Tournament: All | Round: 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All
Kaushal Balagurusamy on Facebook but I might get a senior name so just in case here's the rest
kblusterpurge@gmail.com - yes I know the email is strange as hell, third graders don't think of great email names sorry
7816864974 - call/text me

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: Marlborough | Judge:
Framing- K 1:15

1. Extinction scenarios key to genuine power resistance- working within the system is key.
   - state inevitable, discourses gets coopted
   - connecting issues with extinction gains political coverage for them. Threat construction for good purposes
   - theorizing accelerates oppression, cede the political (turn is that sitting back leads to more oppression)
   - brings reps together
   -
   Schatz 12 JL, Binghamton U, "The Importance of Apocalypse: The Value of End-­‐Of-­‐ The-­‐World Politics While Advancing Ecocriticism," The Journal of Ecocriticism: Vol 4, No 2 (2012) KB
   Any hesitancy to deploy images of apocalypse out of the risk of acting in a biopolitical manner ignores how any particular metaphor—apocalyptic or not—always risks getting co‐opted. It does not excuse inaction. Clearly hegemonic forces have already assumed control of determining environmental practices when one looks at the debates surrounding off--‐shore drilling, climate change, and biodiversity within the halls of Congress. “As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems … will go unsolved … only to fester more ominously into the future. … Ecological crisis … cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context … of internationalized markets, finance, and communications” (Boggs 774). If it weren’t for people such as Watson connecting things like whaling to the end of the world it wouldn’t get the needed coverage to enter into public discourse. It takes big news to make headlines and hold attention spans in the electronic age. Sometimes it even takes a reality TV show on Animal Planet. As Luke reminds us, “Those who dominate the world exploit their positions to their advantage by defining how the world is known. Unless they also face resistance, questioning, and challenge from those who are dominated, they certainly will remain the dominant forces” (2003: 413). Merely sitting back and theorizing over metaphorical deployments does a grave injustice to the gains activists are making on the ground. It also allows hegemonic institutions to continually define the debate over the environment by framing out any attempt for significant change, whether it be radical or reformist. Only by jumping on every opportunity for resistance can ecocriticism have the hopes of combatting the current ecological reality. This means we must recognize that we cannot fully escape the master’s house since the surrounding environment always shapes any form of resistance. Therefore, we ought to act even if we may get co--opted. As Foucault himself reminds us, “instead of radial ruptures more often one is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about. … And it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships. It is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power” (96--‐97). Here Foucault “asks us to think about resistance differently, as not anterior to power, but a component of it. If we take seriously these notions on the exercise and circulation of power, then we … open … up the field of possibility to talk about particular kinds of environmentalism” (Rutherford 296). This is not to say that all actions are resistant. Rather, the revolutionary actions that are truly resistant oftentimes appear mundane since it is more about altering the intelligibility that frames discussions around the environment than any specific policy change. Again, this is why people like Watson use one issue as a jumping off point to talk about wider politics of ecological awareness. Campaigns that look to the government or a single policy but for a moment, and then go on to challenge hegemonic interactions with the environment through other tactics, allows us to codify strategic points of resistance in numerous places at once. Again, this does not mean we must agree with every tactic. It does mean that even failed attempts are meaningful. For example, while PETA’s ad campaigns have drawn criticism for comparing factory farms to the Holocaust, and featuring naked women who’d rather go naked than wear fur, their importance extends beyond the ads alone6. By bringing the issues to the forefront they draw upon known metaphors and reframe the way people talk about animals despite their potentially anti--‐Semitic and misogynist underpinnings. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s theorization of the multitude serves as an excellent illustration of how utilizing the power of the master’s biopolitical tools can become powerful enough to deconstruct its house despite the risk of co--‐optation or backlash. For them, the multitude is defined by the growing global force of people around the world who are linked together by their common struggles without being formally organized in a hierarchal way. While Hardt and Negri mostly talk about the multitude in relation to global capitalism, their understanding of the commons and analysis of resistance is useful for any ecocritic. They explain, The multitude has matured to such an extent that it is becoming able, through its networks of communication and cooperation … and its production of the common, to sustain an alternative democratic society on its own. … Revolutionary politics must grasp, in the movement of the multitudes and through the accumulation of common and cooperative decisions, the moment of rupture … that can create a new world. In the face of the destructive state of exception of biopower, then, there is also a constituent state of exception of democratic biopolitics, … creating … a new constitutive temporality. (357) Once one understands the world as interconnected—instead of constructed by different nation--‐states and single environments—conditions in one area of the globe couldn’t be conceptually severed from any other. In short, we’d all have a stake in the global commons. Ecocritics can then utilize biopolitics to shape discourse and fight against governmental biopower by waking people up to the pressing need to inaugurate a new future for there to be any future. Influencing other people through argument and end--‐of--‐the--‐world tactics is not the same biopower of the state so long as it doesn’t singularize itself but for temporary moments. Therefore, “it is not unreasonable to hope that in a biopolitical future (after the defeat of biopower) war will no longer be I’lpossible, and the intensity of the cooperation and communication among singularities … will destroy its very possibility” (Hardt and Negri 347). In The context of capitalism, when wealth fails to trickle down it would be seen as a problem for the top since it would stand testament to their failure to equitably distribute wealth. In the context of environmentalism, not--‐in--‐my--‐backyard reasoning that displaces ecological destruction elsewhere would be exposed for the failure that it is. There is no backyard that is not one’s own. Ultimately, images of planetary doom demonstrate how we are all interconnected and in doing so inaugurate a new world where multitudes, and not governments, guide the fate of the planet.

2. Non ideal theory good
Mills 05 Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, 2005
I suggest that this spontaneous reaction, far from being philosophically naïve or jejune, is in fact the correct one. If we start from what is presumably the uncontroversial premise that the ultimate point of ethics is to guide our actions and make ourselves better people and the world a better place, then the framework above will not only be unhelpful, but will in certain respects be deeply antithetical to the proper goal of theoretical ethics as an enterprise. In modeling humans, human capacities, human interaction, human institutions, and human society on ideal-as-idealized-models, in never exploring how deeply different this is from ideal-as-descriptive-models, we are abstracting away from realities crucial to our comprehension of the actual workings of injustice in human interactions and social institutions, and thereby guaranteeing that the ideal-as-idealized-model will never be achieved.

3.  Humanity has a right to exist— anything else excludes infinite future generations which outweighs their impacts on scope- the 1AC’s discussion is uniquely important
Cerutti 14 Furio, Professor of Political Philosophy emeritus at the University of Florence and Adjunct Professor at the Scuola superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa. In the last fifteen years, Cerutti has been aVisiting Professor at Harvard, the Universit´e de Paris 8, the Humboldt Universit ¨at zu Berlin, the London School of Economics and Political Science,(China Foreign Affairs University), Beijing, and Stanford University in Florence. Beyond the publications quoted in this article, Cerutti has written widely on the political identity of the Europeans and the legitimacy of the European Union (last publication: Debating Political Identity and Legitimacy in the European Union, ed. with S. Lucarelli and V. Schmidt, Routledge: London 2011), “Humankind’s First Fundamental Right: Survival,” Constellations, 2014
I have explained elsewhere9 why survival rather than justice is the leading category of a philosophy of global threats. The now thriving literature on justice and climate change misses the point that before we look for ways to establish justice between generations, we have to motivate our interest in their existence and wellbeing, or rather in the existence and wellbeing of humankind.10 While survival of humankind is what best defines our problematic situation, when it comes to the normative aspect I believe that we should assume responsibility for future generations rather than do justice to them; talking responsibility I move from its most elementary manifestation, the responsibility parents take on for their children. Justice as fairness comes in when we have to fight back “generational nepotism:” it is wrong for any generation to spoil the environment without regard to the consequences in the future, far that it may be, that is not just out of respect for those that may harm our children and children’s children. Out of elementary fairness, as expressed in the Golden Rule, we cannot deny parents of the, say, twenty-fifth century the chance to bear and educate their children in decent conditions. Now, survival is a Hobbesian category, as such it sounds like an anathema to critical thinking, just as most categories stemming from the tradition of political realism do. Since under global threats present and future humankind is really endangered in its survival, it is however hard to see the rationale of denying the fact because the name comes from the enemy’s vocabulary. More importantly, there is an essential difference: Hobbes’ survival regards the individual and is therefore self-centered and adversarial (in common parlance, mors tua vita mea), while humankind’s survival as a moral and political goal is by its own definition an universalistic feature. More on this later. A much talked-about issue in this context is the socalled identity problem, which I am however inclined to dismiss. If it means the doubtfulness of any engagement in favor of future generations because we do not know if they will exist (we could decide to stop procreating), the problem is surrounded by an air of futility: there is no imaginable decision process that could effectively lead to a total procreation stop. On the other hand, if only a few humans were alive in the far future, this would be enough of a reason for our engagement. Of course future humanity could never be born because meanwhile the planet may have been burnt out by an asteroid (natural precariousness of human life) or an all-out nuclear war (human-made precariousness). Neither type of precariousness can however be a reason not to endorse the interest of future generations in survival, because reducing that precariousness is exactly the engagement’s telos. The other aspect of the identity problem — the non-identity of posterity’s values and preferences with our own, or their indeterminacy — is not relevant to our case, because the goal for whose attainment we are called to save or sacrifice something for their survival has to do with their sheer survival (in an indispensably civilized framework, as explained above) rather than with our own and the posterity’s moral configuration; in other words, there is no paternalistic attitude in it. In a fairly different meaning, closer to social rather than moral (analytical) theory, identity comes up in another sense. Assuming responsibility for (or, for that matter, being fair to) future generations is not just an altruistic attitude. Not in the sense that we can do as well do so by acting on egoistic grounds: were this the main reason to take action, we were justified to limit our effort to the less costly adaptation policies instead of funding the restructuring of the economy necessary for mitigation, the only way-out from global warming for generations of the far future. To be true, addressing the limitation of global warming or the neutralization of nuclear weapons requires wide-ranging undertakings that can be justified only on grounds of a moral attitude towards future generations rather than of our enlightened self-interest. But doing what we can for the survival of humankind can give ourselves reassurance that our individual life (also seen in the context of our generation’s) is meaningful beyond the limits of our own existence on earth, because doing so helps us shed our isolation as single individuals or single generation and become partners in a wider transgenerational covenant of solidarity. … 3. That the interest to live and to raise children in decent conditions we attribute to future generations ought to be translated into a right is not self-evident. It is not simply that we should abstain from transforming every reasonable claim into a right, and instead reserve this category for the essentials that make the associated life of individuals in the polity possible and acceptable according to each evolutionary stage.11 More importantly, doubts may also arise as to whether it is wise to translate any goal of social and political struggles into a right, that is to “juridify” it instead of focusing on the underlying conflict dynamics and the participation of the conflicting parties. In general I share this preoccupation, and have misgivings at any inflationary expansion of the human rights catalogue. On the other hand, moral rights that do not translate into legal rights12 are politically pointless or at least much less significant than the rights enshrined in a legal order. Also, our case is different, and the issues we are confronted with are more radical than the worries with ‘juridification;’ this is all the truer, since the establishment of a right to survival for humankind would require a long and fierce political and intellectual battle in the first place. First of all, does the right of humanity to survival qualify as a (basic or human) right? Before we proceed, let us note that humankind’s survival is not a good like civil liberties, which is completely at the disposal of human beings; instead, it can depend on the orbits of asteroids and other NEOs.13 The “right of humankind to survival” should therefore be read as a short for “the right of humankind, including future people, to have all previous generations doing their best to ensure their survival and protect them from man-made threats.” In this version, we are clearly afar from the confusion between rights and goals criticized by Dworkin14 (§3.1 in the chapter on Difficult cases), the causation of the good at stake (survival) being elusive, or not completely nor (in the case of climate change) undoubtedly human; also the content of the right is not a physical state, but rather the behavior influencing it. In a manifest way, this also identifies the right’s indispensable correlate, that is the duty of the relevant actors (individuals and institutions) to refrain from behaviors that are likely to cause harm to that good. Whether or not this claim can translate into a right should be investigated from two points of view, those of its structure (a) and its bearer (b). a. As for structure, three of Feinberg’s15 four criteria for being a right are already met (to have a content, a holder and an addressee). The fourth, the ‘source of validation,’ gradually emerges from the argument I am unfolding. Frydman and Haarscher also list four conditions, of which three are already present (titulaire, objet, opposabilite´) – even if more remains to be said about the first one; while the fourth condition (sanction) shall be discussed below in the framework of the constitutionalization problem.16 Finally, let us look at the standard distinction of negative and positive rights, which Shue rightly believes to be substantially untenable. This is also true in our case, because the ‘behavior’ of individuals and institutions, which humanity is entitled to expect, according to the new right, can be implemented either by abstaining in single cases from using or possessing nuclear weapons and emitting excessive GHGs or by establishing new institutions (a global Environmental Protection Agency, say) and strategies (for example, technology transfer from advanced to developing countries to help the latter rein in global warming). What would be acknowledged would be the right, not the policies that according to time and circumstances are devised for its realization. Does this new right share with the other fundamental or human rights the need to be founded in a conception of the human, such as those focused by Donnelly on dignity, by Meyers on moral agency and by Frydman and Haarscher on autonomy?17 Not properly, or not directly. Humanity’s right to survival is a meta-right rather than being the first right and sharing the same foundation with the others.18 Therefore, its foundation is formal rather than rooted in a substantive view of what is human: acknowledging this right is the pre-condition for making all other rights possible. It is their Bedingung der Moglichkeit, ¨ to put it as Kant might have done. Not only in the trivial but sturdy physical sense that human rights can only apply to a living humankind, but not to a ”republic of insects and grass” (Jonathan Schell on the state of the earth after a large nuclear war19). The meta-right as a pre-condition has rather to be understood in the moral sense: no foundation of morality or legality (except in a totally positivistic view of the latter) makes sense if it cannot rely on the respect of the fundamental rights of those (poor populations already affected by global warming, future generations as victims of nuclear war or extreme climate change) harmed by our acts and omissions. Here I mean morality at large, regardless of its being based on a conception of the right or the good. In other words, the two global challenges, which have received so little attention in the mainstream philosophy of the last decades, have indeed philosophical implications capable of undermining the business-as-usual attitude in moral and political theory; I mean the attitude to think of the foundations of morality and polity as if the man-made (modern) world in which they operate had not been substantially altered by humankind’s newly achieved capability to destroy itself and/or the planet. … If philosophical thinking starts with being amazed at something in the world (Plato’s θαυμαζ ειν ´ ), my interest in the present matter was first stimulated by the pre-philosophical amazement I always felt in seeing that in the now enormous human rights discourse (both in politics and academia) so much care is dedicated to the single individuals, and so wide-ranging designs of a cosmopolis to come are based on their rights. Yet nobody seems to take note that the life of all present and future individuals could be annihilated by a nuclear war or upset by catastrophic developments of climate change. It is like insisting on first debating the rights of a ship’s thirdclass passengers3 instead of taking action in the light of the fact that the ship is already taking in seawater from a leak (climate change is already happening) and also risks to hit a mine that is floating around and would send it along with all passengers and crew straight to the ocean depths (by thinking and acting timely, leaks can be filled, mines detected and swept away, all actions that would put the care for third-class passengers on a firmer ground). These dangers are philosophically significant because they tell something about human beings, the only ones who have become able to destroy their own race, as well as about modernity: the possibility of self-destruction sets an end to this era, opens a new one, which can only vaguely be termed post-modern,4 and requires an updated rewriting of the Dialectics of the Enlightenment. It is also politically significant as it challenges present politics to restructure itself by extending its attention to the far future, something which is not possible within the boundaries of modern politics because of its narrow time structure.5 In a more precise language, I term challenges like nuclear weapons (considered in themselves, while nuclear proliferation is but a subphenomenon) and climate change global (in a very specific sense) because they are lethal and planet-wide, can hit approximately everybody on earth and can be reasonably addressed only by the near totality of countries and peoples. They would not wipe out biologically humankind, although this cannot be excluded in case of an all-out nuclear war; but they would destroy human civilization:6 not a set of values, but the set of material and cultural tools (agriculture, communications, transportation and trade) that allow unspecialized animals like the humans to survive and to thrive. It is clear that my thesis presupposes a revised scale of relevance among the issues requiring and stimulating theoretical investigations: in my philosophical view global threats have a greater relevance and are intellectually more challenging than the issues suggested by the media’s headlines (present wars, terrorism, group and minority rights in the US, multiculturalism in Canada or Australia, immigrants in Europe, or, more recently, the crisis of the global economic system). As a reflection upon the deeper longue duree´ determinants of humanity’s fate, political philosophy should not necessarily espouse the agenda suggested by current politics and journalism and, instead, seek its own independent assessment of the state of the world as part of its business; this is a critical attitude that cannot be implemented without a philosophical view on history (not to be confused with a revival of the “grand narratives”). Besides, the shifting of most of Critical Theory to pure normativity has favored the emergence not just of worldviews based on the predominance of Sollen, but also of an exclusive attention on intersubjectivity and its troubles; as if challenges to politics and civilization caused by systemic imperatives (such as the nuclear threat and were beyond the grasp of critical inquiry. What I am attempting in this article is to address an issue such as human rights that is typical of the selfcentered normative approach mentioned and to show how it should be restructured to address the challenges for humankind’s survival. In this attempt I am driven by the intent to debunk the layer of denial (or repression in pshychoanalytical sense) that, more intensely after the end of the Cold War, has removed the nuclear threat from the philosophical reflection on modernity and has later prevented climate change from entering the main agenda of Critical Theory. There is also an epistemological aspect in this: a critical Zeitdiagnose, or an informed assessment of where history has taken us to in our post-modern times is not possible without first taking what hard science has to say about the threats for humankind very seriously.7 With rare exceptions, critical theorists seem to be reluctant to address the philosophical issues raised by global challenges, not to mention their complete denial beginning with Horkheimer and Adorno in the Fifties and Sixties (when Mutual Assured Destruction became a real possibility) of the meaning of nuclear weapons. It is as if Critical Theory, despite its claim to be a general assessment of our civilization, had accepted a tacit division of labor in which its competence is restricted to social justice (in continuation of its original being rooted in the Marxian critique of political economy) and the “damaged” subjectivity. The rest of the real world is left to a purely Hobbesian (and later Luhmannian) reading, or to the perception of side-figures such as Karl Jaspers or Gunther Anders. ¨ A last epistemological remark: starting from problems and threats that, however socially generated, come up as physical events and are accounted for by hard science has the advantage that philosophy can work on them without first engaging in a complicate and doubtful theorizing about how the world should be reshaped according to a general normative theory. This ad hoc theorizing shows the ability or inability of a philosophical view to come to terms with problems that are of paramount importance to everybody, not just to the practitioners of academic philosophy Schulphilosophie.
4. Moral uncertainty means we default to preventing extinction.
Bostrom 11 --¶ (2011) Nick Bostrom, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford Martin School and Faculty of Philosophy
These reflections on moral uncertainty suggest an alternative, complementary way of looking at existential risk. Let me elaborate. Our present understanding of axiology might well be confused. We may not now know—at least not in concrete detail—what outcomes would count as a big win for humanity; we might not or even yet be able to imagine the best ends of our journey. If we are indeed profoundly uncertain about our ultimate aims, then we should recognize that there is a great option value in preserving—and ideally improving—our ability to recognize value and to steer the future accordingly. Ensuring that there will be a future version of humanity with great powers and a propensity to use them wisely is plausibly the best way available to us to increase the probability that the future will contain a lot of value. To do this, we must prevent any existential catastrophe.    
No intent foresight or act omission distinction:
A. The choice to omit constitutes an act in itself since when we intend an act we also must intend not to do anything else
B. Willing foreseen effects are necessary to will the end as a whole, otherwise the intention would never actualize itself.
C. Agent specificity - Intent is unverifiable and reified by systems that claim to be good which makes ethics subjective because anyone can claim to have had good intent – governments must be held accountable

A1 Solvency1:45
Plan Text: Japan should ban the production of nuclear energy
- Plan popular among public
- Earthquakes/volcanoes adv built in
- Current safety insufficient
- Nuclear energy unsustainable
Mainichi 15 Japan’s National Daily. March, 8-12-2015, "Editorial: Japan should not depend on nuclear power," Mainichi, http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20150812/p2a/00m/0na/008000c NB
However, the government's basic stance toward nuclear power has remained unchanged since the outbreak of the disaster, and lessons learned from the catastrophic accident have not been sufficiently put to good use. The restart of the Sendai plant's reactor must not be a step toward reviving the pre-disaster myth of nuclear plants' infallible safety. Lessons learned from the disaster include: Nuclear accidents can happen even if countermeasures are taken and that damage caused by nuclear accidents to people, the environment and society differ markedly from that triggered by other accidents in terms of quality and scale. Moreover, Japan is a volcanic country prone to earthquakes. Such being the case, it is highly risky to continue operating atomic power stations in this country. Nuclear energy is far from being a sustainable energy source when considering how to dispose of radioactive waste. Therefore, the Mainichi Shimbun has insisted that Japan should stop using nuclear plants as early as possible. At the same time, the Mainichi Shimbun has said there could be occasions where Japan must approve of the minimum necessary operation of atomic power plants under certain conditions, taking into account economic and social risks that would be caused by an immediate halt to all nuclear plants. However, the latest reactivation of the Sendai plant's No. 1 reactor does not meet such conditions and should not have been approved. In the first place, the government has not clearly characterized the restart as part of the process of phasing out nuclear power. The basic energy plan approved by the Cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last year states that Japan's reliance on atomic power will be reduced to the minimum possible level. As such, it is the national government's duty to draw up a road map toward steadily phasing out nuclear power in line with this policy. However, the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry has set the ratio of nuclear power to total electric power to be generated in Japan in 2030 at 20-to-22 percent. To achieve this, it would be necessary to rebuild or extend the use of aging nuclear reactors beyond the 40-year limit, and construct new reactors. This indicates the government intends to return to a society dependent on atomic power. The essential condition of minimizing damage that would be caused by a nuclear accident to local residents has not been met. It is true that the new regulatory standards require nuclear plant operators to implement stricter safety measures, assuming serious accidents that had not been assumed under the previous standards. The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) that examines whether nuclear reactors meet the regulatory standards has become more independent of the government. However, these measures to beef up safety measures are necessary conditions but are not sufficient. In the Fukushima nuclear crisis, confusion in the chain of command worsened the situation. Information on the spread of radioactive substances was not provided to local residents, causing some of them to flee to areas where radiation levels were higher. The evacuation of hospitalized patients and residents of nursing care facilities was greatly confused and many people died while evacuating or at evacuationn shelters. Following the accident, the zone where local bodies are required to work out evacuation plans for local residents was expanded from 8-10 kilometers from nuclear plants to 30 kilometers. Evacuation plans have been worked out for residents near the Sendai plant, but evacuation drills have not been conducted to secure the effectiveness of the plan. The national government has tolerated the local body's failure. The attitude to hastily restart the Sendai nuclear reactor without taking sufficient safety measures for local residents is apparently based on the myth of nuclear plants' infallible safety. To ensure the safety of local residents, the local government should conduct evacuation drills, clarify problems involving the evacuation plan and even suspend operations at the plant depending on the results of the drills. A lack of clarity for responsibility over reactivating nuclear plants has not changed since before the March 2011 outbreak of the nuclear plant crisis. Since nuclear plants are operated by private companies as business activities, power companies are primarily responsible for restarting atomic power stations and ensuring safety at the plants. However, nuclear plants are operated as part of the government's policy. The government intends to approve reactivation of nuclear reactors as long as the reactors meet the regulatory standards, while the NRA is of the view that meeting the standards does not necessarily mean the plants are absolutely safe. This has raised concerns that nobody would be held responsible if another nuclear accident were to take place, just as was the case with the Fukushima crisis. There are more fundamental problems. The government has failed to show its determination to promote a nuclear and energy policy while gaining public understanding. In most opinion polls conducted by various news organizations, those who are opposed to restarting nuclear plants have outnumbered those in favor since the March 2011 accident. In an Aug. 8-9 survey conducted by the Mainichi Shimbun, 57 percent of the respondents expressed opposition to resuming operations at the No. 1 reactor at the Sendai power station. Still, no means have been secured to reflect public opinion in the country's energy policy even following the nuclear accident that has had such a huge impact on local residents. The process of using an advisory panel to the Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry to determine the direction of the nation's energy policy has remained unchanged since before the crisis. The previous government led by the Democratic Party of Japan, which is now the largest opposition party, at least attempted to conduct a deliberative poll and took other measures to reflect public opinion in the energy policy. However, the current administration has not even shown such a stance. The fact that radioactive waste will only accumulate as long as atomic power plants are operated poses a serious challenge. It is necessary to consider final disposal of radioactive waste on the assumption that it will take 100,000 years before such waste becomes harmless, but Japan has no prospects for working out any feasible disposal plan. Even if a nuclear accident were not to occur again, atomic power stations can not be maintained over a long period as long as no solution is found to problems involving the final disposal of radioactive waste. First and foremost, the government should draw up a specific road map toward scrapping nuclear power. It is also necessary to create a system under which the NRA would evaluate local governments' evacuation plans and drills in advance. The restart of the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant should not be used as a springboard to revive Japan's dependence on atomic power
Decommissioning will be issued through four steps
Schmittem 16 Schmittem, Marc (Analyst for EU-Japan Energy Cooperation ). “Nuclear Decomissioning in Japan- Opportunities for European Companies”. EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation. Tokyo, March 2016. http://www.eu-japan.eu/sites/default/files/publications/docs/2016-03-nuclear-decommissioning-japan-schmittem-min_0.pdf NB
Decommissioning is the responsibility of the operator of a nuclear facility. The NRA defines the decommissioning of NPPs in Japan by the following four activities: Dismantling of the relevant reactor facilities (1), transfer of nuclear fuel (2), removal of irradiated material (3), and the disposal of radioactive waste (4)19. Within these boundaries, nuclear operators can design their own decommissioning strategies. The currently preferred approach for commercial NPPsin Japan combines immediate dismantling with deferred dismantling. Immediate dismantling is a strategy where dismantling begins immediately after the approval of the project, whereas in deferred dismantling, the reactor is first placed in safe storage for a number of years to reduce the radioactive inventory. The operators of commercial power reactors in Japan have opted for such safe storage periods, but the dismantling of secondary facilities will begin as soon as possible. Like the decommissioning strategies of many other countries, the basic decommissioning strategy in Japan consists of sequential stages: Site preparation (including site characterisation, defueling and decontamination), safe storage, and deconstruction and dismantling (DandD) (see Figure 1). Waste management and disposal is also a part of the decommissioning process. The basic strategy envisions this as only becoming an issue during the DandD stage, but in practice waste from decommissioning also needs to be handled at earlier stages. While this is acknowledged in the individual decommissioning plans for Japanese reactors, lingering problems with waste management have led to delays in some ongoing decommissioning projects (see the description of the individual decommissioning projects in Part II and the discussion of waste management later in this chapter). The newest decommissioning plans also show a tendency for more prolonged safe storage periods.¶ In the first stage of the decommissioning project, the fuel in the reactor core and the spent fuel¶ pool (SFP) is retrieved and transported to either a temporary storage site21 or a reprocessing¶ plant22¶ . After a survey and characterisation of the radioactive inventory of the facility, systems¶ and facilities are decontaminated to reduce the radioactive dose rates in the work spaces and to¶ prepare the site for dismantling. In the second stage, the reactor core is placed in safe storage, during which basic safety, monitoring and cooling systems are maintained. This stage is meant to reduce the radioactive inventory in the reactor through natural decay processes. The duration of this phase is usually around 10 years for physicochemical reasons, but a certain period of relative inactivity in the decommissioning process might also be necessary for some utilities to recover the financial losses from the premature or long-term shut-down of the reactor after the Fukushima accidents (see part I.6). The dismantling of non-essential and redundant systems and peripheral facilities also begins at this point. The safe storage stage is followed by the DandD stage. During this phase, again in a number of sequential steps, the various components of the reactor are dismantled. This stage sees the highest demand for specialised equipment, particularly during the dismantling of the highly radioactive reactor pressure vessel (RPV) and its internals, where remote-controlled, submersible equipment is required for safety reasons. After the reactor has been dismantled, the reactor building and the remaining facilities are dismantled. Large quantities of waste, both radioactive and non-radioactive (see section I.4), are generated in this stage. The Japanese strategy envisions the implementation of strategies to reduce the amount of waste, through means such as a clearance system and the recycling of non-radioactive waste. At the end of the decommissioning process an application for verification of completion is submitted to the NRA, which then assesses the final state of the site. If the measurable radioactive dose rates are within the legal limits and all targets of the decommissioning plan have been reached, the NRA formally terminates the licence of the operator and releases the site from regulatory control. The site of the former reactor can then be reused for new purposes. The current plan is to build new reactors on the sites of decommissioned reactors, due to difficulties in acquiring sites for new reactors and an expected unwillingness of the local population to develop the land of the former NPP for agricultural or residential purposes23. However, in light of strengthened safety regulations, stricter licensing criteria and growing opposition to the operation of NPPs in the surrounding communities and local governments, it is not yet known if this strategy will be economically and politically feasible.
Several Barriers to Renewables:

1. Nuclear power companies block renewables
   Wingfield-Hayes 15 Wingfield-Hayes, Rupert 6 May 2015, "Japan's Renewable Revolution At Risk - BBC News". BBC News. N. p., 2016. Web. 12 Sept. 2016. Rupert Anthony Wingfield-Hayes is a British journalist who is the BBC's Tokyo correspondent, having previously served as the BBC's correspondent in Beijing, Moscow and the Middle East KB
   Higher fuel bills and higher emissions are bad for Japan, bad for the planet. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's answer? Turn the nuclear plants back on. But in the four years since the nuclear plants were shut down, Japan has also begun to witness something else - a renewable energy revolution. And the return to nuclear power may be putting that under threat. Japan is a mountainous island nation with a sunny climate and lots of active volcanoes. In other words there are lots of potential ways to generate renewable energy - hydro, wind, tidal, solar and, the big one, geothermal. And yet prior to 2011, just 9 of Japan's power came from renewables - and almost all of that from hydropower. Only 1 came from solar. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Following the Fukushima disaster, the Democratic Party government enacted a "feed-in tariff". Anyone could put solar panels on their roof, connect up to the grid and the power companies would be required to pay them a generous 40 Yen per kWh. The response was dramatic. Money poured in to solar, and not just on people's rooftops. In 2011 Japan had just 4.9 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. Just three years later, at the end of 2014, that had leapt to 23GW. It put Japan ahead of Italy as the number three solar energy producer in the world. In November 2013 electronics giant Kyocera began producing power from Japan's biggest solar array so far, nearly 1.5 sq km of panels built on the site an old shipyard in Kagoshima bay. It can produce 70MW of power, enough to power more than 20,000 homes. That is just the beginning. The company has plans to build a 430MW plant on one of Japan's many offshore islands, big enough to power 130,000 homes. It's all great news, except it has all suddenly ground to a halt. At the end of last year Japan's big power companies began telling solar producers they could take no more electricity from them. At the same time the government dropped the price utilities would have to pay for electricity from new solar to 27 Yen per kWh. Suddenly the calculus for building more solar has been put in serious doubt. No-one is suggesting a conspiracy. But the timing is significant. In the face of widespread opposition, the Abe government is pushing ahead with a return to nuclear power. His most persuasive argument for doing so is that Japan needs the cheap reliable "base load" power that only nuclear can provide. That claim flies in the face of scientific evidence that Japan could greatly increase its output from renewable sources. Japan's geothermal potential is huge. It has 119 active volcanoes. Geothermal is cheap, reliable and works 24 hours a day. But so far only a tiny fraction of it is being exploited. It is odd that at the same that it is focusing so much time and energy on a return to unpopular and risky nuclear power, the Japanese government's policy on renewables appears to be in such complete disarray.
   2. Fiscal tradeoff. FIT tariffs deter carbon usage, banning nuclear would supercharge current renewable development
   - feed in tarriff
   Takase 14 Kae Takase, "Renewable Energy Burst in Japan", NAPSNet Special Reports, May 27, 2014, http://nautilus.org/napsnet/napsnet-special-reports/energy_burst_japan/ NB
   After the Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear accident, most Japanese conservative policymakers changed their public stance from “reluctant toward renewables, positive toward nuclear”, to “positive toward both renewable and nuclear” or “positive toward renewables, negative to nuclear.” It is an interesting indicator of the profound impact of the Fukushima accident on the Japanese public psyche that politicians such as former Prime Minister Koizumi are now supporting a “no nuclear”, or no further nuclear, energy future for Japan, given their strong support for nuclear power in the past. Feed-in tariff started for all renewable sources of electricity in July, 2012. The tariff rates are set high enough to encourage many kinds of companies, from small to large, to enter the renewable power business. Since it has been only less than 2 years since the FIT started, the majority of newly operating renewable power plants are photovoltaic systems, because other types of renewable electricity sources require longer lead times for development and installation before they begin generating power. There are, however, many projects going on for other sources of renewable electricity, and if the Japanese government does its best to deploy renewables in the way that current policies direct, Japan can overcome deployment issues and reach a future in which a large percentage of the electricity used in Japan is generated from renewable resources. Even at high levels of renewable electricity deployment, the surcharge on retail electricity tariffs associated with the FIT will be less than 300 yen per household per month in 2020, for an average household use of 300kWh per month. This estimate incorporates an assumption that the installed capacity of renewable power will double by 2030, but capital cost decreases, for example, for PVs and wind power plants, could lower the expected surcharge. In order to achieve success in transitioning the Japanese energy system to mostly renewable energy, a stable and fair level FIT tariff is needed to ensure the renewable energy business of stable profits until the capital costs of renewable technologies decline sufficiently to make them cost-competitive with conventional electricity options.1 The cost of renewable power, especially wind power, is reported to be less than fossil-fueled power in other countries, and thus has the potential to be very chap energy. If the cost of renewable energy decline to levels similar to the costs of fossil fuels, then power grid upgrades, and/or new types of systems to support the addition of renewable electricity sources to the grid, need to be realized. The Japanese government is conducting several demonstration projects for upgrading transmission lines and interconnection points to strengthen the power grid. Along with the deployment of batteries, hydrogen production and conversion systems, pumped storage hydroelectric plants, undersea compressed air storage, and/or other technologies for storing surplus renewable electricity for use during periods of higher demand, we can expect Japan to obtain 50-70 of its electricity from renewable sources in 2050. A policy to encourage deployment of renewable heating systems is also under discussion indeploy more solar heating systems, biomass cogeneration systems, and similar technologie Japan. Here, the goal is to s. In Japan, however, district heating is not as popular as in some of the other countries of the region (including the Koreas and northern China) due to high construction costs, thus there will need to be some changes in technologies and/or policies if renewable heating systems are to be widely deployed. In the meantime, there has not yet been any practical policy discussion regarding the large-scale deployment of renewable heating sources. To shift to a low carbon society, for example, one in which GHG emissions are 60-80 less than current levels, the first step will be to improve end-use efficiency—the efficiency with which electricity and other fuels are used to meet society’s needs for energy services—as much as possible. To encourage energy efficiency, it is very important not to lower tariffs too early, even as renewable electricity costs decline, and not to change the promised FIT rates, and to in tandem implement a comprehensive policy for promoting energy efficiency improvements. Ultimately, Japan’s high electricity prices, kept so both by the structure of the electricity industry and by the need to purchase expensive imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) to fuel additional power generation since the nuclear fleet has been off-line, are both a spur to the development of renewable energy, but also a reason for utilities to seek to retain control over generation and hence, pricing. Reducing electricity costs would relieve an economic burden on Japan’s businesses and consumers, and help to make Japanese industry more economically competitive, but doing so may be somewhat at odds with incentivizing renewable energy through high feed-in tariffs and other support. And of course, implementing renewable energy also accomplishes other important long-term goals, namely reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. The outcome of the push and pull between the forces in favor of and resisting the restart of Japan’s nuclear fleet will also affect the urgency and pace with which energy efficiency and renewable energy are deployed in Japan. Improving the efficiency of energy use and implementing renewable energy would benefit not only future generations, but current households and businesses as well would profit from by saving energy (and associated energy costs), as well as profiting from the sale of renewable energy outputs. Further, if Japan can establish a path to realization of a low carbon energy system, the lessons learned in doing so will benefit Japanese industries, as they will be able to provide goods and services associated with energy efficiency and low carbon energy not only domestically, but to other nations as well.
   Renewables are ready:
2. Fiscal changes in Japan indicate overwhelming capability for renewable expansion
   Dewit 15 Andrew Dewit (Andrew DeWit is Professor in Rikkyo University’s School of Policy Studies and an editor of The Asia-Pacific Journal. His recent publications include “Climate Change and the Military Role in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response,” in Paul Bacon and Christopher Hobson (eds) Human Security and Japan’s Triple Disaster (Routledge, 2014), “Japan’s renewable power prospects,” in Jeff Kingston (ed) Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2013), and (with Kaneko Masaru and Iida Tetsunari) “Fukushima and the Political Economy of Power Policy in Japan” in Jeff Kingston (ed) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11 (Routledge, 2012). He is lead researcher for a five-year (2010-2015) Japanese-Government funded project on the political economy of the Feed-in Tariff.), 10-7-2015, "Japan’s Bid to Become a World Leader in Renewable Energy," Global Research, http://www.globalresearch.ca/japans-bid-to-become-a-world-leader-in-renewable-energy/5480274. Asia Pacific Journal, Global Resaerch NB
   Some of the most persuasive evidence of the LDP’s expanding commitment to renewable energy and efficiency is found in the central government’s budget, particularly the central agencies’ requests for the coming fiscal year (April 1, 2016 to March 31, 2017). During the summer of 2015, Japan’s fiscal process was notable for energy-related requests that mushroomed over the previous year. One standout example is the Ministry of Environment’s (MoE) submission for renewable energy and efficiency projects, which is fully 62 higher than its fiscal year 2015 spending.5 We shall explore these and related requests in greater detail presently, comparing them with budgets under the DPJ. But first, it is important to point out that these budget outlines are preliminary. In Japan’s fiscal process, central agencies submit their initial budget requests to the Ministry of Finance (MOF) by the end of August, which is followed by negotiations among MOF’s budget examiners and the various ministries and agencies. These negotiations generally last until about December, and result in a draft budget. It is likely that about YEN 5 trillion will be trimmed from the YEN 102 trillion budget request. But according to an analysis in the September 5, 2015 Asahi Shimbun these cuts are likely to be centred on social security.6 It is highly unlikely that the Abe cabinet did not approve the dramatic increases in proposed spending on renewable energy and efficiency, and thus they are probably not going to be sacrificed.¶ In addition, the expanded energy-related project requests are in part to be funded by extra revenues gleaned by increased “green” taxation of fossil fuels. This gives the spending programmes additional protection, because one rationale for the taxes is to increase incentives for the development and deployment of alternative energy. In spite of continuing steel-industry pressure to have such taxes axed,7 the LDP did not roll back the carbon taxes that were introduced in October of 2012, and have since been raised in stages. The taxes are set to reach YEN 289/ton of CO2 with the scheduled April 1, 2016 increase.8 As described above, the MoE’s energy-related fiscal request for 2016 was 62 higher than its fiscal 2015 initial budget. The MoE’s total request for 2016 was YEN 1.68 trillion, a 33 increase over the fiscal 2015 appropriation. One of the factors driving this overall increase is the Japanese government’s commitment to reducing its carbon emissions by 26 by 2030 versus 2013 levels. As a major part of this overall aim, the MoE’s renewable and efficiency-related spending requests for 2016 amount to just under YEN 176 billion.¶ The MoE is, of course, not the only central agency with a prominent role in directing public finance at renewable energy and efficiency projects undertaken by Japan’s local governments, private firms, NPOs and other actors. The METI is another major supplier of subsidies for such projects. In the energy field, the METI’s requests for 2016 total just under YEN 976 billion. This figure is a significant increase on the YEN 796.5 billion in the fiscal 2015 initial budget, and efficiency and renewables receive striking increases. To be sure, one of Japan’s leading journalists on energy-related matters, Ishida Masaya, criticizes the METI’s fiscal 2016 request for including about YEN 200 billion in spending on nuclear (including YEN 133 billion in support to local sites of nuclear reactors). This figure is roughly the same as the nuclear spending in fiscal 2015, which totals YEN 185 billion. Ishida regards maintaining this level of support for nuclear as being inconsistent with the new (from 2014) energy basic plan’s explicit commitment to maximize renewables and minimize nuclear.¶ But Ishida devotes considerably more attention to the METI’s aim to nearly double its support of efficiency and conservation, raising its fiscal 2015 YEN 127.7 billion spending in this category to YEN 242.9 billion. He adds that this spending to cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce power consumption is largely targeted at factories, which are the most costly venues for achieving gains in energy efficiency and conservation. The METI’s spending on this category will thus nearly triple, from YEN 50 billion in 2015 to YEN 135.6 billion in 2016. Ishida rightly focuses on this initiative, as the METI itself describes the current need for efficiency and conservation as comparable to the period in the immediate wake of the 1970s oil shocks.9¶ METI is generally seen as powerfully influenced by vested energy interests, including the nuclear village and those focused on fossil fuels. So it is also telling that METI plans to more than double its spending in support of renewable-energy projects, from YEN 35.8 billion in 2015 to YEN 81.8 billion in 2016. METI will also raise its RandD on efficiency from YEN 50.7 to YEN 63.2 billion and its RandD on renewables from YEN 49.3 to YEN 53.7. METI is also asking for a tripling in its funding on hydrogen-related deployment (fuel cells and hydrogen stations) and research (including renewable power to gas10), from fiscal 2015’s YEN 11.9 billion to YEN 37.1 billion.11¶ Another central agency with a strong role in fostering the diffusion of renewables and efficiency is the Ministry of Infrastructure, Land, Transport and Tourism (MLIT). Since 2011, it has been undertaking one of the most interesting of Japan’s waste-heat related initiatives, through its “B-DASH” (Breakthrough by Dynamic Approach in Sewage High Technology) Project.12 Japan’s potential for waste-heat capture in its sewerage systems has been assessed at 15 million households’ worth of heat-energy use.13 The fiscal 2016 request for the B-DASH project aimed at exploiting this energy potential is YEN 3.6 billion, and via the initial fiscal 2015 budget the MLIT already has a YEN 901.2 billion fund for waste-heat recovery and other renewable-energy (e.g. methane) from Japan’s 460,000 kilometres of sewers, via the MLIT social infrastructure development disbursements.14 This project has already led to such initiatives as Toyota City’s “Future Challenge City” partnership, announced on August 26, 2015, with Sekisui Chemical on heat-recovery in the city’s sewers.15¶ Moreover, one of the increased efficiency-related fiscal requests by the MLIT is for housing and building stock. The MLIT fiscal 2015 budget for this category totals YEN 116 million, but the request for 2016 is YEN 32.2 billion, or well over 300 times more. This prodigious increase apparently reflects a powerful commitment to raise efficiency in the country’s building stock after new, but non-obligatory, efficiency standards introduced in 2013 had little effect.16¶ Other central agencies with a direct interest in the diffusion of renewable energy and efficiency include the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) as well as the Ministry of Agriculture, Farms and Forestry (MAFF). Their roles in fostering the deployment of renewable energy focus less on the technology per se than on the coordination of local governments (MIC) as well as primary-sector producers, such as forestry firms in biomass (MAFF). Their proposed spending on energy projects generally did not leap as noticeably as the cases surveyed above, save for the MIC’s special programme of fostering the deployment of largely biomass-fired district heating and cooling systems in local areas. This programme is the “Distributed energy infrastructure project.” It received YEN 240 million in fiscal 2015, but is slated to more than triple to YEN 700 million in fiscal 2016. The bulk of MIC’s large-scale spending increases are centred on the ICT infrastructure that is one of the core network technologies in Japan’s nationwide rollout of the smart community, internet of things, and related projects that cross multiple agency jurisdictions.17 The MIC spending on ICT in the fiscal 2015 initial budget is YEN 115.3 billion but is slated to increase to YEN 137.8 in fiscal 2016.18The above projects are in themselves good reasons to pay close attention to the MIC. But in addition, the current MIC Minister, Takaichi Sanae, has been a very strong proponent of renewable energy for several years. Under her leadership, the MIC bureaucracy have continued with their significant organizational initiatives to put local governments in charge of energy. We shall examine these initiatives in the subsequent section on institutional changes the LDP has made to foster the accelerated diffusion of renewables and efficiency. But for the present, note that the MIC collated the distributed and renewable-energy project spending – by the MIC itself as well as METI, MoE, and MAFF – relevant to local government. Takaichi presented the results of the MIC survey on these matters at a September 4, 2015 press conference. She pointed out that there are 31 subsidy programs, worth a total of YEN 102.7 billion in fiscal 2015 as well as an additional YEN 126 billion via the 2014 fiscal year’s supplementary budget.19
   2. Computer models prove that Japan can go 100 renewables if they could continue development
   - japan is a great env.
   Esteban 14 Esteban, Miguel. Portugal-Pereira, Joana. “Post-disaster resilience of a 100 renewable energy system in Japan”. 1. Gradutate Program of Sustainability Science- Global Leadership Initiative (GPSS-GLI), Graduate School of Frontier Sciences.The University of Tokyo. Kashiwanoha, Kashiwa City, Japan. 2. Energy Planning Program, Graduate School of Engineering, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Centro de Tecnologia, Bloco C, Sala 211, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, Rio de Janeiro RJ21941-972, Brazil. Accepted February 13, 2014 NB
   Proposed future 100 renewable energy system. The present paper modifies the methodology proposed by Esteban et al. 22,38 to take into account electricity demand for each hour of the year to calculate the reliability of an expanded renewable energy system. The method uses historical meteoro- logical data from AMeDAS (Automated Meteorological Data Acquisition System of the Japan Meteorological Agency) 50 for 2001 to estimate the hourly production of electricity. The method simulates the production of wind farms and PV panels distributed throughout Japan using equations that takes into account climatic conditions at each point (see Esteban et al. 22,38, for more de- tails). The software is EXCEL based, with the climate data for each point pasted and processed directly in the spreadsheet. The resulting file, at over 100 MB, was run using an Intel i7 processor laptop, taking up to 1 min to compute a given scenario. Using an EXCEL spreadsheet allowed the authors to observe directly all data manipulation, and was thus thought to be more intuitive than building the model using a computer language (such as Fortran or Cþþ). ¶ Solar panels were considered to be installed in major population centres. For the sake of simplicity, and due to computational limi- tations, the population of Japan was grouped into 15 different re- gions, with the weather station in each regional capital being used to determine the amount of solar electricity that can be produced in each hour of the year. Conversion efficiency was only assumed as 20, not much higher than that at present, with a list of the assumed characteristics of the solar cells given in Table 3 (for a more detailed discussion on conversion efficiency see Ref. 38). Regarding wind farms (Table 4) the authors considered only 24 of the largest wind farms. Future increases in turbine numbers are assumed to be located around the areas were these farms are currently situated, and the future proportional distribution of wind turbines is hence kept identical to their present spatial distribution. The maximum rated capacity of wind turbines was kept at 10 MW, which is probably easily achieved in the future (see Ref. 38). The ratio of solar wind installed capacity was kept at 31, as Esteban et al. 22 calculate this to be the most advantageous for the overall system stability of the country. ¶ If solar and wind power cannot meet electricity demand, the simulation will start to use other types of energy to balance the system. First it will resort to hydropower, then to biomass, and finally to hydro pumped-storage. In this case, the simulation fol- lows 23, and assumes that the installed capacity will be 19.4 GW and that the maximum storage capacity would be 1.2 PJ. Conven- tional hydropower would stay constant, with no new dams built. ¶ Finally, if the system cannot balance, the electricity from electric cars is used. In this sense it will be assumed that there are 35 million electric vehicles by 2030, and that each car has a battery with a 50-kWh storage capacity, they will represent a total storage capacity of 1750 GWh (see Ref. 25). The transmission capacity from batteries to grid was assumed to be high, at around 100 GW, as in many cases the batteries would only be used to directly power appliances within a house. ¶ A total of six different scenarios were analysed, combining different installed capacities of wind and solar power, but keeping all other renewables constant, in order to better visualise the re- sults (see Table 5). The electricity production due to solar and wind was worked out using meteorological data, while the production of hydropower, biomass and geothermal plants was assumed to be always available (the capacity factor of these plants is given in Table 6). Three different scenarios of energy consumption (see Fig. 2) were considered. Scenario A describes a Business as Usual scenario, Scenario B represents 10 saving in electricity consump- tion during the summer, and Scenario C corresponds to 20 sum- mer savings. In total this provides a matrix of 18 different scenarios of energy production and consumption. Reliability of a 100 renewable energy system ¶ Current electricity producing systems use basically two types of plants, base load plants that meet the constant electricity demands and other load-following, or “cyclical” plants, that can quickly be switched on and off to meet cyclical variations in demand 54. The challenge of a 100 renewable system would thus be to demon- strate that it can reliably meet electricity demand. However, the difference between a centralised and decentralised system resides in that the partial failure of the system would not necessarily result in blackouts for the entire population. Hence, essentially the grid could be re-built in a way in which large industries and power operators would be guaranteed energy supply, but housing would be given a lower priority, as they could supplement their energy needs from batteries and solar power. Such a system would auto- matically switch off air-conditioning units once batteries fell below a certain level, to guarantee that food and other perishable good did not get wasted. As such, even if the system could not supply the overall demand 100 of the time in one year, large blackouts would not take place. Furthermore, such a system would be more resilient the effect of large-scale natural disasters. ¶ As Ref. 38 points out, peaks in both solar and wind electricity production occur during the peak periods of electricity usage (during the afternoon), and this trend is generally repeated throughout the year in most locations. In fact, due to the smooth- ening effect of renewable energy installation in a country the size of Japan, a combination of solar and wind technologies will always yield some electric power 22. Fig. 3 shows the total electricity production and consumption for each of the scenarios considered. The amount of electricity wasted (such as extra wind during the night hours that cannot be stored) is also indicated. In this sense, scenario A1, B1 and C1 represent the greatest electricity wastage, due to a high level of redundancy in the system (wind or solar capacity that is not used most of the year, but that is needed only for the summer months). However, these scenarios though result in the lower levels of system stress (defined as the  of hours in the year when demand is over 80 of the available capacity), and a completely reliable grid (i.e. when the installed capacity can meet 100 of electricity demand). Other scenarios represent progres- sively lower electricity wastage, though at the expense of system stress and reliability, as the chances of electricity shortage during the summer months increases In this sense scenario C6 is quite interesting, as it results in very little electricity wastage, despite reaching over 98.4 reliability. Obviously, in this case the system achieves higher stability by curtailing electricity consumption during the summer months, resulting in a reduced necessity for extra generation capacity for these months (that would be idle during most of the year). Thus, scenario C6 appears to be the best option, and means that attempting energy reduction policies dur- ing the summer months should go hand-in-hand with the devel- opment of a 100 renewable energy system. Finally, Fig. 4 also shows the system reliability without batteries (i.e. the  of hours that the system can meet demand without having to resort to the energy stored in batteries). ¶ One of the problems often cited about the inclusion of tech- nologies such as wind in the electricity mix is that they can increase the ramping rate, or the speed at which load-following units must increase and decrease output 54. However, the current system does not suffer from this problem as wind and solar form the basis of the system and only a limited number of other energy sources are considered (biomass, hydro, pumped storage and batteries). All of these can be switched on or off relatively quickly, in comparison to other types of plants such as nuclear. Furthermore, “the combina- tion of multiple wind sites tends to smooth out the aggregated wind generation in a system, which reduces the per-unit size of ramps and mitigates the range of flexibility required” 54. The inclusion of more technologies, such as ocean or geothermal en- ergy, could also further enhance the smoothening effect and lower the ramping rate. ¶ Japan is a country that is particularly threatened by natural di- sasters. These events can have important consequences for the generation and distribution of electric power, and thus future government policy should attempt to make electricity supply more resilient and de-centralized, so that failure in one part of the system does not deprive large sectors of the population or industry of electricity. Prior to 2011, energy policy in Japan was dictated by the large power companies, which convinced the public of nuclear power trustworthiness. However, nuclear energy has also shown how it is unreliable in an earthquake-prone country, and the gov- ernment should try to curtail the power of the monopolised pro- duction and promote small-scale electricity generation. The present paper, therefore, attempts to assess the feasibility of a 100 renewable energy electricity system in Japan by the year 2030 in order to achieve a higher level electricity resilience. To this end, a model that simulates future electricity production based on hourly wind and solar data was developed, using estimated future hourly electricity demand in Japan for the year 2030. ¶ Through the analysis carried out, the authors showed that a large-scale 100 renewable PV-wind-hydro-biomass energy sys- tem in Japan can be reliable. Such as system would use pump-up storage and electric batteries to balance the daily fluctuations in supply and demand. The system is generally very stable during the winter, spring and autumn periods in Japan, with occasional small amounts of battery storage needed for the system to be able to successfully meet the electricity demand during these periods. The most important challenge of the system would be providing suffi- cient electricity to meet the summer demand peak. Scenarios A1e B1eC1 reveal the most optimised performance, as they guarantee stable and reliable supply. However, these scenarios have almost 93 higher installed capacity than scenarios A6eB6eC6, and most of this extra capacity would stand idle throughout the year. On the other hand, scenarios A6eB6eC6 reduce the idle installed capacity, though at the cost of decreasing system reliability. However, sce- nario C6 shows that if electricity consumption during summer months can be curtailed by 20, then the system appears to be very stable (98.4 reliability).
   Nuclear expansion fails: 
3. Legal court cases after F-D make nuclear expansion unfeasible
   Tsukimori 7-22 Osamu Tsukimori and Aaron Sheldrick, 7-22-2016, "Japan business lobby says Abe government can't rely on nuclear energy," Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-energy-idUSKCN1020XH NB
   Japan's use of nuclear power is unlikely to meet a government target of returning to near pre-Fukushima levels and the world's No.3 economy needs to get serious about boosting renewables, a senior executive at a top business lobby said. Under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's energy policies, nuclear is supposed to supply a fifth of energy generation by 2030, but Teruo Asada, vice chairman of the Japan Association of Corporate Executives, said Japan was unlikely to get anywhere near this. The influential business lobby has issued a proposal urging Tokyo to remove hurdles for renewable power amid the shaky outlook for nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The move shows how business attitudes are now shifting as reactor restarts get held up by legal challenges, safety issues and public scepticism. "We have a sense of crisis that Japan will become a laughing stock if we do not encourage renewable power," said Asada, who is also chairman of trading house Marubeni Corp. Long dependent on imported fossil fuels, Japan's government and big business actively promoted nuclear energy despite widespread public opposition. The government wants nuclear to make up 20-22 percent of electricity supply by 2030, down from 30 percent before Fukushima. So far, however, only two out of 42 operable reactors have started and the newly elected governor of the prefecture where they are located has pledged to shut them. Renewables supplied 14.3 percent of power in the year to March 2016 and the government's 2030 target is 22-24 pct. "In the very long term, we have to lower our dependence on nuclear. Based on current progress, nuclear power reliance may not reach even 10 percent," said Asada, adding the association wanted measures to encourage private investment in renewables and for public funding of infrastructure such as transmission lines. The influential business lobby has a membership of about 1,400 executives from around 950 companies. Andrew DeWit, a professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo focusing on energy issues, said the push signaled "a profound change in thinking among blue-chip business executives." "Many business leaders have clearly thrown in the towel on nuclear and are instead openly lobbying for Japan to vault to global leadership in renewables, efficiency and smart infrastructure." When asked about the association's proposals, an industry ministry official said the government was maintaining its nuclear target. "The Japanese government will aim for the maximum introduction of renewable energy but renewable energy has a cost issue," said Yohei Ogino, a deputy director for energy policy. But three sources familiar with official thinking told Reuters in May that Japan will cut reliance on nuclear power when it releases an updated energy plan as early as next year.
   2. Earthquake frequency makes nuclear shutdown often- oil dependence is the status quo, renewables is the way out
   Dewit 15 Andrew Dewit (Andrew DeWit is Professor in Rikkyo University’s School of Policy Studies and an editor of The Asia-Pacific Journal. His recent publications include “Climate Change and the Military Role in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response,” in Paul Bacon and Christopher Hobson (eds) Human Security and Japan’s Triple Disaster (Routledge, 2014), “Japan’s renewable power prospects,” in Jeff Kingston (ed) Critical Issues in Contemporary Japan (Routledge 2013), and (with Kaneko Masaru and Iida Tetsunari) “Fukushima and the Political Economy of Power Policy in Japan” in Jeff Kingston (ed) Natural Disaster and Nuclear Crisis in Japan: Response and Recovery after Japan’s 3/11 (Routledge, 2012). He is lead researcher for a five-year (2010-2015) Japanese-Government funded project on the political economy of the Feed-in Tariff.), 10-7-2015, "Japan’s Bid to Become a World Leader in Renewable Energy," Global Research, http://www.globalresearch.ca/japans-bid-to-become-a-world-leader-in-renewable-energy/5480274. Asia Pacific Journal, Global Resaerch NB
   So consider where Japan is. The country has just adopted mid-term energy targets that few find credible. It has also done this in the midst of enormous uncertainty on conventional energy supplies, prices, geopolitics and other factors. It bears keeping in mind that Japan is not just the world’s fifth-largest power market, but also the world’s largest importer of LNG, the second largest importer of coal, and the third-largest net importer of oil and oil products.32 Figure 2 on “Changes in Japan’s Power Mix” shows that the country’s import dependence on conventional fuels to produce power greatly increased between 2010 to 2013, when nuclear’s share shrank and LNG’s role ballooned from 29.3 percent of power to 43.2 percent, coal increased from 25 percent to 30.3 percent, and oil and liquid petroleum gas (LPG) more than doubled from 6.6 to 13.7 percent. Virtually all of these fuels are imported, so Japan’s import dependence increased dramatically, from 62 percent in 2010 to 88 percent in 2013. The comparison with the average EU power mix in 2011 is striking, as the EU’s overall dependence on imports is 49 percent.¶ Figure 2 shows that Japan in 2013 was even more import dependent than it was in 1973. That was the year of the first oil shock, which is still such a benchmark for vulnerability among Japanese policymakers that – as noted earlier – the METI emphasizes it in its fiscal and regulatory planning for efficiency and conservation and indeed uses when it produces figures (figure 2 is a direct translation of METI’s work). Admittedly Japan’s power mix in 2013 was less dependent on a single energy source, in contrast to the over 70 percent dependence on oil and LPG in 1973. At the same time, the geopolitical, climate and other risks of using fossil fuels in the present far exceed those of 1973.¶ Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate the scale of contemporary risks. For example, the September 21, 2015 Financial Times warns that current low prices for oil have put as much as USD 1.5 trillion of investment in energy projects in question. This constriction in the infrastructure of supply brings profound risks of dramatic price escalations as early as 2017.33 And in spite of continuing optimism concerning unconventional oil and gas reserves, especially the US “shale revolution,” a growing number of objective and rigorously empirical studies of the actual resource base and costs of production suggest that shale’s important addition to the global supply portfolio is better measured in years than decades.34 Indeed, the shale boom was in large measure driven by a doubling of US high-yield “junk bond” debt to USD 2 trillion, a bubble that appears to be imploding.35 Meanwhile, demand for energy continues to grow: China’s gasoline consumption in July of 2015 was up 17 percent over the previous year.36 One respected expert’s extrapolation of present trends in oil warns that just China and India alone will be “theoretically consuming 100 of global net exports around the year 2032.”37¶ In short, 3-11 and all that has happened since has reduced nuclear to at best a minor role in Japan’s power mix. Certainly nuclear appears incapable of displacing much of Japan’s environmentally damaging, expensive and geopolitically risky reliance on fossil fuels in the power mix. So the real question for LDP policymakers is whether they will allow vested energy interests to dominate investment decisions and income streams in the country’s power economy, its most critical infrastructure. The energy vested interests’ performance during the 2030 “best mix” debate showed that unchecked, their self-interest would turn Japan into an energy- and climate-technology Galapagos while the rest of the world embraces renewable energy and efficiency. This argument is not wishful thinking: on October 2, 2015, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced that “renewable energy will represent the largest single source of electricity growth over the next five years, driven by falling costs and aggressive expansion in emerging economies.” The IEA believes the coming five years will see renewables provide two-thirds of net additions to global power systems, representing over 700 gigawatts or over twice Japan’s installed power capacity. This forecast suggests that by 2020 renewable power generation will be supplying a volume of electricity “higher than today’s combined electricity demand of China, India and Brazil.”38¶ The budget numbers reviewed above suggest that the LDP’s renewable-energy supporters are determined not to allow vested interests and incrementalism to ruin the country’s fortunes. They are using the Abe regime’s explicit commitment to maximize the share of renewables as an opportunity to use state finance to accelerate the diffusion of renewable energy and efficiency. But they are not doing this willy-nilly. It would seem that the Abe regime and Japan’s energy bureaucracy have also learned important lessons from various experiences, including the Board of Audit of Japan survey noted above. The survey assessed the return on directly subsidized renewable project spending. It found that 63.7 of total spending was devoted to solar, producing only 38.6 of total installed capacity. By contrast, a mere 0.8 of total subsidies spent on geothermal has resulted in projects that (once in operation) will represent 19.5 of installed capacity. For biomass, the return was not as powerful as geothermal. But even then, 25.3 of subsidy spending resulted in 17.6 of total installed capacity. And with both geothermal and biomass, the power output does not depend on the time of day or the weather.39
   A2- Tech Leadership 1:50

Japan’s global credibility rides on new climate change efforts
Watanbe 3-15 Chisaki Watanbe (contributor). “Japan Signs Off on Climate Change Plan to Meet Paris Targets.” Bloomberg News. March 15th, 2016. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-15/japan-signs-off-on-climate-change-plan-to-meet-paris-targets

Japan’s government signed off on a set of measures ranging from energy-saving steps to a broader use of hydrogen to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a bid to meet the country’s commitments made last year at the Paris climate meeting. The cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is expected to approve the plan in early May after public comment, Environment Minister Tamayo Marukawa said Tuesday. The goal is to cut emissions by 26 percent by 2030 using 2013 levels as a base. “The plan will map out the path to achieve the mid-term goal of a 26 percent reduction by 2030,” Marukawa said at a news conference. “It also includes an 80 percent cut by 2050 as a long-term target.” Japan will strengthen the development of innovative technologies, according to the plan, which also calls for local governments to compile their own measures. “It is very significant that we can show our determination to make contributions after the Paris Agreement,” Marukawa said, referring to the international accord reached in December to tackle climate change.

Japan needs to take action on emissions - climate leadership makes coop likely
- japan is an innovation leader but doesn’t implement any of the tech in the squo – allows other countries to spark ahead even tho japan has the best tech
Born 15  Dimsdale, Taylor, Liz Gallagher, and Camilla Born. "Japan's Climate Policy Leaves It Internationally Isolated". EnergyPost.eu. N. p., 2015. Web. 11 Aug. 2016. KB
With just months remaining before the next international climate agreement in Paris, countries have begun stepping forward with their pledges for action. The contributions that have been announced by the world’s largest economies illustrate the emerging consensus betting on a low carbon future. They also show a growing understanding of the reinforcing self-destructive dynamic whereby fossil fuelled growth eats the climate, and climate change then further eats into growth. The latest announcements by the EU, US, and China are more ambitious than previous commitments, and taken together they will significantly lower the global GHG emissions trajectory and reduce the projected level of warming. Achieving these targets will bring other benefits, creating 470,000 additional jobs in the US, saving the EU US$33bn in avoided fossil fuel imports annually, and reducing China’s reliance on domestically produced coal by 21. The emission reduction target Japan is considering is reported to be in the range of 24-26 below either 2005 or 2013 levels by 2030. This target is less ambitious than the pledges from either the US or the EU As other OECD member countries including the US, UK, Germany and Mexico have made climate action a pillar of their economic policy and diplomacy, the lack of effort from the world’s third largest economy and fifth largest emitter means that Japan increasingly finds itself isolated. The ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target Japan announced in 2010 has been severely weakened. The emission reduction target Japan is considering is reported to be in the range of 24-26 below either 2005 or 2013 levels by 2030. This target is less ambitious than the pledges from either the US or the EU, and is also not consistent with Japan’s own long term objective to reduce emissions by 80 by 2050. Japan’s population will decrease by 30m by 2050 which should make greater emissions reductions easily achievable. While the US and EU targets could be strengthened, they are both broadly consistent with their long term goals.¶ Japan played an integral role as host of the world’s first international climate change agreement in Kyoto in 1997. And despite the US deciding not to ratify the agreement in 2001 under President Bush, Japan ultimately agreed to a 6 emission reduction target under the Kyoto Protocol which officially came into force in 2005.¶ Japan’s membership in the Kyoto Protocol was strongly opposed by the country’s most influential business and industry associations, and at the climate conference in Cancun in 2010 Japan decided not to sign up to a second commitment period. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs reasoned that it was unfair and ineffective as many of the world’s major emitters were not subject to legally binding commitments. The decision took many by surprise and set the tone for what became a difficult, but eventually successful, negotiating session.¶ Prior to its decision not to sign up to the second commitment period of Kyoto, in 2009 Japan announced a target to reduce its emissions by 25 below 1990 levels by 2020 – a serious pledge that would have required effort above and beyond existing policies. Importantly, the target was based in part on a government energy plan to increase the share of nuclear energy from roughly 30 to around 50 by 2030.¶ The meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors following an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 was the second largest nuclear disaster in history and led to Japan losing almost one-third of its electricity supply virtually overnight. This event had a major impact on Japanese energy policy which persists today. At the same time, nuclear power provided around one-third of electricity supply which in turn accounted for around one-third of Japan’s emissions. So in terms of emissions, nuclear was important but, at 2010 levels, it delivered only around 10 of Japan’s total emissions abatement.¶ The Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) lobbied strongly against the DPJ’s target of a 25 reduction below 1990 levels by 2020, claiming it would be impossible to meet and would threaten economic recovery¶ In 2012 Shinzo Abe was re-elected as the seventh Prime Minister in six years, and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) took over power from the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Abe won stressing the need to restore the country’s economic growth, strengthen its international diplomacy, and counter growing national security threats by revising parts of the country’s war-renouncing constitution.¶ Since Abe’s return to power, most of the Government’s resources have been devoted to Abe’s economic reform program. Often called “Abenomics”, this has aimed at boosting domestic demand and jump-starting Japan’s faltering economic growth. Climate change has fallen off the political agenda, and in 2013 the government significantly weakened its emissions reduction commitment to allow a 3 increase in emissions above 1990 levels. It has been reported that Japan will announce a 2030 target ahead of the G7 Summit in June, of around 25 below 2005 or 2013 levels by 2030 – roughly equivalent to an 18 decrease below 1990 levels.¶ The Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) lobbied strongly against the DPJ’s target of a 25 reduction below 1990 levels by 2020, claiming it would be impossible to meet and would threaten economic recovery. But the 25 target was based on the most ambitious of three possible pathways put forward by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) and, though ambitious, was realistic. In general, industry and business associations have long enjoyed close ties to the LDP and strong influence with METI. Preferential treatment for business combined with the instability caused by frequent government turnover has contributed to the lack of longer term strategic planning that would favor a more ambitious low carbon agenda.¶ Japan’s turn to coal¶ The energy shortfall caused by the Fukushima disaster has been addressed primarily through an increase in fossil fuel imports. Japan has always had very low energy self-sufficiency, but is now the world’s largest liquefied natural gas importer, second largest coal importer, and third largest net importer of crude oil and oil products. It is reliant on supply from areas of growing instability; almost all of its crude oil and over a quarter of its gas come from the Middle East. Japan’s GHG emissions rose to the second-highest level on record in FY2013, while its CO2 emissions intensity has increased by 17 from 1990 levels.¶ Japan currently has over forty coal plants in the development pipeline which would account for half of what the country could emit under the government’s target emissions budget in 2050. These are likely to become stranded assets that will struggle to attract private investment without government guarantees and subsidies – which Japan, as a member of the G20, has agreed to phase out.¶ While the use of solar and other clean energy resources also initially increased thanks to the availability of feed-in tariffs, this trend has stalled. Japan’s powerful utilities, which have a monopoly on the market, have blocked renewables’ access to the grid, claiming this would present a risk to grid stability. METI claims renewable energy is too costly and has repeatedly cut the incentives in place for solar power, most recently by 16 in March 2015. The government had approved 71 GW of renewable energy through November of 2014, with solar energy accounting for more than 90 of the total. But only 14 of those projects are actually connected to the grid. Instead, the government’s Strategic Energy Plan from 2014 prioritises coal and nuclear as important sources of base-load power and energy security.¶ In Japan electricity market reform is leading to further expansion of coal generation. New entrants are finding coal easiest and cheapest to build and a lack of low carbon generation policy support could push coal generation levels dangerously high¶ Japan’s turn to coal is also driven by its export policy strategy and objectives. Several of the world’s largest manufacturers of coal technology including Toshiba, JGC, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), and Hitachi are Japanese companies. The government has provided generous support to the coal technology manufacturing industry through export credits and other development finance via the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI).¶ Between 2007 and 2013, Japan provided US$16.8bn in financing for overseas coal projects – more than double that of any other OECD country. Some of the funds Japan has designated for climate finance have gone to coal projects. Despite claims that this benefits the environment by offsetting the use of inefficient coal, the vast majority of Japanese financing has gone to coal plants that are less efficient than the global average. Between 2003 and 2015, over 40 of coal plants financed by the JBIC used subcritical combustion technology, with 52 using supercritical and only 6 using ultra-supercritical. As recently as March 2015 Japan has proposed continuation of funding for coal plants by Export Credit Agencies, including incentives for slightly higher-efficiency plants. Meanwhile, the share of subcritical plants in Chinese capacity exports has been falling rapidly.¶ As Japan’s international support for coal has increased, the US, UK, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and other OECD countries have committed to stop financing coal plants, except under very special circumstances. And despite its growing power needs, China has acknowledged that there is a need to move beyond the use of coal. China’s latest Energy Development Strategy Action Plan includes limits on the growth of coal consumption, which fell in 2014. China has also implemented policies to ensure that most of new coal build uses best available technology.¶ In Japan however, electricity market reform is leading to further expansion of coal generation domestically. New entrants to the market are finding coal easiest and cheapest to build and a lack of low carbon generation policy support could push coal generation levels dangerously high. Japan’s Environmental Impact Assessment process for small coal (below 112MW) is less onerous than for wind farms.¶ As one of the world’s largest international investors and exporters Japan has a great deal to gain from growth in global low carbon markets, which now stands at a value of US$4-5 trillion. Along with the US and Germany, Japan is one of the leaders in innovation of energy technologies, including wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), and biomass. Japan holds more patents in wind and solar PV than any country outside of the US. Solar power is set to become profitable in Japan before the end of this year, at which point it will be commercially viable in every G7 country. The policies and targets being put in place in both developed and developing countries will significantly alter the shape of Japan’s major export markets. Europe’s climate and energy policies over the past two decades for example have helped the EU reduce its energy intensity by 28 since 1990. Over the same period Japan’s energy intensity has flat-lined, and several European countries now consume more energy per dollar of GDP than Japan. The EU has a rising population and lower per capita emissions than Japan, but has committed to deeper and faster emission reductions. It is also worth noting that there are increasing trade tensions over low carbon markets and pressures will grow for countries to have comparable commitments to carbon reduction. Outside Europe, China is also in the process of restructuring its economy to make future growth more sustainable. Since 2012 it has been the world’s largest investor in clean energy by a wide margin and is on track to meet its pledge to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 40-45 by 2020. As part of its agreement with the US last year, China has pledged to increase the share of non-fossil energy in its total primary energy supply to about 20 by 2030. That would require an additional 800-1,000 gigawatts of zero emissions generation capacity, roughly the total capacity of the current US electricity system. If it can improve on this target modestly, it could become the largest renewable energy market in the world. China is planning to implement a national carbon market by 2016, and has also placed a cap on coal consumption, which fell in 2014. Japan faces critical decisions about its energy and economic future that will also have implications for its role in the world and how it is perceived by its international partners. Upon returning to office in 2012, Prime Minister Abe promised a proactive approach and new era of Japanese diplomacy. But abandoning its responsibilities on climate change as others step forward is likely to leave Japan isolated, and will create challenges for Japanese diplomats, not just in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) but in other multilateral fora as well. Japan can avoid this outcome. It has experience as a leader in climate diplomacy via its role in driving the international negotiations towards agreement of the Kyoto Protocol. And according to the Japan Center for Economic Research a 30 reduction below 2005 levels by 2030 is achievable. The Climate Action Network of Japan has recommended an even stronger reduction target of 40-50 compared with 1990 levels by 2030. Japan has the advantage of decades of leadership in technological innovation and its strength in the fields of engineering and scientific research Abe’s popularity could be used to reduce the outsized influence of incumbent industries and focus on reforms that will benefit all Japanese citizens, aligning Japan’s interests with those of its international peers. While transitioning to a low carbon economy does not come without its challenges, Japan has the advantage of decades of leadership in technological innovation and its strength in the fields of engineering and scientific research. A Japan that is more proactive in its climate diplomacy could tip the scales in favor of an international agreement that successfully reduces climate risk, and help to ensure Japan’s industries are competitive in the green markets of the future.

A renewable japan saves the economy, outcompetes oil markets, makes japan a global provider sparking a EU partnership.
Orlando 5-9 Danuta Slusarska, and Fabio Orlando. 5-9-2016. "Japan’S Energy Policy Shifts Five Years After Fukushima - Friends Of Europe". Friends of Europe. N. p., 2016. Web. 11 Aug. 2016. KB
It is estimated that between 2007 and 2014, the country invested roughly €17bn in coal power plants and mines abroad, mainly in Asia, with funds from Japanese credit agencies paid as bilateral loans. A pivotal role has also been played by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), a state-owned credit bank providing resources for foreign investment. The JBIC backed the construction of coal plants and invested in several coal facilities in countries such as Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Amid criticism from the international community concerned about the impact of such investment on global climate change mitigation, the Japanese government defended its bilateral loans as climate finance, arguing that by building more efficient coal plants it was helping developing countries to emit less greenhouse gases. But Japan will soon have to modify its strategy, as the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reached a deal last November to curb subsidies used to export technology for coal-fired power plants. Japan led the fight to block the deal, but ultimately had to concede. Yet it does not seem that Japan is ready to change its pro-coal strategy at home. Around 41 new coal-fired power plants are planned to be built over the next ten years, and a new tax system will favour imports of coal over natural gas. These policies threaten to bind Japan even closer to coal for decades to come, leaving the country highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. World frontrunner in energy efficiency One energy ‘fuel’ that Japan has in abundance is energy efficiency. Ever since the oil crisis of the 1970s, the government has put a great deal of effort into energy saving as a way to compensate for its scarcity in resources. As a result, Japan now has one of the lowest energy-intensive economies and one of the most energy-conscious populations among developed countries. Energy efficiency was of particular importance in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, when electricity capacity dropped drastically, threatening power blackouts. Much of the electricity savings were driven by a popular movement known as ‘Setsuden’ (energy saving), aimed at encouraging people and companies to conserve energy and adopt more sustainable practices. Measures included replacing high-consumption lighting with low-power LED lights, ‘thinning’ lighting by removing some bulbs, limiting air-conditioning, shutting off appliances instead of putting them on standby, cutting exterior lighting, changing working shifts to avoid peaks, or slowing down public transport. All this allowed Japan to drastically reduce power demand almost overnight. Energy-efficiency standards for many electrical appliances and vehicles were created under the Top-Runner Programme in 1999, and further reinforced in recent years. The New National Energy Strategy and the Energy Conservation Frontrunner Plan to promote energy conservation were adopted in 2006, setting a target to improve the country’s energy efficiency by at least 30 by 2030 compared to 2003 levels. Various financial and fiscal incentives have been put in place to encourage energy conservation and efficiency in industry, including sectoral benchmarks, tax incentive schemes, depreciation rates and low-interest loans. Large industrial companies are obliged to appoint an energy manager responsible for implementing an energy-efficiency plan for the company. Japan is also actively promoting demand-side management technologies and smart grids deployment, and is the world’s largest investor in smart meters. In the transport sector, Japan has introduced one of the strictest fuel-efficiency standards for passenger cars, and light and heavy-duty trucks, and its main carmakers – Toyota, Nissan and Honda – enjoy a reputation of world-leading energy-efficient car manufacturers. Yet the reputation of the Japanese car industry is now under threat due to recent revelations that Mitsubishi’s employees falsified fuel economy tests data for more than 600,000 vehicles in order to cut corners, in a new scandal following the Volkswagen case. As a leader in energy-efficiency policies, RandD investment and innovation, Japan has also been actively contributing to international cooperation on advancing energy efficiency on a global scale and developing international standards through the International Energy Agency (IEA), International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Cooperation (IPEEC), New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organisation (NEDO) and regional initiatives such as APEC, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. It has also developed bilateral partnerships with its neighbours and major economies such as the EU and the US to boost capacity building and joint policy research, and to disseminate know-how thanks to joint demonstration projects. Focus on energy RandD and innovation Japan gives very high priority to research, development and deployment (RDandD), and its public spending as percentage of GDP exceeds that of all other major economies. According to the IEA, Japan has one of the world’s largest budgets dedicated to RDandD in the fields of nuclear energy, energy efficiency, renewable energy sources, smart grids, clean coal, and carbon capture and storage. The country is also the world’s leader in climate-related technological innovation, as indicated by the number of patents it holds, mainly in renewable energies, energy-efficient buildings and lighting, and electric and hybrid vehicles. A big boost to clean energy technologies was given by the Cool Earth-Innovative Energy Technology Programme. Adopted in 2008, the initiative is the outcome of a study conducted by an investigative commission comprising key intellectual figures and promoted by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The programme focuses on 21 key technologies whose deployment is expected to accelerate substantial global emissions reductions, and has allowed Japan to promote international and regional cooperation on RandD and innovative technology development, while maintaining its international competitiveness. On this basis, Japan and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2014 launched the ‘Asia Pacific Clean Air Partnership’, aimed at encouraging existing regional initiatives supporting common projects in order to curb air pollution in the area. But as a result of two decades of economic stagnation, Japan has now visibly decreased its share of energy RDandD from 23 in 1990 to 12 in 2014. China is now poised to lead the world in total RandD spending by 2019 due to a recent surge in public investment in renewable energy RDandD. Further efforts will be necessary if Japan wants to stay at the forefront of energy research and development at the global and regional scale. Regulatory overhaul of the power sector In an unprecedented step to boost the country’s sagging economy, modernise the energy sector, lower energy bills, and advance efficiency and innovation, the Abe government has decided to embark on a major reform to deregulate electricity and gas markets. If done properly and in a coordinated way, the move could raise Japan to the rank of the world’s largest deregulated electricity market in history and a worldwide model to follow. Japan has lagged behind the US and the EU on similar measures for more than 10 years, as its regional monopoly companies have wielded strong political influence preventing any progress on liberalising the sector. Yet increased losses in power companies’ revenues and persisting high energy prices have made evident the need to change Japan’s ‘business as usual’. Japan’s electricity retail market was fully liberalised on 1 April 2016, allowing Japanese households to choose their power suppliers and opening up a ¥10tn (€81bn) market to newcomers. The unbundling of the transmission sector is scheduled for April 2020 and foresees to separate power grids from power plants in an attempt to ensure equal access to the power transmission network by all power suppliers. A bill revising the Gas Business Law, which calls for full liberalisation of the gas retail market by 2017, mandates that major city gas companies in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka separate their gas pipe management sections into new entities in April 2022. A new committee will be established to oversee transactions in the power and gas industries to ensure fair competition. The package of reforms is expected to bring much-needed competition to gas and electricity markets that have until now been monopolistically operated by local companies. The competition would allow the sectors – which have suffered from inefficiencies in the absence of economic incentives – to become more efficient, driving down costs. New players from a wide variety of industries have already lined up, bringing with them innovative services and new business models offering discount prices combining cell phone, Internet and electricity services. New entrants could also boost technological innovation and improvements in smart meters, energy efficiency and renewable energy, affecting the world’s technological landscape. Implications for Europe The 2011 earthquake and disaster at Fukushima sparked widespread public concern over the safety of nuclear power generation and led to a re-evaluation of energy policies in many parts of the world. The European Council decided to mandate a review of the safety features of European nuclear reactors. The so-called ‘stress tests’ were applied to all nuclear power plants in the EU and an Action Plan was published in 2012 containing further measures to improve the safety of nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, member states’ reactions differed, ranging from Germany deciding to phase out its nuclear power plants, to the UK giving the green light to boost its nuclear capacity with a new Hinckley Point C project. The similarities in environmental, political and economic situation offered fertile ground to build a close EU-Japan strategic partnership. Both like-minded partners face major challenges in view of improving energy efficiency, boosting competitiveness while addressing climate change and energy security issues, and dealing with growing competition from countries like China and India. Energy cooperation takes place as part of the EU-Japan Summit, EU-Japan Industrial Policy Dialogue, and Science and Technology Agreement. Yet a comprehensive focus on clean energy is still missing from existing cooperation structures. The new Strategic Partnership Agreement and Free Trade Agreement currently under negotiation could be the game changers, opening a new era in EU-Japan relations. For Japan, there is a clear interest in learning from the EU experiences about the best policies to incentivise and scale up renewable energy deployment, and solutions to accommodate large quantities of clean energy sources into its market. Meanwhile, Japan emerges as an attractive clean energy market for European companies, including SMEs and large utilities, in particular thanks to efforts to deregulate and liberalise Japan’s energy market.

Japan could become a lead renewables market, but only if they move beyond nuclear power—their tech will get exported and reduce climate change globally as they get modeled.
Pollock 15 Simon Pollock (Australia-based climate change writer and journalist. In addition to working on international climate change policy in Australia, he was a member of the start-up team that launched Al Jazeera English Television from its Asia Headquarters in Kuala Lumpur in 2006. Simon’s interest in development and environmental issues stemmed from observation of how the two don’t always mix during six years in Beijing as a Kyodo News reporter). “Japan’s Narrowing Nuclear Path to a Low-Carbon Future.” Our World, brought to you by United Nations University. October 20th, 2015. https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/japans-narrowing-nuclear-path-to-a-low-carbon-future KB
Izadi-Najafabadi said Japan will eventually follow Europe and the United States in promoting the escalated use of renewables, but this is likely to take time and will probably require Japan’s industrial leaders, rather than its politicians, to show the way. Japanese industry is actually further developed in supporting advances in renewable technology than many outside the country realize. While China has stolen the limelight in terms of its huge move during recent years into the renewable energy market, it is less known that Japan represented the world’s second biggest solar photovoltaic (PV) market in 2013. It accounted for 10 percent of the global total, compared to 13 percent for China. This entailed an impressive doubling of PV capacity in Japan from the previous year. Japan’s technical edge The Climate Group recently reported how cutting-edge Japanese solar technology was behind the recent opening of one of the world’s largest floating solar panel plants in central Hyogo prefecture. Japanese ceramics company Kyocera, which has expanded globally, developed the water-based technology to get around Japan’s lack of land space and to help provide the necessary cooling for a solar plant’s operations. Some believe Japan possesses the technical edge to make inroads into the renewable energy market. Though perhaps not in the rapidly aggressive fashion by which it made gains in the automotive industry in the 1980s, leading it to overtake the United States as number one automobile maker. Llewelyn Hughes, an Australian National University lecturer and Japanese market consultant, told me that because the cost of production in China is much lower, Japanese companies are not doing as well as they used to in the solar market. “This picture, however, can be misleading as some renewable production in China actually represents outsourcing from Japan,” said Hughes. “There is still a strong potential for Japan to apply its technological prowess and engineering expertise in renewable technology. Japan could become a lead renewables technology market, and then export this technology to developing countries to help them leapfrog over the more carbon-intensive steps adopted by the developed countries.” Hughes pointed to a collaborative arrangement between Japan’s Panasonic and Tesla, a firm based in California perhaps best known for its electric cars among its array of high-tech products. As part of the collaboration, Panasonic’s innovation is helping to drive progress in battery storage, the “holy grail of renewables”, said Hughes. There are also signs afoot that Panasonic may be about make a more concerted push into the global solar market by supplying batteries for homes, beginning in Europe. “Japan could become a lead renewables technology market, and then export this technology to developing countries to help them leapfrog over the more carbon-intensive steps adopted by the developed countries,” says Llewelyn Hughes, an Australian National University lecturer and Japanese market consultant. Japanese companies’ collaboration with firms in China and the US to pave innovative paths to low-carbon development — based on high-tech cooperation and market force competition — calls into question the ongoing focus of state-based efforts to reduce climate change. While diplomats pore over obscure but highly politicised texts to broach an international agreement, companies are using the flow of ideas across national boundaries to find entrepreneurial ways to tackle climate change. Individual breakthroughs on new and innovative ways to seek profits across borders may help generate step changes leading to a low-carbon world, as has been the case with the Steve Jobs-led burgeoning communication revolution of tablets and smartphones. It is likely, however, that the positioning of nation states will continue to dominate news headlines about climate change — and this is an area where Japan’s climate reputation will likely continue to suffer. Japan’s increased use of coal brought by the sudden removal of nuclear power from its energy mix has made it far more difficult for the country to achieve domestic reduction targets considered credible by other nations. The sudden, tragic and disruptive nature of the 2011 earthquake helps to garner sympathy for Japan’s challenges in reducing its domestic emissions. Such considerations are likely, however, to be quickly forgotten when considering Japan’s ongoing support of coal mining and combustion in other countries. Japan funds overseas coal use A report by a consortium of environmental groups released in June found that Japan is now the planet’s top public financier of overseas coal plants, technology and mining. The report found that Japan provided more than US$20 billion to coal projects in other countries between 2007 and 2014 — roughly a quarter of total international support for coal-fired power. During the same period, according to the report, Japan contributed about US$5 billion to coal mining projects around the world. Japan’s decision to continue funding coal mining and combustion overseas sits uncomfortably with the World Bank’s announcement in 2013 that it would stop financing coal projects, except in rare cases. Japan’s support for overseas coal plants in Indonesia (US$1 billion in loans) and India and Bangladesh (US$630 million) as climate finance loans has raised the most ire among environmentalists. The Japanese government has portrayed its support in pragmatic terms, arguing that some countries can only afford to use coal for their energy generation. In this view, Japan’s financial assistance means developing countries can build high-tech coal combustion plants that cause less pollution than those that would be built without such help. Japanese support “is a very practical and realistic and effective way to reduce carbon dioxide”, the Associated Press newswire quoted Takako Ito, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, as saying. As rising powers such as China and Brazil move to wind down their coal use, new coal plants in Japan are likely to face increased business risks. This issue has set off deliberations within the United Nations (UN) Green Climate Fund, the main international body channelling aid funds to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. The UN body’s current stance — where the use of climate finance to support coal plants is not explicitly banned — is likened by Karen Orenstein, a campaigner for Friends of the Earth US, to a “torture convention that doesn’t forbid torture”. Japan’s support for advancing coal in developing countries is likely to remain a weak spot in Japan’s diplomatic armour, opening it up to continuing overseas criticism. The power of the market, though, may ultimately play the biggest role in weaning Japan from its current support for coal projects in developing countries. As rising powers such as China and Brazil move to wind down their coal use, new coal plants in Japan are likely to face increased business risks. Conversely, current low demand for coal may allow Japanese utilities to seek lower prices. However, in the longer term, Japan’s current investments in coal at home and abroad could well prove to be a losing bet. Predicting future global trends is rarely straightforward, but judging by the perennial air pollution and high percentage of emissions caused by coal, it is unlikely this fossil fuel will be the energy source of choice for current and rising powers. The government’s faith in nuclear power is understandable considering it has served the country well prior to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Fears about nuclear energy are, however, unlikely to dissipate quickly — especially in the only country that has borne the brunt of nuclear weapons. It seems then that the government’s current bet in putting renewables just below coal, and on a par with nuclear energy, threatens to push Japan out of a global growth curve leading to a low-carbon world based on renewable energy.

Global warming definitively causes extinction
Sharp and Kennedy 14 – (Associate Professor Robert (Bob) A. Sharp is the UAE National Defense College Associate Dean for Academic Programs and College Quality Assurance Advisor. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Strategic Security Studies at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA) in the U.S. National Defense University (NDU), Washington D.C. and then as Associate Professor at the Near East South Asia (NESA) Center for Strategic Studies, collocated with NDU. Most recently at NESA, he focused on security sector reform in Yemen and Lebanon, and also supported regional security engagement events into Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and Qatar; Edward Kennedy is a renewable energy and climate change specialist who has worked for the World Bank and the Spanish Electric Utility ENDESA on carbon policy and markets; 8/22/14, “Climate Change and Implications for National Security,” International Policy Digest, http://intpolicydigest.org/2014/08/22/climate-change-implications-national-security/)
Our planet is 4.5 billion years old. If that whole time was to be reflected on a single one-year calendar then the dinosaurs died off sometime late in the afternoon of December 27th and modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago, or at around lunchtime on December 28th. Therefore, human life on earth is very recent. Sometime on December 28th humans made the first fires – wood fires – neutral in the carbon balance. Now reflect on those most recent 200,000 years again on a single one-year calendar and you might be surprised to learn that the industrial revolution began only a few hours ago during the middle of the afternoon on December 31st, 250 years ago, coinciding with the discovery of underground carbon fuels. Over the 250 years carbon fuels have enabled tremendous technological advances including a population growth from about 800 million then to 7.5 billion today and the consequent demand to extract even more carbon. This has occurred during a handful of generations, which is hardly noticeable on our imaginary one-year calendar. The release of this carbon – however – is changing our climate at such a rapid rate that it threatens our survival and presence on earth. It defies imagination that so much damage has been done in such a relatively short time. The implications of climate change is the single most significant threat to life on earth and, put simply, we are not doing enough to rectify the damage. This relatively very recent ability to change our climate is an inconvenient truth; the science is sound. We know of the complex set of interrelated national and global security risks that are a result of global warming and the velocity at which climate change is occurring. We worry it may already be too late. Climate change writ large has informed few, interested some, confused many, and polarized politics. It has already led to an increase in natural disasters including but not limited to droughts, storms, floods, fires etc. The year 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record according to an American Meteorological Society (AMS) report. Research suggests that climate change is already affecting human displacement; reportedly 36 million people were displaced in 2008 alone because of sudden natural disasters. Figures for 2010 and 2011 paint a grimmer picture of people displaced because of rising sea levels, heat and storms. Climate change affects all natural systems. It impacts temperature and consequently it affects water and weather patterns. It contributes to desertification, deforestation and acidification of the oceans. Changes in weather patterns may mean droughts in one area and floods in another. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, sea levels rise but perennial river water supplies are reduced because glaciers are retreating. As glaciers and polar ice caps melt, there is an albedo effect, which is a double whammy of less temperature regulation because of less surface area of ice present. This means that less absorption occurs and also there is less reflection of the sun’s light. A potentially critical wild card could be runaway climate change due to the release of methane from melting tundra. Worldwide permafrost soils contain about 1,700 Giga Tons of carbon, which is about four times more than all the carbon released through human activity thus far. The planet has already adapted itself to dramatic climate change including a wide range of distinct geologic periods and multiple extinctions, and at a pace that it can be managed. It is human intervention that has accelerated the pace dramatically: An increased surface temperature, coupled with more severe weather and changes in water distribution will create uneven threats to our agricultural systems and will foster and support the spread of insect borne diseases like Malaria, Dengue and the West Nile virus. Rising sea levels will increasingly threaten our coastal population and infrastructure centers and with more than 3.5 billion people – half the planet – depending on the ocean for their primary source of food, ocean acidification may dangerously undercut critical natural food systems which would result in reduced rations. Climate change also carries significant inertia. Even if emissions were completely halted today, temperature increases would continue for some time. Thus the impact is not only to the environment, water, coastal homes, agriculture and fisheries as mentioned, but also would lead to conflict and thus impact national security. Resource wars are inevitable as countries respond, adapt and compete for the shrinking set of those available resources. These wars have arguably already started and will continue in the future because climate change will force countries to act for national survival; the so-called Climate Wars. As early as 2003 Greenpeace alluded to a report which it claimed was commissioned by the Pentagon titled: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for U.S. National Security. It painted a picture of a world in turmoil because global warming had accelerated. The scenario outlined was both abrupt and alarming. The report offered recommendations but backed away from declaring climate change an immediate problem, concluding that it would actually be more incremental and measured; as such it would be an irritant, not a shock for national security systems. In 2006 the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) – Institute of Public Research – convened a board of 11 senior retired generals and admirals to assess National Security and the Threat to Climate Change. Their initial report was published in April 2007 and made no mention of the potential acceleration of climate change. The team found that climate change was a serious threat to national security and that it was: “most likely to happen in regions of the world that are already fertile ground for extremism.” The team made recommendations from their analysis of regional impacts which suggested the following. Europe would experience some fracturing because of border migration. Africa would need more stability and humanitarian operations provided by the United States. The Middle East would experience a “loss of food and water security (which) will increase pressure to emigrate across borders.” Asia would suffer from “threats to water and the spread of infectious disease. ” In 2009 the CIA opened a Center on Climate Change and National Security to coordinate across the intelligence community and to focus policy. In May 2014, CNA again convened a Military Advisory Board but this time to assess National Security and the Accelerating Risk of Climate Change. The report concludes that climate change is no longer a future threat but occurring right now and the authors appeal to the security community, the entire government and the American people to not only build resilience against projected climate change impacts but to form agreements to stabilize climate change and also to integrate climate change across all strategy and planning. The calm of the 2007 report is replaced by a tone of anxiety concerning the future coupled with calls for public discourse and debate because “time and tide wait for no man.” The report notes a key distinction between resilience (mitigating the impact of climate change) and agreements (ways to stabilize climate change) and states that: Actions by the United States and the international community have been insufficient to adapt to the challenges associated with projected climate change. Strengthening resilience to climate impacts already locked into the system is critical, but this will reduce long-term risk only if improvements in resilience are accompanied by actionable agreements on ways to stabilize climate change. The 9/11 Report framed the terrorist attacks as less of a failure of intelligence than a failure of imagination. Greenpeace’s 2003 account of the Pentagon’s alleged report describes a coming climate Armageddon which to readers was unimaginable and hence the report was not really taken seriously. It described: A world thrown into turmoil by drought, floods, typhoons. Whole countries rendered uninhabitable. The capital of the Netherlands submerged. The borders of the U.S. and Australia patrolled by armies firing into waves of starving boat people desperate to find a new home. Fishing boats armed with cannon to drive off competitors. Demands for access to water and farmland backed up with nuclear weapons. The CNA and Greenpeace/Pentagon reports are both mirrored by similar analysis by the World Bank which highlighted not only the physical manifestations of climate change, but also the significant human impacts that threaten to unravel decades of economic development, which will ultimately foster conflict. Climate change is the quintessential “Tragedy of the Commons,” where the cumulative impact of many individual actions (carbon emission in this case) is not seen as linked to the marginal gains available to each individual action and not seen as cause and effect. It is simultaneously huge, yet amorphous and nearly invisible from day to day. It is occurring very fast in geologic time terms, but in human time it is (was) slow and incremental. Among environmental problems, it is uniquely global. With our planet and culture figuratively and literally honeycombed with a reliance on fossil fuels, we face systemic challenges in changing the reliance across multiple layers of consumption, investment patterns, and political decisions; it will be hard to fix! 

A3 us jap
The US-Japan alliance is strong now, but it won’t last long-term unless leaders redouble their efforts at cooperation
Curtis 5-14 Gerald Curtis (Burgess Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Columbia University). “The US and Japan in a Turbulent Asia.” Keynote speech given to the Columbia Business School. May 14th, 2016. http://weai.columbia.edu/read-gerald-l-curtiss-keynote-speech-the-us-and-japan-in-a-turbulent-asia/ NB

It is a great honor and a deep personal pleasure to be invited to give this keynote address on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Columbia’s Center on Japanese Economy and Business. Hugh Patrick has provided the Center with extraordinary vision and leadership since he came to Columbia and created it in 1986. I want to congratulate him and to personally thank him. I would like to use the limited time I have today to consider a few of the challenges East Asia’s changing geopolitical environment pose to Japan, to the United States, and to the US-­Japan alliance. The alliance is strong and it will remain critically important for maintaining peace and stability in East Asia for as far out as we can see. But in thinking about the future of our alliance we need at the outset to remind ourselves of something about the past: that is that the US-­Japan alliance was forged in the crucible of the cold war; that it was part of a global US containment strategy against the Soviet Union; and that it was negotiated at a time when Japan was a weak and defeated nation. That is no longer the world we live in. The stability of a bipolar world order in which American economic, military, political, and soft power reigned supreme is becoming a distant memory. Yes, the US remains the most powerful country in East Asia and globally and it will continue to be so for years to come. But it is not the dominant economic power in Asia and it no longer enjoys a position of unchallengeable military supremacy. China does not have to fully match American military power to make the cost to the US of using that power very high; that cost will continue to increase as China’s military grows stronger. Bipolarity presented countries with a clear strategic choice as to how to position themselves in the world system. But East Asia now is evolving a multipolar system whose complexity makes the costs and benefits of different policy options more difficult to estimate, coordination among allies harder to achieve, and the dangers of misunderstanding, suspicion, and miscalculation all the greater. In the fluid, uncertain political environment in East Asia, every country in the region is thinking anew about its national security strategy. Japan is no exception. It has taken steps to see to it that its strategy is relevant to the world as it is now, not as it was in the past. Prime Minister Abe has sought to strengthen Japan’s military capabilities, but the driving force behind developments in Japan’s security policy are the structural changes that have occurred in the international system. If Prime Minister Abe were to leave office tomorrow I do not believe there would be fundamental change in Japan’s security policy regardless which LDP politician succeeded him. As for Japan’s political opposition, It is hard for me to believe that the Democratic Party is serious about repealing the national security legislation passed by the Diet last September and reversing the cabinet decision to reinterpret Article nine with regard to collective defense. Doing so would create a crisis in Japan’s relations with the United States and it would be an open invitation to China to increase its pressure on Japan over the Senkaku islands and other issues. I know that many Democratic Party Diet members share my view but unfortunately they are not speaking out. The end of bipolarity, China’s challenge to the regional status quo, and the complex power balance that is emerging in East Asia are changing the dynamics of the US-Japan alliance in important ways. During the Cold War Japanese worried about the United States drawing their country into a conflict they wanted no part of. And it was not only the left that feared this kind of entanglement. The LDP itself adopted a large number of self imposed constraints on the government’s security policy to reduce precisely that danger ­­ the ban on collective defense and on the export of weapons and weapons technology, a one percent ceiling on defense spending, the prohibition of the acquisition of offensive weaponry, and a doctrine of minimal homeland defense. The Abe Administration now has removed or is weakening these constraints, aware of the necessity to do more to sustain the alliance with the United States, to strengthen its own defense capabilities, and to have greater influence in regional and global affairs. It is pursuing a strategy that does not diverge from but that builds upon and accelerates policy trends that have been evolving over the past half century. It is a strategy with three prongs: to have Japan to do more for itself; do more to strengthen the alliance with the United States; and to develop security relationships with other countries in the region and elsewhere. Given the changed international situation in East Asia, skillful management of the US­-Japan alliance requires a redoubling of the efforts of leaders in both our countries to enhance cooperation and coordination and also to engage in more power sharing, that is sharing not only burdens but decisions about what those burdens should be. That is a difficult adjustment for both of us, for America because we are accustomed to the US making decisions and then consulting with our allies about what their role should be in implementing them, and for Japan because power sharing involves taking risks. 

A renewable energy focused Japan amplifies US-Japan relationship which bolsters Japanese military readiness, strengthens their economy, and founds a powerful alliance
- Beginning of card talks about nuclear energy—that's what current japan is launching out of now, plan does that
Some second part says support for nuclear--- that's from companies which are now shifting.
coordination between militaries is promoted through developing clean energy for them,
IPCC is wrong--- that there is a rapid declining cost of renewables that make them actractive, LSE Economist analyzes and Fred Pearce prove that, IPCC doesnt acount for water-energy-food crisis, and albedo shifts in the Arctic region. greening military bases can also help decentralize areas and give civilians access to more power- internal link to the ifrst advantage
deployment of advanced green tech such as liquid metal batteries (Designed to store energy on the electric grid, the high-capacity battery consists of molten metals that naturally separate to form two electrodes in layers on either side of the molten salt electrolyte between them. Tests with cells made of low-cost, Earth-abundant materials confirm that the liquid battery operates efficiently without losing significant capacity or mechanically degrading — common problems in today’s batteries with solid electrodes.) THIS ALSO SOLVES INTERMITTENCY BECAUSE THEY STORE A TON OF ENERGY AND CAN PROVIDE QUICK ACCESS
- - no dependence on water with renewable resources which decreases risk of conflict
Dewit 14 Andrew Dewit, 5-9-2014, "Could a US-Japan ''Green Alliance'' Transform the Climate-Energy Equation?," Truthout, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23597-could-a-us-japan-green-alliance-transform-the-climate-energy-equation NB
US President Barack Obama's April 23-25 visit to Japan unfortunately went pretty much as expected. Obama asked for concessions on a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement, and received a souvenir "key milestone" whose content and location remain a mystery. Abe asked for exports of fracked gas, kind words about nuclear power, and promises on the Senkaku-Diaoyu Island dispute, and – for what they are worth - got commitments on paper.1 The US-Japan Joint Statement2 and Obama's comments to the Yomiuri newspaper emphasized collaboration, including "coordination between our militaries."3 But on energy, Team Abe and the nuclear village won out and the official depiction of collaboration was limited to "working together to promote the development of clean energy, including by facilitating business cooperation and deepening civil nuclear cooperation." Japan's April 11, 2014 "Strategic Energy Plan" – a plan without any targets for anything - was "welcomed," whereas the US military's target of 25 renewable energy by 2025 remained one unnoticed elephant among the herd in the room. Another elephant was the US military and "climate change," which got three boilerplate mentions in the Joint Statement. There was no emphasis on US-Japan military cooperation on climate change, even though the US military itself has for years identified climate change as the mother of all threats, including fully 8 detailed references to "climate change" and its consequences in its March 4, 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR 2014).4 Indeed, the American green military-industrial complex is openly calling for NATO to focus even more on climate change and greening, and not get unduly distracted by the Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan.5 As for the assurance of fracked gas that Abe got, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus recently dismissed relying on it rather than renewables and efficiency as "prohibitively expensive."6 But Japanese energy politics and Team Abe's preferences apparently led to ignoring these pertinent items, as well as the fact that there is already a "Green Alliance" between the US and Japan. The Joint Statement's inattention to this alliance, as well as the way it is being mismanaged, indicates that the framework desperately needs top-level attention, particularly on military collaboration. Expanding and escalating US-Japan green collaboration would surely do more to foster both countries' energy and military security than any other move. Considering the geopolitical stakes in East Asia, it is bizarre that years of US military green leadership7 and open collaboration with just about every other partner except the Japanese Self Defence Forces goes without comment in the relations between the two nations and in the press.8Arguably, the most significant backdrop to the Obama visit was the flood of evidence of accelerating climate change and resource crises along with rapid movement in energy paradigms. Over the past few months, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered several reports on climate change that spotlighted the scale of the challenge and need for rapid deployment of renewable energy, especially solar power, and efficiency.9 And though the IPCC's reports are enormously informative and the biggest ever international scientific collaboration, even they are not the full picture. The IPCC cost-benefit assessments neither examine the benefits of an energy-paradigm shift nor explore the reality that the costs of renewables and efficiency are falling rapidly. LSE economist Dimitri Zenghelis rightly derides that approach as "insane."10Indeed, research released in late March by Citigroup made a persuasive case that the "age of renewables" has already begun because the rapidly declining costs of renewable power sources makes them even more attractive than increasingly volatile gas, even in the US heartland of unconventional gas.11 And as environmental expert Fred Pearce pointed out in a recent article on the IPCC study and its misinformed concern about costs of renewables, the "UN Environment Programme revealed that almost half of all new generating capacity added to grids around the world last year was from renewable energy sources, overwhelmingly wind and solar."12 Note also that the IPCC reports also underestimate and at times overlook (generally because the research results are too recent) the gravity of the water-energy-food crisis and the role of such positive feedbacks as changes in the jet stream, accelerated melting of Greenland ice, and the power of albedo shifts in the Arctic region.13 Nor do the IPCC reports examine the rising pecuniary and other non climate-related costs of the conventional, resource-intensive economy whose extraction costs are increasing.14 In short, the IPCC report series' warning is very likely insufficiently assertive. Worse yet, the IPCC's April 2014 summary report, a 33-page overview for policymakers that is what most people actually read, was "gutted at the insistence of government officials" according to report co-author Harvard University Professor Robert Stavins.15 Compared to the IPCC, the US military is both more forthright in its assessments of climate change risk and realistic in its appraisal of the cost-cutting merits of renewable energy and efficiency. Consistent with several years of military-centred analyses, the QDR 2014 warns that the multiplicity of effects produced by climate change "will influence resource competition while placing additional burdens on economies, societies, and governance institutions around the world." The QDR 2014 also points out that the US military's ambitious programs "to increase energy and water security, including investments in energy efficiency, new technologies, and renewable energy sources, will increase the resilience of our installations."16 These programs, which include the US Navy's goal of 50 renewables by 2020, were detailed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, in partnership with Navigant Research, in a January 16, 2014 assessment. Importantly, in light of the reigning "common sense" that renewables are expensive, the study's emphasizes that the programs reduced costs.17 The US military is not independently generating these analyses and cutting-edge mitigation-adaptation programs, but rather in cooperation with other federal agencies (especially the Department of Energy), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), Sandia National Laboratories, and other elements of what can legitimately be described as a green military-industrial complex.18 The direct relevance of this to Japan is that since November of 2009 there have been high-level US-Japan agreements to cooperate on clean-energy technologies and build a "Green Alliance." One important step was taken in mid-November of 2009, when Hatoyama Yukio was the Prime Minister of a Democratic Party of Japan government (ironically, Hatoyama was – like all previous and sitting PMs, when ensconced in the nuclear village - eager to act on a nuclear-centred vision).19 In the wake of 2010, the US-Japan Green Alliance initiatives have included cooperation on greening US bases in Japan, according to the 2013 "Defense of Japan" white paper by Japan's Ministry of Defense.20 Other collaboration includes Okinawa-Hawaii energy cooperation.21 The efforts to deploy renewable power and efficiency on Japan-side US bases got caught up in the Japanese left-right polarization over the very legitimacy of the bases, a longstanding issue in Japanese politics.22 On March 15, 2012, Akahata, the newspaper of the Japanese Communist Party (JCP), delivered a stinging blast at use of YEN 2.85 billion Japan-side fiscal support (Omoiyari-yosan) to green US bases, deriding it as a plot to legitimate their presence.23 Greening military bases as well as the economy of Okinawa itself, however, offers multiple positive externalities.24 Just as centre-left dislike of the military per se leads to a global cognitive dissonance concerning military green activism on energy and climate change,25 For ideological reasons, Japanese progressives are unwilling to recognize and use the greening US military as one of the most potent arguments in their fight for sustainable, decentralized smart power. Yet JCP and Akahata outrage about solar panels at US bases fails to explain why the green alliance, rather than a few flowers, was not on the table between Abe and Obama. The big stumbling block confronting the green alliance is Team Abe's clear reluctance even to talk about green power. Moreover, the US-Japan green initiatives that are underway are all largely controlled by the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI), which appears less than keen to accelerate their slow pace. The METI appears to be managing the US-Japan cooperation on the green alliance in a way that avoids disruption to the energy vested interests in Japan. Hence, even on the US-Japan Renewable Energy Roundtable (whose second annual event was held in December of 201326), the Japanese side did not include – among several striking omissions - Softbank-founded Japan Renewable Energy Foundation, even though it links renewable energy industries with 36 of Japan's 47 prefectures and 17 of its 20 designated cities (cities with over 500,000 residents).27 Nor did the US side include the American Council of Renewable Energy (ACORE), which links the US renewable industry, the states, and the military. ACORE is for example key to what the April 26 Washington Post described as a state-by-state "battle" over renewable energy that the "fossil fuel interests are losing."28 METI's approach evidently excludes potentially disruptive actors from a process that, similar to METI's smart cities effort,29 aims at the difficult, often contradictory, object of pursuing innovation within a network of vested interests. One great risk here is that potential synergies are forfeit to a quest for stable, predictable change, even as competitors globally hone their organizational and technological resources so as to gain advantage in growing markets. The Japanese themselves, such as in the Innovation-Promotion Commission in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, know of the patent need for disruptive innovation and the institutional barriers that hinder it.30 The Japanese are also increasingly aware that the Israelis, with the world's top innovative potential, are now deliberately using their military – at about 7 of GDP the largest organization in the country – to disrupt their own deeply monopolized power sector.31 Israel is, as Michigan University Mid-East expert Juan Cole notes, adding solar and related technologies to their impressive list of competitive export industries and modes of regional collaboration.32¶ Another risk in not bolstering the green alliance is posed by the current Abe Shinzo administration's focus on redefining the Japanese military's role in the context of great economic, geopolitical, and climate instability. The Abe efforts emphasize military initiatives with a surprisingly "hawkish" stress on being "battle oriented."33 Yet green would seem the geopolitically safer and economically more rewarding option, as the US military's QDR 2014/2010 and other analyses indicate. Greater US-Japan collaboration on the test-bedding development and deployment of the most advanced green technologies, such as Ambri's liquid metal batteries,34 centred on military bases and extending through to the private economy, can not only help repurpose the military per se in fraught times.35 Substitution of conventional inputs with renewables, as well as the destruction of unnecessary demand with radical efficiency, can help alleviate the pressure on water and other resources that the US military warns lead to or exacerbate conflict.¶ Moreover, closely linking the US and Japan, the world's number 1 and number 3 economies, would almost certainly amplify synergies and accelerate the ongoing rollout of resilient and smart communities. What seems most crucial and doable in the short run is to expand the relatively closed circle of METI-led green collaboration. The METI control over the US-Japan collaboration on green has apparently led to exclusion of ACORE, JREF, ISEP, and other US-Japan actors that would seem essential to getting closer and comprehensive collaboration among subnationals in the US and Japan as well as between those subnational governments. Rather than leaving METI in charge, and able to exclude participants, it would seem better to open these initiatives up. Japan's regional blocs, such as Kanto and Kansai,36 are notably more aggressive on renewables and efficiency than the central government and could be given a larger role. Kanagawa Prefecture's April 2014 revision of its smart, ICT-centred green energy program,37 in light of rapid technological change, suggests it would be best to drive the initiatives more towards the prefecture and city level. Subnational actors, especially cities, generally have political distance from energy vested interests and thus more enthusiasm to grasp the opportunity for disruptive change that must be embraced in the face of existential threats. The METI, by contrast, is part of the compromised central government mechanism that drafted and passed a "Strategic Energy Plan" without targets, even in the midst of accelerating climate change and smart energy revolutions. If METI were actually serious about renewables and efficiency, then the energy plan would have targets and Obama and Abe would have had expansion of "green alliance" initiatives on their plate.¶ The importance of the US-Japan green alliance initiatives transcends partisan politics. The reality in the US is that while the Obama administration talks of "all of the above" on energy, at the spearpoint of innovative deployment they are actually mobilizing the deliberately disruptive green military-industrial complex. Among a multitude of moves, their 2013 appointment of former ACORE head Dennis McGinn, an impressive exponent of renewables, to Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy and Installations, was a potent indicator of intent.38¶ By contrast, the Japanese cabinet and the METI are trying to protect Tepco and other giant firms in its YEN 16 trillion power economy, feeding an increasing number of them bailouts.39 So Team Abe ignore the dynamism, disruption and opportunity that Citigroup, the Washington Post, the US military, and a host of others describe. Team Abe views dynamism as a threat, as it most certainly is for the complacent common sense shared by the circle of bankers, nuke villagers, gas fans and others who dominate Japan's energy monopolies. Their collective ambitions on energy and the alliance was concisely summarized on April 25 by Kobayashi Yoshikazu, of the Institute of Energy Economics, in an article that highlights nuclear and LNG as the core "areas of bilateral energy cooperation between Japan and the United States."40¶ The Japanese sense of vulnerability on energy is grounded in the reality of possessing virtually no conventional resource endowments. It is now compounded by the desperation of extant vested energy interests. These actors' political clout has impaired the country's capacity to, as Bloomberg editor James Gibney exhorts, "make disaster the mother of invention" by using the Fukushima shock as a spur to "achieving sustainable, smart-energy self-sufficiency."41 Failure to take this resource-lite road could lead the Japanese further towards the risk of conflict. Imagine for example that the Japanese follow Team Abe's lead and lock themselves into reliance on depleting conventional resources, with or without the smidgeon of nuclear power they can realistically expect.42 And then ask what might happen if the Americans do not have the fracking abundance that their boosters claim to possess, a likelihood already gnawing at the banks and other players who have bet big money on the "shale revolution."43 One patent risk is conflict with the Chinese over conventional resources as well as – warns Keith Johnson in the April 25 Foreign Policy – over the East China Sea methane hydrate deposits that the Japanese are also trying to develop.44 As retired Navy Rear Admiral David Titley, an expert on climate change, wrote in a Fox News editorial in an effort to shake some sense into the heads of denialists: "The parallels between the political decisions regarding climate change we have made and the decisions that led Europe to World War One are striking – and sobering. The decisions made in 1914 reflected political policies pursued for short-term gains and benefits, coupled with institutional hubris, and a failure to imagine and understand the risks or to learn from recent history."45 That pretty much summarizes the irresponsibility of leaving green off the table between Obama and Abe. The risks exacerbated by re-affirming the status quo are precisely the kinds of risks that the US green military-industrial complex is aimed at. So the Obama regime and other players should think of how to push the promising arrow of an expanded green alliance into the Abe and METI bubble of complacency. And perhaps the Japanese and international media should be asking why green collaboration was not at the centre of that Abe-Obama negotiating table at this historic time, when an embryonic green alliance already exists.

The US-Japan alliance is key to the Asia Pivot—that prevents multiple nuclear wars against China, North Korea, and Russia
- China is becoming assertive and modern esp in SCS.
- North Korea is adjusting it's nuclear and missile provocations
- Russia relations getting worse with US i.e. the annexation of crimea and being allied with US enemies
- non of recs exist in squo, aff is a linkage point that can promote the alt solvency claims
there are multiple scenarios for war: hybrid warfare employing armed fishermen or maritime law enforcement vessels, terrorism/cyberattacks, missile threats, naval strikes, or nuclear attacks,
- air based defenses and missile defense ssytems are essential, getting control of information collection is also good. currently japan is missing out on some improvements of it's airfields. 

Harold 8-12 Dr. Scott W. Harold (associate director of the RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy, and a political scientist at the non-profit, non-partisan RAND Corporation, as well as a member of the Pardee RAND Graduate School faculty). “Don’t Weaken the U.S.–Japan Alliance, Strengthen It.” National Review. August 12th, 2016. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/dont-weaken-the-usE28093japan-alliance-strengthen-it-17330

The threat environment in Northeast Asia has been shifting in recent years as China’s military modernization and assertiveness, North Korea’s nuclear and missile provocations, and Russia’s turn towards hostility against the United States are fueling a rise in the risk of armed conflict between major powers. Confronting threats as varied as ISIS, al-Qaeda, Iran, and Ebola, some might wonder if the United States has the resources and will to stay engaged and shape the future of security in the Asia-Pacific, including offering extended deterrent guarantees to its Japanese, South Korean, Filipino, Australian, and Thai allies. Others are asking whether U.S. allies are even worth defending. Are they? I believe that the answer is yes, the U.S. has the resources to shape the future of the Asia-Pacific, and yes, its allies are worth defending. To abandon U.S. alliances would not only be more costly but also ultimately make America less safe at home. While U.S. defense budgets will remain constrained for some years to come, the U.S. military still retains very substantial hardware, training, doctrinal, operational experience, and human capital advantages. In addition, the United States enjoys the support of major allies who provide basing and access, logistical support, and critical enabling capabilities that ultimately make them important force multipliers for the defense of the U.S. homeland as well as its overseas interests and core values. As the largest status quo power allied with the United States in East Asia, no country plays a more important role than Japan in supporting the rule of law-based international order. If the United States wants to meet the challenges posed by increasingly well-armed, hostile and autocratic governments bent on intimidating the free world, it needs to continue to broaden and deepen its defense cooperation with Japan and states like it. Below I suggest four urgent priority areas for continued improvements: planning and joint training for a variety of contingencies; additional types of military hardware to bolster deterrence; addressing the basing of U.S. forces in Okinawa; and closer cooperation on innovative thinking about deterrence and war-fighting concepts. Forward, Together To date, the two allies have taken a number of important steps both separately and together, but much more work remains to be done. Japan, under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has reinterpreted Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution to engage in collective self-defense. The Abe administration has also established a National Security Secrets Act; set up a National Security Secretariat to assist with decision-making; lifted restrictions on defense exports; shifted the focus of defense planning scenarios from a ground invasion from the north to an air and naval threat from the southwest; and increased the country’s defense budget to approximately $40 billion. It has added critical hardware to the inventory of its Self-Defense Forces, including RQ-4 Global Hawk high-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, and advanced F-35 Lightning II fighters. Tokyo has also inducted helicopter carriers into the Maritime Self-Defense Forces, brought on-line new P1 maritime patrol aircraft, and expanded its submarine fleet from 16 to 22 boats, all while developing a 4000-man rapid reaction amphibious capability and emplacing radar and anti-ship cruise missiles along the coasts of remote islands in the country’s southwest. In November 2015 it announced plans to send 500 Ground Self Defense Force troops to one of these islands, Ishigaki, and in March it activated a radar station on another, Yonaguni Island, to be staffed by 160 Ground Self-Defense soldiers. Both islands are close to the Senkakus that China claims and is seeking to undermine Japanese control over. Ultimately, Tokyo plans to station approximately 10,000 troops across the southwest islands chain to meet this threat. For its part, in 2011 the Obama administration announced that it would “rebalance” to the Asia-Pacific region, a policy whose military component aims to create a more geographically-distributed, operationally-resilient, and politically-sustainable force posture across the region. The U.S. is also improving the capabilities it forward deploys in Japan, and has moved up many of its most advanced capabilities, including the F-22 Raptor, MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft to replace the more dated CH-46 Seaknight, an additional AN/TPY-2 radar, Global Hawk UAVs, and P-8 maritime patrol aircraft for submarine tracking. In late 2015, the 7th Fleet replaced the aging USS George Washington with the much newer USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier. Bilaterally the allies have also taken important steps together. During his 2014 trip to Japan, President Obama noted that the United States would regard an attack on the Senkakus as triggering Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan mutual defense treaty. Following this, in April 2015, the United States and Japan signed new defense guidelines that establish the basis for more effective coordination between the allies, including by establishing a new bilateral planning mechanism, an alliance coordination mechanism, and beginning discussions about cooperation in gray zones at sea, in outer space, and in cyberspace. And in December 2015, Tokyo agreed to increase its annual contributions in support of U.S. forces stationed in Japan, promising up to $8 billion over the next five years. The Department of Defense has calculated that this makes Japan the cheapest nation in the world in which to station U.S. forces, cheaper even than bringing them back to the United States. Critical Next Steps First, because forward-deployed U.S. forces protect both the United States and its allies, it is critical that the two sides share a common threat perception and understanding of the breakdown of roles and missions in the event of a crisis or conflict with China, North Korea, or Russia. These countries can present a variety of threats ranging from hybrid warfare employing armed fishermen or maritime law enforcement vessels, to terrorism and cyberattack, to high-end air and missile threats, naval strikes, or even nuclear attack. Continued tabletop and field exercises, aided by analytic war-gaming and scenario planning aimed at unearthing and stress-testing planners’ operational assumptions, will be critical for designing effective deterrent or war-fighting strategies and supporting those with the right types of capabilities and concepts of employment. Second, it will be critical for the allies to retain information dominance and air superiority in order to prevail in any contest. Because some of the most dangerous threats to Japan (as well as U.S. forces based in Japan) come from ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as air-delivered munitions, the continued build-out of a layered integrated air and missile defense system comprised of land-, sea-, and air-based defenses as well as point defense and endo-/exo-atmospheric interceptors will be important. Equally important is the supporting terrestrial and space-based aspects of the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance infrastructure that support such an Integrated Air and Missile Defense architecture. Ideally, U.S. and Japanese defenses could eventually be expanded into a network that would include other Asian allies and partner nations, especially since the defense of these nations depends heavily on U.S. access to basing in Japan. These partners could provide intelligence, tracking and telemetry data, and back-up communications channels in the event of disruption or destruction of U.S. and Japanese networks, as well as substantial political and diplomatic support during a crisis. The intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance demands on U.S. and Japanese forces are likely to be substantial in any conflict, and as such, a high degree of resiliency in the event of attacks on the allies’ space-based communications systems is warranted. This could include additional satellites and launch capabilities to produce more operationally-responsive space capacity, supplemented by procurement of high-altitude, long-endurance airborne ISR and communications relay platforms that are more mobile and less easily targeted than satellites on known orbital trajectories. In light of the criticality of air power for situational awareness, defense, and power projection, the airfields across Japan that the U.S. Air Force and Japan Air Self-Defense Forces operate out of require improved protections. In addition to their importance for the defense of Japan, these airfields would constitute key enablers for military operations in defense of South Korea, Taiwan or the Philippines in a contingency. Yet today many of these installations have insufficient revetments or bunkers to protect vulnerable allied air assets such as high-end fighters, aerial refueling capabilities, UAVs, and airborne early warning and control platforms. To improve the survivability of these important airframes, airfields in Japan operated by both countries require additional hardening to reduce the vulnerability of critical pieces of the allies’ air defense networks, and should also be regularly tested against the threat of attack and sabotage by adversary special operations forces. Procuring sufficient reconstitution capabilities and practicing rapid runway recovery as well as dispersal to alternate military or even civilian airfields would also be helpful. Additionally, strategic deception could be employed to confuse targeting of above-ground petroleum, oil, and lubricants storage units. And in any conflict that escalates to the higher end of the military spectrum, the allies would likely find their stockpile of critical and precision-guided munitions depleting rapidly; investing now in additional weaponry to be stored in secure facilities would pay substantial dividends in the event of an actual conflict, especially with an adversary like China that has built up deep reserves of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as air-delivered munitions. Third, no single location is more critical to the defense of Japan than Okinawa, which hosts approximately 70 percent of the nearly 50,000 American soldiers in Japan. Unfortunately, the political basis for continued U.S. operations out of Okinawa has grown increasingly challenging over the past several years. While many observers blame this development largely on political opportunism and naïveté on the part of former Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio, combined with a measure of politicking among local leaders on Okinawa, it is nonetheless also true that Okinawans have long borne a disproportionate burden for the defense of Japan and have suffered substantial inconveniences and indignities in the course of this. Regrettably, a small number of American service members and support personnel have committed appalling criminal acts ranging from seriously injuring local Okinawans in drunk driving accidents to gang rape and even murder. The actions of a small number of individuals out of the hundreds of thousands who have served honorably in Okinawa over the decades has severely complicated efforts to relocate Marine Corps Air Station Futenma from the heart of the crowded Ginowan district to Camp Schwab in Henoko. U.S. defense leaders and their Japanese counterparts should not abandon the relocation effort, which is currently frozen pending a court ruling that should clear the way for it to proceed. But neither should they spare any effort to address the serious concerns about noise, air, and ground pollution as well as off-base crime that anger Okinawans. Local U.S. military leaders should continue explaining how the replacement of the CH-46 Seaknight with the newer and operationally safer MV-22 Osprey reduces the risk of an accident while improving the U.S. Marines’ abilities to assist in responding to emergencies such as the April earthquake in Kumamoto. Local commanders from the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force as well as U.S. Air Force’s 18th Wing stationed at Kadena Air Base have critical roles to play in reaching out, listening to, and addressing the reasonable concerns of Okinawans affected by U.S. military operations in defense of Japan, signaling to them that the U.S. respects them and is open to minimizing the negative impact of the U.S. presence on local communities as far as possible. Finally, the United States and Japan have been thinking about how to deter and, if necessary, fight a technologically-advanced, high-end adversary such as China. As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army builds up an arsenal of advanced cruise and ballistic missiles, submarines, surface vessels, fighter-bombers, mines, anti-satellite weapons, refueling aircraft, and cyber weapons plus the ability to fight across the electro-magnetic spectrum, it is important for the United States and its allies to come up with plans for how to ensure that they are pacing this emerging military challenge. For the United States, innovations such as the Air-Sea Battle Concept, which was subsequently revised and incorporated into the broader concept of how to achieve Joint Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons, have been important early steps in shifting towards more serious thinking about how to meet the challenges of a high-end adversary with advanced capabilities. Japan has also begun to think about “going anti-access at sea”, effectively building its own network of shore-based radar and anti-ship cruise missile capabilities that might turn the cost equation of power projection back against China. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Defense has announced plans to pursue a “third off-set strategy” where the United States and its allies will work together to out-innovate potential system challengers and maintain the capacity to defend common interests through superior military technology and greater sharing of relevant research and development efforts. These important developments need to continue and deepen. Steady as She Goes So long as the United States and Japan stick together, they should have sufficient combined strength to meet the challenges of deterring or, if necessary, defeating the threats they confront. America’s allies are doing their part to help meet these challenges, as Japan has shown by making tremendous strides in improving its ability to make proactive contributions to the alliance and to the peace of the Asia-Pacific region in recent years. However, if inaccurate caricatures of feckless, free-riding allies drive the U.S. political debate in a direction that suggests that Washington will abandon its legally-binding alliance commitments, the risk of war will actually go up and America will be less safe. The greatest threat that the United States faces stems not from democratic allies who don’t spend enough on defense, but from authoritarian leaders who seek to undermine the United States and intimidate its allies to reshape the regional order in ways that make it safe for dictators to bully free societies. 

UV – State

1. Humans are fundamentally free and shaped by the experiential – means reject deterministic conceptions of identity or statehood, choice is fundamental to change which proves reformism
   - freedom should be recognized as a form of universal potentiality, choices are what shape experiences
   -if choice fundamentally is the author of history, then critiques that rely on historically static conceptions of statehood or identity fundamentally fail because they fail to recognize that people’s political choice cause the empirical and likewise can be reversed
   McSweeny 96 BILL McSWEENEY Lectured in Sociology at the Univ of York, Head of International Peace Studies Program @ Irish School of economics, Ph.D. Trinity College Dublin B.Phil. University of York B.A. University of Essex RIS 1996 (22)
   An analogy between identity and individual freedom will serve to illustrate the point. The test of freedom cannot be reduced to a test of the absence of obstacles to the fulfilment of desires. By that criterion, a happy slave might be judged free and a frustrated professor enslaved. Neither can it be reduced to perception. The slave may perceive himself more free than the professor, but it is obvious that the concept of personal freedom loses the meaning we invest in it, if we limit it to the perception of either. We need a test to judge the needs which are relevant to personal freedom if we are to rescue the concept from being merely an expression of taste. The test of freedom must begin from a positive judgment about human needs and rights, not from a negative assessment of obstacles. The philosophical starting-point must be some ideal of human nature.31 The fact that we have no authoritative, epistemological basis for constructing such an ideal is no argument against its necessity. We can, and we routinely do, make judgments about personal freedom. But they are not judgments which can be validated by empirical observation alone. If we want a test allowing us to transcend individual perception and to judge personal freedom in the light of the human competence to which the concept refers, then we are in the business of making a moral decision. We stand some chance of making a more reasoned judgment if we address its normative character explicitly than if we hide it from view behind a veil of false respect for the authenticity of the person. The implication for personal and collective identity should be clear. The basis of judgment about personal identity overlaps closely with the judgment about personal freedom. The answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ clearly does not rest simply on empirical evidence, though the factual, historical data collected in our passport, our diary and our past experiences are very relevant. Neither can it be decided exclusively in terms of subjective perception. We routinely ‘correct’ the identity claims not only of others but of ourselves. It rests also on the contrast and balance between a normative view of human nature and the facts of personal biography. It entails an element of decision as well as self-observation. Similarly, the collective question, ‘Who are we?’ cannot be answered simply by reference to opinion polls, ancient myths, folk music or other measures of collective history. It too entails a decision based on a theory which relates some of the countless biographical facts of our collective past and present to a view of who we want to be. ‘We are who we choose to be’ overstates our freedom in the matter but makes the point forcefully that collective identity is a choice made by people, not a property of society which transcends their agency. We choose from an array of possible identities, so to speak. (Clearly, this is to analyze identity formation in the abstract. No society exists where we could observe this process from the starting-point of a tabula rasa without an already-existing identity and the consequent pressures of socialization to adopt and to affirm it.) The question is how these diverse individual choices come to cohere in a clear or vague collective image, and how disputes about identity, with security implications, are settled. If we reify the notion of societal identity, in the manner of Waever et al., the answer is that it just happens. If sub-societal groups see things differently from the majority, Waever et al. offer no criteria by which to judge and resolve the dispute. For them, the idea society has an identity by definition. People do not choose it; they recognize it, they belong to it.32 This is sociologically untenable. It is blind to the moral choices which go into the melting-pot of the process of identity formation. To answer the question raised above: individual and group choices come to cohere in a societal identity—when they do—only by virtue of higher-level moral decisions about what counts and what does not in the image we want to have of ourselves. Whether it is the state, the Supreme Court or simply the most powerful hidden interests which settle the matter is less important than that we recognize the inescapable ethical judgment in the process of choosing the components of a collective identity. These agencies are political instruments, made necessary by the fact that social order requires a referee with the mandate to speak for society. In Buzan (1991), as noted, the state was not only given the political mandate in relation to security, it was also ontologically identified with the needs and rights of the people whose security was at stake. The moral judgment involved in Buzan’s account is hidden within the function of the state. In the new focus on societal identity, there is no referee and there are no criteria for legitimizing decisions about identity. In effect, the construction of identity and the resolution of identity disputes are left to emerge, incorrigible and beyond assessment, from the mysterious workings of society. The element of normative judgment in the negotiations which constitute the permanent process of identity formation is lost. Collective identity is not ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered. What is ‘out there’ is identity discourse on the part of political leaders, intellectuals and countless others, who engage in the process of constructing, negotiating and affirming a response to the demand—at times urgent, mostly absent—for a collective image. Even in times of crisis, this is never more than a provisional and fluid image of ourselves as we want to be, limited by the facts of history. The relevance of this argument to the concept of societal security should be clear.
   2. Policymaking – critical thinking also requires examining policies, not principles in isolation – educational activities should foster an informed citizenry
   COVERSTONE 05
   Coverstone 5 MBA (Alan, Acting on Activism, http://home.montgomerybell.edu/~coversa/Acting20on20Activism20(Nov2017-2005).doc)
   An important concern emerges when Mitchell describes reflexive fiat as a contest strategy capable of “eschewing the power to directly control external actors” (1998b, p. 20). Describing debates about what our government should do as attempts to control outside actors is debilitating and disempowering. Control of the US government is exactly what an active, participatory citizenry is supposed to be all about. After all, if democracy means anything, it means that citizens not only have the right, they also bear the obligation to discuss and debate what the government should be doing. Absent that discussion and debate, much of the motivation for personal political activism is also lost. Those who have co-opted Mitchell’s argument for individual advocacy often quickly respond that nothing we do in a debate round can actually change government policy, and unfortunately, an entire generation of debaters has now swallowed this assertion as an article of faith. The best most will muster is, “Of course not, but you don’t either!” The assertion that nothing we do in debate has any impact on government policy is one that carries the potential to undermine Mitchell’s entire project. If there is nothing we can do in a debate round to change government policy, then we are left with precious little in the way of pro-social options for addressing problems we face. At best, we can pursue some Pilot-like hand washing that can purify us as individuals through quixotic activism but offer little to society as a whole. It is very important to note that Mitchell (1998b) tries carefully to limit and bound his notion of reflexive fiat by maintaining that because it “views fiat as a concrete course of action, it is bounded by the limits of pragmatism” (p. 20). Pursued properly, the debates that Mitchell would like to see are those in which the relative efficacy of concrete political strategies for pro-social change is debated. In a few noteworthy examples, this approach has been employed successfully, and I must say that I have thoroughly enjoyed judging and coaching those debates. The students in my program have learned to stretch their understanding of their role in the political process because of the experience. Therefore, those who say I am opposed to Mitchell’s goals here should take care at such a blanket assertion. However, contest debate teaches students to combine personal experience with the language of political power. Powerful personal narratives unconnected to political power are regularly co-opted by those who do learn the language of power. One need look no further than the annual state of the Union Address where personal story after personal story is used to support the political agenda of those in power. The so-called role-playing that public policy contest debates encourage promotes active learning of the vocabulary and levers of power in America. Imagining the ability to use our own arguments to influence government action is one of the great virtues of academic debate. Gerald Graff (2003) analyzed the decline of argumentation in academic discourse and found a source of student antipathy to public argument in an interesting place. I’m up against…their aversion to the role of public spokesperson that formal writing presupposes. It’s as if such students can’t imagine any rewards for being a public actor or even imagining themselves in such a role. This lack of interest in the public sphere may in turn reflect a loss of confidence in the possibility that the arguments we make in public will have an effect on the world. Today’s students’ lack of faith in the power of persuasion reflects the waning of the ideal of civic participation that led educators for centuries to place rhetorical and argumentative training at the center of the school and college curriculum. (Graff, 2003, p. 57) The power to imagine public advocacy that actually makes a difference is one of the great virtues of the traditional notion of fiat that critics deride as mere simulation. Simulation of success in the public realm is far more empowering to students than completely abandoning all notions of personal power in the face of governmental hegemony by teaching students that “nothing they can do in a contest debate can ever make any difference in public policy.” Contest debating is well suited to rewarding public activism if it stops accepting as an article of faith that personal agency is somehow undermined by the so-called role playing in debate. Debate is role-playing whether we imagine government action or imagine individual action. Imagining myself starting a socialist revolution in America is no less of a fantasy than imagining myself making a difference on Capitol Hill. Furthermore, both fantasies influenced my personal and political development virtually ensuring a life of active, pro-social, political participation. Neither fantasy reduced the likelihood that I would spend my life trying to make the difference I imagined. One fantasy actually does make a greater difference: the one that speaks the language of political power. The other fantasy disables action by making one a laughingstock to those who wield the language of power. Fantasy motivates and role-playing trains through visualization. Until we can imagine it, we cannot really do it. Role-playing without question teaches students to be comfortable with the language of power, and that language paves the way for genuine and effective political activism. Debates over the relative efficacy of political strategies for pro-social change must confront governmental power at some point. There is a fallacy in arguing that movements represent a better political strategy than voting and person-to-person advocacy. Sure, a full-scale movement would be better than the limited voice I have as a participating citizen going from door to door in a campaign, but so would full-scale government action. Unfortunately, the gap between my individual decision to pursue movement politics and the emergence of a full-scale movement is at least as great as the gap between my vote and democratic change. They both represent utopian fiat. Invocation of Mitchell to support utopian movement fiat is simply not supported by his work, and too often, such invocation discourages the concrete actions he argues for in favor of the personal rejectionism that under girds the political cynicism that is a fundamental cause of voter and participatory abstention in America today.

Tournament: Scarsdale | Round: 1 | Opponent: Byram JB | Judge: Daniel Lu
The role of the ballot is to embrace the politics of black lives matter to use meritocratic policy discussion to resolve material conditions of antiblackness.
Academia has been subsumed by antiblackness, education must imagine new futures independent of whiteness
Quick 6-21 Kimberly Quick (The Century Foundation. Policy Associate), 6-21-2016, "Why Black Lives Matter in Education, Too," Century Foundation, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/black-lives-matter-education/ NB
Last month, the
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from the concept.
Black lives matter isn’t futurism – state movements build coalitions necessary to spur self coalition and revalue black life and agency by restoring culture
Bailey 15 Bailey, Julius, and David J. Leonard. "Black Lives Matter: Post-Nihilistic Freedom Dreams." Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 5.3/4 (2015): 67-77.KB
Three simple words: Black-
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happen in the current moment.
Causal processes predispose us to certain types of reasoning. Particular morality must deconstruct oppression and be historically informed– identity critique is no more radical than ideal political philosophy that essentializes groups
YOUNG 90  Iris Marion Young. Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. “Justice and the Politics of Difference.” Princeton University Press. 1990 KB
Impartial reason aims to adopt a point of view outside concrete situa­ tions of action, a transcendental "view from nowhere" that carries the perspective, attributes, character, and interests of no particular subject or set of subjects. This ideal of the impartial transcendental
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of social relations (of. May, 1987, pp. 22-23).

Plan
Thus, the plan: Resolved- The United States Federal Government should ban qualified immunity for police officers through strict liability.
This ensures litigation against harm regardless of police intent and reforms police behavior
- Answers departments turns case bc 1. Policing is shitty rn so theres no uniqueness to a marginal increase so try or die for the aff to improve policing 2. Police wouldn’t arrest frivolously bc frivolous arrests bring litigation in a feedback cycle, only good arrests will be pursued to avoid shit, insurers will get pissed so indemnity doesn’t take this out
Veksler 07 Veksler, David. "The One Minute Case For Strict Civil Liability Of The Justice System". One Minute Cases. N. p., 2007. Web. 4 Nov. 2016.KB
What is the problem
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pushing for enforcement.

Uniqueness
Police violence is common place- squo civilian oversight isn’t sufficient –people sue 1 of the time because of QI and police get away with force on millions
A. Civil complaints are too informal and departments ignore them so people who complain are deterred from suing – legal lawsuits are binding and attorneys help establish clear precedent to create department policy change – the only barrier is qualified immunity
B. Creates uniqueness for lawsuits – 1 of people file lawsutis because they find complains easier, lawyers don’t pick up cases cuz QI, and even lesser cases that are picked up are successfully taken through
Schwartz 11 Schwartz, Joanna C. "What Police Learn from Lawsuits." Cardozo L. Rev. 33 (2011): 841. Joanna Schwartz is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She teaches Civil Procedure, the Civil Rights Litigation Clinic KB
Although almost every police department has a policy to accept and investigate civilian complaints against police personnel,121 there are four reasons to
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improperly sent to probate.
QI enables judges to hack for the police due to the reasonability standard so people are deterred from suing – allowing police to get away with anything – empirics confirm, justice delayed is better than no justice at all
Pattis 16 bracketed for ableist rhetoric Pattis, Norm. Management, Elite. "Norman Pattis Blog". Norm Pattis Blog. N. p., 2016. Web. 25 Oct. 2016.KB
I get many calls each week
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most of them don't even realize it.
Cognitive evidence proves people hack for the police because of the lack of constitutional precedent
Leong 8: Nancy Leong. October 11, 2008. Social Sciences resource network. The Saucier qualified immunity experiment: An empirical analysis. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1282683.RW
This paper provides
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that was unlawful."
Solvency
Deterrance solves:

Court precedent and co-op, litigation establishes precedent which expedites trials and provides rights which builds trust and accountability
Stefan 16 De Stefan, Lindsey, (J.D. Candidate, Seton Hall Universtiy School of Law; B.A. Ramapo College of New Jersey. "“No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:” How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct" (2017). Law School Student Scholarship. Paper 850. http://scholarship.shu.edu/student_scholarship/850  NB
Altering the qualified
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citizen-police relationship.
2. Police fear liability, negative reputation, and losing their jobs, indemnification allows poorer cops to comply too
Schwartz 14 Schwartz, Joanna C. “Police Indemnification” Assistant Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. New York University Law Review. 2014 NB
Others will argue that, despite
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indemnified by the city, which pays settle- ments and judgments against officers out of a general fund.
Independently, qualified immunity masks other methods of the CJS that maintain racial violence.
Hassel 99 Hassel, Diana. "Living a Lie: The cost of Qualified Immunity" Winter 1999. Volume 64. Missouri law Review. Available at: http://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol64/iss1/9  NB
The problem with qualified immunity is not so much that the outcomes are sometimes unfair but the fact that qualified immunity blocks a clear view
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from us the tools required for reform.
Particularity is a gold standard and policy simulation is good – truth doesn’t exist in abstract or its divorced from empirical specificity – political critical theory’s totalizing claims cede the political and are totalizing
Zanotti 13 Zanotti 13 Laura, associate professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech., Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2008 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2009. “Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World”, originally published online 30 December 2013, DOI: 10.1177/0304375413512098, P. Sage Publications KB
Unlike positions that adopt governmentality as a descriptive tool and end up embracing the liberal substantialist ontological assumptions and epistemological framework they criticize, positions that embrace
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static recipes for action.