they're connected to the grid. In other words, even though nuclear power plants are generating megawatts of electricity for the grid, they are also dependant on the grid to run their own coolant pumps. If the grid goes down, the coolant pumps go down, too, which is why they are quickly switched to emergency backup power -- either generators or batteries. As we learned with Fukushima, the on-site batteries can only drive the coolant pumps for around eight hours. After that, the nuclear facility is dependent on diesel generators (or sometimes propane) to run the pumps that circulate the coolant which prevents the whole site from going Chernobyl. And yet, critically, this depends on something rather obvious: The delivery of diesel fuel to the site. If diesel cannot be delivered, the generators can't be fired up and the coolant can't be circulated. When you grasp the importance of this supply line dependency, you will instantly understand why a single solar flare could unleash a nuclear holocaust across the planet. When the generators fail and the coolant pumps stop pumping, nuclear fuel rods begin to melt through their containment rods, unleashing ungodly amounts of life-destroying radiation directly into the atmosphere. This is precisely why Japanese engineers worked so hard to reconnect the local power grid to the Fukushima facility after the tidal wave -- they needed to bring power back to the generators to run the pumps that circulate the coolant. This effort failed, of course, which is why Fukushima became such a nuclear disaster and released countless becquerels of radiation into the environment (with no end in sight). And yet, despite the destruction we've already seen with Fukushima, U.S. nuclear power plants are nowhere near being prepared to handle sustained power grid failures. As IBtimes reports: "Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said U.S. plants affected by a blackout should be able to cope without electricity for at least eight hours and should have procedures to keep the reactor and spent-fuel pool cool for 72 hours. Nuclear plants depend on standby batteries and backup diesel generators. Most standby power systems would continue to function after a severe solar storm, but supplying the standby power systems with adequate fuel, when the main power grids are offline for years, could become a very critical problem. If the spent fuel rod pools at the country's 104 nuclear power plants lose their connection to the power grid, the current regulations aren't sufficient to guarantee those pools won't boil over -- exposing the hot, zirconium-clad rods and sparking fires that would release deadly radiation." (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194166/20110...) Now, what does all this have to do with solar flares? How the end of modern civilization will most likely occur As any sufficiently informed scientist will readily admit, solar flares have the potential to blow out the transformers throughout the national power grid. That's because solar flares induce geomagnetic currents (powerful electromagnetic impulses) which overload the transformers and cause them to explode. You've probably witnessed this yourself during a lightning storm when lightning unleashes a powerful electromagnetic pulse that causes a local transformer to explode. Solar flares do the same thing on a much larger scale. A global scale, in fact. The upshot of this situation is that suddenly and without warning, the power grid infrastructure across nearly the entire planet could be destroyed. As a bonus, nearly all satellites will be fried, too, leaving GPS inoperable and causing millions of clueless drivers to become forever lost in their own neighborhoods because they never paid attention to the streets and always relied on a GPS voice to tell them, "In fifty feet, turn right." Communications satellites will be obliterated, too. This, of course, will halt nearly all news propaganda distribution across the planet, causing tens of thousands of people to instantly die out of the sheer fear of suddenly having to think for themselves. As another bonus, nearly all mobile phone service will be disrupted, too, meaning all the teenage text junkies of the world will, for the first time in their lives, be forced to lay down their iPhones and interact with real people in the real world. But the real kicker in all this is that the power grid will be destroyed nearly everywhere. What happens when there's no electricity? Imagine a world without electricity. Even for just a week. Imagine New York City with no electricity, or Los Angeles, or Sao Paulo. Within 72 hours, most cities around the world will devolve into total chaos, complete with looting, violent crime, and runaway fires. But that's not even the bad news. Even if all the major cities of the world burned to the ground for some other reason, humanity could still recover because it has the farmlands: the soils, the seeds, and the potential to recover, right? And yet the real crisis here stems from the realization that once there is no power grid, all the nuclear power plants of the world suddenly go into "emergency mode" and are forced to rely on their on-site emergency power backups to circulate coolants and prevent nuclear meltdowns from occurring. And yet, as we've already established, these facilities typically have only a few hours of battery power available, followed by perhaps a few days worth of diesel fuel to run their generators (or propane, in some cases). Did I also mention that half the people who work at nuclear power facilities have no idea what they're doing in the first place? Most of the veterans who really know the facilities inside and out have been forced into retirement due to reaching their lifetime limits of on-the-job radiation exposure, so most of the workers at nuclear facilities right now are newbies who really have no clue what they're doing. There are 440 nuclear power plants operating across 30 countries around the world today. There are an additional 250 so-called "research reactors" in existence, making a total of roughly 700 nuclear reactors to be dealt with (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf01.html). Now imagine the scenario: You've got a massive solar flare that knocks out the world power grid and destroys the majority of the power grid transformers, thrusting the world into darkness. Cities collapse into chaos and rioting, martial law is quickly declared (but it hardly matters), and every nation in the world is on full emergency. But that doesn't solve the really big problem, which is that you've got 700 nuclear reactors that can't feed power into the grid (because all the transformers are blown up) and yet simultaneously have to be fed a steady stream of emergency fuels to run the generators the keep the coolant pumps functioning. How long does the coolant need to circulate in these facilities to cool the nuclear fuel? Months. This is also the lesson of Fukushima: You can't cool nuclear fuel in mere hours or days. It takes months to bring these nuclear facilities to a state of cold shutdown. And that means in order to avoid a multitude of Fukushima-style meltdowns from occurring around the world, you need to truck diesel fuel, generator parts and nuclear plant workers to every nuclear facility on the planet, ON TIME, every time, without fail, for months on end. Now remember, this must be done in the middle of the total chaos breakdown of modern civilization, where there is no power, where law enforcement and emergency services are totally overrun, where people are starving because food deliveries have been disrupted, and when looting and violent crime runs rampant in the streets of every major city in the world. Somehow, despite all this, you have to run these diesel fuel caravans to the nuclear power plants and keep the pumps running. Except there's a problem in all this, even if you assume you can somehow work a logistical miracle and actually deliver the diesel fuel to the backup generators on time (which you probably can't). The problem is this: Where do you get diesel fuel? Why refineries will be shut down, too From petroleum refineries. Most people don't realize it, but petroleum refineries run on electricity. Without the power grid, the refineries don't produce a drop of diesel. With no diesel, there are no generators keeping the coolant running in the nuclear power facilities. But wait, you say: Maybe we could just acquire diesel from all the gas stations in the world. Pump it out of the ground, load it into trucks and use that to power the generators, right? Except there are other problems here: How do you pump all that fuel without electricity? How do you acquire all the tires and spare parts needed to keep trucks running if there's no electricity to keep the supply businesses running? How do you maintain a truck delivery infrastructure when the electrical infrastructure is totally wiped out? Some countries might be able to pull it off with some degree of success. With military escorts and the total government control over all fuel supplies, a few nations will be able to keep a few nuclear power facilities from melting down. But here's the real issue: There are 700 nuclear power facilities in the world, remember? Let's suppose that in the aftermath of a massive solar flare, the nations of the world are somehow able to control half of those facilities and nurse them into cold shutdown status. That still leaves roughly 350 nuclear facilities at risk. Now let's suppose half of those are somehow luckily offline and not even functioning when the solar flare hits, so they need no special attention. This is a very optimistic assumption, but that still leaves 175 nuclear power plants where all attempts fail. Let's be outrageously optimistic and suppose that a third of those somehow don't go into a total meltdown by some miracle of God, or some bizarre twist in the laws of physics. So we're still left with 115 nuclear power plants that "go Chernobyl." Fukushima was one power plant. Imagine the devastation of 100+ nuclear power plants, all going into meltdown all at once across the planet. It's not the loss of electricity that's the real problem; it's the global tidal wave of invisible radiation that blankets the planet, permeates the topsoil, irradiates everything that breathes and delivers the final crushing blow to human civilization as we know it today. Because if you have 100 simultaneous global nuclear meltdowns, the tidal wave of radiation will make farming nearly impossible for years. That means no food production for several years in a row. And that, in turn, means a near-total collapse of the human population on our planet. How many people can survive an entire year with no food from the farms? Not one in a hundred people. Even beyond that, how many people can essentially live underground and be safe enough from the radiation that they can have viable children and repopulate the planet? It's a very, very small fraction of the total population. Solar flares far more likely to hit nuclear power plants than tidal waves or earthquakes What's the chance of all this actually happening? A report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that "...over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity enables a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss, a risk that significantly outweighs that of major earthquakes and tsunamis." (http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/194166/20110...) The world's reliance on nuclear power, you see, has doomed us to destroy our own civilization. Of course, this is all preventable if we would only dismantle and shut down ALL nuclear power plants on the planet. But what are the chances of that happening? Zero, of course. There are too many commercial and political interests invested in nuclear power. So the power plants will stay, and we will therefore be vulnerable to a solar flare which could strike us at any time and unleash a global nuclear holocaust. Planet Earth has been struck by solar flares before, of course, but all the big hits in recorded human history took place long before the age of modern electronics, so the impacts were minimal. Today, society cannot function without electronics. Nor can nuclear facility coolant pumps. Once you realize that, you begin to understand the true danger in which humanity has placed itself by relying on nuclear power. By relying on nuclear power, we are risking everything. And we're doing it blindly, with no real acknowledgement of the dangers of running 700+ nuclear facilities in a constant state of "near meltdown" while foolishly relying on the steady flow of electricity to keep the fuel rods cool. If Fukushima, all by itself, could unleash a tidal wave of deadly radiation all by itself, imagine a world where hundreds of nuclear facilities go into a total meltdown simultaneously. A repeat of the 1859 solar storm -- called the Carrington Event -- would "devastate the modern world," admits a National Geographic article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011... What can you do about any of this? Build yourself an underground bunker and prepare to live in it for an extended period of time. (Just a few feet of soil protects you from most radiation.) The good news is that if you survive it all and one day return to the surface to plant your non-hybrid seeds and begin rebuilding human society, real estate will be really, really cheap. Especially in the radiation zones. Take this seriously! Read more from NASA http://www.space.com/12580-sun-unleashes-maj... http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science... From NASA: "Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii. Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted..." "...as electronic technologies have become more sophisticated and more embedded into everyday life, they have also become more vulnerable to solar activity. On Earth, power lines and long-distance telephone cables might be affected by auroral currents, as happened in 1989. Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could be disrupted by solar radio noise. Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare. In fact, a recent paper estimates potential damage to the 900-plus satellites currently in orbit could cost between $30 billion and $70 billion."
Scenario 2 is Water
Plants cause environmental damage, water wars
Wareham and Green 7 – (Oct 28, Dr Sue Wareham became involved in MAPW over 20 years ago out of a "horror at the destructive capacity of a single nuclear weapon." Sue believes that her work through MAPW is fundamental to her commitment to the protection of human life and the improvement of human well-being. Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner for Friends of the Earth and author of the report No Solution To Climate Change (pdf file 1.98MB) launched in September 2005. His PhD thesis dealt with the history of the Lucas Heights nuclear plant and the debate over the replacement of its nuclear research reactor. He is a member of the EnergyScience Coalition. Read his essay Environmentalists Do Not Support Nuclear Power: Critique of James Lovelock and Patrick Moore. “Nuclear power and water scarcity” http://www.sciencealert.com/nuclear-power-and-water-scarcity)
The connections between water scarcity, power generation and the federal government's promotion of nuclear power are worth reflecting on in National Water Week, held from October 21-27. Some problems associated with nuclear power are much discussed – such as its connection to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Less well known is the fact that nuclear power is the most water-hungry of all energy sources, with a single reactor consuming 35-65 million litres of water each day. Water scarcity is already a serious problem for Australia's power-generation industry, largely because of our heavy reliance on water-guzzling coal-fired plants. Current problems in Australia's power industry resulting from water shortages include: expensive long-distance water haulage to some power plants as local supplies dwindle; reduced electrical generating capacity and output at some coal and hydro plants; higher and more volatile electricity prices; increased risks of blackouts; and intensified competition for water between power plants, agriculture, industries, and environmental flows. Introducing nuclear power would exacerbate those problems. A December 2006 report by the Commonwealth Department of Parliamentary Services notes that the water requirements for a nuclear power station are 20-83 per cent higher than for other power stations. Moreover, those calculations do not include water consumption by uranium mines. The Roxby Downs mine in South Australia uses 35 million litres of water each day, with plans to increase this to 150 million litres each day. Mine operator BHP Billiton does not pay one cent for this water despite recording a record $17 billion profit in 2006-07. Water outflows from nuclear power plants can damage the local environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states: "When nuclear power plants remove water from a lake or river for steam production and cooling, fish and other aquatic life can be affected. Water pollutants, such as heavy metals and salts, build up in the water used in the nuclear power plant systems. These water pollutants, as well as the higher temperature of the water discharged from the power plant, can negatively affect water quality and aquatic life." A report by the U.S. Nuclear Information and Resource Service details the destruction of delicate marine ecosystems and large numbers of animals, including endangered species, by nuclear power plants. Most of the damage is done by water inflow pipes, while expulsion of warm water causes further damage. Another documented problem is 'cold stunning' - fish acclimatise to warm water but die when the reactor is taken off-line and warm water is no longer expelled. In New Jersey, local fishermen estimated that 4,000 fish died from cold stunning when a reactor was shut down. Nuclear reactors in numerous European countries have been periodically taken off-line or operated at reduced output in recent years because of water shortages driven by climate change, drought and heat waves. Nuclear utilities have also sought and secured exemptions from operating conditions in order to discharge overheated water. The water consumption of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency and conservation measures is negligible compared to nuclear or coal. Operating a 2,400 Watt fan heater for one hour consumes 0.01 litres of water if wind is the energy source, 0.26 litres if solar is the energy source, 4.5 litres if coal is the energy source, or 5.5 litres if nuclear power is the energy source. Tim Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, notes that hastening the uptake of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and geothermal 'hot rocks' will help ease the water crisis as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions - a win-win outcome. Globally, there is another compelling reason to ensure that decisions on water allocation - including its use in energy production - are made wisely and equitably. Limited access to water is already contributing to armed conflicts ('water wars') in a number of places around the globe. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recently noted that shortages of food and water in sub-Saharan Africa were a precursor to the current tragic violence in Darfur. The problem goes "far beyond Darfur", he warned, as many other places are now suffering water shortages.
Water wars cause global wars
Engelke and Sticklor 15 – (Sept 15, Peter Engelke is a Resident Senior Fellow with the Strategic Foresight Initiative at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. Russell Sticklor is a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the Stimson Environmental Security Program in Washington, DC. “Water Wars: The Next Great Driver of Global Conflict?” http://nationalinterest.org/feature/water-wars-the-next-great-driver-global-conflict-13842?page=show)
We live in an age of great anxiety about threats to global peace and stability. Among these are worries that intense water-related stresses, now showing up in regions around the world, may become all-too-common sources of conflict. Just as often, however, concerns about water wars are dismissed as much ado about nothing. An influential school of thought has long contended future international conflicts will not be fought over this resource. Water, it says, is of such elemental importance to human existence that even long-time adversaries will be forced to accommodate one another’s needs in a water-scarce future. As water is too expensive to transport over long distances, moreover, it is very difficult to steal or plunder. And history gives some comfort to this forecast: as few wars have been fought specifically over water, it is highly unlikely humanity will start engaging in water conflicts now. Or so the thinking goes. In the case of water, this logic — of the past as predictor of the future — is compelling and comforting. But it also is dangerously myopic, for it fails to consider the possibility that the future may look nothing at all like the past. From nearly any standpoint, the world we live in is a fundamentally different place compared with the past. Over just the last century, for example, the global population has rocketed upward from roughly two billion to well past seven billion. While population growth is hardly the only driver of social, economic, and ecological change at global and regional scale, it has been among the most important. Nor is this process at an end. Current demographic projections forecast a global population of at least nine billion by 2050 — and possibly more. Water in the Anthropocene: Population growth provides a fitting illustration of the rapid pace of change in the modern world. No consequence is more important than what has been done to nature. Humans have so drastically altered the Earth that scientists now question whether we remain in the Holocene, the 12,000-year-old geological epoch during which all of recorded human history has occurred. Instead, increasingly they speak of the Earth as having entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene. The basic idea behind the Anthropocene is that human activity has so thoroughly disrupted the Earth’s core processes (for instance, its nitrogen cycle or sediment flows) that the planet no longer can be said to function according to the familiar rhythms of the Holocene. Human interference in the Earth’s carbon cycle, for example, has changed the planet’s climate and in the process altered rainfall patterns, accelerated glacial melting, increased air and sea temperatures, and much else. Gone is the Holocene’s stable climate; here is the Anthropocene’s unstable one. While there is some debate amongst scientists and others about whether the Anthropocene will lead to a better or worse future, nearly everyone involved in the discussion agrees that the Earth of the future will not resemble its past. From here forward, we face an unfamiliar planet that will throw our assumptions about nearly everything out the window. No resource stands to be more affected by the arrival of the Anthropocene than fresh water. Finite and increasingly scarce in many parts of the world, fresh water remains the most vital single input for everything from food production, energy generation, and manufacturing to human health, social development, and economic modernization. Unlike oil, water has no substitute, making access to it nothing less than a matter of existential importance to every living creature on Earth. Yet despite its monumental role in local and international affairs, water ironically remains completely undervalued, pumped and consumed virtually free of charge across much of the world. We essentially pump water as we breathe oxygen; it is a learned reflex, central to our ability to survive and thrive as a species. Nicknames like “blue gold” and “oil of the 21st century” attest to the value of fresh water and its importance to everyday affairs throughout the world. While every country’s water equation is different, at a global scale the basic problem is that demand for water is soaring while water supplies are being squeezed. On the demand side, the challenge results from an inexorable combination of global economic and population growth combined with water-use inefficiencies. On the supply side, the problem results not just from exhaustion of the world’s stock of fresh water capital, as is happening to groundwater reservoirs nearly everywhere. Fresh water supply is also becoming less predictable as climate change sets in—shifting rainfall and snowfall patterns and increasing evaporation rates are giving us more frequent droughts and floods. The upshot is that the arrival of the Anthropocene foreshadows a world where received wisdom may no longer be a reliable guide to the future. Water insecurity from drought, excessive groundwater extraction, and changed seasonal precipitation patterns is affecting — or soon will affect — regions as diverse as the Middle East, South Asia, the Caribbean, northern China, sub-Saharan Africa, the western United States, and many more. Water Geopolitics: Much as oil shaped the global geopolitics of the 20th century, water has the power to reorder international relations in the current century. The world’s emerging water geopolitics are complicated, as fresh water resources are distributed unevenly across the globe. There are great water powers, blessed with enormous renewable reserves (Brazil, Russia, the United States, Canada, and China round out the top five). But even within these huge countries, water availability is not uniform, with southern Brazil, the western United States, northern China, and other sub-regions facing intense water stress. Far more numerous than the water powers are the water have-nots, a growing list of countries suffering through a perfect storm of rapid population growth, resource depletion, poor governance, economic stagnation, and unsettling climate change impacts, all within the context of chronic aridity. The most water-fragile among them are concentrated in a strategically significant belt stretching from North Africa across the Middle East and Horn of Africa into Central, South, and East Asia. It is in these naturally arid or semi-arid countries where water scarcity has the greatest potential to inflict serious harm. Water stress is best understood as a precursor to conflict. While the environmental security community generally agrees that water disputes rarely leads to interstate violence, the same cannot be said of intrastate conflict. Here, at the subnational level, water disputes and instability can trigger violent conflict, particularly in situations of existing social, political, or economic fragility. Water stress acts as an accelerant, increasing the likelihood of conflict. Moreover, water scarcity-fueled instability can have dangerous security implications for wider geographic regions. Take Syria as an example. Between 2006 and 2010, the country was hit hard by drought, which wiped out rural livelihoods for many and caused significant internal displacement across the country. Internal displacement in turn helped stir up a pot that boiled over into all-out civil war in Syria, eventually spreading to Iraq. Over the last two years, ISIS has viewed water access and control as a primary strategic objective of their campaign, and has commandeered hydroelectric dams, irrigation canals, reservoirs, pipelines, and other water infrastructure to cement territorial gains. Water has played an important role in Yemen’s ongoing collapse. Decades of mismanagement have left the country — one of the world’s most water-scarce nations — with dilapidated water infrastructure, severely depleted groundwater reserves, and high rates of water-use inefficiency. Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, may become the first capital in the modern world to functionally run out of water, possibly as soon as 2025. In Pakistan, meanwhile, runaway population growth and shifting rainfall patterns threaten its water outlook. With a massive population set to nearly double in the next 35 years, Pakistan’s demand on its very limited water resources will intensify in a way that is almost unimaginable. Already, the country is one of the most water scarce on earth. In a nod to water’s importance in shaping the region, many Pakistani militant groups long hostile to India have supplanted protests over Indian control of Kashmir with more specific protests over access to Kashmir’s most valuable resource — water. Other countries join Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan on the list of nations facing a similar combination of water stress and social and political insecurity. They include conflict-prone countries of geopolitical significance, including Iran, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria, and Somalia. Even more worrisome, global heavyweights such as China, India, and even the United States face uncomfortable futures given mismatches between forecasted demand for water and squeezed sources of supply. While there is no reason to believe that the latter states will suffer from the same forms of insecurity as those countries in the arc of crisis, neither will they be exempted from the blunt realities of a water-stressed world.
