1nc - Sharkfin Vs. Halogen

Jordan Bakke Sharkfin vs. Halogen – 1NC

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First off is topicality on “significantly reform”.....................................................................................2 A. Interpretation.................................................................................................................................................................2 B. Violation..........................................................................................................................................................................2 C. Voters...............................................................................................................................................................................2

Second off is topicality on “environmental policy”..............................................................................3 A. Interpretation.................................................................................................................................................................3 B. Violation..........................................................................................................................................................................3 C. Standards........................................................................................................................................................................3 D. Voters...............................................................................................................................................................................3

Third off is a kritik of capitalism...........................................................................................................4 A. Framework.....................................................................................................................................................................4 B. Link..................................................................................................................................................................................4 C. Analysis...........................................................................................................................................................................4 D. Consequence...................................................................................................................................................................6 E. Alternative.......................................................................................................................................................................6

Fourth off is uranium shortage..............................................................................................................7 Last is on-case..........................................................................................................................................8 On solvency..........................................................................................................................................................................8

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Jordan Bakke Sharkfin vs. Halogen – 1NC

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FIRST OFF IS TOPICALITY ON “SIGNIFICANTLY REFORM” A. Interpretation The plan must substantially alter the shape and structure of environmental policy. My interpretation isn't much different from the one in the 1AC. However, I'm emphasizing that the plan must substantially alter the environmental policy's form; tweaking its condition isn't enough to be topical. Sharkfin in CX says the plan changes the policy's shape/structure, so I'm holding the plan to that expectation.

B. Violation The plan is a tweak, not a reformation. It doesn't alter the shape/structure of the government's policy; it only increases two variables while keeping the system intact. It improves or worsens condition, but not form. Therefore, since it doesn't meet Sharkfin's definition of changing shape/structure, the plan isn't topical.

C. Voters A negative ballot is necessary for the following reasons. First, unfair division of ground. Affirmative teams have basically infinite prep time. They have all season to work on their cases, whereas negative teams have the season to research a plethora of cases. It's extremely unfair to skew this imbalance by running cases that negatives can't even predict, forcing them to resort to generic, non-case-specific arguments. Almost everyone would go 3-3 at tournaments by dodging negative research. By losing the debate, a non-topical affirmative team is discouraged from making debate unfair. Second, killed education. Debates should be educational – a great value of debating is to reinforce strategies to use in future rounds. When I debate a non-topical case, there's no way that I can predict teams to run it at tournaments. That educational opportunity goes to waste. Winning a debate should encourage affirmative teams to promote education, not to avoid it.

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Jordan Bakke Sharkfin vs. Halogen – 1NC

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SECOND OFF IS TOPICALITY ON “ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY” A. Interpretation I define environmental policy the same as environmental law, which Encyclopedia Britannica defines as: Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 20 July 2009 http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9344534

Principles, policies, directives, and regulations enacted and enforced by local, national, or international entities to regulate human treatment of the nonhuman world.

B. Violation The plan is effectually topical. It doesn't change the way the government regulates human treatment of nature. It only tweaks a governmental policy that indirectly affects how non-governmental companies treat nature.

C. Standards Sharkfin in CX rules out the possibility of the government using a non-environmental policy to address environmental issues. Therefore, any policy in the world is environmental policy as long as it's intended to help the environment. My interpretation is better for the following reasons. First, plan-in-a-vacuum. A plan should be deemed topical independently of its intent. This is how to weed out absurd squirrel cases like these: - Curfew to prevent people from driving at night, reducing carbon dioxide emissions; - Capping family sizes to address overpopulation; - Mortgage bailouts to affect the development of new houses. My interpretation meets this standard because whether or not a policy's purpose is to benefit the environment, if it regulates human interactions with nature, it's topical. If it doesn't, it's non-topical. Those squirrels are topical according to Sharkfin's definition. Second, clarity and consistency. Sharkfin's interpretation makes it easy to whimsically decide whether or not a plan is topical. It could be topical in one round, because the affirmative team intends to help the environment, but non-topical in the next round, because the next team has no environmental intention. My interpretation stays the same regardless of people's intent.

D. Voters Cross-apply fairness and education from topicality on “significantly reform.” Page 3/9

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THIRD OFF IS A KRITIK OF CAPITALISM A. Framework Mindsets matter. A debate must be evaluated by the philosophies supported, in addition to the plan. The plan is only imaginary – if the affirmative team wins this debate, nothing actually happens in congress. However, their win would encourage the mindset that they promote, which tangibly affects all of us. Mindsets that actually affect us should be evaluated before the hypothetical world because they are more important.

B. Link The case promotes capitalism. The case's main premise is that competitive enterprise, stimulated by the government, solves energy problems. Moreover, capitalistic enterprise is defended as a good system with which we should work.

C. Analysis First, in promoting capitalistic enterprise, the affirmative philosophy buttresses consumerism. George Liodakis, professor of social science, writes in 2001 (George, Professor of Social Science at Technical University of Crete, The people-nature relation and the historical significance of the Labour Theory of Value, Capital and Class, Spring 2001,

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3780/is_200104/ai_n8940388) JXu If our interpretation of Marx's labour theory of value is correct, it becomes clear that an ecological revision or correction of this theory, contrary to what is often argued, is not necessary, at least in its specific historical context. As I have shown, the

problem is not the Marxian approach to value and the character of capitalism, which on the one hand, considering the natural forces as 'a gift to capital, leads to the squandering of natural resources and the degradation of the environment, while people-nature relation, but the

value, on the other hand, as the historically specific and dominant reflection of economic calculation in capitalism, is objectively determined by the quantity of necessary 'abstract' labour, disregarding the substantial contribution of nature in production.

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Second, commodities in a consumerist society are at the disposal of infinite consumption. Erazim Kohák, PhD, professor of philosophy, writes in 2000 (Erazim, Professor Emeritus Philosophy Boston University, The Green Halo: A Bird’s Eye View of Environmental Ethics, p.57) The shift to consumerism—the

mode of life in which the driving motor of the society ceases to be need,

replaced by greed—production for profit, not for satisfaction of need—represents a fundamental shift in human perception of the whole of life. For the first time, it is a one-sided perception which does not recognize the integrity and intrinsic value of nonhuman being. The consumerist experience is solipsistic. I, I alone, matter. The other ceases to be Thou, as Buber uses that term, and becomes simply it. The world is constituted as a reservoir of raw materials, humans as distracted, one-dimensional consumers. In the background there is the triple assumption: the meaning of life is to have ever more and the task of society is to make this possible, because a rise in consumption will solve all our unresolved problems. All else has to wait. First we need to produce more and consume more. We have all seen examples—ruthless clearcutting, surface mining, polluted rivers, nuclear power plants, poisoned atmosphere. E.O. Wilson speaks of the sixth global catastrophe, von Weizsacker of the self-destruction of a civilization oriented solely the example of to short-term gain. Lynn White Jr., writing in 1968, saw a different driving mechanism—a society which

can no longer understand the idea of enough and so with iron necessity must seek ever more until, like Plato's Atlantis, it destroys itself. White cites the more efficient plough which, however, required a team of eight oxen. To maintain so large a team the owner could not be content to produce within the limits of need. Such an owner had to overproduce to pay for the team. Similarly contemporary

society, bound by large

investments, cannot afford contentment. It must generate discontent and artificial need. Succeeding decades bore him out. How much of all for which we strive so breathlessly did we "need" thirty years ago? We are stuck on the escalator of ever greater demands. That is the origin of the ecological crisis: an

infinite demand finds itself in an inevitable conflict with a very finite world. In a world of raw materials, a world devoid of its own life, value, and order, there is nothing natural and so also nothing just sufficient. There is no more enough, there is only more.

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D. Consequence Infinite consumption and technological progress will eliminate nature. Kohák writes in 2000 (Erazim, Professor Emeritus Philosophy Boston University, The Green Halo: A Bird’s Eye View of Environmental Ethics, p.3-4)

When today we speak of an ecological crisis we are basically articulating a realization that this primitive, seemingly self-evident ethics will no longer do. We made do with it for three centuries and in a sense even longer. Ancient Romans treated nature with the same total unconcern as we. The deserts around Carthage, once Rome's granary, and deforested rocky slopes of southern Italy testify to that. The monks who brought the beaver to extinction in the Czech lands in the eighteenth century—beaver was considered fish and so allowable on fast days—were no more considerate. We have simply assumed that, whatever we do, nature is always more powerful and can make good the damage. Still during the Second World War we used to hear on the radio how many gross register tons of crude oil, destined for England, the German navy sank. We were anxious for England but never dreamed of considering the fate of the oceans and the fish. We simply assumed nature would set it right and, in general, it worked out that way. It

works out no longer. All available indicators show that humankind is drastically crippling the ability of the biosphere to make up for human interventions and to preserve an environment suitable for our kind of life. Nature has not changed—it still is what it has been throughout the countless millennia of its evolution. Nor did our approach to nature change—we are still acting wholly in the spirit of "cowboy ethics," interested only in our own wishes and sublimely unconcerned about the consequences of our doing, just as drivers care little about the effect of their exhaust fumes on the city, people, or nature. After all, we have a right and we have always done so . . . Seemingly, nothing has changed, so why worry? Because something has changed. Figuratively speaking, we have run out of yellow paint for covering up the damage we are causing (see p. i). The effects of the heedless disregard which for centuries we could paint over with cosmetic measures will no longer be hid. Our mode of living upon this Earth is endangering its ability to support our kind of life. That is what the global ecological crisis for the twenty-first century is all about: we are using more than the Earth can replace. In the Czech Republic, the government for years refused to admit what scientists and citizens see ever more clearly, that our conceptions of being human on this Earth are in direct conflict with the conditions of sustainability of life. As the mythical King Canute commanded in his royal authority that the tide should stop rising, so until very recently first our Communist, then our neo-liberal leaders proclaimed that there is no ecological threat and acted accordingly, perhaps in the hope that what they will not acknowledge will not exist.

E. Alternative We should reject capitalism and affirm the immanent presence of revolution, because all that stops the revolution is a lack of belief in it. Slavoj Žižek, professor of sociology, writes in 2004 (“Revolution at the Gates, Zizek on Lenin – The 1917 Writings” p.259-260) In a genuine revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justifies present violence – it is rather as if in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short circuit between the present and the future, we are – as if by Grace – briefly allowed to act as if the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, there to be seized. Revolution is experienced not as a present hardship we have to endure for the sake of the happiness and freedom of future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we are already free even as we fight for freedom; we are already happy even as we fight for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or de-legitimized by the long-term outcome of present acts; it is, as it were, its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.

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FOURTH OFF IS URANIUM SHORTAGE Uranium shortage blocks nuclear expansion. MIT News in 2007 (Elizabeth A., MIT tech talk, Lack of fuel may limit U.S. nuclear power expansion, MIT News office, March 21, 2007, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/fuel-supply.html) Limited supplies of fuel for nuclear power plants may thwart the renewed and growing interest in nuclear energy in the United States and other nations, says an MIT expert on the industry. Over the past 20 years, safety concerns dampened all aspects of development of nuclear energy: No new reactors were ordered and there was investment neither in new uranium mines nor in building facilities to produce fuel for existing reactors. Instead, the industry lived off commercial and government inventories, which are now nearly gone. Worldwide, uranium production meets only about 65 percent of current reactor requirements. That shortage of uranium and of processing facilities worldwide leaves a gap between the potential increase in demand for nuclear energy and the ability to supply fuel for it, said Thomas Neff, a research affiliate at MIT's Center for International Studies. "Just as large numbers of new reactors are being planned, we are only starting to emerge from 20 years of underinvestment in the production capacity for the nuclear fuel to

only a few years ago uranium inventories were being sold at $10 per pound; the current price is $85 per pound. Neff has been operate them. There has been a nuclear industry myopia; they didn't take a long-term view," Neff said. For example,

giving a series of talks at industry meetings and investment conferences around the world about the nature of the fuel supply problem and its implications for the so-called "nuclear renaissance," pointing out both the sharply rising cost of nuclear fuel and the lack of capacity to produce it. Currently, much of the uranium used by the United States is coming from mines in such countries as Australia, Canada, Namibia and, most recently, Kazakhstan. Small amounts are mined in the western United States, but the United States is largely reliant on overseas supplies. The

United States also relies on Russia for half its fuel, under a "swords to ploughshares" deal that Neff originated in 1991. This deal is converting about 20,000 Russian nuclear weapons to fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants, but it ends in 2013, leaving a substantial supply gap for the United States. Further, China, India and even Russia have plans for massive deployments of nuclear power and are trying to lock up supplies from countries on which the United States has traditionally relied. As a result, the United States could be the "last one to buy, and it could pay the highest prices, if it can get uranium at all," Neff said. "The take-home message is that if we're going to increase use of nuclear power, we need massive new investments in capacity to mine uranium and facilities to process it." Mined uranium comes in several forms, or isotopes. For starting a nuclear chain reaction in a reactor, the only important isotope is uranium-235, which accounts for just seven out of 1,000 atoms in the mined product. To fuel a nuclear reactor, the concentration of uranium-235 has to be increased to 40 to 50 out of 1,000 atoms. This is done by separating isotopes in an enrichment plant to achieve the higher concentration. As Neff points out, reactor operators could increase the amount of fuel made from a given amount of natural uranium by buying more enrichment services to recover more uranium-235 atoms. Current enrichment capacity is enough to recover only about four out of seven uranium235 atoms. Limited uranium supplies could be stretched if industry could recover five or six of these atoms, but there is not enough processing capacity worldwide to do so.

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LAST IS ON-CASE On solvency His evidence says that loan guarantees would be a “useful incentives,” but they aren't. The plan will fail to stimulate the nuclear industry; here's why. First, loan guarantees are empirically denied. Nuclear Information and Resource Service 2008 “Round 2 of Nuclear Loan Guarantee Battle About to Begin. Let's Stop Them Entirely This Time!” Feb 20 http://www.nirs.org/alerts/02-20-2008/1 As you know, in December Congress voted to authorize $18.5 Billion in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees for the construction of new atomic reactors (along with $2 billion for a uranium enrichment plan, $8 billion for various coal technologies and $10 billion for renewables and efficiency projects). The Congressional authorization is only good through Fiscal Year 2009.

The guarantees have been available for 2 years and haven't made a difference. The first inherency card conveniently leaves out the fact that the new reactors are merely expected in the future. There's no reason to believe they'll be built. Second, nuclear reactors are too expensive to be cost-competitive. Nuclear Information and Resource Service in 2008 (False Promises, Jessie Carr and Dulce Fernande, adapted by the staff of Nuclear information and resource center, http://www.nirs.org/falsepromises.pdf) While the nuclear industry argues that nuclear power is cheaper than some other forms of electricity generation, it counts only the price of operating the

Operating costs of nuclear power plants are relatively low, but to argue these are the true costs of nuclear power is disingenuous, like arguing that it is cheap to drive a Rolls Royce counting only the price of gasoline and leaving out the purchase price. In fact, the cost of nuclear power is extremely high at the beginning and end of the operational cycle of a nuclear power plant: construction costs for reactors built since the mid-1980’s have ranged from $2-$6 billion, averaging more than $3,000 per kW of electric generating capacity (in 1997 dollars). Historically, nuclear power has been anything but cost effective. The capital cost for construction of a reactor is very high, and cost overruns are highly probable for new reactors. Initial industry cost estimates of $1,500- $2,000 per kW of electric generating capacity for the new generation of nuclear plants plants, not the full costs of building them.

appear to have been based on wishful thinking: the first actual applications (from Constellation Energy and NRG Energy) project costs about twice that. The prices of recently built nuclear power plants in Japan were much higher, ranging between $1,796 and $2,827 per kW, in 2003 dollars. In October 2007, Moody’s Investors Service estimated that new US reactors are likely to cost $5,000 to $6,000 per kW. The

Congressional Research Service indicates that average construction costs have totaled more than $3,000 per kW, and that the nuclear industry’s claims that new plant designs could be built for less than that amount (if a number of identical plants were built) have not been demonstrated. Indeed, nuclear

construction cost estimates in the US have been notoriously inaccurate. The estimated costs of some existing nuclear units were wrong by factors of two or more, The total estimated cost of 75 of today’s existing nuclear units was $45 billion (in 1990 dollars). The actual costs turned out to be $145 billion (also in 1990 dollars). Perhaps, the most striking example of cost overruns was the Shoreham nuclear plant in New York. With an initial estimated cost of $350 million, the plant ended up costing $5.4 billion when it was completed 20 years later, about 15 times the original cost. The plant never produced a single kW of commercial power, and the cost overruns of the project contributed to saddling Long Island with some of the nation’s highest electricity rates. Europe’s most recent nuclear project, the European Pressurized Water Reactor at Olkiluoto in Finland, is running over budget and causing financial losses for French builder Areva, which is building the reactor under a 3 billion euro fixed-price contract. The company’s operating income for 2006 was severely affected by the construction delays, and the company took a loss of some $900 million (US) for the year. The loss is due to a “significant” provision the group made to account for past and expected future costs of delays at Olkiluoto. In November 2006, the French media reported the reactor was already 24 months behind schedule, despite only 20 months of construction undertaken! Construction costs already have reached 4.5 billion euros, and some independent economists such as Steve Thomas of the University of Greenwich in the UK predict final actual costs for the reactor could top 5 billion euros (about $7 billion (US)).

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Third, incentives fail to overcome market challenges of nuclear power. Michael Brooks writes in 2006 for New Scientist (Michael, senior feature editor, New Science, Apr 22-Apr 28. Vol. 190, Iss. 2548; pg. 33, 5 pgs, Proquest) If they ever invest at all, that is. In January, the financial analyst Standard & Poors issued a report saying that even the new

incentives for the US nuclear industry will not be enough to persuade investors to climb aboard; from a business perspective, nuclear remains the highest-risk form of power generation. That's because the subsidies don't deal with the capital, operating and decommissioning risks that most concern the capital markets, says Amory Lovins, CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based energy analysis firm. "The effect of even such huge subsidies will be the same as defibrillating a corpse," he says. "It will jump, but it will not revive." In conclusion, the plan can't be legitimately considered because it promotes non-topicality, which destroys education and research, and it bolsters capitalism, which will destroy nature. But even if it is considered, it can't do a thing because there's neither enough uranium nor enough market competitiveness for the nuclear reactors to succeed. Therefore, vote negative.

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