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: Everything | Round: 1 | Opponent: Everything | Judge: Everything
All broken things are on Nirmal's Wiki- please check that before reading disclosure just because you didn't do prep for this shit.

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
AND
static recipes for action.

Tournament: Harvard | Round: 2 | Opponent: all | Judge: all
Advantage 1 is Econ (1:15)
Restrictions on campus speech undermine the free exchange of ideas—that kills economic growth and competitiveness
Millsap 16 Adam Millsap (research fellow for the State and Local Policy Project with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University). “Free Speech Is Good for the Economy.” U.S. News and World Report. May 23rd, 2016. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-23/free-speech-is-good-for-the-economy
Commencement season is now underway, and President Barack Obama recently had the honor of speaking at Howard University. His speech touched on a variety of topics, including the troubling trend of colleges canceling speakers that some students and faculty find offensive. The president is right that people should engage with one another on the battlefield of ideas rather than try to silence those with whom they disagree. As many people have pointed out, this engagement is important for a well-functioning democracy. But what people may not realize is that it's critical for a well-functioning economy as well. New ideas and innovation are necessary for sustaining economic growth, and there's a large body of evidence that emphasizes the exchange of ideas as an important component of an innovative economy. The United States has been especially successful at fostering innovation and growth in the technology sector. Facebook's market capitalization alone is twice the size of all the large European tech giants combined. There's good reason to believe that America's economic prosperity in this rapidly changing sector is due to its commitment to the free exchange of ideas. The theory that ideas and innovation are crucial to economic growth is an old one. Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" is perhaps the best known explanation of the role that innovation plays in the economy. Schumpeter explained that competition requires firms to constantly innovate, since those that don't will quickly be replaced by those that do. Ultimately micro-level creative destruction helps drive macro-level economic growth. But not all countries have to be innovators in order to grow. From the 1950s until the mid-'80s the Solow growth model was the primary tool of economists who studied economic growth. One of its main predictions was that poorer countries would eventually catch up to, or converge with, rich countries. The intuitive reasoning behind the theory of convergence is that poor countries could simply imitate the technological innovation of rich countries and grow accordingly. Instead of spending time and resources reinventing the internal combustion engine, the airplane, antibiotics or the assembly line, all countries like China and India had to do was start using them. But while imitation is a viable method of generating economic growth when a country is lagging behind, it can't go on forever. Once a country reaches the economic frontier – where there are no longer any countries to imitate – only innovation and technological progress can generate additional growth. The United States has been on the frontier for at least a century and our economic growth is primarily powered by our ability to innovate. Innovation itself is often described as an output of a country – e.g. the United States "leads the world in innovation" – but this language obscures where innovation actually takes place. It happens locally; individuals, not countries, innovate. Engineers and scientists working for companies, laboratories and universities and people tinkering in their garage, shed or basement are the real drivers of innovation, and most of this innovation occurs in cities. The large amount of specialized knowledge in cities, along with the rapid dissemination of information, is what fosters innovation. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that a city's success is proportional to the ability of its residents to innovate and generate new ideas. Cities devoid of entrepreneurs who routinely generate new ideas will stagnate and decay. And stagnation at the local level inevitably leads to stagnation at the national level. Researchers routinely point out that the proximity of people in cities is one of the primary reasons most innovation occurs there, but the exact mechanism through which the transfer of knowledge and ideas takes place is often omitted. The assumption seems to be that simply putting a bunch of people together on the same city block will create innovation. But the actual communication part is a crucial input into the production of innovation. As economists Curtis Simon and Clark Nardinelli note in their study of the growth of English cities in the 19th and 20th centuries: "The creativity of the market economy – the increasing returns so important in modern growth theory – in large part arises from what happens when people with information get together and talk. The talk is necessary to turn information into productive knowledge." Since spreading ideas and information requires communication – people talking to one another, attending lectures and presentations, watching videos, etc. – it's likely that limiting speech, either formally or informally, would have pernicious effects on innovation and harm economic growth in the United States. Despite the robust protections of the First Amendment and Americans' long history of exercising their right to free speech, there are signs that a significant portion of society is questioning how far this right should extend. College students around the country are increasingly calling for limits on speech. Several colleges have cancelled speakers due to the vocal opposition of students and faculty, and some college administrations are beginning to favor safety and inclusivity over the free exchange of ideas. Even high schools are getting on board; after students at a Bronx high school recently threatened to walk out on former presidential candidate Ted Cruz, his appearance was cancelled. The combination of these incidents reveals that many of the next generation of teachers, politicians, government administrators and business people are comfortable with suppressing speech they personally don't like. While it's true that speech that offends a large portion of the population, or that criticizes a specific group, is unlikely to be the type of speech that leads to innovation, this criticism in large part misses the point. What matters is not whether restrictions on offensive, hurtful or "hate" speech harm innovation directly, but whether such restrictions significantly reduce the likelihood of engaging in conversation in general. It's hard to predict where a conversation will end up. While civilized people should try to be sensitive to others, the subjectivity of offensive speech makes it difficult to always say the "right" thing. If the penalty for saying the "wrong" thing is large enough, even a small probability of digressing to a sensitive topic can be enough to discourage conversation. Currently the United States is one of the most economically competitive countries in the world as well as the most supportive of free expression. I don't think this is a coincidence: America's unique commitment to free speech and the open exchange of ideas has given entrepreneurs in the United States a competitive advantage. Efforts to clamp down on speech at the local level for the sake of safety and inclusivity may seem largely benign at first. But over time a climate that is hostile to certain forms of speech can have a chilling effect on all speech. As an economic leader, we rely on the free exchange of ideas and information for the serendipitous discoveries that increase our standard of living, and because of this, the long-term costs of stifling speech are larger than commonly recognized.
The US is key to the global economy for the foreseeable future- but their on the brink of decrease now
High 12/5 (Peter. Reporter on Innovative ideas in the world of information technology) Forbes . He is in an interview with Peter Zeihan (Geopolitical Strategist Peter Zeihan is a global energy, demographic and security expert, and the author of The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder. He is an advisor to the US State Department and to the Washington, DC think tank community. In his book, he notes that the reassertion of geopolitics as the rule by which the world operates; global demographic inversions; and shale energy will all lead to a period of U.S. domination across the next half century and possibly beyond. I recently spoke with Zeihan, and our conversation covered these changes, the U.S.’s changing role in global security and trade; the sectors that will be changed most, countries that are the best targets for trade by the United States, as well as a variety of other topics) “Reasons Why The US Will Dominate The World Economy For The Foreseeable Future” Dec 5, 2016. http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhigh/2016/12/05/reasons-why-the-us-will-dominate-the-world-economy-for-the-foreseeable-future/#63cf66623841.  NB
Peter High: In your book, The Accidental Superpower, you talked about how a variety of rules that we have come to take as given over the past seventy years are going to be changed regarding geopolitics. Especially considering the recent election, I would be curious about how the theses you had posited in that book remain, are amplified, or are changed. Peter Zeihan: There are a couple of things going on simultaneously. First, because of demographic aging on a global scale, the United States is emerging as the only market over the long-term. Second, the United States is backing away from the world. It is reducing the American footprint overseas while its ability to intervene increases. What we have done with Special Forces, what we are doing with drones, what we are doing with satellite tech—the ability to reach out is higher than it has been for decades. But our need to do that with troops on the ground or maintaining the day-to-day order of the international system is going away. Third, Trump is taking a lot of the trends that already existed in American politics and kicked them up a notch. We are already going through this period of new isolationism and here comes a trade warrior who wants to renegotiate every trade deal on the books, specifically fingering Mexico and China, two of our three biggest trading partners. You put these three things together and you get a United States that is transitioning from being the global guarantor of security, global trade, and energy markets to one that, at best, has stepped back from it all and, more likely, even sees a vested interest in disrupting it to a certain degree. At the same time, the U.S. is the only market. The split between successful countries and failed countries in the future is how well can you buddy up with the only country that matters? Everything else is going to be a free for all. In the United States, you have the market, the financial capital, the labor system, the consumption base, the energy—and you can project power out, rather than have to defend your own borders. That does not exist anywhere else on the planet, and is not going to exist anywhere else on the planet in the next fifty years. The only question in my mind for the last few years has been “What is the speed of the transition?” Under a President Hillary Clinton, it would have taken four to eight years. Under President-elect Donald Trump, it will probably take four to eight months. The year 2017 is shaping up to be the most dynamic year in international affairs since at least 1945. High: Are you suggesting that some of what we are seeing with the positive reaction of the markets in the U.S. is symptomatic or emblematic of some positive economic changes for the U.S.? Are these sustainable from your perspective? Zeihan: I would not bet too much on any specific economic trend that seems to be manifested on Wall Street for the last couple of weeks. The market had fully positioned itself for a Clinton victory and when that did not happen, everyone went scrambling in every other direction they could imagine. Whether Trump’s economic plans are good for the mid- and the long-term, we really do not know yet. The first of three things that Trump says he is going to attack in his first couple of months is corporate tax reform, which is solid. I think there is a surprising amount of bipartisan support for that in Congress already. The second is healthcare. That will be a hell of a fight, but with control over Congress, the Executive Branch and, probably very soon, the courts, that is one that Trump can win, just not in the first 30 days. The third one is immigration. In the first stage, it is going to be about capacity building. If he really is serious about doing mass deportations, then there will need to be a fair overhaul and bulking up of INS. That is not something you can do in a month. Those three policies are not going to generate short-term results. We will not see the first economic outcome for that for two years, so do not hold your breath. High: Given the power that America will have to choose the markets in which to emphasize, where do you believe the country should focus? Zeihan: First, I would argue that the U.S. has not had a meaningful foreign policy towards either East Asian or Western Europe since the Bush senior administration. The Clinton administration did not have a foreign policy. In the George W. Bush administration, it was all Middle East, all the time. In the Obama administration, the Russian reset and the pivot towards Asia were basically just a little bit of window dressing to cover the fact that we were cancelling our Middle East policy. So, we have really not had a functional foreign policy in any meaningful sense of the term for twenty-five years. In my view, the two areas where it makes the most sense for the United States to engage in a constructive manner are Latin American, specifically Mexico, and Southeast Asia, specifically Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam. These are the parts of the world that have good demography and where a combination of local consumptive capacity could marry well with American technology and military policy. Anywhere else in the world, you are going to deal with collapsing demographies so there is no market to access. If you go to the Persian Gulf, you are going to be in the middle of a Saudi Arabian knife fight. If you go into Europe, you must deal with the Russian resurgence. If you go into East Asian, you must deal with what is brewing into a Japan/Korea/Taiwan/China fight. You do not have to deal with that in Southeast Asia. Half the population is under thirty. You do not have to deal with that with Mexico, which is already the U.S.’s number one or number two trade partner, depending on how you do the data. These two regions are easy. They do not have a lot of heartburn and they offer a lot in terms of resources and markets. High: Explain the basis of the global world order for the past 70 years. Zeihan: Before World War II, you did not trade with your neighbors if you could help it because any military conflict anywhere in the world could disrupt what were ganglion supply chains, even if you were not the target of a war. You kept everything in house, expanded into empire, and used your navy to protect your internal trade. World War II ultimately brought the whole system crashing down. Since the United States was the only country involved in the war that did not have fighting on its soil, it could impose a replacement system at Bretton Woods in 1944. Bretton Woods worked fundamentally differently. Instead of everybody having their own sequestered imperial economy, everything was put into a global bucket. Everyone who was represented at Bretton Woods could access that bucket for resources and markets. And the U.S. Navy guaranteed the security of the seas for absolutely everyone. This had never been attempted before. It worked for two reasons. One, the U.S. did the protecting; and two, the U.S., whose market survived the war, opened that market to all the allies and allowed them to export their way back to affluence. We did this not because we were nice, but because we were basically bribing an alliance. The catch of Bretton Woods was if you wanted all this access, you had to allow the United States to fight the Cold War its way. It started with the wartime allies and eventually expanded it to the Axis in the 1950’s—Latin American, Northern Europe, Scandinavians, we eventually brought in Southeast Asia—and by the time we got to the end of the Cold War, you had over half the global system as part of this network. The problem is that Americans were so impressed with the end of the Cold War that we picked a domestic candidate for the next six or seven elections. The free trade aspect of Bretton Woods was allowed to linger on while the security quid pro quo, which was the American justification for it in the first place, fell by the wayside. For the last twenty-five years, we have been backing away from that system. That has made the world a lot more chaotic and has allowed things like Syria, the Japanese financial crisis, and European financial crisis to happen. Had any of these things happened in the 1960’s or 1970’s, the United States would have stepped in with a massive financial and/or military involvement to stymie it. We are not doing that anymore so you have military conflicts around the world breaking out. Today, we are at the verge of American withdrawal from active management. The secondary powers that have had their economic security provided to them basically free of charge now must start looking after their own affairs. Most of them are not ready. Of those that are, they are not the kind of countries that we normally associate with ones that we want to be world leaders. The Russians are asserting influence into central Europe. That is going to provoke a response from Sweden and Germany, probably Turkey, too. The American withdrawal from the Persian Gulf leaves it up to the Iranians and the Saudis to duke it out over who is in charge. The oil price war over the last two years is just the opening round of that. Syria is a piece of that. The next stage is some sort of energy crisis triggered by either Saudi Arabia or Iran or Poland or Russia. If any of those four countries decide to use energy as a weapon, you are talking about a minimum of two million barrels of crude going off line, perhaps as much as twenty-five. Then you get an energy crisis, and that means that the Chinese and the Japanese have to fight for whatever cargos they can access. One way or another, the global system that we are all so used to—and that we just assume operates on autopilot—is going to break down. If Trump lives up to his rhetoric and his pullback is as aggressive as it looks like it is going to be, this next year is the year. High: There are three hypotheses highlighted in your book, The Accidental Superpower: the reassertion of geopolitics as the rule by which the world operates; global demographic inversions; and shale energy, which by making U.S. energy independent in many ways could be the lubricant of a lot what you have just described. Can you walk us through these three hypotheses and the importance of the U.S.’s position for the foreseeable future? Zeihan: First, geopolitics. Policy, culture, finance—everything is shaped by physical geography. Some countries have extreme advantages over others. If you have a lot of flat lands and rivers for natural transport corridors, it is very easy to develop and expand. The cost of moving goods on water is about one-twelfth of what it is on land. Countries like France or Germany or Japan or the United States have a massive leg up in their ability to generate financial, economic, industrial, and agricultural power. That translates into everything else that they do and makes them major military powers as well. Bretton Woods made that not matter because it put everybody in the same club. It told countries that they could not use military power to impress their will upon others. Free trade gave everybody access. Free movement of capital made the countries that were relatively capital poor, whether they are Brazil or India or Spain, the ability to function as strong secondary powers for the first time in history. All of these things in economic competition that had driven imperial competition for centuries were suddenly given for free. You remove Bretton Woods and it all starts up again. The Germans must start looking after their own interests. The Japanese cannot rely on the protection of the American Navy and freedom of the seas for their imports and exports. The Chinese, who were probably the biggest beneficiaries of Bretton Woods, actually have to go back to their 4,000 years of internal strife because they lack projection capacity. They are caged by their own geography. This story is going to repeat over and over across the world. All of those secondary powers that used to be major empires all of a sudden have to start acting imperial again. And that is going to generate everything from energy crises to famines to military conflicts. Number two is demography. People of different ages act differently. For those in their twenties and thirties, it is all about consumption. Their incomes are low; it is house loans, car loans, college loans. High growth, but high debt. For your mature workers in their 40's, 50's, and 60's, they are preparing for retirement and their incomes are very high. This is all the investment capital that makes the world move. This is the tax base. Young folks do the consuming. Older folks take care of the investment capital. Finally, once they retire they start drawing more from the system than they put in. Pensions and health care start to overwhelm their finances and that becomes a problem for governments. In a traditional demography, the elderly are the smallest group. The folks in the middle group are larger and the young workers make up the bulk. It is a pyramid. But with urbanization and the post-World War II experience, we have had a collapse in birth rate throughout most of the world and now the demography is completely inverted in a lot of the world: the big bulge in the demography is not the young worker but the mature worker who is socking away a lot of capital for retirement and paying huge taxes. By the time you get to 2022, the majority of the baby boomers will have retired, and they will take all that investment capital and all that tax money with them. Every government on the planet is going to have to get along with a lot less income while they have to dish out a lot more payment for the retirees. There is only one country in the world that is an exception to that: the United States, because we are the only place where the boomers actually had kids. We come out on the other end all right because the millennial generation is large and by the time they are in their 40's and 50's, our demographics will have more or less fixed themselves. That does not happen anywhere else. Everywhere else, the population gets older every year, the population gets less skilled every year, and financial costs go up every year. The European financial crisis, the Japanese financial crisis—these are as good as they will ever be right now. It is all downhill from here. While the United States is losing interest in maintaining the global system, at the same time the global structure breaks down, the United States is becoming the only market in the world. And it is going to be keeping to itself. That is a triple hit to every economy in the world. If you are a trade-based economy like Korea or China or Germany, you get hit from every possible angle at the same time. Number three is shale. It all comes down to full cycle breakeven prices: how much does it cost to get a barrel of crude on average out of the ground including everything from exploration on the front end, to production costs, to mid-stream piping, to taxes on the back end? In the big four shale fields in the United States, the breakeven price is about $40 per barrel. So U.S. shale—what we have always thought of as the really expensive stuff—is now cost-competitive with every energy basin in the world outside of the Persian Gulf itself. There is a whole suite of new technologies-- things like refracking and multi-lateral drilling, in-drilling, and water tanks—that are coming together to make a new best practices suite, merging with Big Data and that price structure is still going down. By the time we get to January 2019, we will probably be at about $25 per barrel. Because of that cost structure, you are seeing U.S. energy output increasing despite weak prices. Unless the bottom falls out of the oil markets and we go down to $20 per barrel, I see no reason for that to change. You will undoubtedly see North America achieving full energy independence within a couple of years and with a little tweak in the price structure by the end of this term, it is entirely possible that not just North America will be energy-independent, but the United States itself might be very close.
Economic decline risks a breakdown of international institutions—that causes war
- 1930s prove that prolonged global downturn has geopolitical repercussions in the US and Europe
- Brings about trade wars and competition over resources,
- Hurts international institutions like EU and WT
- Tensions are rising now
Kreitner 11 Ricky Kreitner (intern at Business Insider). “Serious People Are Starting To Realize That We May Be Looking At World War III.” Business Insider. August 8th, 2011. http://www.businessinsider.com/serious-people-are-starting-to-realize-that-we-may-be-looking-at-world-war-iii-2011-8
Noting liberal despair over the government's inability to combat economic depression, and conservative skepticism that traditional tools will be effective, John Judis of The New Republic argues that a global depression far longer and more severe than anyone expected now seems nearly impossible to avoid. Judis believes that the coming "depression" will be accompanied by geopolitical upheaval and institutional collapse. "As the experience of the 1930s testified, a prolonged global downturn can have profound political and geopolitical repercussions. In the U.S. and Europe, the downturn has already inspired unsavory, right-wing populist movements. It could also bring about trade wars and intense competition over natural resources, and the eventual breakdown of important institutions like European Union and the World Trade Organization. Even a shooting war is possible." Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph has noticed a similar trend. In a post titled, "This Really Is Beginning To Look Like 1931," Knowles argues that we could be witnessing the transition from recession to global depression that last occurred two years after the 1929 market collapse, and eight years before Germany invaded Poland, triggering the Second World War: "The difference today is that so far, the chain reaction of a default has been avoided by bailouts. Countries are not closing down their borders or arming their soldiers – they can agree on some solution, if not a good solution. But the fundamental problem – the spiral downwards caused by confidence crises and ever rising interest rates – is exactly the same now as it was in 1931. And as Italy and Spain come under attack, we are reaching the limit of how much that sticking plaster can heal. Tensions between European countries unseen in decades are emerging." Knowles wrote that post three days ago. Since then it has become abundantly obvious that Europe will soon become unwilling or unable to continue bailing out every country with a debt problem. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy continues to chug along, to the extent it is chugging at all, on the false security offered
That’s the most probable scenario for war
- Cooperation has increasily been less likely to work in multiple empirical examples i.e. 1990s,
- Most likely to cause economic crises
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Elhefnawy 11 Nader Elhefnawy (professor of English at the University of Miami, writer on IR published in peer-reviewed journals including International Security, Astropolitics, and Survival). “Twenty Years After the Cold War: A Strategic Survey,” Parameters, The U.S. Army War College Quarterly. Spring 2011. http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/2011spring/Ehlefnawy.pdf

Relative calm has prevailed among the great powers since the demise of the Soviet Union. Large-scale warfare remains a possibility, but by and large interstate war has been confined to the margins of the international system, and limited in its intensity, with the operational realities of the world’s major armed forces characterized by alternative missions. Neoliberal globalization has been robust but economically problematic, characterized by slow growth, financial instability, and other factors contributing to social and political stress. East Asia, and especially China, constituted the principal exception to the slow growth characterizing these decades. East Asia has massively increased its share of world manufacturing, exports, and exchange reserves, while at the same time the EU expanded and consolidated the continent’s resources, with some “game-changing” implications (like the euro). Additionally, rising commodity prices have resulted in booms among resource exporters, particularly energy exporters, which have also permitted these nations to enjoy greater political leverage.¶ As a result, while the United States remains in a class of its own with regard to military power, and its large national market, there have been some substantial shifts in economic power from the United States and Japan to other actors over the past two decades. This is particularly true of China, the EU, and a select number of energy exporters, resulting in a more complex and diffuse distribution of power. At the same time the relationships of the major powers are less defined by concerns related to traditional, state-centered threats than at any time since the nineteenth century, if not earlier. While these may not be the traditional threats, they do present an unprecedented array of non-traditional security concerns in areas like energy, the environment, and finance, and physical threats presented by non-state actors, such as international terrorism and high-seas piracy. Despite these mounting threats, cooperation has consistently fallen short of the levels hoped for in the early 1990s.¶ Many of the current trends seem likely to continue through the foreseeable future. The interaction of the crises of the past several years (especially in energy and international finance) combined with long-mounting stresses in the global economy (slow growth, debt, ecological pressure) all raise the possibility of changes in some areas of development, particularly if these changes impact the world’s three principal loci of economic power: China, the European Union, and the United States. China may continue to grow rapidly, though perhaps less so as it matures, and begins to pursue goals beyond the mere maximizing of GDP. Even if the EU’s attempts at integration and expansion recede (as is plausible), Europe as a whole is likely to remain powerful, even if that power is less extensive and well-organized.¶ Meanwhile the US position is not unlike what the “declinists” of the 1980s and early 1990s anticipated. The most significant direct challenges to the United States some twenty years after the Cold War are not military, but economic: deindustrialization, balance of payments problems, debt, and surviving inside an ever-more integrated global economy and strained ecosystem. Relations among the great powers may yet grow more intense, but economic crisis seems the most likely cause of any future conflict, with the less traditional dimensions of security presenting the most realistic obstacles to the United States’ freedom of action if such events ever do materialize.
Economic collapse causes competition for resources and instability that escalates and goes nuclear
- Terrorist appeals will decline, groups in 2025 will be descendants of long established groups, that become self- radicalized in the absence of economic outlets.
- close proximity nuclear rivals will produce inherent difficulties.
- less cooperation increases and pushes tensions over the bwrik
- cooperation manages resources and dincreasingly differnet
Harris and Burrows 9 Mathew, PhD European History @ Cambridge, counselor in the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and Jennifer is a member of the NIC’s Long Range Analysis Unit “Revisiting the Future: Geopolitical Effects of the Financial Crisis” http://www.ciaonet.org/journals/twq/v32i2/f_0016178_13952.pdf Increased Potential for Global Conflict
Of course, the report encompasses more than economics and indeed believes the future is likely to be the result of a number of intersecting and interlocking forces. With so many possible permutations of outcomes, each with ample Revisiting the Future opportunity for unintended consequences, there is a growing sense of insecurity. Even so, history may be more instructive than ever. While we continue to believe that the Great Depression is not likely to be repeated, the lessons to be drawn from that period include the harmful effects on fledgling democracies and multiethnic societies (think Central Europe in 1920s and 1930s) and on the sustainability of multilateral institutions (think League of Nations in the same period). There is no reason to think that this would not be true in the twenty-first as much as in the twentieth century. For that reason, the ways in which the potential for greater conflict could grow would seem to be even more apt in a constantly volatile economic environment as they would be if change would be steadier. In surveying those risks, the report stressed the likelihood that terrorism and nonproliferation will remain priorities even as resource issues move up on the international agenda. Terrorism’s appeal will decline if economic growth continues in the Middle East and youth unemployment is reduced. For those terrorist groups that remain active in 2025, however, the diffusion of technologies and scientific knowledge will place some of the world’s most dangerous capabilities within their reach. Terrorist groups in 2025 will likely be a combination of descendants of long established groups_inheriting organizational structures, command and control processes, and training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks_and newly emergent collections of the angry and disenfranchised that become self-radicalized, particularly in the absence of economic outlets that would become narrower in an economic downturn. The most dangerous casualty of any economically-induced drawdown of U.S. military presence would almost certainly be the Middle East. Although Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is not inevitable, worries about a nuclear-armed Iran could lead states in the region to develop new security arrangements with external powers, acquire additional weapons, and consider pursuing their own nuclear ambitions. It is not clear that the type of stable deterrent relationship that existed between the great powers for most of the Cold War would emerge naturally in the Middle East with a nuclear Iran. Episodes of low intensity conflict and terrorism taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established. The close proximity of potential nuclear rivals combined with underdeveloped surveillance capabilities and mobile dual-capable Iranian missile systems also will produce inherent difficulties in achieving reliable indications and warning of an impending nuclear attack. The lack of strategic depth in neighboring states like Israel, short warning and missile flight times, and uncertainty of Iranian intentions may place more focus on preemption rather than defense, potentially leading to escalating crises. 36 Types of conflict that the world continues to experience, such as over resources, could reemerge, particularly if protectionism grows and there is a resort to neo-mercantilist practices. Perceptions of renewed energy scarcity will drive countries to take actions to assure their future access to energy supplies. In the worst case, this could result in interstate conflicts if government leaders deem assured access to energy resources, for example, to be essential for maintaining domestic stability and the survival of their regime. Even actions short of war, however, will have important geopolitical implications. Maritime security concerns are providing a rationale for naval buildups and modernization efforts, such as China’s and India’s development of blue water naval capabilities. If the fiscal stimulus focus for these countries indeed turns inward, one of the most obvious funding targets may be military. Buildup of regional naval capabilities could lead to increased tensions, rivalries, and counterbalancing moves, but it also will create opportunities for multinational cooperation in protecting critical sea lanes. With water also becoming scarcer in Asia and the Middle East, cooperation to manage changing water resources is likely to be increasingly difficult both within and between states in a more dog-eat-dog world.
Advantage 2 is SV
Censorship empirically makes hate speech more appealing because extremists get looked at as martyrs and revolutionaries,
Heinze 16 (Eric Heinze – Professor of Law and Humanities at the University of London, “Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship”, “The Prohibitionist Challenge”, pgs. 149-152, https://books.google.com/books?id=UJJyCwAAQBAJandpg=PA150andlpg=PA150anddq=censoring+hate+speech+helps+the+right-wing+martyrandsource=blandots=aVdz0PZticandsig=prvOZgxAtkhebwxC7EDhcb6HDicandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwj0xaWXofLQAhXEwlQKHcqWDwUQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepageandq=censoring20hate20speech20helps20the20right-wing20martyrandf=false,
American oppositionists have lacked domestic empirical evidence of ineffectiveness, available on the continent, due to the post-1960s erosion and disappearance of American bans. They have nonetheless long warned against censorship’s tendency to tutor speakers in re-packaging and re-coding hateful messages, transforming crude insults into what Nadine Strossen calls ‘veiled innuendos’. The Harvard African-American Studies scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. challenges those who ‘spend more time worrying about speech codes than coded speech’. Historically, he notes, African Americans have not fared better in environments of polite speech. They have often still faced discrimination, yet without the blunt speech that would help them to make sense of it, and to plan their life strategies accordingly. ‘the real power commanded by the racist’, Gates recalls, ‘is likely to vary inversely with the vulgarity with which it is expressed.’ Barack Obama makes a similar point in response to ongoing problems of US racism: ‘it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not.’ Those warnings echo Martin Luther King, Jr.’s earlier admonition, ‘Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.’ In his 2003 book Nigger, Gate’s African-American Harvard colleague Randall Kennedy warns against a ‘vocabulary of indirection’ fostering a milieu in which ‘the damaging but polite polemic is protected, while the rude but impotent epithet is not.’ That observation chimes with the veteran African-American civil rights attorney Theodore Shaw’s confirmation that non-repression of hate speech facilitates the gathering of evidence for the enforcement of minorities’ rights. Martin Imbleau, albeit defending French penalties for Holocaust denial, concedes that linguistic manipulations lead to mainstreamed hate speech. But he fails to ask the crucial question – whether those manipulations emerge precisely from the need to avoid falling afoul of the French bans. Imbleau rightly counts ‘taboos’ around Nazism among the stimuli that spur Holocaust deniers. Yet he fails to explain how so strongly exalting and entrenching that taboo – augmenting our response from moral outrage to a legal penalty – can diminish such an incentive. ‘Scandal’ following high-profile prosecutions, as Adriano Prosperi observes with respect to Holocaust denial in Italy, ‘is the universal path to success’. For Strossen, ‘censored speech becomes more appealing and persuasive to many listeners merely by virtue of the censorship’. It is Imbleau’s own chain of causation, then, which identifies bans as sources rather than remedies for intolerance. He condemns the right-wing extremist Jean-Marie LePen’s self-styled image as a free speech martyr. Yet he fails to notice that it is precisely the penalties for speech, which, over decades, placed LePen in that role. French bans spurred him to promote his narrative as the heroic outsider, the renegade excluded by the state from equal access to public discourse. Imbleau warns against the dangers of Holocaust denial disseminated through the mediatization of ‘star’ anti-Semites like Robert Faurisson. He fails to observe, however, that it is precisely the French ban, as with high-profile prosecutions of Holocaust deniers in Austria, Germany, and elsewhere, which have, in each case, triggered the media hype. A further qualification added by some prohibitionists is that bans should protect only the small subset of groups targeted fro their ‘immutable characteristics’ such as race, over which one has little control, but not such as religion, which, involving ‘ideas’ (a more Western view of religion) as well as free choices, must be open to criticism. Muslims in the West, however, often form ethnic minorities. As a casual glance through the tabloids quickly reveals, stabs at Islam become ways of waging racism without reference to race even if grosser versions may end up being punishable in some LSPDs. Once again, instead of diluting hatred, such a legal incentive tutors and invigorates it. Precisely opposite to any such view, many Muslims state that it is their faith, more than their ethnicity, that forms the more important part of their identity. Far from calming the atmosphere, that ‘narrow ban’ position sets up a discriminatory, two-tier regime. It makes groups excluded from protection, because they are not defined racially, feel less respected than groups included under it. The excluded group feels more a victim of state discrimination than the protected group. State policy then pits one group against another in an unseemly rivalry of ‘more victim than thou’. Whatever anti-discrimination policies a state may prefer, one which itself discriminates between outsider groups can scarcely claim must moral high ground. As a practical matter, some oppositionists claim that bans positively detract from non-punitive programmes against intolerance, even while appearing sympathetic to them. Bans have certainly proven easy to pass with little opposition. Mainstream political parties like to be seen as supporting gestures of tolerance, regardless of the substantive policies they otherwise pursue. Sustained and effective civic education, by contrast, requires harder work. For Strossen, ‘regulating speech’ is ‘at best a distraction from, and sometimes an obstacle to, efforts to grapple with the real, concrete problems’, such as discrimination in education or employment, or the lack of investment in poor areas. Bans, Strossen argues, focus policy-makers on ‘symbolism’ instead of ‘something real to promote actual equality.’ Throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, while Germany scored questionable successes in punishing hate speech, it tended to be highly lax in punishing violent hate crimes, often failing to distinguish them from ordinary assaults and batteries. Abstention from coercive censorship by no means debilitates a democracy’s battle against intolerance. During the Danish cartoon crisis, some prominent continental media outlets reprinted the cartoons in a defensive posture of asserting their freedoms of expression, even after violent threats or responses had appeared. Their American counterparts refrained from doing so, perhaps from their own fears of attack, yet also because they had no censorship battle to wage against the government. Several European news agencies reprinted the cartoons in the defensive posture of needing to capture still-unconquered, non-viewpoint-punitive territory within public discourse.
Plan Solves
A. Counterspeech is especially effective- it bolsters campus-wide movements and mitigates the risk of dealing with censorship issues which sacrifices focus on the movement
Calleros 95 Calleros, Charles R. “Paternalism, Counterspeech, and Campus Hate-Speech Codes: A Reply to Delgado and Yun” (Professor of Law, Arizona State University). HeinOnline. Arizona State Law Journal. 1995 NB
Delgado and Yun summarize the support for the counterspeech argument by paraphrasing Nat Hentoff: "Antiracism rules teach black people to depend on whites for protection, while talking back clears the air, emphasizes self-reliance, and strengthens one's self-image as an active agent inchargeofone'sowndestiny."50 DelgadoandYunalsocitetothosewho believe that counterspeech may help educate the racist speaker by addressing 51 the ignorance and fear that lies behind hostile racial stereotyping.
But they reject this speech-protective argument, stating that "it is offered blandly, virtually as an article of faith" by those "in a position of power" who "rarely offer empirical proof of their claims. _{52 The authors argue that talking back in a close confrontation could be physically dangerous, is unlikely to persuade the racist speaker to reform his views, and is impossible "when racist remarks are delivered in a cowardly fashion, by means of graffiti scrawled on a campus wall late at night or on a poster placed outside of a black student's dormitory door." 53 They also complain that "even when successful, talking back is a burden" that minority undergraduates 54 should not be forced to assume. In rejecting the counterspeech argument, however, Delgado and Yun cast the argument in its weakest possible form, creating an easy target for relatively summary dismissal. When the strategies and experiential basis for successful counterspeech are fairly stated, its value is more easily recognized. First, no responsible free speech advocate argues that a target of hate speech should directly talk back to a racist speaker in circumstances that quickly could lead to a physical altercation. If one or more hateful speakers closely confronts a member of a minority group with racial epithets or other hostile remarks in circumstances that lead the target of the speech to reasonably fear for her safety, in most circumstances she should seek assistance from campus police or other administrators before "talking back." Even staunch proponents of free speech agree that such threatening speech and conduct is subject to regulation and justifies more than a purely educative response. The same would be true of Delgado's and Yun's other examples of speech conveyed in a manner that defaces another's property or 56 When offensive or hateful speech is not threatening, damaging, or impermissibly invasive and therefore may constitute protected speech, 57 education and counterspeech often will be an appropriate response. However, proponents of free speech do not contemplate that counterspeech always, or even normally, will be in the form of an immediate exchange of views between the hateful speaker and his target. Nor do they contemplate that the target should bear the full burden of the response. Instead, effective counterspeech often takes the form of letters, discussions, or demonstrations joined in by many persons and aimed at the entire campus population or a community within it. Typically, it is designed to expose the moral bankruptcy of the hateful ideas, to demonstrate the strength of opinion and numbers of those who deplore the hateful speech, and to spur members of the campus community to take voluntary, constructive action to combat hate and to remedy its ill effects. 58 Above all, it can serve to define and underscore the community of support enjoyed by the targets of the hateful speech, faith in which may have been shaken by the hateful speech. Moreover, having triggered such a reaction with their own voices, the targets of the hateful speech may well feel a sense of empowerment to compensate for the undeniable pain of the speech. 59 One may be tempted to join Delgado and Yun in characterizing such a scenario as one "offered blandly, virtually as an article of faith" and without experiential support. 6° However, campus communities that have creatively used this approach can attest to the surprising power of counterspeech. Examples of counterspeech to hateful racist and homophobic speech at Arizona State and Stanford Universities are especially illustrative.61 In an incident that attracted national attention, the campus community at Arizona State University ("A.S.U.") constructively and constitutionally responded to a racist poster displayed on the outside of the speaker's dormitory door in February 1991. Entitled "WORK APPLICATION," it contained a number of ostensibly employment-related questions that advanced hostile and demeaning racial stereotypes of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans. Carla Washington, one of a group of African- American women who found the poster, used her own speech to persuade a resident of the offending room voluntarily to take the poster down and allow her to photocopy it. After sending a copy of the poster to the campus newspaper along with an opinion letter deploring its racist stereotypes, she demanded action from the director of her residence hall. The director organized an immediate meeting of the dormitory residents to discuss the issues. In this meeting, I explained why the poster was protected by the First Amendment, and the women who found the poster eloquently described their pain and fears. One of the women, Nichet Smith, voiced her fear that all nonminorities on campus shared the hostile stereotypes expressed in the poster. Dozens of residents expressed their support and gave assurances that they did not share the hostile stereotypes, but they conceded that even the most tolerant among them knew little about the cultures of others and would 62 benefit greatly from multicultural education.
 The need for multicultural education to combat intercultural ignorance and stereotyping became the theme of a press conference and public rally organized by the student African-American Coalition leader, Rossie Turman, who opted for highly visible counterspeech despite demands from some students and staff to discipline the owner of the offending poster. The result was a series of opinion letters in the campus newspaper discussing the problem of racism, numerous workshops on race relations and free speech, and overwhelming approval in the Faculty Senate of a measure to add a course on American cultural diversity to the undergraduate breadth 63 requirement.
 The four women who initially confronted the racist poster were empowered by the meeting at the dormitory residence and later received awards from the local chapter of the NAACP for their activism.64 Rossie Turman was rewarded for his leadership skills two years later by becoming the first African-American elected President of Associated Students of A.S.U.,65 a student body that numbered approximately 40,000 students, only 66 2.3 percent of them African-American. Although Delgado and Yun are quite right that the African-American students should never have been burdened with the need to respond to such hateful speech, Hentoff is correct that the responses just described helped them develop a sense of self-reliance and constructive activism. Moreover, the students' counterspeech inspired a community response that lightened the students' burden and provided them with a sense of community support and empowerment. Indeed, the students received assistance from faculty and administrators, who helped organize meetings, wrote opinion letters, spoke before the Faculty Senate, or joined the students in issuing public statements at the press conference and public rally.67 Perhaps most important, campus administrators wisely refrained from disciplining the owners of the poster, thus directing public attention to the issue of racism and ensuring broad community support in denouncing the racist poster. Many members of the campus and surrounding communities might have leapt to the racist speaker's defense had the state attempted to discipline the speaker and thus had created a First Amendment issue. Instead, they remained united with the offended students because the glare of the public spotlight remained sharply focused on the racist incident without the distraction of cries of state censorship. Although the counterspeech was not aimed primarily at influencing the hearts and minds of the residents of the offending dormitory room, its vigor in fact caught the residents by surprise. 68 It prompted at least three of them to apologize publicly and to display curiosity about a civil rights movement that they were too young to have witnessed first hand. 69 This effective use of education and counterspeech is not an isolated instance at A.S.U., but has been repeated on several occasions, albeit on smaller scales.7°
One year after the counterspeech at A.S.U., Stanford University responded similarly to homophobic speech. In that case, a first-year law student sought to attract disciplinary proceedings and thus gain First Amendment martyrdom by shouting hateful homophobic statements about a dormitory staff member. The dean of students stated that the speaker was not subject to discipline under Stanford's code of conduct but called on the university community to speak out on the issue, triggering an avalanche of counterspeech. Students, staff, faculty, and administrators expressed their opinions in letters to the campus newspaper, in comments on a poster board at the law school, in a published petition signed by 400 members of the law school community disassociating the law school from the speaker's epithets, and in a letter written by several law students reporting the incident to a prospective employer of the offending student.71 The purveyor of hate speech indeed had made a point about the power of speech, just not the one he had intended. He had welcomed disciplinary sanctions as a form of empowerment, but the Stanford community was alert enough to catch his verbal hardball and throw it back with ten times the force. Thus, the argument that counterspeech is preferable to state suppression of offensive speech is stronger and more fully supported by experience than is conceded by Delgado and Yun. In both of the cases described above, the targets of hateful speech were supported by a community united against bigotry. The community avoided splitting into factions because the universities eliminated the issue of censorship by quickly announcing that the hateful speakers were protected from disciplinary retaliation. Indeed, the counterspeech against the bigotry was so powerful in each case that it underscored the need for top administrators to develop standards for, and some limitations on, their participation in such partisan speech. 72 Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out Of course, the community action in these cases was effective and empowering precisely because a community against bigotry existed. At A.S.U. and Stanford, as at most universities, the overwhelming majority of students, faculty, and staff are persons of tolerance and good will who deplore at least the clearest forms of bigotry and are ready to speak out against intolerance when it is isolated as an issue rather than diluted in muddied waters along with concerns of censorship. Just as the nonviolent demonstrations of Martin Luther King, Jr., depended partly for their success on the consciences of the national and international audiences monitoring the fire hoses and attack dogs on their television sets and in the print media,73 the empowerment of the targets of hateful speech rests partly in the hands of members of the campus community who sympathize with them. One can hope that the counterspeech and educational measures used with success at A.S.U. and Stanford stand a good chance of preserving an atmosphere of civility in intellectual inquiry at any campus community in which compassionate, open minds predominate. On the other hand, counterspeech by the targets of hate speech could be less empowering on a campus in which the majority of students, faculty, and staff approve of hostile epithets directed toward members of minority groups. One hopes that such campuses are exceedingly rare; although hostile racial stereotyping among college students in the United States increased during the last decade, those students who harbored significant hostilities (as contrasted with more pervasive but less openly hostile, subconscious racism) still represented a modest fraction of all students.74 Moreover, even in a pervasively hostile atmosphere, counterspeech might still be more effective than broad restrictions on speech. First, aside from the constitutional constraints of the First Amendment, such a heartless campus community would be exceedingly unlikely to adopt strong policies prohibiting hateful speech. Instead, the campus likely would maintain minimum policies necessary to avoid legal action enforcing guarantees of equal educational opportunities under the Fourteenth Amendment 75 or federal antidiscrimination statutes such as Title V176 or Title IX. 77 Second, counterspeech even from a minority of members of the campus community might be effective to gradually build support by winning converts from those straddling the fence or from broader regional or national audiences. Such counterspeech might be particularly effective if coupled with threats from diverse faculty, staff, and students to leave the university for more hospitable environments; even a campus with high levels of hostility likely would feel 78 pressures to maintain its status as a minimally integrated institution.
The A.S.U. and Stanford examples illustrating the efficacy of counterspeech also lend support to the argument that "firee speech has been minorities' best friend ...as a principal instrument of social reform."79 In both cases, demonstrations, opinion letters, and other forms of counterspeech dramatically defined the predominant atmosphere on each campus as one that demanded respect and freedom from bigotry for all members of the community; it is doubtful that passage of a speech-restrictive policy could have sent a similar message of consensus any more strongly. Moreover, in the A.S.U. case, the reasoned counterspeech, coupled with the decision to refrain from disciplining the hateful speaker, persuaded the Faculty Senate to pass a multicultural education proposal whose chances for passage were seriously in doubt in the previous weeks and months.8 The racist poster at A.S.U. may have been a blessing in disguise, albeit an initially painful one, because it sparked counterspeech and community action that strengthened the campus support for diversity.
Diverse student bodies are a rally point for change for protests outside the campus
Delgado 15 Delgado, Sandra. “The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University”  (Doctoral Student in curriculum studies at the university of british Columbia). Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy. University of British Columbia. 2015 NB
During the last decade students have played a prominent role, as part of the many resistance efforts against the privatization of the university. They have organized massive movements, occupied campuses and buildings, and they have made extraordinary and creative demonstrations to raise the public’s awareness about the consequences of the corporatization of higher education (Hill, 2013). Among the most popular and studied movements of the decade are the ones that took place in 2011 in Chile (Salinas and Fraser, 2012; Somma, 2012) and 2010 in England (Ibrahim, 2011). In these cases, students not only organized unprecedented large marches and public demonstrations, but also they inspired many subsequent national and transnational movements. As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (Luesher- Mamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention,3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas. Student political activity has been studied by scholars in social movements, youth activism, communication, anthropology, sociology and history. Outside of mainstream academic publishing, activists and militants have also contributed to document experiences of student activism by writing booklets, autobiographies, weblogs, music and poetry (e.g. from Goliardic poetry in medieval Europe to contemporary song writing). Some activists have also registered their experiences and perspectives in storied form and their work can be found as part of the literary genre.4} 

Advocacy (0:15)
Thus the plan, Resolved: Public colleges and universities in the United States ought not restrict any constitutionally protected speech by adopting policies on freedom of speech modeled on Yale University’s Woodward Report of 1974.
Kurtz 15 clarifies Stanley Kurtz (graduated from Haverford College and holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He did his field work in India and taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago). “A Plan to Restore Free Speech on Campus.” National Review. December 7th, 2015. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/428122/plan-restore-free-speech-campus-stanley-kurtz
Many of the proposals listed below can be mandated for public universities by state legislatures. These proposals can also galvanize student activism on campuses across the country, as well as activism by faculty, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and citizens. Alumni can press their alma maters to adopt these proposals, on pain of losing donations. Citizens can press their state legislators to adopt these proposals, on pain of losing votes. Here is the program: First: Colleges and universities ought to adopt a policy on freedom of expression modeled on Yale’s Woodward Report of 1974, which identifies ensuring intellectual freedom in the pursuit of knowledge as the primary obligation of a university. While the Woodward Report forthrightly acknowledges the importance of solidarity, harmony, civility, and mutual respect to campus life, it unmistakably marks these values as subordinate in priority to freedom of expression. In accordance with this, the Woodward Report rejects the proposition that members of an academic community are entitled to suppress speech they regard as offensive. Of course, within a university, the need for intellectual freedom is in the service of the pursuit of knowledge. Freedom of expression is a critical consideration, yet does not in itself fully resolve issues like the structure of the college curriculum. That said, the Woodward Report can and should serve as a model for statements on free expression at our colleges and universities. Once adopted, new statements on freedom of expression would supersede and replace any pre-existing speech codes. Second: Colleges and universities need to systematically educate members of their community in the principles of free expression. The central theme of freshman orientation, for example, ought to turn around the primacy of free speech. Many colleges and universities now assign incoming freshman a “common reading” to complete over the summer before entering school. During freshman year, colleges organize seminars and guest-lectures around that reading. The National Association of Scholars has reported on the thin and tendentious nature of many common reading selections, and I have commented on their politicization. As an antidote to such problems, colleges should consider assigning John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty as a common reading for entering freshmen. Responding to threats to intellectual freedom at Princeton, a student group, the Princeton Open Campus Coalition, recently called for bringing more representatives of seldom-heard viewpoints to campus. Inviting outside speakers to address John Stuart Mill’s argument for liberty of thought and discussion during freshman orientation would be an easy way to draw unconventional voices to campus. At every level of the university, efforts should be made to invite both outsiders and insiders to study, discuss, and debate the scope and meaning of free speech. Political philosopher Peter Berkowitz recently floated the idea of establishing university centers for the study and practice of free speech. These centers would “foster an understanding of free speech and its indissoluble connection with liberal education.” The founding of such centers on our campuses should become a priority. Third: “A university administration’s responsibility for assuring free expression imposes further obligations: it must act firmly when a speech is disrupted or when disruption is attempted; it must undertake to identify disruptors, and it must make known its intentions to do so beforehand.” The above passage is from Yale’s Woodward Report. Although the Woodward Report is official university policy at Yale, some of its central recommendations are apparently not being taken seriously. Consider the recent controversy over freedom of speech at Yale, where a student had to be dragged out of a lecture hall by a police officer after disrupting the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program’s conference on free speech (video here). The conduct of this student would appear to be a violation of Yale’s Undergraduate Regulations on “peaceful dissent, protests, and demonstrations” (derived from the Woodward Report), which bar any member of the University community from preventing “the orderly conduct of a University function or activity, such as a lecture, meeting…or other public event,” on pain of potential suspension or expulsion. If Yale’s regulations were being properly enforced, this student would have faced a disciplinary hearing. Ultimately, if the facts turned out to be as they appear from the video and published reports, some sort of discipline would result — at minimum, a warning that any further such actions would bring certain suspension or expulsion. To all appearances, no such discipline has taken place. And appearances are important, because a core recommendation of the Woodward Report is that in order to serve as effective deterrents to further violations, sanctions for disruption of speech must be publicized. (I have submitted a series of questions to Yale’s administration on disciplinary proceedings related to the disruption at the Buckley Program conference on free speech, and will report when I receive a reply.) We take it for granted nowadays that conduct like this student’s disruption of the Yale free-speech conference — and conduct far worse — entails no consequences for students. If we are to restore free speech to our campuses, that needs to change. In the absence of a deeper understanding of the principles of free expression, discipline alone will not be effective. Yet in combination with broader education in the principles of intellectual freedom, discipline for interference with campus speech can be very effective indeed. We will not see freedom of speech on our campuses until disruptors face discipline for silencing, or attempting to silence, others. Fourth: College and university trustees must monitor administrators to ensure that they promote and defend freedom of expression. Thomas D. Klingenstein, chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute, recently suggested that college and university trustees establish a board-level standing committee on free expression (COFE), and provide that committee with staff and considerable independence. A university COFE could act as a check on the reluctance of college administrators to court student displeasure by enforcing rules against disruption of speech. For public universities, state legislatures could receive and act on reports from a system-wide COFE. The public should also take an interest in COFE reports. Fifth: Colleges and universities ought to adopt policies on institutional political neutrality based on the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee Report of 1967. The Kalven Report explains that the ability of a university to foster political dissent and criticism by faculty and students actually depends upon the political neutrality of the institution itself. The principles of academic freedom and institutional neutrality embodied in the Kalven Report are the surest antidote to demands that universities divest themselves of stock in fossil-fuel providers, Israeli companies, and other political targets. Advocates who attempt to inject universities into the political process by means of their endowments substantially inhibit the intellectual freedom of faculty and students who wish to explore contrary points of view. The National Association of Scholars’ recent reports on campus sustainability and fossil-fuel divestment detail the illiberal implications of these movements. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni includes the text of the Kalven Report and an excellent commentary by civil libertarian attorney Harvey Silverglate in its guide to academic freedom. Trustees should take note. * Designing a program to restore free speech to our campuses is not difficult. The steps outlined above — most of them drawn from widely respected reports issued by major universities — would go a long way toward solving the problem. The difficulty is finding the political will and the levers of influence to take these steps when faculty and administrators have forgotten, abandoned, or turned against liberal ideals. Widespread public support for the proposals above, matched by action in state legislatures and an active movement of students on campus, represents the best hope of overcoming these obstacles.

FW
First, Theory of the good:
Moral realism is true and pain/pleasure are the only intrinsic values
GRAY 09
Gray, James W. "An Argument for Moral Realism." Ethical Realism. N.p., 07 Oct. 2009. Web. 04 Sept. 2015. https://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/an-argument-for-moral-realism/. MA in philosophy from San Jose State University (2008)
If we have evidence that anything in particular has intrinsic value, then we also have evidence that moral realism is true. Our experiences of pleasure and pain are probably the most powerful evidence of intrinsic value because such experiences are tied to our belief that they have intrinsic value. My argument that pain has intrinsic disvalue is basically the following: We experience that pain is bad. We experience that pain is important. The disvalue of pain is irreducible. The disvalue of pain is real. If pain is bad in the sense of being important, irreducible, and real, then pain has intrinsic disvalue. Therefore, pain has intrinsic disvalue. I am not certain that the premises are true, but I currently find good reasons for accepting them. Therefore, we have reason for accepting the conclusion. The conclusion could be read saying, “We have reason to believe that pain has intrinsic disvalue.” If we accept that pain has intrinsic disvalue, then we will simultaneously accept moral realism.1 In order to examine the plausibility of my argument, I will examine each of the premises: We experience that pain is bad. We know pain is bad because of our experience of it. If someone described their pain as extremely wonderful, we would doubt they are feeling pain. Either the person is lying or doesn’t know what the word “pain” means. When a child decides not to touch fire because it causes pain, we understand the justification. It would be strange to ask the child, “So what? What’s wrong with pain?” We experience that pain is important. If pain is important in the relevant sense, then it can provide us reason to do something without merely helping us fulfill our desires. In other words, we must accept the following: The badness of pain isn’t just an instrumental value. The badness of pain is a final end. Pain’s badness isn’t an instrumental value – Pain’s disvalue is not an instrumental disvalue because pain can be quite useful to us. Pain can tell us when we are unhealthy or injured. We evolved pain because it’s essential to our survival. Pain’s bad for a different kind of reason. Pain’s disvalue is found in our negative experience, and this is why pain is a candidate for having an intrinsic disvalue. Whenever someone claims that something has intrinsic value, we need to make sure that it’s not just good because it’s instrumentally valuable. If it’s merely useful at bringing about something else, then it’s not good in and of itself (as intrinsic values are). Pain is perhaps the perfect example of something that is useful but bad. If usefulness was the only kind of value, then pain would actually be good because it helps us in many ways. Pain’s badness isn’t just our dislike of pain – We dislike pain because it feels bad.2 If pain didn’t feel bad, then we wouldn’t have such a strong desire to avoid intense pain. Pain means “feels bad” and it is manifested in various experiences, such as touching fire. We have to know the meaning of “bad” in order to understand pain at all. We attain an understanding of “bad” just by feeling pain. If pain was only bad because we dislike it, then we couldn’t say that “pain really matters.” Instead, the badness of pain would just be a matter of taste. However, we don’t just say pain is bad because we dislike it. We also say pain is bad because of how it feels. Avoiding pain is a final end – A final end is a goal people recognize as being worthy of being sought after for its own sake. Money is not a final end because it is only valuable when used to do something else. Pleasure and pain-avoidance are final ends because they are taken t be worthy of being avoided for their own sake. We know that avoiding pain makes sense even when it doesn’t lead to anything else of value, so avoiding pain is a final end.3 If I want to take an aspirin, someone could ask, “Why did you do that?” I could answer, “I have a headache.” This should be the end of the story. We understand that avoiding pain makes sense. It would be absurd for someone to continue to question me and say, “What difference does having a headache make? That’s not a good reason to take an aspirin!”4 Both realists and anti-realists can agree that pain is bad, and they can both agree that pain is a final end. Our desire to avoid pain is non-instrumental and such a desire is experienced as justified. (However, the ant-realist might argue that it is only taken to be justified because of human psychology.) If pain is a final end, then we understand (a) that pain is important and (b) it makes sense to say that we ought to avoid pain. Pain’s disvalue is irreducible. If the badness of pain was reducible to nonmoral properties, then we should be able to describe what “bad” means through a non-moral description. However, we currently have no way of understanding pain’s badness as being something else. We can’t describe pain’s badness in non-moral terms. If someone needs to know what ” bad” means, they need to experience something bad. To say that some moral states are irreducible is just like saying that some mental states are irreducible. Pain itself can’t be described through a non-mental description. If we told people the mental states involved with pain, they would still not know what pain is because they need to know what it feels like. Someone could argue that “bad” means the same thing as something like “pain,” and then we would find out that the badness of pain could be reduced to something else. However, pain and the badness of pain are conceptually separable. For example, I could find out that something else is bad other than pain. They could then reply that “bad” means the same thing as a disjunction of various other bad things, such as “pain or malicious intent.” But people who disagree about what constitutes what is “bad” aren’t just arguing about the meaning of the word “bad.” They are arguing about what has the property “bad.”5 Additionally, the word “bad” would no longer have any importance. If “bad” just means “pain or malicious intent,” then why care about it? Why ought I refrain from causing pain or having a malicious intent? It could be that we can find out that “bad” and “pain” are identical, but then “bad” might not be entirely reducible to “pain” (or a disjunction of bad things). We might still think that there are two legitimate descriptions at work. The “pain” description and the “bad” description. (Some people think water is H2O through an identity relation similar to this.) This sort of irreducible identity relation require us to deny that pain is “important.” (If the identity theory did require us to deny that pain is “important,” then we would have a good reason to reject such an identity theory.) I have given reason to think the word “bad” is irreducible, but I haven’t proven it. If someone could prove that pain isn’t important, and we can reduce pain to something else, then I will be proven wrong. I just don’t see any reason to agree with that position at this time. I discuss the badness of pain as irreducible in more detail in my essays “Objection to Moral Realism Part 1: Is/Ought Gap” and “Objections to Moral Realism Part 3: Argument from Queerness.” The badness of pain is real. If the badness of pain is real, then everyone’s pain is bad. Pain isn’t bad just for me, but not for you. It states that we don’t all merely share a subjective preference in avoiding pain, but that pain’s badness is something worthy of being avoided and helping others avoid it. Why does it seem reasonable to believe pain’s badness to be real? There are at least four reasons. One, I experience that my pain hurts and I know that other people do as well. Two, it’s not just people’s subjective preferences in question. People hate pain because of how it feels. Three, people’s pain exists (and if pain exists, then the badness of the pain exists). Four, I see no reason to deny that the badness of other people’s pain exists. I will discuss this final consideration in more detail when I discuss anti-realist objections. We have no good reason to deny that pain is bad. We experience that pain is bad for ourselves, and other people experience that pain is bad for themselves as well. Even though pain is subjective, there is nothing delusional about our belief that pain is bad. It’s not just a personal like or a dislike. We don’t just agree to treat other people’s pain as important as part of a social contract. The belief that the badness of pain is real and “pain is bad no matter who experiences it” will be rejected by anti-realists. If I gave food to the hungry, it would be absurd to question why I did it. Imagine someone who disagrees with my action and says, “Other people’s pain is irrelevant. You should only try to avoid pain for yourself, so feeding the hungry is stupid.” This person’s position is counterintuitive to the point of absurdity. We have all accepted that other people’s pain matters. It makes sense to feed the hungry, it makes sense to give to charity, and it makes sense to give someone an aspirin who has a headache. We don’t have to benefit from helping other people. To deny that “pain is bad no matter who experiences it” isn’t a position that many people can find acceptable. (I suppose some sociopaths might find it acceptable.) If pain is bad, important, irreducible, and real, then pain has intrinsic disvalue. I want to suggest this premise to be justified in virtue of the very meaning of intrinsic value. If pain is bad, important (worthy of being desired), irreducible, and real; then I think we have already established that pain has intrinsic disvalue by definition. We have established moral facts that could give us what we ought to do, such as, “We ought to avoid pain.” Such an ought judgment is not merely based on my personal belief or desire; it’s based on the fact that pain is important no matter who experiences it. Conclusion: Pain has intrinsic disvalue If my premises are true, then the conclusion follows. I have given reason for accepting the premises, so we have some reason for accepting the conclusion, and the conclusion entails the truth of moral realism. I will take all of my premises to be sufficiently justified, but I will consider why someone might decide that the badness of pain “isn’t real.” An anti-realist could attempt to deny that “pain is bad no matter who experiences it.” The strongest evidence that badness is real is the fact that denying it seems to require unjustified philosophical commitments. I will attempt to show that the alternatives are less justified in the next section.
AND constructivism collapses
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.    
Next, Metaphysics - Physicalism is true and is side constraint on ethics
PAPINEAU 09
- Intrinsic facts must be physical, a priori abstract concepts can’t affect action because that violates conservation of energy
- Belief desire pairs constitute action – we have a belief based on empirical understandings of concepts then a desire to take an action based on a belief
Papineau, David, "Naturalism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/naturalism/.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the conservation of kinetic plus potential energy came to be accepted as a basic principle of physics (Elkana 1974). In itself this does not rule out distinct mental or vital forces, for there is no reason why such forces should not be ‘conservative’, operating in such a way as to compensate losses of kinetic energy by gains in potential energy and vice versa. (The term ‘nervous energy’ is a relic of the widespread late nineteenth-century assumption that mental processes store up a species of potential energy that is then released in action.) However, the conservation of energy does implys that any such special forces must be governed by strict deterministic laws: if mental or vital forces arose spontaneously, then there would be nothing to ensure that they never led to energy increases. During the course of the twentieth century received scientific opinion became even more restrictive about possible causes of physical effects, and came to reject sui generis mental or vital causes, even of a law-governed and predictable kind. Detailed physiological research, especially into nerve cells, gave no indication of any physical effects that cannot be explained by in terms of basic physical forces that also occur outside living bodies. By the middle of the twentieth century, belief in sui generis mental or vital forces had become a minority view. This led to the widespread acceptance of the doctrine now known as the ‘causal closure’ or the ‘causal completeness’ of the physical realm, according to which all physical effects can be accounted for by basic physical causes (where ‘physical’ can be understood as referring to some list of fundamental forces) non-physical causes of physical effects. As a result, the default philosophical view was a non-naturalist interactive pluralism which recognized a wide range of such non-physical influences, including spontaneous mental influences (or ‘determinations of the soul’ as they would then have been called). The nineteenth-century discovery of the conservation of energy continued to allow that sui generis non-physical forces can interact with the physical world, but required that they be governed by strict force laws. This gave rise to an initial wave of naturalist doctrines around the beginning of the twentieth century. Sui generis mental forces were still widely accepted, but an extensive philosophical debate about the significance of the conservation of energy led to a widespread recognition that any such mental forces would need to be law-governed and thus amenable to scientific investigation along with more familiar physical forces.5 By the middle of the twentieth century, the acceptance of the casual closure of the physical realm led to even stronger naturalist views. The causal closure thesis implies that any mental and biological causes must themselves be physically constituted, if they are to produce physical effects. It thus gives rise to a particularly strong form of ontological naturalism, namely the physicalist doctrine that any state that has physical effects must itself be physical. From the 1950s onwards, philosophers began to formulate arguments for ontological physicalism. Some of these arguments appealed explicitly to the causal closure of the physical realm (Feigl 1958, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958). In other cases, the reliance on causal closure intercourse between realms. By contrast, a physicalist naturalism about conscious states will integrates the mental realm with the causal unfolding of the spatiotemporal world in an entirely familiar way. Given this, general principles of theory choice would seem to argue strongly for physicalism over epiphenomenalism.9 If we focus on this last point, we may start wondering why the causal closure thesis is so important. If general principles of theory choice can justify physicalism, why bring in all the complications associated with causal closure? The answer is that causal closure is needed to rule out interactionist dualism. General principles of theory choice may dismiss epiphenomenalism in favour of physicalism, but they do not similarly discredit interactionist dualism. As the brief historical sketch earlier will have made clear, interactionist dualism offers a perfectly straightforward theoretical option requiring no commitment to any bizarre causal structures. Certainly the historical norm has been to regard it as the default account of the causal role of the mental realm.10 Given this, arguments from theoretical simplicity cut no ice against interactionist dualism. Rather, the case against interactionist dualism hinges crucially on the empirical thesis that all physical effects already have physical causes. It is specifically this claim that makes it difficult to see how dualist states can make a causal difference to the physical world. It is sometimes suggested that physicalism about the mind can be vindicated by an ‘inference to the best explanation’. The thought here is that there are many well-established synchronic correlations between mental states and brain states, and that physicalism is a ‘better explanation’ of these correlations than epiphenomenalism (Hill 1991, Hill and McLaughlin 1999). From the perspective outlined here, this starts the argument in the middle rather than the beginning, by simply assuming the relevant mind-brain correlations. This assumption of pervasive synchronic mind-brain correlations is only plausible if interactionist dualism has already been ruled out. After all, if we believed interactionist dualism, then we wouldn't think dualist mental states needed any help from synchronic neural correlates to produce physical effects. And it is implausible to suppose that we have direct empirical evidence, prior to the rejection of interactive dualism, for pervasive mind-brain correlations, given the paucity of any explicit examples of well-established neural correlates for specific mental states. Rather our rationale for believing in such correlations must be that the causal closure of the physical realm eliminates interactive dualism, whence we infer that mental states can only systematically precede physical effects if they are correlated with the physical causes of those effects. G.E. Moore's famous ‘open question’ argument is designed to show that moral facts cannot possibly be identical to natural facts. Suppose the natural properties of some situation are completely specified. It will always remain an open question, argued Moore, whether that situation is morally good or bad. (Moore 1903.) Moore took this argument to show that moral facts comprise a distinct species of non-natural fact. However, any such non-naturalist view of morality faces immediate difficulties, deriving ultimately from the kind of causal closure thesis discussed above. If all physical effects are due to a limited range of natural causes, and if moral facts lie outside this range, then it follow that moral facts can never make any difference to what happens in the physical world (Harman, 1986). At first sight this may seem tolerable (perhaps moral facts indeed don't have any physical effects). But it has very awkward epistemological consequences. For beings like us, knowledge of the spatiotemporal world is mediated by physical processes involving our sense organs and cognitive systems. If moral facts cannot influence the physical world, then it is hard to see how we can‘t have any knowledge of them.

UV
Particularism
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 an intra-agential (or relational) ontology, maintain that nothing ‘‘is’’ but everything is made within specific practices. Governmentality as a research program that explores ‘‘the present as multiply constituted, polytemporal . . . and recombinatory . . . and not just the expression of a singular logic or the resultant of a linear process’’61 has an important role to play as a methodology of inquiry that brings to the foreground the techniques through which power is practically enacted, the ambiguity embedded in its practices, and the various tactics for unsettling it that become possible in the context of multifarious political encounters. Because political power scripts do not stand as substances that preexist the practices of their making and the specific relations that construct them, the application of a relational ontology and of an archival methodology opens the way for nonidealist, engrained in praxis, analyses of politics and conceptualizations of political agency. In this framework, the space for politics is rooted on ambiguity and performativity, that is on the making and remaking of meaning, subjects, power, and political spaces in the context of agonic relations. What Does This All Matter for Political Agency? I will now turn to elaborating more specifically on the relevance of scholarly positions that, while not necessarily relying mainly on governmentality as a research program, have imagined both power and subjects in non-substantialist ways and embraced situatedness and ambiguity as the very constitutive space for politics for conceiving political agency beyond liberal straightjackets. For Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, far from being issues to be resolved or feared in the name of a sovereign universal truth and the definition of what one’s identity is, ambiguity and uncertainty are indeed political resources to be deployed in sites of struggles where the ‘‘differences between inside and outside are uncertain.’’62 Here political action is not predicated on asserting ‘‘the life and freedom or some sovereign identity, some community of truth that is victimized and repressed by power.’’63 Instead, resistance is very much about questioning practices of power that attempt ‘‘to impose and fix ways of knowing and doing that shall be recognized as natural and necessary to autonomous being.’’64 For Ashley and Walker, in other words, political action is about questioning assumptions about the unity of identity, the mighty homogeneity of power, and the stability of categories of thought. Downplaying ambiguity is indeed itself a technique of power. In taking issue with ‘‘descriptive’’ governmentality theories, Jacqueline Best argued representing social events as totally calculable is itself a governmental strategy, part of government’s very attempts to depoliticize them.65 For Best, such representations undermine the analysis of what ‘‘exceeds efforts to govern through risk.’’66 Therefore, one should not be seduced by contemporary governmental strategies’ own promise of infallibility. For Best, ambiguity brings to the foreground the limits of knowledge and should be included in current analyses of governmental tactics. Ambiguity is a fundamental trajectory of power, rooted in the nontransparency of language that always calls for hermeneutics and opens the possibility for political interpretation and manipulation even in the presence of governmental strategies of regulation. Indeed, pace liberal institutionalism that looks at norms as ‘‘entities’’ and explanatory variables for institutional behavior, regulations are only a shell and norms are always in context, negotiated and renegotiated in the contingent spaces within which they are interpreted. Postcolonial literature has also offered interesting insights of how political agency may be exerted in the face of power’s self representation as a powerful and mighty script. Homi Bhabha has argued that colonial power’s self-representation as ‘‘unity’’ is a colonial strategy of domination and explored the subversive potential of the mimicry and mockery of the colonized.67 For Bhabha, The display of hybridity—its peculiar ‘‘replication’’—terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery. Such a reading of colonial authority profoundly unsettles the demand that figures at the centre of the originary myth of colonialist power. It is the demand that the space it occupies be unbounded, its reality coincident with the emergence of an imperialist narrative and history, its discourse nondialogic, its enunciation unitary, unmarked by the trace of difference-a demand that is recognizable in a range of justificatory Western ‘‘civil’’ discourses. 68 Bhabha sees subjection and resistance as intimately related. Political agency is a process of hybridization through transformation of meaning. Thus, ‘‘Colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures which can then be resolved as an issue of cultural relativism. Hybridity is a problematic of colonial representation and individuation that reverses the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority—its rules of recognition.’’69 Political agency is not portrayed as the free subjects’ total rejection of a unified totalizing assemblage of power. While (the colonizer’s) power attempts to reproduce its script by creating the ‘‘mimic men,’’ that is, the ‘‘docile colonial subjects who are ‘almost the same, but not quite’,’’70 it also creates an ambivalence, a contradiction between ‘‘same’’ and ‘‘not quite’’ that can be appropriated by the subaltern. Mimicry is easily camouflaged as mockery, with the colonial subject consequently subverting or refusing to simply repeat the master’s lessons. Instead of producing a controlled imitation or a managed response from the native, the civilizing mission elicits an answer back, a menacing look, a distorted and disturbing echo.71 Agency is exerted through moves that are imbricated with discourses of power but also recognize and question them. In this way, universal claims are unsettled and power’s purported unity menaced. Bhabha sends a note of caution to those whose response to subjection is direct opposition, a warning that ‘‘overcoming domination, far from getting rid of it, often occasions its mere reversal.’’72 Thus, Ilan Kapoor suggests that ‘‘the agent must play with the cards s/he is dealt, and the hegemon, despite the appearance of absolute strength, needs or desires the subaltern.’’73 Purity of identity may not ever have been a possibility, even less when the very ideas of what accounts for identity and alterity are being rapidly reworked. In relying on Foucault’s understanding of power and on feminist elaborations of Identity,74 Roland Bleiker has embraced a non- substantialist standpoint and the acceptance of ambiguity as central for conceptualizing human agency and for exploring its actual transformative possibilities. Bleiker questions positions that see agency as a reflection of externally imposed circumstances as well as traditions that ‘‘bestow the human subject . . . with a relatively large sense of autonomy.’’75 Assumptions of fundamental autonomy (or ‘‘freedom’’) would ‘‘freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’76 As Bleiker puts it: ‘‘A conceptualization of human agency cannot be based on a parsimonious proposition, a one-sentence statement that captures something like an authentic nature of human agency. There is no essence to human agency, no core that can be brought down to a lowest common denominator, that will crystallize one day in a long sought after magic formula. A search for such an elusive centre would freeze a specific image of human agency to the detriment of all others.’’77 For Bleiker, universals are indeed tainted with an imperial flavor. This includes the imperialism of ideas of identity based on liberty and freedom (rather than imbrication, situatedness, and relationality) as the ontological horizon for understanding human nature and assessing political agency. Non-substantialist positions do not assume the existence of monolithic power scripts or ontologically autonomous subjects; do not establish linear links between intentions and outcomes, and do not assume that every form of agency needs an identifiable agent. Instead, they call for careful attention to contexts. In this disposition, Bleiker advocates a modest conceptualization of agency, one that relies upon Michel de Certeau’s operational schemes, Judith Butler’s contingent foundations, or Gilles Deleuze’s rhizomes.78 In a similar vein, in a refreshing reading of realism, Brent Steele has highlighted the problematic aspects of assessing political agency based upon actors’ intention and focused on contexts as the yardstick for assessing political actions.79 For Steele, ‘‘as actors practice their agency within the space of a public sphere, intentionality—at best—becomes dynamic as new spaces in that sphere open up. Intentions, even if they are genuine, become largely irrelevant in such a dynamic, violent, and vibrant realm of human interaction.’’80 In shifting attention from ‘‘intention’’ to the context that made some actions possible, Steele sees agency as a ‘‘redescription’’ of existing conditions, rather than the total ‘‘rejection’’ of or ‘‘opposition’’ to a totalizing ‘‘script.’’ As a consequence, Steele advocates ‘‘pragmatist humility’’ for politicians and scholars as well.81 In summary, in non-substantialist frameworks, agency is conceptualized as modest and multifarious agonic interactions, localized tactics, hybridized engagement and redescriptions, a series of uncertain and situated responses to ambiguous discourses and practices of power aimed at the construction of new openings, possibilities and different distributive processes, the outcomes of which are always to an extent unpredictable. Political agency here is not imagined as a quest for individual authenticity in opposition to a unitary nefarious oppressive Leviathan aimed at the creation of a ‘‘better totality’’ where subjects can float freed of ‘‘oppression,’’ or a multitude made into a unified ‘‘subject’’ will reverse the might of Empire and bring about a condition of immanent social justice. By not reifying power as a script and subject as monads endowed with freedom non-substantialist positions open the way for conceptualizing political agency as an engagement imbricated in praxis. The ethical virtue that is called for is ‘‘pragmatist humility,’’ that is the patience of playing with the cards that are dealt to us, enacting redescriptions and devising tactics for tinkering82 with what exists in specific contexts. Conclusion In this article, I have argued that, notwithstanding their critical stance, scholars who use governmentality as a descriptive tool remain rooted in substantialist ontologies that see power and subjects as standing in a relation of externality. They also downplay processes of coconstitution and the importance of indeterminacy and ambiguity as the very space where political agency can thrive. In this way, they drastically limit the possibility for imagining political agency outside the liberal straightjacket. They represent international liberal biopolitical and governmental power as a homogenous and totalizing formation whose scripts effectively oppress ‘‘subjects,’’ that are in turn imagined as free ‘‘by nature.’’ Transformations of power modalities through multifarious tactics of hybridization and redescriptions are not considered as options. The complexity of politics is reduced to homogenizing and/or romanticizing narratives and political engagements are reduced to total heroic rejections or to revolutionary moments. By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects’ relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to ‘‘rejection,’’ ‘‘revolution,’’ or ‘‘dispossession’’ to regain a pristine ‘‘freedom from all constraints’’ or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems. International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with. Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than overarching demonizations of ‘‘power,’’ romanticizations of the ‘‘rebel’’ or the ‘‘the local.’’ More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to ‘‘what happens’’ instead of fixations on ‘‘what ought to be.’’83 Such ethics of engagement would not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine ‘‘freedom’’ to be regained. Instead, it would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault ‘‘my point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.’’84 Both in its “individualistic” version (i.e. a positions that focus on the parts’ attributes) and in its “structuralist’ versions (i.e. positions that focus on detecting the organizing principles of the whole) substantialism has underpinned the position of scholars belonging to very different traditions, such as neorealist, neoliberals, post- Marxists as well as some post-modernists. Substantialist structuralism explains the whole in terms of a few overarching principles that determine the parts’ behavior, and posits the parts as having given attributes before their contextual interactions. Scholars such as Hardt and Negri (2000) and Giorgio Agamben (1998) borrow Michel Foucault’s terminology but not his methodology and embrace substantialist assumptions (Zanotti, 2013). While favoring divergent political aspirations, substantialist-structuralist positions share an ontology that represents agents as monads endowed with fundamental characteristics and qualities and that explains social phenomena and political dynamics through a few, ahistorical overarching principles. Regardless of what the organizing principle of choice is (i.e. anarchy for Waltz, Empire for Hardt and Negri, or the liberal biopolitical order for Agamben), it is reified as an inescapable deterministic factor that shapes the behavior of actors and structures the outcomes of their deeds. In a structural-substantialist framework the structure always tends to reproduce itself, thus re-directing and re-orienting actor’s political engagements towards preserving the status quo. The ways out of the determinism of this script are few. Short of changing the organizing principle of the system (as a conservative substantaliststructuralist like Waltz would have it), totally withdrawing from the “script” of power (as Prozorov (2007), who embraces Agamben suggested) or constituting th “multitude as one” to fight the mighty “Empire” (as Hardt and Negri would like it), agents can do very little to change “what is”. In summary regardless of their stated political preferences, these positions are politically conservative because they stifle political imagination and straightjacket options for action.  Chris Brown’s has recently called for a “‘critical problem-solving’ theory, that is, theory that relates directly to real-world problems but approaches them from the perspective of the underdog” (Brown, 2013, 483). A change of perspective in the direction Browns suggests demands in my view a reflection on the ethical and political implications of IR ontologies and methodologies. In this paper I embrace Michel Foucault’s methodology and political intent as my starting point for exploring these connections. In “Questions of Method,” from which the excerpts above are taken, Michel Foucault (1991) established a relation between the problem of truth and the political. In taking issues with some of the most dogmatic streams of Marxism, Foucault defended an intellectual and political project centered on deconstructing what is taken for granted instead of devising an overarching principle for explaining all that happens in society or for establishing a more desirable social order. Foucault did not aspire to guaranteeing “an appropriate outcome. ” Instead, he aimed at displacing certainties and at “participating in the “difficult displacement of forms of sensibility”. I make my case on the connections between ontologies, epistemology and ethics by arching back to a debate that has become a classic in IR, i.e. the one between the most famous proponent of neorealism, Kenneth Waltz and his critics. I continue by assessing critical realism’s contribution to a non-substantialist understanding of ontology, epistemology and ethics. I focus on the work of IR scholar Heikki Patomäki (2002) to argue that while maintaining an attachment to some overarching explanatory “structural” features, critical realism rejects substantialism and adopts a relational ontology. In particular the notion of “emergence” challenges structuralist determinism. I continue by addressing the more radical non-substantialist ontology proposed by the feminist realist philosopher of science Karen Barad (2007) and by exploring the relevance of her notion of “intra-agential agency” for ethics. Both critical realism and, to a greater extent, Karen Barad’s version of scientific realism open an ontological space where conceptualizations of political agency and ethics rooted upon praxis and contingent configurations (instead of universal normative abstractions) are possible. In this vein, instead of relying upon abstract theorizations of “what is right” across time and places, ethical decisions must include practical assessments of what is possible under specific circumstances, as well as gauge political consequences and distributional effects. This position leads to a reconfiguration of political agency that moves away from universal prescriptions rooted upon universal normativity, and sees ethics as a method or an “attitude” that embraces uncertainty and mutable contingent conditions rather than static recipes for action.