Carbon Tax 1ac

Contention 1 is inherency. A) Cap-and-trade is inevitable, both on the international and domestic fronts. Bloomberg 12/4/09 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aXRBOxU5KT5M For Wall Street, these kinds of voluntary carbon deals are just a dress rehearsal for the day when the U.S. develops a mandatory trading program for greenhouse gas emissions. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley will be watching closely as 192 nations gather in Copenhagen next week to try to forge a new climate-change treaty that would, for the first time, include the U.S. and China. U.S. Cap and Trade Those two economies are the biggest emitters of CO2, the most ubiquitous of the gases found to cause global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, whose emissions targets will expire in 2012, spawned a carbon-trading system in Europe that the banks hope will be replicated in the U.S.

The U.S. Senate is debating a clean-energy bill that would introduce cap and trade for U.S. emissions. A similar bill passed the House of Representatives in June. The plan would transform U.S. industry by forcing the biggest companies -- such as utilities, oil and gas drillers and cement makers -- to calculate the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they emit and then pay for them.

And, cap-and-trade will degenerate into massive banks trading derivatives, increasing costs to consumers and guaranteeing economic instability. Bloomberg 12/4/09 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aXRBOxU5KT5M Chan has an ally in hedge fund manager Michael Masters, founder of Masters Capital Management LLC, based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. He says speculators will end up controlling U.S. carbon prices, and their participation could trigger the same type of boom-and-bust cycles that have buffeted other commodities. In February 2009 House testimony, Masters -- who is no relation to Blythe Masters -- estimated that the early 2008 price bubbles in crude oil, corn and other commodities cost U.S. consumers more than $110 billion. The hedge fund manager says that banks will attempt to inflate the carbon market by recruiting investors from hedge funds and pension funds. “Wall Street is going to sell it as an investment product to people that have nothing to do with carbon,” he says. “Then suddenly investment managers are dominating the asset class, and nothing is related to actual supply and demand. We have seen this movie before.” Thus the plan: The US federal government should reform its environmental policy by passing and implementing H.R. 1337, a scaling tax on carbon consumption in the United States. Funding and enforcement through normal means, we'll clarify.

Contention 2 is solvency. A. Put away your counterplans - carbon tax is superior to cap-and-trade by a wide margin – multiple reasons. Avi-Yonah and Uhlmann '9 [Reuven S. and David M., University of Michigan Law School, "Combating Global Climate Change: Why a Carbon Tax is a Better Response to Global Warming than Cap and Trade," Stanford Environmental Law Journal 2009] A more efficient and effective market-based approach to reduce carbon dioxide emissions would be a carbon tax imposed on all coal, natural gas, and oil produced domestically or imported into the United States. A

carbon tax would enable the market to account for the societal costs of carbon dioxide emissions and thereby promote emission reductions, just like a cap and trade system. A carbon tax would be easier to implement and enforce, however, and simpler to adjust if the resulting market-based changes were either too weak or too strong. A carbon tax also would produce revenue that could be used to fund research and development of alternative energy and tax credits to offset any regressive effects of the carbon tax. Because a carbon tax could be implemented and become effective almost immediately, it would be a much quicker method of reducing greenhouse gas emissions than a cap and trade system. B. Carbon tax is key to generating societal trends in alternative energy and consumption patterns – solves climate change. Avi-Yonah and Uhlmann '9 [Reuven S. and David M., University of Michigan Law School, "Combating Global Climate Change: Why a Carbon Tax is a Better Response to Global Warming than Cap and Trade," Stanford Environmental Law Journal 2009] The global climate

change crisis will not be resolved simply by implementing a carbon tax or a cap and trade system—or by any other legislative approach. Fundamental changes in energy production, development, and conservation, as well as changes in transportation, land use, and natural resource policies, must be pursued alongside efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. An effective carbon mitigation strategy, however, will be the centerpiece of any successful program to combat global climate change. While the widespread embrace of cap and trade is a positive development after decades of inaction, before we move forward we should pause to consider whether a cap and trade system is the best approach to combating global climate change. This Article demonstrates that a

better response to global climate change would be a carbon tax that is adjusted over time to achieve the necessary reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, as well as the corresponding improvements in alternative energy sources and land and resource management practices that are essential to conserving our planet for future generations.

Advantage 1 is climate change. People are losing their homes and lives to climate change right now – claims that the earth isn't experiencing climate change are delusional at best. AP 5/29/09 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30998907/print/1/displaymode/1098/ Climate-change disasters kill around 300,000 people a year and cause about $125 billion in economic losses, mainly from agriculture, a think-tank led by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan reported Friday.

The Global Humanitarian Forum also estimated that 325 million people are seriously affected by climate change — a number it says will double by 2030, as more people are hit by natural disasters or suffer environmental degradation caused by climate change. "Climate change is a silent human crisis," Annan said in a statement. "Yet it is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time." The report suggests that rising

sea levels, desertification and changing rainfall patterns are reducing many people's access to safe drinking water and food. This in turn increases diarrhea, malaria and malnutrition. The report said 99 percent of all people who die due to climate-change related causes live in developing countries, even though those countries generate less than 1 percent of total emissions of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. The impacts will only get worse – water shortages will trigger massive resource wars including the populations of China and India. Smith and Vivekananda '7 (Dan Smith is the Secretary General of International Alert and member of the Advisory Group for the UN Peacebuilding Fund while Janani Vivekananda is his research assistant. “A climate of conflict: the links between climate change, peace and war” http://www.international-alert.org/publications/getdata.php? doctype=Pdf&id=322&docs=980) Climate change will significantly affect fresh water supply. Worldwide, over 430 million people currently face water scarcity, and the IPCC predicts that these numbers will rise sharply because climate change will affect surface water levels that are established by rainfall and glacial melting. In some situations, increased glacial melting will cause inland water levels to rise in the short term, followed by a downturn later, but the

overall projected impact of climate change is that water scarcity will increase with time. This will be especially problematic in middle-income countries making the transition from agricultural production to industry. Such states, of which the largest and most advanced in the process are India and China, face an urgent situation as their water resources are already stressed and depleting while demand is growing rapidly. The conflict risk if water resources are inadequate lies in poor management that either wastes water by inappropriate use of it and inadequate conservation measures, or politicises the issue and seeks a scapegoat on which to blame shortages.

Conflicting claims to water resources have been a feature of numerous conflicts as major rivers are very often shared between countries. The situation is particularly problematic when a militarily strong state or region is downstream to a militarily weaker state or region. China, India, Mexico, the Middle East, Southern Africa and Central Asia are among the countries and regions of the world that have been and are likely to be affected by violent conflict over water rights. Tensions over water rights and supply also can be worsened by development programmes that privatise control of the resource without looking after the rights of the poor.

The bottom line – cutting carbon emissions is the only way to stem the biggest extinction event since T. Rex. Courier Mail 3/31/08 (Australia-based international newspaper, published daily. “Species Wipeout-Humans Included”) The planet is already amid a ``human-induced mass extinction event'' which is defining a new geological age known as the Anthropocene, says Professor Will Steffen, director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at Canberra's Australian National University. Professor Steffen will speak at the Second International Salinity Forum in Adelaide today.``In 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem

the current rate of species loss is higher than the background rate inferred in the fossil record. ``This rapid rate in the loss of species diversity is similar in intensity to the event around 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs and other Assessment published a report on the changes in species diversity and found

species.''Damming nearly all of the world's major rivers had left 75 per cent of the world's fisheries exploited or depleted, he said. The human impact had been pronounced in Australia, due to the highly variable climate, unique wildlife and poor soils, he said.``Human

history is littered with examples of civilisations that have collapsed because of their inability to adjust to environmental change -- such as the Mayans in Meso-America the Norse colonies in southern Greenland and the Akkadian civilisation, which was located in what is now Syria.'' With no one sure what the tipping point was,

the best course of action was to mitigate climate change and reduce

greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, he said.

Finally, threats to biodiversity always outweigh because each species loss risks human extinction. Diner '94 [David, Ph.D., Planetary Science and Geology, "The Army and the Endangered Species Act: Who's Endangering Whom?,"Military Law Review, 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161] To accept that the snail darter, harelip sucker, or Dismal Swamp southeastern shrew 74 could save [hu]mankind may be difficult for some. Many, if not most, species are useless to[hu]man[s] in a direct utilitarian sense. Nonetheless, they may

be critical in an indirect role, because their extirpations could affect a directly useful species negatively. In a closely interconnected ecosystem, the loss of a species affects other species dependent on it. 75 Moreover, as the number of species decline, the effect of each new extinction on the remaining species increases dramatically. 4. Biological Diversity. -- The main premise of species preservation is that diversity is better than simplicity. 77 As the current mass extinction has progressed, the world's biological diversity generally has decreased. This trend occurs within ecosystems by reducing the number of species, and within species by reducing the number of individuals. Both trends carry serious future implications. 78 [*173] Biologically diverse ecosystems are characterized by a large number of specialist species, filling narrow ecological niches. These ecosystems inherently are more stable than less diverse systems. "The more complex the ecosystem, the more successfully it can resist a stress. . . . [l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist collapse better than a simple, unbranched circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." 79

By causing widespread extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each

new animal or plant extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined affects, could cause total ecosystem collapse and humanextinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, 80 [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.

Advantage 2 is leadership. Unipolarity is over. Successive U.S. administrations have destroyed U.S. leadership in the world through poor policy choices that decrease U.S. power relative to other actors. Haass '8 [Richard, CFR president, “What Follows American Dominion?” Financial Times, 4/16/2008]

The unipolar era, a time of un-precedented American domin-ion, is over. It lasted some two decades, little more than a moment in historical terms.

Why did it end? One explanation is history. States get better at generating and piecing together the human, financial and technological resources that lead to productivity and prosperity. The same holds for companies and other organisations. The rise of new powers cannot be stopped. The result is an ever larger number of actors able to exert influence regionally or globally. It is not that the US has grown weaker, but that many other entities have grown much stronger.

By both what it has done and what it has failed to do, the US has accelerated the emergence of new power centres and has weakened its own position relative to them. A second reason unipolarity has ended is US policy.

The carbon tax is key to restoring American leadership. Avi-Yonah and Uhlmann '9 [Reuven S. and David M., University of Michigan Law School, "Combating Global Climate Change: Why a Carbon Tax is a Better Response to Global Warming than Cap and Trade," Stanford Environmental Law Journal 2009]

From this perspective, in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, both a carbon tax and a cap and trade system serve the essential function of persuading the rest of the world that we are serious, and therefore that they should cooperate in a global policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Both cap and trade and a carbon tax are equally useful from that perspective, but for the reasons explained above, a carbon tax can be implemented much faster than cap and trade and, therefore, is preferable from the standpoint of international leadership. Stated differently, Benefit Certainty requires bringing large developing countries to the bargaining table, and a carbon tax is better and faster in doing so than cap and trade.

We control the internal links to hegemony – innovation and resulting economic competitiveness are the only way for the US to regain and retain primacy. Martino '7 [Rocco, “A Strategy for Success: Innovation Will Renew American Leadership,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, Spring 2007 http://www.fpri.org/orbis/5102/martino.innovationamericanleadership.pdf ]

The United States of course faced great challenges to its security and economy in the past, most obviously from Germany and Japan in the first half of the twentieth century and from the Soviet Union in the second half. Crucial to America’s ability to prevail over these past challenges was our technological and industrial leadership, and especially our ability to continuously recreate it. Indeed, the United States has been unique among great powers in its ability to keep on creating and recreating new technologies and new industries, generation after generation. Perpetual

innovation and technological leadership might even be said to be the American way of maintaining primacy in world affairs. They are almost certainly what America will have to pursue in order to prevail over the contemporary challenges involving economic competitiveness and energy dependence. And, hegemony prevents proliferation and global nuclear war. Khalilzad '95 [Zalmay, US Ambassador to the United Nations. “Losing the Moment? The United States and the World After the Cold War.” The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2. pg. 84 Spring 1995] Under the third option, the

United States would seek to retain global leadership and to preclude the rise

of a global rival or a return to multipolarity for the indefinite future. On balance, this is the best long-term guiding principle and vision. Such a vision is desirable not as an end in itself, but because a world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and more receptive to American values -- democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, threats of regional hegemony by renegade states, and low-level conflicts. Finally, U.S. leadership would help preclude the rise of another hostile global rival, enabling the United States and the world to avoid another global cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange.