Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Affirmative

Ocean Th ermal Energy Convers ion 1AC Observation One: Inherency. ..................1 Harms Scenario [___]: Overfishing............2 [___] Food supply..................................2 [___] Biodiversity....................................4 [___] Resistant bacteria. .......................6 [___] Genetically modified fish. .......... 10 Harms Scenario [___]: Fossil Fuels. .......... 13 [___] Oil Spills....................................... 13 [___] Resource Wars. .......................... 14 [___] Global Warming......................... 16 [___] Oil Dependence. ....................... 17 [___] Oil Terrorism................................ 19 Harms Scenario [___]: Water.................. 20 Plan:....................................................... 22 Observation Three: Solvency................. 23 Advantage [___]: Space........................ 25 [___] Asteroids..................................... 26 [___] Nuclear War............................... 28 [___] Nanotechnology. ....................... 30 [___] Gray Goo............................. 31 [___] Bio-weapons........................ 32 [___] Economy. ................................... 33 Advantage [___]: Hydrogen Power. ...... 35 Inherency No OTEC Now ........................................... 36 Harms Overfishing Overfishing Now........................................ 37 A2: Solving Overfishing Now ..................... 40 Overfishing Destroys Biodiversity ............... 41 Biodiversity Impact .................................... 42 Overfishing Causes Fishing Collapse......... 43 Fishing Collapse Impact............................ 44 Overfishing Hurts Economy ....................... 45 No Laws Prevent Engineering ................... 47 Engineering Increases Hunger .................. 48 Genetic Modification Decision Rule ......... 49 Genetics Discursive Solvency.................... 50 A2: Fish Farming Solves.............................. 51

Fossil Fuels Fossil Fuels Running Out ............................ 52 Fossil Fuel Exhaustion Impact .................... 54 Fossil Fuels Cause Global Warming........... 55 Oil Dependence Now .............................. 56 Oil Dependence Causes War................... 57 Oil Dependence Destroys Economy ........ 58 Oil Terrorism Impacts................................. 60 Global Warming Impacts ......................... 61 Warming Causes Water Shortage ............ 62 Warming Causes Hunger .......................... 63 A2: Global Warming Doesn’t Exist ............ 64 A2: Nuclear Power Solves ......................... 65 A2: Fusion Power Solves ............................ 68 A2: Natural Gas Solves.............................. 69 Water Water Shortages Now ............................... 70 Water Shortage Causes War .................... 72 Space Advantage No Space Travel Now ............................... 73 Now Is Key for Space ................................ 75 Space Travel Snowballs ............................ 76 Space Exploration Solves Everything ........ 77 Space Exploration Moral Imperative........ 78 Space Exploration Solves All Critiques ...... 79 A2: Other Planets Uninhabitable .............. 80 A2: We’ll Find Aliens .................................. 81 A2: We’ll Have Wars With Colonies........... 82 A2: China Relations on Space .................. 83 A2: Nuclear Power Solves Space.............. 84 Asteroid = Extinction ................................. 87 Space Solves Asteroids ............................. 89 A2: No Planet-Killers Coming .................... 90 A2: We Never Get Hit................................ 92 A2: Deflect the Asteroid............................ 93 Economic Collapse Turns Case ................ 94 Exploration Solves Economy..................... 95

Nano Space Scenario Nanotech is Coming Now .........................96 Nanotechnology is Inevitable...................97 Rogue Nanites Cause Extinction ...............98 Space Solves Bio-Weapons .......................99 Nano Helps Quantum Theory.................. 100 Space Solves Nano ................................. 101 Hydrogen Advantage No Hydrogen Fuel Now ........................... 102 A2: There’s Hydrogen Research Now...... 103 Japan Developing Hydrogen ................. 104 Fossil Fuels Key to Electricity..................... 105 Hydrogen Fuel Key to Space .................. 106 Hydrogen Solves Fuel Crisis...................... 107 Hydrogen Fuel Solves Pollution................ 108 Hydrogen Increases Hegemony ............. 109 Hydrogen Solves Dedevelopment .......... 110 A2: EU Relations....................................... 111 Renewables Solve Poverty...................... 112 Solvency OTEC Increases Fishing ............................ 113 OTEC Solves Energy................................. 114 OTEC Solves Fossil Fuels ........................... 116 OTEC Solves Nuclear Power .................... 117 OTEC Solves Global Warming ................. 118 OTEC Solves Water Shortages ................. 119 OTEC Creates Hydrogen ......................... 121 Companies Will do OTEC ........................ 122 Government Can Encourage OTEC ....... 123 DOE Can Solve........................................ 124 A2: Too Expensive for Businesses ............. 125 A2: No Locations ..................................... 126 A2: Causes Global Cooling..................... 127 Answers Politically Unpopular................................ 128 Increases Economy................................. 129 Decreases Hegemony ............................ 130 A2: Private Actor CP................................ 131 A2: ‘Technology’ is Bad........................... 132 A2: Environmental Critiques .................... 133 Topicality................................................. 135

Ocean Th ermal Energy Convers ion Observation One: Inherency. ................................1

OTEC Affirmative

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Observation One: Inherency. Companies don’t have the economic incentive to develop Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, a.k.a. OTEC, now. NOAA Online http://www.csc.noaa.gov/opis/html/summary/otec.htm Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Act (42 U.S.C. §§ 9101 et seq. There has been a low level of activity under the OTEC Act since its passage in 1980. Following NOAA's initial environmental studies and implementation of a licensing program, NOAA has not received any license applications for OTEC facilities or plantships. The availability and the relatively low prices of fossil fuels, coupled with the risks to potential investors, has limited the interest in commercial development of OTEC projects. The need to protect the environmental quality of ocean resources and ecosystems may outweigh the benefits of constructing OTEC facilities in certain areas. Moreover, OTEC projects have offered an unclear return on a significant investment. (Source: Year of the Ocean Discussion Papers, 1998)

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Harms Scenario [___]: Overfishing. [___] Food supply. Overfishing is occurring everywhere, and past examples show it will only continue. Dayton, Thrush and Coleman in 2002 Paul K. Dayton (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) Simon Thrush (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and Felicia C. Coleman (Florida State University) October 28 2002 “The Ecological Effects of Fishing” for the Pew Ocean Commission) Fishing, even when not extreme, presents a very predictable suite of consequences for the targeted populations, including reduced numbers and size of individuals, lowered age of maturity, and truncated age structure. This is as true for recreational fishing as it is for commercial fishing. It is also accompanied by a less frequently predicted consequence to the ecosystems in which the exploited populations are embedded. We offer here descriptions of these fishing effects, and a discourse on the ability of marine systems to recover from them. Extent of Fishing Effects on Target Species Worldwide, some 25 to 30 percent of all exploited populations experience some degree of overfishing, and another 40 percent is heavily to fully exploited (NRC, 1999). Experience suggests that those populations classified as fully exploited nearly always proceed to an overfished status (Ludwig et al., 1993). Indeed, between 1980 and 1990, the number of overexploited populations increased 2.5 times (Alverson and Larkin, 1994). This is truly an unfortunate pattern because overfishing is not a necessary consequence of exploiting fish populations (Rosenberg et al., 1993).

And, overfishing causes fish stocks to collapse. By Roger E. McManus accessed April 8, 2003 (Senior Advisor for Oceans to the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of the Interior, and President Emeritus and Vice Chair for Ocean Policy of the Center for Marine Conservation) “Protecting Some Fish Within No-Take Areas Is Common Sense” While it may not be easy to cut back on fishing, neither we nor the fish are served by continuing to stress their stocks or habitats. You could compare mismanaging fish stocks to mismanaging your credit. Spending more money than you make as a regular practice is like regularly overfishing to catch more fish and make more money than the fish stocks can normally produce. Sooner or later your standard of living will start to decline just as the number of fish caught will start to decline as you continue overfishing. In extreme examples one can go bankrupt and fish stocks can collapse. For many of the world's fisheries we are borrowing against the future, and while there may be social or economic pressures to continue to over fish, we will just be postponing the pain if we don't limit our killing of the fish to the amount of fish their stocks can sustain.

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Also, crashing fish stocks remove fish as a source of food. Peter Montague March 1998 (Editor of Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly) “Oceans without fish” Even if a fishery does not collapse completely, fishing down the food chain can have serious consequences. In the north sea, the cod population has been so depleted that fishermen are now concentrating on a second-level species called pout, which the cod used to eat. The pout, in turn, eat tiny organisms called copepods and krill. Krill also eat copepods. As the pout are removed, the krill population expands and then the copepod population declines drastically. Because copepods are the main food of young cod, the cod population cannot recover. Fish farming might seem like a way out of this problem, but it is not at least not as presently practiced because farmed fish are fed fish meal made from unpopular fish such as herring or menhaden. It would seem to be only a matter of time before the herring and menhaden too are depleted. Dr. Pauly believes that in 3 or 4 decades, many oceanic fisheries will "collapse in on themselves." The result will be a loss of high-quality protein for humans, even before the fisheries collapse completely. Humans eat somewhere between trophic levels 2.5 and 4. Lower then that, there isn't much that people eat. "There is a lower limit for what can be caught and marketed, and zooplankton [at trophic level 2] is not going to be reaching our dinner plates in the foreseeable future," Dr. Pauly wrote in Science.

Finally, loss of protein from fish pushes us over the edge into extinction through disease or war. By Douglas S. Winnail October 1996 (Ph. D) From the World A head “On the Horizon: Famine”

With world food stores dwindling, grain production leveling off and a string of bad harvests around the world, the next couple of years will be critical. Agricultural experts suggest it will take two bumper crops in a row to bring supplies back up to normal. However, poor harvests in 1996 and 1997 could create severe food shortages and push millions over the edge. Is it possible we are only one or two harvests away from a global disaster? Is there any significance to what is happening today? Where is it all leading? What does the future hold? The clear implication is that things will get worse before they get better. Wars, famine and disease will affect the lives of billions of people! Although famines have occurred at various times in the past, the new famines will happen during a time of unprecedented global stress--times that have no parallel in recorded history--at a time when the total destruction of humanity would be possible! Is it merely a coincidence that we are seeing a growing menace of famine on a global scale at a time when the world is facing the threat of a resurgence of new and old epidemic diseases, and the demands of an exploding population? These are pushing the world's resources to its limits! The world has never before faced such an ominous series of potential global crises at the same time! However, droughts and shrinking grain stores are not the only threats to world food supplies. According to the U.N.'s studies, all 17 major fishing areas in the world have either reached or exceeded their natural limits. In fact, nine of these areas are in serious decline. The realization that we may be facing a shortage of food from both oceanic and land-based sources is a troubling one . It's troubling because seafood--the world's leading source of animal protein--could be depleted quite rapidly. In the early 1970s, the Peruvian anchovy catch--the largest in the world--collapsed from 12 million tons to 2 million in just three years from overfishing. If this happens on a global scale, we will be in deep trouble. This precarious situation is also without historical precedent!

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[___] Biodiversity. Overfishing pushes marine ecosystems to collapse and destroys biodiversity. Dayton, Thrush and Coleman in 2002 Paul K. Dayton (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) Simon Thrush (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) and Felicia C. Coleman (Florida State University) October 28 2002 “The Ecological Effects of Fishing” for the Pew Ocean Commission In the last hundred years, the percentage of marine waters fished, the sheer volume of marine biomass removed from the sea, and the pervasiveness of habitat-altering fishing techniques has cumulatively eroded marine ecosystems’ capacity to withstand either human induced or natural disturbances. Compounding the problem, but only touched upon here, are the influences of pollution, climate change, and invasive species (covered in the Pew Oceans Commission reports by Boesch et al., 2001 and Carlton, 2001). This report provides an overview of the ecologica leffects—both direct and indirect—of current fishing practices. Among the consequences are changes in the structure of marine habitats that ultimately influence the diversity, biomass, and productivity of the associated biota (Jennings and Kaiser, 1998); removal of predators, which disrupts and truncates trophic relationships (Pauly et al., 1998); and endangerment of marine mammals, sea turtles, some seabirds, and even some fish (NRC, 1998). Fishing can change the composition of ecological communities, which can lead to changes in the relationships among species in marine food webs. These changes can alter the structure, function, productivity, and resilience of marine ecosystems (Figure One). The repeated patterns of overfishing, bycatch mortality, and habitat damage are so transparent that additional science adds only incrementally to further documentation of immediate effect. Although it is always possible to find exceptions to these patterns, the weight of evidence overwhelmingly indicates that the unintended consequences of fishing on marine ecosystems are severe, dramatic, and in some cases irreversible.

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Also, loss of marine biodiversity creates a snowball effect that destroys the entire marine environment. Environment News Service August 21 2002 Marine Ecosystems Collapse When Predators Removed

preservation of biodiversity is an absolute necessity to keep marine ecosystems healthy and prevent local or regional extinction of multiple species, say marine zoologists at Oregon State University. Their newly published study was done on coral reefs in the Bahamas, where the scientists were able to isolate some reefs and selectively remove certain fish, and their competitors or predators, to observe the effect. They found that overfishing of any one species, especially predator species, can have ripple effects that destabilize the whole fishery. "The research showed that all fish species within a food web are connected with one another, and the removal of any one species can cause whole populations to break down," said Dr. Mark Hixon, Oregon State University professor of zoology, the study's lead author. "This is especially true when you take away the predatory species, which are a key to the natural balance and health of marine ecosystems, said Hixon, a marine ecologist and conservation biologist specializing in coastal fishes. The study is relevant to the global problems now being experienced in many commercial fisheries, Hixon said, because many of the fish species most commonly targeted by fisheries are marine predators. The study, published this week in a professional journal, the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," was funded by a four year, $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, and also by the National Undersea Research Program of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). "We found that the removal of any one species can have ramifications for the whole ecosystem," Hixon said. "Without predation, a fish species can increase its population to an unsupportable size. Lacking food, fish become vulnerable to disease, changes in water conditions and ultimate collapse of that species or the whole fishery. Everything is connected to everything else."

And, species extinction is like playing Russian Roulette – we never know which species extinction might cause complete collapse and human extinction. Paul Wapner, Angust 1994 Dep’t of Int’l Politics and Foreign Policy at American University “Politics and Life Sciences” p.177 Massive extinction of species is dangerous then because one cannot predict which species are expendable to the system as a whole. As Philip Hoose remarks, “Plants and animals cannot tell us what they mean to each other.” One can never be sure which species holds up fundamental biological relationships in the planetary ecosystem. And, because removing species is an irreversible act, it may be too late to save the system after the extinction of key plants or animals. According to the US National Research council, “the ramifications of an ecological change of this magnitude [vast extinction of species] are so far reaching that no one on earth will escape them.” Trifling with the “lives” of species is like playing Russian roulette with our collective futures as the stakes.

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[___] Resistant bacteria. Overfishing causes outbreaks of disease in marine populations. Jeremy Jackson July 27 2001 (lots of other people involved, selected to receive the Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Excellence Award from U. San Diego, Professor of Oceanography) “Historical Overfishing and the Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems” The second important corollary is that overfishing may often be a necessary precondition for eutrophication, outbreaks of disease,or species introductions to occur (27). For example, eutrophication and hypoxia did not occur in Chesapeake Bay until the 1930s, nearly two centuries after clearing of land for agriculture greatly increased runoff of sediments and nutrients into the estuary (77). Suspension feeding by still enormous populations of oysters was sufficient to remove most of the increased production of phytoplankton and enhanced turbidity until mechanical harvesting progressively decimated oyster beds from the 1870s to the 1920s (77, 80) (Fig. 2C). The consequences of overfishing for outbreaks of disease in the next lower trophic level fall into two categories. The most straightforward is that populations in the lower level become so dense that they are much more susceptible to disease as a result of greatly increased rates of transmission (94). This was presumably the case for the sea urchin Diadema on Caribbean reefs and the seagrass Thalassia in Florida Bay. In contrast, among oysters disease did not become important in Chesapeake Bay until oysters had been reduced to a few percent of their original abundance (80), a pattern repeated in Pamlico Sound (86, 87) and Foveaux Strait, New Zealand (93). Two factors may be responsible. First, oysters may have become less fit owing to stresses like hypoxia or sedimentation, making them less resistant to disease (87). Alternatively, suspension feeding by dense populations of oysters and associated species on oyster reefs may have indirectly limited populations of pathogens by favoring other plankton—an explanation that may extend to blooms of toxic plankton and most other outbreaks of microbial populations (88).

And, antibiotics used to treat outbreaks of disease in fish farms mean antibiotic resistant bacteria will spread to humans. Suzuki 2002 (David, August 4, Founder of the David Suzuki Foundation) St. John’s Telegram “Destroying a Valuable Tool”

The European Union has banned the use of antibiotics in animal feed, but it is still permitted in North America. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, more than half of the antibiotics in the U.S. are used for agricultural purposes (which includes farming fish like salmon). This indiscriminate use of antibiotics can lad to resistant infections in humans in two ways. First, people can become infected with resistant bacteria by direct consumption of meat containing a resistant pathogen like salmonella. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimates that every year up to 10,000 Americans develop antibiotic-resistant infections from eating chicken containing such bacteria. Second, resistant bacteria found in food animals can transfer resistance to normally harmless bacteria in humans through physical contact. These common bacteria are persistent and may spread from person to person. They can cause infections, and if the bacteria are resistant to antibiotics, the infection may prove difficult to treat. Recently, a ground of U.S. scientists developed a mathematical model to examine how feed antibiotics to livestock can lead to resistance. Their findings indicate that giving animals massive doses of antibiotics that are also used for humans reduces the useful lifespan of the drug by about 30 per cent.

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Additionally, resistant microbes are becoming harder and harder to treat, and could spread internationally like wildfire. Laurie Garett 1996 (science and health writer for Newsday and author of The Coming Plague) “The Return of Infectious Diseases” Foreign Affairs

Anything but stationary, microbes and the insects, rodents, and other animals that transmit them are in a constant state of biological flux and evolution. Darwin noted that certain genetic mutations allow plants and animals to better adapt to environmental conditions and so produce more offspring; this process of natural selection, he argued, was the mechanism of evolution. Less than a decade after the U.S. military first supplied penicillin to its field physicians in the Pacific theater, geneticist Joshua Lederberg demonstrated that natural selection was operation in the bacterial world. Strains of staphylococcus and streptococcus that happened to carry genes for resistance to the drugs arose and flourished where drug-susceptible strains had been driven out. Use of antibiotics was selecting for ever-more-resistant bugs. More recently scientists have witnessed an alarming mechanism of microbial adaptation and change – one less dependent on random inherited genetic advantage. The genetic blueprints of some microbes contain DNA and RNA codes that command mutation under stress, offer escapes from antibiotics and other drugs, marshal collection behaviors conducive to group survival, and allow the microbes and their progeny to scour their environments for potentially useful genetic material. Such material is present in stable rings or pieces of DNA and RNA, known as plasmids and transposons, that move freely among microorganisms, even jumping between species of bacteria, fungi, and parasites. Some plasmids carry the genes for resistance to five or more different families of antibiotics, or dozens of individual drugs. Others confer greater powers of infectivity, virulence, resistance to disinfectants of chlorine, even such subtly important characteristics as the ability to tolerate higher temperatures or more acidic conditions. Microbes have appeared that can grow on a bar of soap, swim unabashed in bleach, and ignore doses of penicillin logarithmically larger than those effective in 1950. In the microbial soup, then, is a vast, constantly changing lending library of genetic material that offers humanity’s minute predators myriad ways to outmaneuver the drug arsenal. And the arsenal, large as it might seem, is limited. In 1994 the Food and Drug Administration licensed only three new antimicrobial: drugs, two of them for the treatment of AIDS and none an antibacterial. Research and development has ground to a near halt now that the easy approaches to killing viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites—those that mimic the ways competing microbes kill one another in their endless tiny battles throughout the human gastrointestinal tract—have been exploited. Researches have run out of ideas for countering many microbial scourges, and the lack of profitability has stifled the development of drugs to combat organisms that are currently found predominantly in poor countries. “The pipeline is dry. We really have a global crisis,” James Hughes, director of the National Center for Infectious Disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, said recently. DISEASES WITHOUT BORDERS During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund devised investment policies based on the assumption that economic modernization should come first and improved health would naturally follow. Today the World Bank recognizes that a nation in which more than ten percent of the working-age population is chronically ill cannot be expected to reach higher levels of development without investment in health infrastructure.

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<> Furthermore, the bank acknowledges that few societies spend health care dollars effectively for the poor, among whom the potential for the outbreak of infectious disease is greatest. Most of the achievements in infectious disease control have resulted from grand international efforts such as the expanded program for childhood immunization mounted by the U.N.’s Children’s Emergency Fund and WHO’s smallpox eradication drive. At the local level, particularly in potentially unstable poor countries, few genuine successes can be cited. Geographical sequestration was crucial in all postwar health planning, but diseases can no longer be expected to remain in their country or region of origin. Even before commercial air travel, swine flu in 1918-19 managed to circumnavigate the planet five times in 18 months, killing 22 million people, 500,000 in the United States. How many more victims could a similarly lethal strain of influenza claim in 1996, when some half a billion passengers will board airline flights? Every day one million people cross an international border. One million a week travel between the industrial and developing worlds. And as people move, unwanted microbial hitchhikers tag along. In the nineteenth century most diseases and infections that travelers carried manifested themselves during the long sea voyages that were the primary means of covering great distances. Recognizing the symptoms, the authorities at ports of entry could quarantine contagious individuals or take other action. In the age of jet travel, however, a person incubating a disease such as Ebola can board a plane, travel 12,000 miles, pass unnoticed through customs and immigration, take a domestic carrier to a remote destination, and still not develop symptoms for several days, infecting many other people before his condition is noticeable. THE CITY AS A VECTOR Population expansion raises the statistical probability that pathogens will be transmitted, whether from person to person of vector-insect, rodent, or other—to person. Human density is rising rapidly worldwide. Seven countries now have overall population densities exceeded 2,000 people per square mile, and 43 have densities greater than 500 people per square mile. (The U.S. average, by contrast, is 74). High density need not doom a nation to epidemics and unusual outbreaks of disease if sewage and water systems, housing, and public health provisions are adequate. The Netherlands, for example, with 1,180 people per square mile, ranks among the top 20 countries for good health and life expectancy. But the areas in which density is increasing most are not those capable of providing such infrastructural support. They are, rather, the poorest on earth. Even countries with low overall density may have cities that have become focuses for extraordinary overpopulation, from the point of view of public health. Some of these urban agglomerations have only one toilet for every 750 or more people. Most people on the move come to burgeoning metropolises like India’s Surat, (where pneumonic plague struck in 1994) and Zaire’s Kikwit (site of the 1995 Ebola epidemic) that offer few fundamental amenities. These new centers of urbanization typically lack sewage systems, paved roads, housing, safe drinking water, medical facilities, and schools adequate to serve even the most affluent residents. They are squalid sites of destitution where hundreds of thousands live much as they would in poor villages, yet so jammed together as to ensure astronomical transmission rates for airborne, waterborne, sexually transmittied, and contacttransmitted microbes.

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Finally, this is the greatest threat to human survival. Bruce Sterling February 1995 (science journalist) in Bitter Resistance At the close of this century, antibiotic resistance is one of the gravest threats that confronts the human race. It ranks in scope with overpopulation, nuclear disaster, destruction of the ozone, global warming, species extinction and massive habitat destruction. Although it gains very little attention in comparison to those other horrors, there is nothing theoretical or speculative about antibiotic resistance. The mere fact that we can’t see it happening doesn’t mean that it’s not taking place. It is occurring, stealthily and steadily, in a world which we polluted drastically before we ever took the trouble to understand it. We have spent billions to kill bacteria but mere millions to truly comprehend them. In our arrogance, we have gravely underestimated our enemy’s power and resourcefulness. Antibiotic resistance is a very real threat which is well documented and increasing at considerable speed. In its scope and its depth and the potential pain and horror of its implications, it may be the single greatest menace that we human beings confront – aside, of course, the steady increase in our own numbers. And if we don’t somehow resolve our grave problems with bacteria, then bacteria may well resolve that population problem for us.

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[___] Genetically modified fish. First, continued overfishing cause a move towards genetically modified fish to feed the population when natural fishing reserves collapse. BBC News September 29 2000, GM 'solution' to over-fishing Genetically modified farmed-fish will feed the world by the year 2025 as global catches decline, predicts a US scientist. GM fish farms will be the only way to supply enough seafood amid the continuing collapse of commercial marine fisheries, believes Professor Yonathan Zohar, of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. He says biotechnology will lead to stronger, faster-growing, more nutritious fish that can reproduce all year round. But critics argue that GM fish may offer a temporary solution to providing food but will not address the problem of over-exploitation of our seas and oceans. Declining stocks The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation reports that 60% to 70% of fisheries in the world's oceans are threatened by over-fishing. The agency estimates that at some point between 2015 and 2025, half of all fish consumed in the world will be farmed. New molecular and biotechnology tools will be required to bring fish farming on a par with farming of other livestock, says Professor Zohar. Whereas people have improved the genetics, health, nutrition and reproduction of other livestock through centuries of husbandry and science, time may be far shorter for improving seafood crops, he told the International Marine Biotechnology Conference in Queensland, Australia. 'Unproven science' But environmental campaign group World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF, says GM fish are a distraction from the pressing issues that face our oceans today. "GM fish may offer a solution to fish as a food resource, though the science is far from certain on this matter, but it will not address the unsustainable and catastrophic exploitation of our seas and oceans," said a spokesperson.

Now is a key time – new genetic engineering developments move us towards even more genetic engineering and destruction of biodiversity. Sierra Club March 2001 “Genetic Engineering at a Historic Crossroads” Genetic Engineering Committee Report We are now at a turning point in history. We can continue to allow the virtually unrestricted release of genetically engineered organisms to the environment, or we can bring this technology under strict control. If we continue on our present path of unrestricted releases of GEOs, we will eventually live in a genetically engineered world, as the genome of each species now on earth is either deliberately altered by genetic engineering or indirectly altered by inheritance of transgenes from a genetically engineered organism. In such a world there would be nothing left of living nature, as every species would have been deprived of its genetic integrity, and every ecosystem would thereby have been irreversibly disrupted. <> Fish, as well as other animals, are also being genetically engineered to grow more rapidly. If they are released to the environment (fish culture tanks often discharge during storm conditions), they may out-compete native species and thereby disrupt ecosystems.

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Also, genetically modified foods increase world hunger and cause exploitation of the poor by multinational corporations. Pakissan.com 2001 Advisory / BIOTECHNOLOGY Environmental impacts of genetic engineering http://www.pakissan.com/english/advisory/biotechnology/environ mental.empacts.shtml Although increases in population are often used to justify the development of genetic engineering, according to the United Nations' World Food Programme we are currently producing one and a half times the amount of food needed to provide everyone in the world with an adequate and nutritious diet. In spite of this, at least 1 in 7 people in the world are suffering from severe hunger. Even if genetic engineering was able to deliver its promises of high yielding, disease-resistant crops to the third world, it seems unlikely that this would be of benefit to starving populations because it fails to address the root causes of hunger. Indeed, the suggestion that this complex problem can be solved with a biotechnological panacea allows both governments and industry to distance themselves from their complicity in the political structures and social inequalities that lead to starvation. For every £1 that the West is gives in aid to third world countries, £3 is paid back by these same countries as interest on their debt. The UN Development Report in '97 stated that, "In Africa alone, the money spent on annual debt repayments could be used to save the lives of about 21 million children by the year 2000." At the height of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, oilseed rape, linseed, and cottonseed was being grown on prime agricultural land to be exported as feed for livestock to the UK and other European countries. "Rather than reducing world hunger, genetic engineering is likely to exacerbate it. Farmers will be caught in a vicious circle, increasingly dependent on a small number of giant multinationals, such as Monsanto, for their survival. For 25 years Action Aid has been listening to poor farmers and supporting their efforts to maintain sustainable farming. Even though the world's population is growing, we know it produces enough food for all - food mountains are evidence of this. It is the inequitable distribution of food that is keeping millions hungry. The truth is that genetically engineered crops will provide a 'better way forward' for Monsanto's profits, but could be a huge step backwards for the world's poor."

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And, genetic engineering reduces animals to tools for humans and causes unnecessary suffering. Andrew B. Perzigian 2003 “Genetic Engineering and Animals: A Short Summary of the Legal Terrain and Ethical Implications” Animal Legal and Historical Center Michigan State University--Detroit College of Law In general, opponents of genetic engineering assert that such technology creates a huge diminution in the standing of animals, leaving them as nothing more than "test tubes with tails," only of benefit for the exploitive practices of factory farming, and drug and organ manufacturing. Creating more efficient agricultural animals threatens weaken the genetic diversity of the herd and thereby make them more susceptible to new strains of infectious disease. Also, if transgenic farm animals ever escape into wild populations, they can have profoundly disturbing effects on the natural environment, including a complete elimination of natural populations and the processes of natural selection. Animal rights advocates also argue that each species should enjoy an inherent, natural right to be free of genetic manipulation in any form. This is especially the case when genetic engineering is used as a means of depriving animals of their sentience, of exacerbating the cruel, horrific conditions of the modern factory farm and biomedical lab. Although the sheer numbers may decline, the actual suffering experienced by agricultural and research animals may increase.

Finally, genetic engineering breaks down the barriers between species that are key to sustaining life on earth – the impact is extinction. Sierra Club March 2001 “Genetic Engineering at a Historic Crossroads” Genetic Engineering Committee Report As environmentalists, one of our most basic concerns is the preservation of species. We live in a time when the rate of species extinction has increased drastically, primarily as a result of human activities. Now a new form of human activity, genetic engineering, may pose the ultimate threat to the survival of all species. Many of those who are promoting genetic engineering give every indication that they regard life as a form of information technology: that genes are mere bundles of information to be transferred from one species to another on the basis of expediency and potential corporate cash-flow; that the natural barriers to genetic transfer that protect the integrity of species are mere inconveniences to be overcome; and that the very concept of species is an anachronism which it is now time to discard. Because these principles are being put into application—genetically engineered organisms are now being made and released to the environment—we have to conclude that genetic engineering threatens the continued existence of all species as life-forms that are distinct from one another. Genetic engineering should be considered an environmentally dangerous technology that is breaking down the barriers that have protected the integrity of species for millions of years. There are probably good reasons why it is impossible for a conventional plant breeder to combine plant genes with animal genes. Those reasons have to do with the very survival of life on earth, and we ignore them at our peril.

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Harms Scenario [___]: Fossil Fuels. [___] Oil Spills Offshore drilling is causing oil spills, which are widespread and cause huge damage to ecosystems.

Oil spills increase pollution and destroy marine life. Offshore Technologies 2003 Oil Spills and Environmental Damage, http://www.offshore-technology.com/contractors/environmental/oil-spills.html In many oil pollution spills involving tankers or offshore wells, the oil spills could catch light. Then, when the oil burns it produces gases that lead to global warming and acid rain, as well as other toxic gas emissions that can cause pollution. Even if the oil doesn't catch fire, the less dense components will eventually evaporate into the atmosphere causing much the same effect. After a few hours, the denser parts of the oil spills forms a sticky mixture with the water called 'mousse'. This may then mix with sediment on the sea floor to create a tar like substance that can destroy the habitats of bottom dwelling organisms, as well as wash up on beaches several miles from the spill itself. The oil can then leak into any reservoirs that extend under the beaches, contaminating local wells. Oil spills can also harm marine life in different ways; poisoning after ingestion; direct contact; and destroying habitats. The oil may be ingested by fish through their gills, or by animals that attempt to clean themselves. Ingesting the oil can destroy a creature's internal organs, and interferes with the reproductive process.

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[___] Resource Wars. Oil reserves are almost exhausted and could begin to decline in the next few years. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall April 2003 How Hydrogen Can Save America http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/hydrogen_pr.html Petroleum suppliers and auto manufacturers alike understand the need to disentangle their business models from crude. By most estimates, the worldwide oil supply has nearly stopped growing. Thanks to new discoveries, the total reserve increased by 56 percent between 1980 and 1990 but only 1.4 percent between 1990 and 2000. Pessimistic geologists argue that production will begin to decline as early as 2006, while optimists point at 2040. What's more, it's now clear that oil consumption is at least partly to blame for global warming, prompting everlouder calls for alternatives. It shouldn't take much persuasion to convince the oil and car industries that the most profitable course is to adapt to hydrogen sooner with government money rather than later without.

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And, the exhaustion of fossil fuels will cause ecological destruction and wars around the planet. Joseph George Caldwell February 3 2003 (supervised economic development projects in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Africa, PhD degree in mathematical statistics) “What Oil Can Do to Tiny States: And Big Ones Too!” T S Elliot (“The Hollow Men”) surmised that the world would end in a whimper. That is possible, but the leaders of the human species do not do things that way. Mankind will not sit around collectively and starve to death as the world’s food supplies disappear as global oil reserves exhaust. Nation will attack nation, tribe will attack tribe, clan will attack clan, fighting over the last drop of oil and the food that it makes possible. Unless plague strikes first – and the possibility of that increases daily with each new day of gross intermingling and each new strain of genetically modified life – global famine will lead to global war, not to global resignation. Can anything be done to bring an early end to the mass industrialization that is choking the planet to death? Or is a solution totally beyond man’s capacity? Economics has a stranglehold on the planet. As the situation grows more and more dire, all world leaders call for more industrial production, not less. Instead of using the last of the fossil fuels to prepare for a better world tomorrow, all world leaders are champing at the bit to consume every bit of it as fast as possible, in a feeding frenzy of consumption and hedonic pleasure – more factories, more cars, more roads, more subways, more houses, more computers, more telephones, more communications, more bandwidth, more hospitals, more drugs, more physicians, more schools, more buildings, more clothes, more food, more money, better homes, better medical care, more televisions, more CDs, more churches, more temples, more mosques, more exotic vacations, more airplanes, more cruise ships, more ski lodges, more movies, more spare time, more and better sports stadia – more of every material good, service, and pleasure. More for our generation even though it means a ruined world for all generations to come. And more is never enough. And the cost to the other species of the planet and to future generations of mankind does not matter. The gap between rich and poor grows wider and wider, and evergrowing numbers endure lives of hellish misery as Moloch consumes the Earth. The religion of economics calls for more efficiency and promises an ever-higher standard of living for human beings, even as millions more are born into direst poverty, the animal world is disappearing, and our world crumbles. The leaders offer more of everything, and say that more industrial production will provide it. But more industrial production means more and more people living in dire poverty, and more and more destruction of the environment, and more and more extinction of species. No leader has the courage or the will or the desire to accept and to admit and to declare that it is industrial production that is the problem, not the solution. The lie that continued industrial production and continued peace will reduce poverty and improve mankind’s standard of living is very deceptive. The Siren’s call to a better life is irresistible. The people are helpless to say “No! We do not believe you any more, and we have suffered enough!” What is to be done? You might start by praying for an early end to the petroleum age.

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[___] Global Warming. Fossil fuels cause global warming, and the pace is increasing – if we don’t act now, climate change will cause huge damage. John D. Podesta August 2003 VISITING PROFESSOR OF LAW AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER “The Future of Energy Policy” Foreign Affairs

The clearest consequences of increased concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere have now been well documented: rising temperatures and sea levels, altered precipitation patterns, increased storm intensity, and the destruction or migration of important ecosystems. Most unsettling, however, is the growing scientific concern that climatic changes may not happen gradually, as has been commonly assumed. In a recent report, the National Research Council warned: Recent scientific evidence shows that major and widespread climate changes have occurred with startling speed. For example, roughly half the north Atlantic warming since the last ice age was achieved in only a decade. ... Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly. Thus, greenhouse warming and other human alterations of the earth system may increase the possibility of large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events. Preventing catastrophic climate change is, at its core, an energy challenge. Globally, fossil fuel production and use accounts for nearly 60 percent of the emissions that are causing the earth's atmospheric greenhouse to trap more heat. In the United States, the number is 85 percent. To avoid worsening the problem, governments around the world would have to take immediate, far-reaching steps: dramatically r educing the burning of fossil fuels, slowing deforestation, altering agricultural practices, and stemming the use of certain chemicals. Because change of this magnitude will take so much time, and because there is so much momentum built into the current rate of carbon release, it will be impossible to hold atmospheric concentrations at the current level of 380 parts per million (which is already one-third higher than preindustrial levels). More realistically, studies for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest that an extremely ambitious program to reduce worldwide carbon emissions by as much as two-thirds by the end of the century will be necessary just to hold the level of accumulated carbon in the earth's atmosphere below 550 parts per million -- roughly double preindustrial levels. Even if this goal is reached, the likely result is that sea levels will rise significantly and species extinction will increase.

And, global warming is equal to nuclear war in its destruction. Mitchell ’91 (George J, Senator, “World on Fire” p. 90)

The prospect for the planet under the higher temperatures and rising sea levels now predicted within our own lifetimes is sobering enough. The world of Eric and Luisa could become our world before we die. We are on the brink of it even now. Even if we could stop all greenhouse gas emissions today, we would still be committed to a temperature increase worldwide of two to four degrees Fahrenheit by the middle of the twenty-first century. It would be warmer than it has been for the past two million years. Unchecked it would match nuclear war in its potential for devastation.

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[___] Oil Dependence. The U.S. is already hugely dependent on foreign oil, and it’s only going to get worse. Gary C. Bryner Spring, 2002 Research Associate, Natural Resources Law Center, University of Colorado School of Law, and Professor, Public Policy Program, Brigham Young University THE NATIONAL ENERGY POLICY: ASSESSING ENERGY POLICY CHOICES Colorado Law Review The United States imports about sixty percent of the oil it uses each day, and that percentage will likely climb as domestic energy production declines and consumption increases. Even if the United States increases domestic output significantly, the nation is projected to become more and more dependent on imports because of growing demand and will, therefore, continue to be vulnerable to energy shocks. n138 The future of oil imports is quite uncertain. The United States imports some 1.6 million barrels of oil a day from Saudi Arabia, n139 and that country warned in October 2001 that the Bush administration's failure to negotiate peace between Israel and the Palestinians might jeopardize United States-Saudi relations. n140 Iraq, exporter of 0.6 million barrels of oil a day to the United States, n141 might withhold oil from global markets in retaliation for United Nations' sanctions n142 or in response to the war on global terrorism. Neither the leading congressional bills nor the Bush plan offer a solution to this quandary of our major dependence on imported oil. Critics have repeatedly argued that opening ANWR to oil development, the Bush administration's major response to American reliance on imported oil, would not produce oil for at least seven years, and then would likely yield only the equivalent of 140 days worth of oil. n143 The United States simply lacks the domestic oil resources to be able to become self-sufficient by expanding production. It [*366] has not been self sufficient in energy for more than forty years. n144 Those who make projections about the availability of resources often assume that the rate of consumption will be constant and, thus, create overly optimistic expectations concerning available supplies. In fact, steady growth in consumption results in enormous increases because of the profound power of exponential growth. For example, a resource that would last one hundred years at current consumption levels will only last sixty-nine years at a one percent growth rate, fifty-five years at a two percent growth rate, and only thirty-six years at a five percent growth rate. n145 Projections of energy resources at current consumption rates can give a false sense of security that resources will be plentiful in the future, when, in reality, population and consumption growth rates make the future of energy resources quite uncertain. While energy use per dollar of gross domestic product has fallen dramatically in the United States (fifty percent between 1950 and 2000), energy consumption per person in the United States has increased significantly during the past half century. n146 Given the nation's steady population growth, an energy policy that relies on a continuance of existing policy, and even a temporary expansion in domestic fossil fuel production, will result in even greater reliance on imported energy in the future.

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And, foreign oil dependence will always risk economic collapse, terrorism, and drawing the US into regional wars. John D. Podesta August 2003 VISITING PROFESSOR OF LAW AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER “The Future of Energy Policy” Foreign Affairs

The intensity of oil use in the transportation sector makes the American economy vulnerable to the actions of other states. A study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimates a $7 trillion cost to the U.S. economy from the oil market upheavals of the last 30 years. Indeed, every economic recession in the past 40 years has been preceded by a significant increase in oil prices. Diversification of U.S. oil imports is not an adequate answer. Oil is like any other commodity -- the last unit sold determines its price. The United States could shift all its purchases to sources that are relatively safe politically, such as Canada and Mexico, and it would still not be protected. The global price is what matters most. This means, for example, that if a terrorist sets off a "dirty bomb" in the Saudi port of Ras Tanura, the price of oil will spike everywhere in the world, dramatically affecting the U.S. economy. Nor are supply disruptions and price shocks the only risks that oil dependence creates for U.S. national security. The flow of funds to certain oil-producing states has financed widespread corruption, perpetuated repressive regimes, funded radical anti-American fundamentalism, and fed hatreds that derive from rigid rule and stark contrasts between rich and poor. Terrorism and aggression are byproducts of these realities. Iraq tried to use its oil wealth to buy the ingredients for weapons of mass destruction. In the future, some oil-producing states may seek to swap assured access to oil for the weapons themselves. It is also increasingly clear that the riches from oil trickle down to those who would do harm to America and its friends. If this situation remains unchanged, the United States will find itself sending soldiers into battle again and again, adding the lives of American men and women in uniform to the already high cost of oil.

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[___] Oil Terrorism . Piracy of oil tankers is on the rise – as long as tankers are going, there will be the risk of an intentional oil spill that will devastate ecosystems. James M. Stuhltrager 2003 Staff Attorney, Mid-Atlantic Environmental Law Center at Widener University School of Law COMBATING TERRORISM IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL TRENCHES Widener Law Symposium The risk of the use of oil pollution as a terrorist weapon is both real and significant. Modern risk management defines risk as "the likelihood of harm (in defined circumstances, and usually qualified by some statement of the severity of the harm)." n14 When applied to oil pollution, it is apparent that the risk of the intentional use oil pollution as a weapon is great. The probability that a terrorist group could hijack or otherwise commandeer an oil tanker is significant. As evidenced by the occurrence of piracy, modern oil tankers are extremely vulnerable to hijacking. Moreover, the environmental and economic consequences of an intentional oil spill are enormous. By that measure, the risk of terrorist use of oil pollution is significant. International shipping is extremely vulnerable to acts of piracy. Although in the United States, tales of pirates may have been relegated to history or amusement park attractions, in the rest of the world, piracy remains a very real threat. There were more than 800 pirate attacks in 2000 and 2001. n15 Though acts of piracy are widespread, they are particularly serious in Southeast Asia. In 2000, the three countries that experienced the most piracy incidents were Indonesia, India, and Bangladesh. n16 Pirate attacks on oil tankers are on the rise. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) has noted that attacks on oil tankers have increased in terms of percentage of overall piracy. n17 This surge in oil tanker hijackings is primarily due to the value [*404] of petroleum and the ease with which it is sold on the black market. n18 An example of this was the hijacking of the Singaporean oil tanker Selayang. The Selayang was hijacked on June 19, 2001 after the vessel left the Shell refinery in Port Dickson, Malaysia. n19 The vessel was recovered and the hijackers were captured in an anti-piracy operation conducted by Indonesian naval and air forces. n20 The hijackers indicated that they had arranged to sell the cargo of 3,500 tons of gasoline. n21 This increase in pirate attacks on oil tankers has led some officials to begin to consider the potential environmental ramifications. n22 The IMB has warned maritime nations that hijacked oil tankers or liquified natural gas (LNG) carriers could be used to carry out suicide missions. n23 Due to the size of oil tankers and the proximity of sealanes, confined areas, such as straits, harbors, and rivers, are the most vulnerable. One expert has noted that "[g]iven the large number of . . . fully laden oil tankers using the straits of Malacca and Singapore every day, there is a very real danger of a piracy attack creating an environmental catastrophe. . . ." n24 Such fears are not confined to Southeast Asia. Following September 11, Boston officials temporarily banned LNG vessels from entering the city's harbor due to fears of terrorist attacks. n25 If a terrorist group was to commandeer a tanker and an intentional oil spill was to occur, the potential consequences, both environmental and economic, would be enormous. <> These types of injuries would likely be magnified by the intentional use of oil pollution. Terrorists would plan the incident to occur in environmentally sensitive or economically important areas. For example, an intentional release in the Chesapeake Bay would likely devastate the area's commercial fishing and shellfishing industries. n34 A release in the Delaware River, already an inviting target as it borders the second largest petroleum refining center in the United States, would threaten drinking water supplies to tens of thousands of citizens. n35

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Harms Scenario [___]: Water. Water shortages are coming due to population pressure and climate change, and they will cause disease and environmental destruction. Michael McCarthy March 5, 2003 “Water Scarcity Could Affect Billions: Is This the Biggest Crisis of All?” the lndependent http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0305-05.htm

Population growth is the prime driver. The soaring of human numbers to more than six billion by the millennium meant that water consumption almost doubled in half a century. Between 1970 and 1990 available per capita water supply decreased by one third. Even though birth rates are now slowing, world population is still likely to increase by half as much again, to about 9.3 billion by 2050. Demand, of course, comes not just from the need to drink, the need to wash and the need to deal with human waste, enormous though these are; the really great calls on water supply come from industry in the developed world, and, in the developing world, from agriculture. Irrigating crops in hot dry countries accounts for 70 per cent of all the water use in the world. Pollution, from industry, agriculture and not least, human waste, adds another fierce pressure. About two million tons of waste are dumped every day into rivers, lakes and streams, with one liter of waste water sufficient to pollute about eight liters of fresh water. Today's report estimates that across the world there are about 12,000 cubic kilometers of waste water, which is more than the total amount contained in the world's 10 largest river basins at any given moment. Therefore, it suggests, if pollution keeps pace with population growth, the world will in effect lose 18,000 cubic kilometers by 2050 – almost nine times the amount all countries currently use for irrigation. All that's bad enough. But increasing the stress on water supply still further will be climate change, which UN scientists calculate will probably account for about a fifth of the increase in water scarcity. While rainfall is predicted to get heavier in winter in high latitudes, such as Britain and northern Europe, in many drought-prone countries and even some tropical regions it is predicted to decrease further; and water quality will worsen with rising pollution levels and water temperatures. Yet another difficulty will be the growing urbanization of the world: at present, 48 per cent of the Earth's population lives in towns and cities; by 2030 this will be 60 per cent. Urban areas often have more readily available water supplies than rural ones; their problem is that they concentrate wastes. As the report notes: "Where good waste management is lacking, urban areas are among the world's most life-threatening environments." The direst, direct effects of water scarcity will undoubtedly be on health. The presence of water can be a bane as well as a benefit: Water-related diseases are among the commonest causes of illness and death. Water-borne illnesses, such as gastric infections leading to diarrhea, are caused by drinking contaminated water; vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and schistosomiasis, are passed on by the mosquitoes and small snails that use water to breed. Millions contract such diseases. In the year 2000, the number of people estimated to have died from water/sanitation associated diseases was 2.2 million, a million of them from malaria. The majority of victims were aged under five. The world's soaring demand for fresh water is also causing increasing environmental stress; the stream flows of about 60 per cent of the world's largest rivers have been interrupted by dams and, of the creatures associated with inland waters, 24 per cent of mammals and 12 per cent of birds are threatened. About 10 per cent of freshwater fish species have been studied in detail and about a third of these are thought to be threatened.

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And, water shortages will hit the Middle East the hardest and cause armed conflict. Wolf 1996 (Aaron, Prof. of Geography @ Alabama U., July 10)

“Water” and “war” are two topics being assessed together with increasing frequency. Articles in the academic literature (Cooley 1984; Gleick 1993; Starr 1991; and others) and popular press (Bulloch and Darwish 1993; World Press Review 1995) point to water not only as a cause of historic armed conflict, but as the resource which will bring combatants to the battlefield in the 21st century. Invariably, these writings on “water wars” point to the arid and hostile Middle East as an example of a worst-case scenario, where armies have in fact been mobilized and shots fired over this scarce and precious resource. Elaborate “hydraulic imperative” theories have been developed for the region, particularly between Arabs and Israelis, citing water as the prime motivator for military strategy and territorial conquest. The basic argument is as follows: water is a resource to all aspects of a nation’s survival, from its inhabitants biology to their economy; the scarcity of water in an arid environment leads to intense political pressures, often referred to as “water stress” (a term coined by Falkenmark 1989); the Middle East is a region not only of extreme political conflict, but in which many states are reaching the limits of their annual freshwater supply; therefore Middle East warfare and territorial acquisition must be related to the region’s water stress.

Finally, conflict in the Middle East cause nuclear use by Israel and Armageddon Now. Executive Intelligence Review April 20, 2001 Nuclear War Now?! http://www.larouchepub.com/lar/2001/010420_nuclear_war_now.html If one takes into account, the impact of that 1962 missile-crisis, in reshaping, misshaping, and so on, the mind-set of, especially, the adolescent population of that time, and its later progeny, we should recognize what the actual use of nuclear weapon by Israel would do to the psyche of the entire world. Do you wish to speak of "Opening Pandora's Box"? I encourage you to do so, while you still might be able react rationally to the thought. Agreed, under usual circumstances such an event, even by a U.S. "Mega"-backed Sharon or Netanyahu government in Israel, would not be possible. The notable fact is, therefore, that "usual circumstances" have just gone entirely out of business with the combination of the inauguration of a looney but malicious President George W. "Friedrich Nietzsche" Bush, and with the onrush of the greatest financial collapse in human existence. In such times as these, given the indelicately unbalanced state of mind of the majority of the government and population of Israel at this time, the unthinkable is the only thing which is likely. Look into the mind of the Sharon governent, and the lack of sanity exhibited by Bush and the gnostic religious loonies who are his most important popular base. In short, it is time for all sane members of the U.S. Congress, to dump the customary, and immoral practice of "go along, to get along." Without a forceful and construction intervention by the government of the U.S.A. for good, there are no limits to the extremities into which the current Middle East situation might lead the world. The only way a "Battle of Armageddon" could happen now, is if people in the state of mind of the backers of Sharon Bush might be seized by an irresistable urge to "go all the way," in a Hitler-style exhibition of the Nietzschean will, and thus bring it about.

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Plan: The United States Federal Government should enact legislation giving financial assistance to companies to develop Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion as per our Cohen ’92 evidence. Funding and enforcement through normal means, and we’ll be happy to clarify anything else in Cross-X. Additionally, here’s our framework for the debate. We believe that if we can prove the plan is a better policy option than the status quo, we should win. Critiques or discourse impacts have no role in this calculus because they are not in this policy framework. This is best for debate because it encourages case and resolution focus, and doesn’t force the aff into multiple levels of impact calculus. Also, the aff is given fiat by the ‘should’ in the resolution – the neg has no resolution, so they have no fiat and any counterplan is illegit. Finally, we see topicality as a check to guarantee the negative ground. If they had ground, or could have been expected to find it, then topicality is no longer an issue and you shouldn’t vote on it.

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Observation Three: Solvency The plan will get businesses started on developing OTEC. Robert Cohen APRIL 1, 1992 Ph.D. from Cornell University REVITALIZING THE U.S. OCEAN ENERGY R&D PROGRAM TESTIMONY TO THE ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE This federal funding would provide a 50-50 cost-sharing demonstration to develop a prototype, closed-cycle, land-based, 5 MWe OTEC commercial electric plant sited in a U.S. state or territory such as Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, or the Virgin Islands. Such a plant is estimated to cost a total of about $50 million. Plant output would include one or more coproducts such as fresh water, coastal cooling, and mariculture. This system size would be sufficient to be economic and to project credible cost/performance estimates for larger commercial systems, and the project would provide an attractive opportunity environment in which industry would share the technical and economic risks. Industry would be attracted to this project by the large potential electrical market in many developing countries where OTEC-derived electricity would substitute for presently oil derived electricity.

And, once there is a successful model of OTEC in existence, more companies will follow. THOMAS H. DANIEL, September 2000 (Scientific/Technical Director of the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INTERNATIONAL, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion: An Extensive, Environmentally Benign Source of Energy for the Future) In summary, OTEC has been shown to work at research scales, and plans are underway to build pilot scale plants. Private sector developers will probably be unwilling to make the enormous initial investment required by the inherent large scale of commercial OTEC until the price of fossil fuels increases dramatically and/or governments provide suitable financial incentives. If, however, the pilot scale plants now being planned for some expensive-energy niche markets are successful in demonstrating low -cost long-term operation, OTEC will be much more financially attractive. As it offers tremendous potential for reducing the input of CO2 into our atmosphere, the development of OTEC should not be further delayed.

Also, action by the United States Federal government on energy policy is modeled internationally. John D. Podesta August 2003 VISITING PROFESSOR OF LAW AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER “The Future of Energy Policy” Foreign Affairs

Energy is a common thread weaving through the fabric of critical American interests and global challenges. U.S. strategic energy policy must take into account the three central concerns outlined above -- economic security, environmental protection, and poverty alleviation -- and set aggressive goals for overcoming them. Leadership from Washington is critical because the United States is so big, so economically powerful, and so vulnerable to oil shocks and terrorism. This is a time of opportunity, too -- a major technological revolution is beginning in energy, with great potential markets. And finally, the reality is that where the United States goes, others will likely follow. America's example for good or for ill sets the tempo and the direction of action far beyond its borders and far into the future.

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Additionally, OTEC makes water colder, which improves ocean ecosystems and fishing. Braun 2002 (Harry, Chairman of the Hydrogen Political Action Committee, September 20, “OTEC CAN SAVE THE OCEANS”) OTEC plants will profoundly improve ocean ecosystems because they function by pumping the deep cold water that is rich in nutrients needed for aquatic plants and animals to the surface. Only then can the nutrients react with sunlight, which then allows the ecosystems to flourish. Indeed, natural cold-water upwellings are responsible for some of the most fertile fishing grounds in the world, such as those off the west coast of South America. Thus, deploying large numbers of OTEC plants throughout the tropical seas could dramatically increase world seafood supplies. Unlike fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, OTEC systems can dramatically improve the natural ocean environment in which they operate. Detailed OTEC engineering studies have been completed by a number of investigators, including Lockheed, Bechtel, Grumman, TRW, the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University and the College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Also, OTEC would completely replace fossil fuels as a source of energy and provide renewable energy to the entire world population. Braun 2002 (Harry, Chairman of the Hydrogen Political Action Committee, September 20, “OTEC CAN SAVE THE OCEANS”)

The oceans contain 98 percent of the Earth's water, and they make up over 70 percent of the Earth's surface area that receives solar radiation. This makes the oceans the largest solar collector on the Earth, and it has cost nothing to build. Moreover, half of the Earth's surface lies between the latitudes 20 degrees North and 20 degrees South, which is mostly occupied by the tropical oceans where ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) plants could efficiently operate. According to calculations by Clarence Zener, a professor of physics at CarnegieMellon University, the potential energy that could be extracted by OTEC plants located in the tropical ocean areas would be approximately 60 mil-lion megawatts. Assuming the OTEC systems would have an operating capacity of about 80 percent, they would be able to generate over 400 billion megawatt-hours per year, which is more than three times the current total human annual energy consumption of roughly 150 billion megawatt-hours. Thus, OTEC systems could, in and of themselves, have the potential to generate enough electricity and/or hydrogen literally to run the world -- without using any of the earth's remaining fossil fuel reserves.

And, OTEC creates fresh water which solves for shortages and food supplies. Patrick Takahashi and Andrew Trenka, 1996 Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and Pacific International Center for High Technology Research, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, pg. 7-8 The desalinated water produced by open-cycle and hybrid-cycle OTEC systems is actually purer (less saline) than the water provided by most municipal water systems. Estimates indicate a 1 MW plant fitted with a second stage fresh water production unit could supply approximately 55 kilograms per second of fresh water, approximately 4750 m3/day, sufficient for serving a population of 20 000. Fresh water production from reverse osmosis and multi-stage flash desalination plants costs between $1.30 and $2.00jm3 for a plant with a 4000 m3/day capacity. Using these figures, a 1 MW OTEC plant could produce almost $3 million worth of desalinated water per year. In addition to potable, fresh water for domestic use, desalinated water from OTEC can be used for crop irrigation to increase food supplies.

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Advantage [___]: Space. There are no current technologies capable of getting us to more distant planets. By Greg Clark May 21 2000 Staff Writer Will Nuclear Power Put Humans On Mars? http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/nuclearmars_000521.ht ml When it comes to attracting interest in new mission plans to far-out places in the solar system, it is often the wildly futuristic concepts that get the attention. Antimatter propulsion, solar and magnetic sails all make great stories, but such futuristic concepts don't do anything to get humans out to the moon, or Mars, or to various local comets or asteroids within the foreseeable future. With these futuristic technologies barely out of their conceptual phases, practical use of such far-out concepts for human space transportation is decades away at best.

And, OTEC provides the economic and technological basis for space colonization. Marshall T. Savage, 1993 founder of the First Millennial Foundation The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, pg. 34 In the process of producing power, the OTECs pump vast quantities of cold water up from the depths. This deep water is saturated with nitrogen and other nutrients. When this nutrient-rich water hits the warm sunlit surface, algae populations explode. The algae are cultivated in broad shallow containment ponds that spread out around the central island of Aquarius like the leaves of a water lily. The algae soak in the tropical sun, absorbing the rich nutrient broth from the depths and producing millions of tons of protein. Aquarius will be the first of the new cybergenic life forms, but by no means the last. Once we have grown ten thousand of these colonial super-organisms, we will culture and harvest enough protein-rich algae to feed every hungry human on earth. We will generate enough electrical power power-converted into clean-burning hydrogen -to completely replace all fossil fuels. We will build enough living space to house hundreds of millions of people in self-sufficient, pollution-free, comfort. We will learn the harsh lessons of space colonization in the mellow school of a tropical paradise. And, we will unleash a cash flow large enough to underwrite any adventure in space we care to imagine.

The advantages from that are…

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[___] Asteroids. First, we find new asteroids around the earth every day, any of which could kill billions or cause human extinction if there were a collision. The Times (London) September 19, 2000 Asteroids could shut down Earth plc Mark Henderson

The danger of a catastrophic impact is so great that any private company incurring comparable risks would fail British safety standards, the Near Earth Objects Task Force said. A collision with even a medium-size asteroid would put hundreds of thousands of lives at risk from the initial energy blast, tidal waves and a "nuclear winter" effect, the task force found. At worst, an impact could destroy all human life: a similar event 65 million years ago is believed to have led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. International co-operation to track potentially hazardous asteroids and comets, and research into ways of deflecting them from the Earth, is the only answer to the threat, the report concluded. Britain should take the lead in the construction of a powerful new telescope as a key component of a "spaceguard" early-warning system, it advised. The panel, which was chaired by Harry Atkinson, a former chairman of the European Space Agency, was set up in January by Lord Sainsbury of Turville, the Science Minister. Other members were Sir Crispin Tickell, a former British Ambassador to the United Nations, and David Williams, Professor of Astronomy at University College London. Lord Sainsbury is expected to respond to the findings by the end of the year. Estimates of the total cost of the recommendations range from Pounds 15million to Pounds 70million. None of the asteroids and comets that are known to astronomers will pose a threat in the next 50 years but new objects are being discovered every day, leaving the Earth at a definite risk. The probability of a devastating collision is low , Dr Atkinson said, but the effects of a medium-size asteroid made present levels of risk "intolerable". An asteroid 0.6 miles across, which strikes the Earth every 100,000 to 200,000 years, would cause a "nuclear winter" effect, killing up to 1.5 billion people. Smaller objects, which strike at an interval of 70,000 years, could kill as many as 500,000 people.

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And, there’s always a chance of an asteroid wiping out life on earth – we never know when we’ll be hit. There’s a moral obligation to go into space to allow civilization to survive. Carl Sagan 1994 (American astronomer, planetologist, biologist) “A Pale Blue Dot” Random House We are sure that neglecting science, in general, and space research and exploration, in particular, is the exceptionally shortsighted and dangerous course of action, putting at risk the very future of humanity. In the best case, it leads to a waste of time; in the worst, it may end in extinction. There are many threats to mankind, which only expansion into space can fend off. The most spectacular of them is the possible collision of Earth with some celestial body - comet or asteroid. Depending on the size of such a body, the consequences may be different, including extinction of humanity as a species, as well. Astronomical observations and current space research clearly confirm that such cosmic collisions are not rare exceptions within geological timescale; on the contrary, they are a norm. It suffices to look through ordinary binoculars at the surface of the Moon, pockmarked with thousands of impact craters. Many such collisions happened also on Earth in the past; one of them caused the extinction of dinosaurs and many more species of plants and animals. It is also certain that similar collisions will happen in the future. Only, we do not know when - possibly after thousands of years - possibly just next year. Therefore, every year of delay may turn out to be the critical one. Earth also becomes overpopulated. Nothing indicates that the number of its inhabitants may undergo any significant decrease - except as a result of some severe war or global cataclysm, which could endanger the whole Earth's biosphere. Expansion into space offers here a possibility for a peaceful and gentle unburdening of the natural environment, while, at the same time, making survival of our species and civilization possible, even if the damage turns out to be irreversible. The civilization which crosses the space barrier and makes its existence independent of the fate of a particular planet will survive. Others are doomed. < The opening of space to humanity and the ensuing creation of a new branch of human civilization should be done by all of humanity, but in fact it only will be done by those nations who actively choose to participate. If we think that our nation should not consign itself to the sidelines of history; if we think that our people should have accomplishments celebrated in newspapers and not just museums; if we feel that our country and culture holds things that are precious and should be passed on as part of the heritage of humanity's New World, then it is our responsibility to do whatever we can to get our country involved in space exploration, either on its own or teamed with others.

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[___] Nuclear War. Worldwide nuclear war is still a possibility, and nuclear weapons will be mixed with other WMDs to a degree that could cause human extinction. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap6.html Mankind has been faced with the threat of nuclear war for some time now, and despite what some people think, the threat hasn't gone away. The threat has shifted somewhat though, towards a threat of nuclear terrorism and nuclear exchanges between lesser military powers. Nuclear war in and of itself never did pose a threat of eliminating all of humanity. A full scale nuclear war in which every nuclear weapon on Earth is used could wipe out around 30% of the Earth's human population (most fatalities in a nuclear war result from after effects of the nuclear exchange such as: radiation poisoning, environmental changes, starvation, ... and social upheaval) and set human technology back 40 years. The larger problem with nuclear war is nuclear weapons will almost never be used alone. Nuclear weapons will be used together with chemical, biological, and conventional weapons, and this combination of weaponry would have the potential of eradicating all human life, if the conflict were world wide.

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And, colonizing space makes nuclear war less likely to occur, and if it does occur, colonies prevent human extinction. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap6.html

The colonization of space would moderate many of the problems associated with the nuclear war extinction trap. The primary cause of war is human competition and our aggressive natures. We should never try to eliminate our competitive natures (the passion for conquest). To attempt to eliminate our desire to compete would create another extinction trap - the non-advancement trap - which is always 100% fatal. We can however, redirect our competitive natures into positive directions. It is no more difficult for us to direct our competitive natures into positive directions than it is to direct those same natures in negative directions. Another problem we face today is the Earth is a closed system. It is very difficult to exercise our competitive natures without treading on someone else's interests. There is nothing we can do to make Earth an open ended system. Space IS an open ended system and we should be colonizing space and venting our competitive natures against the worthy challenge of space colonization at this very moment. Unfortunately, this is not happening. We are still locked up on our little closed system planet, killing and subjugating one another to a greater or lesser extent in order to get a bigger piece of what is an inherently limited system. Humanity's only possible salvation at this time is the advance of human technology, which has allowed us to utilize a larger portion of the Earth's closed system (usually at the expense of the Earth's other life forms), but the Earth's system IS STILL CLOSED. The threat of nuclear war can not be eliminated by the colonization of space. The colonization of space can only reduce the likely hood of such a war's occurrence, by diverting some of mankind's competitive energy from the power struggle among men for acquiring control over larger pieces of the Earth's closed system, to a struggle to acquire useful power within the open ended system of space. This need not involve control over, or conflict with our fellow man. In space there is plenty of room; you can have as many material goods as you want without infringing on someone else's space; your environment is your own creation to do with as you wish; you can make your environment as large as you want; you can move somewhere else if you don't like your neighbors; your mistakes or someone else's mistakes don't have to affect any one else - because you don't have to be connected to their environment. Even if the colonization of space doesn't prevent the waging of nuclear war, it will greatly increase mankind's chances of surviving such a war. With colonization far enough along when a nuclear war occurred, such a war wouldn't affect the current level of human technology. A large number of space colonies would be nearly impossible to target and destroy. Every space colony will consist of many small independent micro-environments that are able to function separately. Which would make the spreading of a biological or chemical agent throughout a colony very difficult. Each colony is an island of high technology which would be able to help the victims of a nuclear war and rebuild the survivors technology base when the war was over. The space colonies would be unlikely to be directly involved in a nuclear war because the inhabitants of the space colonies will be too busy advancing themselves and making their lives better to meddle in Earth's (backward and unproductive) business.

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[___] Nanotechnology. Nanites are being developed all over the world, and will influence all parts of society when completed. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap2.html

Nanites refer to a particular type of nanotechnology. Nanites are small machines used to manipulate small amounts of matter. Nanites range in size from dust-sized down to submicroscopic. Nanites are being built right now in the USA, Japan and many other places the world over but, are not yet of sufficiently advanced design to be useful for much. Nanites will, however, become so useful they will totally change the economic systems and even the social structure of every country on Earth. Nanites will build consumer goods and control processes on a much smaller level and with much greater precision than the macro-machines we now use, as well as accomplish tasks that are now impossible. Some of the many types of nanites humans will invent and use are :

And, misuse of nanotech is inevitable – however, going to space solves all the dangers of nanotechnology. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap2.html

I believe humans are incapable of using responsibly such a powerful technology. Are we humans just going to resign ourselves to a future here on Earth in which we just hope for the best as the Earth is shaken by wave after wave of war, terror, environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, and plague as each higher level of nanotechnology is developed. My opinion is humans should leave this Earth before nanotechnology is advanced enough to wreak havoc on the Earth's ecosystem and ourselves. Man can build a large number of self contained space colonies separated by great distances. These colonies will communicate and trade with one another and with Earth, but the distances between the colonies will tend to limit each disaster caused by the development of nanotechnology to just one colony. The other colonies will then learn from that one colony's mistake. A large number of space colonies will also serve to reduce tensions among different factions of humanity because the actions and needs of one faction, need not interfere with any other colony, within limits of course. Nanotechnology can provide every colony with almost limitless material goods at very cheap prices. Earth is a closed system; Earth will never get any larger; because the Earth is of limited area each person in all fairness will have to settle for a small piece of a limited pie, and some people will always want more than their fair share.

That’s good, because otherwise we’re all going to die from…

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[___] Gray Goo. Even a single mistake with nanotechnology could cause the complete destruction of the biosphere and all life on earth. Drexler ’86 (K. Eric, Research Fellow @ Institute of Molecular Manufacturing “Engines of Creation” http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html)

Genetic evolution has limited life to a system based on DNA, RNA, and ribosomes, but memetic evolution will bring life-like machines based on nanocomputers and assemblers. I have already described how assembler-built molecular machines will differ from the ribosome-built machinery of life. Assemblers will be able to build all that ribosomes can, and more; assembler-based replicators will therefore be able to do all that life can, and more. From an evolutionary point of view, this poses an obvious threat to otters, people, cacti, and ferns - to the rich fabric of the biosphere and all that we prize. The early transistorized computers soon beat the most advanced vacuum-tube computers because they were based on superior devices. For the same reason, early assembler-based replicators could beat the most advanced modern organisms. "Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough, omnivorous "bacteria" could out-compete real bacteria: they could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop - at least if we made no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies. Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo problem." Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term "gray goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be "superior" in an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable. We have evolved to love a world rich in living things, ideas, and diversity, so there is no reason to value gray goo merely because it could spread. Indeed, if we prevent it we will thereby prove our evolutionary superiority.

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[___] Bio-weapons. Nanotechnology will allow highly advanced biological weapons that could wipe out huge parts of the earth’s population. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap2.html

Unfortunately gene sequencers will also be used to create super biological weapons. Even worse, it won't just be the militaries of the world building these super biological weapons. The technology is so versatile that terrorist groups or even individuals who understand genetics would be able to build such a weapon. Imagine a worker in a genetics lab who gets fired from his job. He steals a single undetectable nanite his last day, takes it home and resequences a common cold virus by adding some especially nasty gene sequences (from a genetic project he worked on a couple of years ago) he has stored on his home computer. He cultures the virus and releases it in the air ventilation system at his former place of employment. His former colleagues don't get sick until they go home and have already infected their families. The families don't get sick until the next day when they are at the hospital, school, work or shopping and they infect the people with whom they come in contact, and before you know it there is a world wide epidemic of a new type of "killer cold virus." Only one person knows where the virus came from. There is no cure for the new cold virus, either you survive it or you don't. The guy who designed the virus probably never meant to kill 20% of the Earth's human population (or maybe he did), but the dirty deed is done, and the world is unprepared to deal with that type of threat.

We have to go to space to avoid extinction from bio-weapons. The Scotsman October 17, 2001, DEADLY VIRUS WILL DESTROY LI FE ON EARTH Alastair Dalton HUMANS will have to move to other planets to survive a biological catastrophe that will hit the Earth within the next 1,000 years, Professor Stephen Hawking warned yesterday. The world's most famous physicist said he was more worried about a virus than nuclear weapons destroying life and said future generations would have to face living in space. Prof Hawking said he was optimistic life would continue, but warned the danger of extinction remained because of man's aggressive nature. Other leading scientists agreed that humans would have to take action to avoid being wiped out like previous dominant Earth species, such as the dinosaurs, but said there was no need for any immediate panic. Prof Hawking, who is due to discuss his new book, The Universe in a Nutshell, at a press conference in Germany today, said the terrorist attacks on the United States last month were less of a threat than biological weapons. He said: "Although 11 September was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do. But in the long term, I am more worried about biology. "Nuclear weapons need large facilities but genetic engineering can be done in a small lab. You can't regulate every lab in the world. "The danger is that, either by accident or design, we create a virus that destroys us." He added: "I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet." Prof Hawking, the chair of mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University since 1979, said: "I think humans will have to learn to live in space," but added that all hope was not yet lost.

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[___] Economy. First, Coming global economic shifts will cause complete economic collapse in all developed nations. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap1.html

In the next couple of decades what are now third world nations will become fully industrialized nations with booming economies. The economies of what are now industrialized nations may not be doing so well because their sources of cheap raw materials, cheap labor, cheap consumer goods and out of country investors (who are a major source of capital financing the national debts of the industrialized nations) will be cut off, as former third word nations consume their labor, industrial output, and capital internally. What are now the wealthiest countries of the world could very well become for a while the poorest countries on Earth. When the economies of what are now the wealthy nations of the world collapse, not many will come to their rescue. The third world nations will be more than happy to pay the USA and the other wealthy nations back for interfering in their internal affaires and slighting them in the past . The wealth of the industrialized nations is becoming more and more concentrated into the hands and control of a smaller and smaller percentage of the total population. These wealthy individuals and corporations will not wait around and allow their wealth to be seized or taxed out of existence when the economies of their home nations go sour. They will abandon their home nations for the greener economic pastures of what are now third world nations and when they leave they will take most of the disposable wealth of their home nations with them. This capital flight will turn deep recessions within what are now wealthy nations into economic collapses.

And, economic collapse causes world war three. Walter Russell Mead August 30, 1998 (Senior Fellow, Council of Foreign Relations) Houston Chronicle. Forget suicide car bombers and Afghan fanatics. It’s the financial markets, not the terrorist training camps, that pose the biggest immediate threat to world peace. How can this be? This about the mother of all global meltdowns: the Great Depression that started in 1929. U.S. stocks began to collapse in October, staged a rally, then the market headed south big time. At the bottom, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had lost 90 percent of its value. Wages plummeted, thousands of banks and brokerages went bankrupt, millions of people lost their jobs. There were similar horror stories worldwide. But the biggest impact of the Depression on the United States – and on world history – wasn’t money. It was blood: World War II, to be exact. The Depression brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, undermined the ability of moderates to oppose Josef Stalin’s power in Russia, and convinced the Japanese military that the country had no choice but to build an Asian empire, even if that meant war with the United States and Britain. That’s the thing about depressions. They aren’t just bad for your 401(k). Let the world economy crash far enough, and the rules change. We stop playing The Price is Right and start up a new round of Saving Private Ryan.

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However, development of space exploration solves economy and global leadership. Aerospace America June, 1998 Space Commercialization: Pushing Ahead in Congress The worldwide commercial space sector has been growing by at least 20 percent annually for the past several years, making it one of the largest industries in the world. The entire space industry recorded revenues of nearly $ 77 billion in 1996 and employed an estimated 835,900 people. Clearly, U.S. leadership and increased growth in the booming global market depends on a commitment to enhance the competitiveness of our industry. The federal government should step up efforts to promote competition and remove obstacles to industry growth and leadership in launch vehicles and space applications such as satellite communications, navigation, and Earth observations as well as in space-related services, information, and other products. For forty years, a strong U.S. civil space program has been a key element in economic competitiveness, international prestige, national security, and humanitarian and disaster relief efforts. However, new elements have been introduced in national civil space policy, including tighter constraints on federal budgets and an increasing demand for some form of economic return on federal investments. In short, a cooperative relationship between the government and industry should be the cornerstone of any policy. The government invests in science and technology in support of the "public good." On the other hand, industry's main role is to develop and exploit the opportunities for opening new markets generated by the growth of space activities. When presented with an opportunity to earn a reasonable return on investment at a reasonable level of risk, industry will provide the capital, manpower, and business, technical, and marketing expertise needed to establish and maintain commercial operations.

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Advantage [___]: Hydrogen Power. Market forces aren’t doing hydrogen fuel. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall April 2003 How Hydrogen Can Save America http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/hydrogen_pr.html Many observers view as inevitable the transition from an economy powered by fossil fuels to one based on hydrogen. But that view presupposes market forces that are only beginning to stir. Today, power from a fuel cell car engine costs 100 times more than power from its internal combustion counterpart; it'll take a lot of R&D to reduce that ratio. More daunting, the notion of fuel cell cars raises a chicken -and-egg question: How will a nationwide fueling infrastructure materialize to serve a fleet of vehicles that doesn't yet exist and will take decades to reach critical mass? Even hydrogen's boosters look forward to widespread adoption no sooner than 30 to 50 years from now. That's three to five times too long.

However, OTEC makes hydrogen fuel cheaper to produce. Penner 2002 (S.S., Center for Energy Research August 27, “Steps Toward the Hydrogen Economy”, http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/487.html) Another solar processing procedure depends on OTEC and involves the use of this large resource from the tropical oceans. An excellent summary of OTEC has recently been published by W.H. Avery (7) and contains an optimistic conclusion concerning sea -based production of methanol from coal on an OTEC platform or production of ammonia from water electrolysis followed by hydrogen reaction with atmospheric nitrogen. Because of high hydrogen transmission costs for substantial distances, the use of condensable fluids is preferred over seabased production of gaseous compressed hydrogen. Since the ultimate purpose of the hydrogen economy is the production of non-polluting fuels without carbon dioxide addition to the atmosphere, the ammonia cycle is preferred. According to Avery (7), cost reductions for ammonia below gasoline and diesel-fuel costs may be achieved with specified OTEC systems after a learning period. The direct use of ammonia in the transportation sector will probably be judged to be too hazardous and land-based reprocessing of ammonia to hydrogen, followed by direct use of this fuel in fuel-cell systems, is likely to be the preferred approach. It should be noted that OTEC development enjoyed support from the US Department of Energy and from the French and Japanese governments to the extent of about $250 million until about 1995, when the development status was judged to be ready for entry by for-profit concerns. Although this last step has not yet materialized, it is likely to occur with significant escalation of fossil-fuel prices or with the passage of laws internalizing (i.e. charging consumers) the projected environmental costs of continued fossil-fuel use. In summary, it is likely that OTEC production of hydrogen containing fuels will serve as one of several preferred approaches to commercial realization of the hydrogen economy using only renewable energy sources.

The advantages that come from that are… [see Hydrogen Fuel impacts section]

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No OTEC Now Current are preventing private development of OTEC. Johnson, F.A., Ocean Thermal Enterprises, Inc. March, 2003. "Low Cost Power and Water."

“Current U.S. law prevents anyone from making OTEC facilities who is not a licensed operator for the U.S. government. This preventative measure though it was originally put in place to prevent commercial use while the government was testing the technology is long overdue to be open to commercial industries….. The United States has been testing modern day OTEC technology for over 30 years, and all reports have confirmed that there are no negative effects due to use of the technology. OTEC is possibly the only source of nonrenewable energy that would be of an economical advantage to these businesses and they are not being allowed to access it.”

Current OTEC systems are small, experimental, and expensive. Practical Ocean Management Systems December 2002 OCEAN THERMOCLINE TECHNICAL FAQ- OTEC http://www.poemsinc.org/FAQOTEC.html The new designs for OTEC are still mostly experimental. Only small-scale versions have been made. The largest so far is near Japan, and it can create 100 kilowatts of electricity. Another small-scale OTEC is off the coast of Hawaii, producing 50 kilowatts of electricity. If a successful OTEC is built, it is planned to produce 2 megawatts of electricity. However, a full scale OTEC would cost many millions of dollars, and it would be very difficult to build.

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Overfishing Now Overfishing is occurring at over one-third of all fishing locations, which causes massive damage to marine ecosystems. Dayton, Thrush and Coleman in 2002 Paul K. Dayton (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) Simon Thrush (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and Felicia C. Coleman (Florida State University) October 28 2002 “The Ecological Effects of Fishing” for the Pew Ocean Commission) Are the oceans in crisis because of fishing? Perhaps they are not. Data from the last decade of United Nations’ reports suggests that global fishing yields have kept pace with increasing fishing effort. However, this simple correlation tells little of the story. Indeed, the reality of declining yields has been obscured by chronic misreporting of catches, by technological advances in gear that increase the capacity to locate and capture fish, and by shifts among industrial fishing fleets toward lower trophic-level species as the top-level predators disappear from marine ecosystems. Do these global realities transfer to the United States? Yes. They may not transfer at the same scale, but with the addition of recreational impacts of fishing, the elements are consistent. In the 2001 report to Congress on the status of U.S. stocks, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) found that approximately one-third of the stocks for which the status was known were either overfished or experiencing overfishing. Though increasing application of conservative single-species management techniques has begun to improve conservation in recent years, it remains that current levels of fishing result in significant ecological and economic consequences. The combined effects of overfishing, bycatch, habitat degradation, and fishing- induced food web changes alter the composition of ecological communities and the structure, function, productivity, and resilience of marine ecosystems. A discussion of these ecological consequences serves as the basis for this report.

We don’t even know all the places where overfishing is occurring now – all estimates are low. Dayton, Thrush and Coleman in 2002 Paul K. Dayton (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) Simon Thrush (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and Felicia C. Coleman (Florida State University) October 28 2002 “The Ecological Effects of Fishing” for the Pew Ocean Commission) The fact that relatively few (28 percent) of the minor stocks that have been assessed are considered overfished should not lull us into a state of complacency. The truth is that we know pitiably little about the status of nearly 81 per-cent of these minor stocks, even though they are fished or perhaps overfished, and we still cannot determine the status of 40.7 percent of the major stocks that produce the vast majority of annual landings (Figure Three).

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Overfishing Now Roughly 75% of fisheries are overfishing now, which is destroying many species of fish. Angela Somma January 2003 (Natural Resource Specialist, Office of Sustainable Fisheries, National Marine Fisheries Service)ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES Volume 8, Number 1 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, world marine and inland capture fisheries production increased steadily, on average by as much as 6 percent per year. In the 1980s, the rate of growth slowed considerably, and in the 1990s harvests leveled off. Around 1990, global fish production plateaued at about 100 million tons annually and hasn't moved much in the succeeding years. While aquaculture output continued to grow, yields from fisheries harvesting wild stocks from the oceans and inland waters were uneven and began to stagnate. A consensus emerged that the stagnation was the result of widespread overfishing. This paper examines the environmental and economic costs of that overfishing. Over the past decade, it became increasingly clear that fisheries resources that were once thought of as nearly inexhaustible had been severely overfished as one fishery after another experienced serious decline. The once-abundant fisheries of bottom-dwelling fish such as cod in New England and eastern Canada were decimated, giant tuna species in the Atlantic were depressed to levels that jeopardized rebuilding, and several species of Pacific and Atlantic salmon were placed on the U.S. endangered species list. And the problem persists. In October 2002, an international scientific advisory commission recommended that all fisheries targeting cod in the North Sea, Irish Sea and waters west of Scotland be closed. Overfishing has obvious detrimental effects on the stocks being overharvested, but it can also harm the ecosystem in which those stocks live and cause economic hardship to fishermen and their communities. The problem of overfishing is widespread throughout both the developed and developing worlds. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that of the major marine fish stocks or groups of stocks for which information is available, 47-50 percent are fully exploited, 15-18 percent are over-exploited, and 9-10 percent have been depleted or are recovering from depletion. Thus, close to 75 percent of the world's major fisheries are fully exploited, or w orse.(1)

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Overfishing Now The United States is destroying its diverse oceans through overfishing. Kate Wing April 2001 (NRDC policy analyst who works to protect marine species and habitat) National Resources Defense Council“ Keeping Oceans Wild”

We live in an ocean country. The United States controls the waters stretching out to 200 nautical miles from the shore, an area of sea as large as the total land in all fifty states. Inside the waters of this ocean country live some of the most extraordinary communities of plants and animals on earth. Because the United States stretches across latitudes from the arctic to the tropics, our oceans contain a greater amount of diversity than almost any other nation. Millions of Americans head to the sea each year to experience this marine biodiversity: in Alaskan bays filled with sea lions and salmon; along sandy beaches in the Gulf of Mexico; on delicate coral reefs around the Hawaiian Islands; and in the rocky tidepools of New England and Washington. There is tremendous wealth in our sea, and we draw on its resources every day. How can we make sure that these rich ocean ecosystems survive for future generations? All too often the only news about the ocean is bad news. Fisheries are crashing as more boats chase increasingly fewer fish. Oil spills and sewage pollute the beaches. Heavy trawl fishing gear scrapes the ocean floor bare, disturbing underwater wildlife. Corals are shattered by boat anchors or die from disease and pollution. Last year, scientists working with the American Fisheries Society identified 82 marine fishes at risk of becoming extinct in the near future.1 Years of treating the ocean as the last frontier—inexhaustible and open 24 hours a day—have taken their toll. We rely on poor and incomplete information about the ocean’s condition and we have erred on the side of taking more, not less. When the National Marine Fisheries Service published its most recent report on the status of fish populations, the most shocking figure was not the 106 populations considered to be overfished. It was the fact that over two-thirds of species that are actively fished are considered “unknown,” meaning that the service has no idea of the condition of those stocks.2 With such a poor understanding of the ocean, marine plants and animals can disappear completely unnoticed.3

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A2: Solving Overfishing Now Current fishery management programs are failing horribly. Kate Wing April 2001 (NRDC policy analyst who works to protect marine species and habitat) National Resources Defense Council “Keeping Oceans Wild”

Even when fishing is drastically reduced or stopped altogether, it may take fifty to one hundred years for a population of fish to recover to even half of its initial size. Mandatory plans to rebuild fish populations are a new part of U.S. law , but so far very few programs have been successful.16 Fishing boats now have the skill and technology to catch in a few seasons what can take decades to replace. Fishing down the food chain is unsustainable, not only for fishermen but also for the ocean wildlife like seals and otters which subsist on fish. Combine heavy fishing pressure with other human activities, like pollution and dredging, and larger environmental changes, like shifting ocean temperature regimes, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Current management techniques are outdated and cannot keep up with technology that is destroying ocean resources. Robert S. Pomeroy 2001 (Senior Associate for the Coastal and Marine Projects, Biological Resources Program at the World Resources Institute) “DEVOLUTION AND FISHERIES CO-MANAGEMENT” It has been predicted that natural stocks will likely be below current levels in the year 2020 or at best maintain their present levels. To prevent further depletion of fisheries resources, improved management is needed. Many current management arrangements have failed to coordinate and restrain the many users of fisheries resources. They have not kept pace with the technological ability to exploit the resource or with the driving incentives to exploit—economic returns, population growth, food, and employment. Management systems have focused on fisheries development and resource management, but have failed to address the issues of economic efficiency, equity and user conflict (Williams 1996). Increasing competition for and conflict over scarce resources will further stress fisheries management systems.

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Overfishing Destroys Biodiversity Our past mistakes are catching up with us now – if we don’t act soon, entire marine ecosystems will start to collapse. Jeremy Jackson July 27 2001 (lots of other people involved, selected to receive the Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Excellence Award from U. San Diego, Professor of Oceanography) “Historical Overfishing and the Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems” Such ghosts represent a far more profound problem for ecological understanding and management than currently realized. Evidence from retrospective records strongly suggests that major structural and functional changes due to overfishing (12) occurred worldwide in coastal marine ecosystems over many centuries. Severe overfishing drives species to ecological extinction because overfished populations no longer interact significantly with other species in the community (5). Overfishing and ecological extinction predate and precondition modern ecological investigations and the collapse of marine ecosystems in recent times, raising the possibility that many more marine ecosystems may be vulnerable to collapse in the near future.

Overfishing hurts marine ecosystems. Tundi Agardy 2000 (PhD, founder and executive director of Sound Seas, a NPO) INFORMATION NEEDS FOR MARINE PROTECTED AREAS: SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIETAL Fishing pressure undoubtedly affects the population dynamics of the target stock as well as those species that interact with the target stock directly (Borisov, 1979; Goeden, 1982; Caddy and Sharp, 1986; Holt, 1990; Fogarty et al., 1991). Exploitation can quickly become overexploitation, particularly with sessile organisms or those species that are naturally rare, have low reproductive rates, or are slow -growing (Jamieson, 1993; Pauly, 1995; Tegner et al., 1996). It is also clear, however, that fisheries exploitation affects food webs and entire ecosystems (Goeden, 1982; Dayton et al., 1995), especially as large-scale commercial exploitation has changed the inefficient hunting mode of the last century to the extremely efficient mining mode of today, made possible by modern technological advances in boats, fishing gear, navigation, and fish-finding instruments (Jennings and Kaiser, 1998). Even quite small-scale fisheries can cause dramatic changes to community ecology and ecosystem productivity when destructive methods of fishing are employed (Saila et al., 1993; R. Steneck, unpubl. data). These impacts and those brought about by large-scale, long-term fisheries exploitation are often large in scale themselves— and sometimes result in what appear to be permanent changes to the ecosystem (Russ and Alcala, 1989; Dayton et al., 1995; Roberts, 1995b; Auster, 1998; Jennings and Kaiser, 1998). The ecological and economic cost of such changes, however, is only now being calculated, and even where such costs have been found to be high, scaling back commercial fisheries exploitation has proven difficult. The open-access nature of marine fisheries has resulted in two problems that are difficult to solve: (1) the attitude of fishing interests who consider marine resources common property and their access to such property an inalienable right and (2) the overcapitalization of fisheries, which makes it nearly impossible for those with investments in fisheries to reduce effort. Given that open access is the root cause for much of the difficulty (Beddington, 1995), area closures seem a logical solution (Polacheck, 1990; Roberts and Polunin, 1991; Bohnsack, 1992; Agardy, 1994b; Ballantine, 1994; Dayton et al., 1995).

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Biodiversity Impact each species we destroy could be the one that causes an ecological collapse and human extinction. David Diner 1994 (JD Ohio State, Military Law Review, Winter, l/n)

4. Biological Diversity. -- The main premise of species preservation is better than simplicity. 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. 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 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 is cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." 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 human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by one, the rivets from an aircraft's wing, mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.

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Overfishing Causes Fishing Collapse Overfishing will lead to a complete collapse of the marine ecosphere and the loss of all commercial fisheries. ECES News 2002 Earth Crash Earth Spirit 02/16/2002 “Scientists issue urgent warning that the current rate of overfishing in the North Atlantic will result in an ocean-wide collapse within 10 years, leaving nothing but jellyfish and plankton.” The entire North Atlantic is being so severely overfished that it may completely collapse by 2010, according to scientists who have just completed the first comprehensive assessment of fish stocks in the North Atlantic Ocean. If current overfishing continues in the North Atlantic, trawlers could soon be left chasing jellyfish and even plankton to make "fake" fish products. "We'll all be eating jellyfish sandwiches," says Reg Watson, a fisheries scientist at the University of British Columbia who participated in the study. While the disastrous fishery collapses in areas like New England and Newfoundland have appeared to be local in scale, the new ocean wide synthesis reveals that the collapse applies to the entire North Atlantic Ocean. The study shows that across the region as a whole, the North Atlantic now has only about one-sixth the number of high-quality "table fish" like cod and tuna that it had in 1900 and is being fished eight times as intensively, scientists say. Fishermen are also chasing species ever lower on the food chain as bigger fish are depleted. "We have looked at the entire North Atlantic - Canada, USA, Europe - and what we have found is that the situation in the region is far worse than people had anticipated," said project leader Dr. Daniel Pauly, from the University of British Columbia. "With few exceptions, we are going to lose most fisheries in the next decade if we don't quickly mend our ways," said Pauly. "It may sound like a doomsday scenario, but the decline is actually accelerating. Even where stocks are doing better, they are still hovering at the bottom of a pit."

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Fishing Collapse Impact People in poorer countries will be hurt the most by a collapse of fishing stocks one billion people will be left without food or livelihood. Robert S. Pomeroy 2001 (Senior Associate for the Coastal and Marine Projects, Biological Resources Program at the World Resources Institute) “DEVOLUTION AND FISHERIES CO-MANAGEMENT” Despite intense fishing pressure and a decline in productivity, small-scale fisheries in the inland, estuarine and near-shore areas still play an important role in local food security in developing countries. They provide food, income and employment. In most societies, small-scale fishers are particularly hit by the problem of shrinking resource base as they have low social status, low incomes, poor living conditions and little political influence. They frequently compete for resource access with larger-scale fishers and other sectors of the economy. It is important to remember that small-scale fisheries are embedded in larger aquatic resource, social, economic and political systems and many of the solutions to improving standard of living lie outside the fisheries sector. The resources on which these people depend are still largely natural fish populations. It is estimated that at least 50 million people in developing countries are directly involved in the harvesting, processing and marketing of fish and other aquatic products and worldwide fish production provides some 150 million people with employment. Approximately 1 billion people rely on fish as a major source of their food, income and/or livelihood (ICLARM 1999). The combined effects of increasing population growth and stabilization of fish supplies has led to a decline in the per capita availability of fish supplies for human consumption, while prices have continued to rise due to a widening gap between supply and demand. Capture fish production has not been able to keep pace with the demand for fish. Production of fish by capture fisheries reached its upper limits in 1989 and began a decline thereafter.

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Overfishing Hurts Economy Overfishing hurts the economy – better managed fishing helps everybody. Angela Somma January 2003 (Natural Resource Specialist, Office of Sustainable Fisheries, National Marine Fisheries Service) ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES Volume 8, Number 1 In addition to the numerous environmental costs, overfishing has significant economic costs as well. If fishery resources were sustainably managed, total harvests could rise an additional 10 million metric tons, adding $16 billion to worldwide gross revenues annually.(3) In the United States, rebuilding currently overfished stocks and preventing overfishing in other fisheries could generate an additional $2.9 billion in revenue each year.(4) Current revenues are $3.0-3.5 billion. Thus, sustainably managing marine fisheries in the United States' 200-mile exclusive economic zone (the source of most of the U.S. catch) could nearly double revenues in this sector of the economy. Ineffective management and overfishing have caused the fishing industry to underperform. In 1992, FAO estimated that worldwide revenue at first-hand sales was approximately $70 billion while the total operating cost for the world's fishing fleet was $85 billion. Thus, the fleet was operating at an annual deficit of $15 billion.(5) The operating deficit can be traced to marked growth in the world's fleet between 1979 and 1989 -- estimated by FAO to have increased by 322 percent without a concomitant increase in the resource.(6) In fact, during this period world fisheries harvests grew at only about half the rate as the fleets, causing overcapacity in the world's fishing fleet. Overcapacity in fisheries in which anyone can participate often leads to "derby" fishing in which all the fishers attempt to catch as much as they can as quickly as they can before the quota is reached. This often creates a temporary market glut and lowers prices for fishers while creating longer-term supply problems for buyers. It also leads to overcapacity in the processing sector and reduces economic benefits to consumers. <> Clearly, overfishing has substantial economic as well as environmental costs. Stopping overfishing and allowing the stocks to rebuild would increase the productivity of the stocks and maximize revenues to the industry in the long run. Such action is necessary to stabilize both the resource and the industry.

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Overfishing Hurts Economy Our economy depends on the health of the oceans – preventing overfishing helps our economy. Scott Burns January 2003 (World Wildlife Fund) ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES Volume 8, Number 1 America's Stake in the Conservation of Fisheries and the Global Oceans

The fate of the earth's oceans is inextricably tied to U.S. economic and national security interests. The oceans provide a source of employment and income for millions worldwide. When sustainable management of marine resources is ignored, the long-term interests of coastal communities suffer and the economic engine upon which so many people depend is undermined. In major fisheries around the world, critically important resources are being depleted, and coastal economies threatened. Managing marine resources sustainably, however, will maximize economic return, strengthening local communities and our national economy.

Destructive fishing practices hurt jobs and the economy. Wilder 1999 Robert J. Wilder, PHD, (Director of Conservation Programs, Pacific Whale Foundation) Mia J. Tegner, Paul K. Dayton Spring 1999 Saving Marine Biodiversity Issues in Science and Technology

The escalating loss of marine life is bad enough as an ecological problem. But it constitutes an economic crisis as well. Marine biodiversity is crucial to sustaining commercial fisheries, and in recent years several major U.S. fisheries have "collapsed"- experienced a population decline so sharp that fishing is no longer commercially viable. One study indicates that 300,000 jobs and $8 billion in annual revenues have been lost because of overly aggressive fishing practices alone. Agricultural and urban runoff, oil spills, dredging, trawling, and coastal development have caused further losses.

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No Laws Prevent Engineering The government isn’t acting to prevent genetic engineering of animals. Andrew B. Perzigian 2003 “Genetic Engineering and Animals: A Short Summary of the Legal Terrain and Ethical Implications” Animal Legal and Historical Center Michigan State University--Detroit College of Law http://www.animallaw.info/articles/ovusgeneticengineering.htm Currently, there are few laws, in either the United States or the European Union (EU) regulating animal cloning and the creation of transgenic animals. In the United States, most research and farm animals are excluded from federal protection. While the European Union (EU) ensures that such animals are treated more humanely than is the case in the United States, both the U.S. and the EU extend patent protection to the owners and creators of transgenic animal species. This provides a huge incentive for the biotechnology industry to continually research and develop novel transgenic animal creations. With patents, researchers can now own and monopolize entire animal species, something unheard of prior to modern genetic engineering. The Supreme Court has upheld transgenic animal patents without any review of the potential ethical and environmental risks associated with the technology involved. (For more on this important decision, click here

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Engineering Increases Hunger Genetic engineering causes more food insecurity in poor countries. Sierra Club March 2001 “Genetic Engineering at a Historic Crossroads” Genetic Engineering Committee Report

In fact there is more than enough food produced by conventional agriculture, without genetic engineering, to feed all of the world's people. One cause of hunger is the ineffective distribution of food. Genetic engineering may actually lead to more food insecurity and hunger because in poor countries it will lead to the planting of monoculture crops, highly vulnerable to disease and pests, in the place of resilient, diverse range of crops, and it will make farmers dependent on corporations that will demand payment for basic inputs such as seed, chemicals, and fertilizers. Terms of trade between developed and less developed nations have often resulted in the best land in the poor countries being used to grow cash crops for export rather than food for consumption at home. Issues of equity and fairness have not been addressed by trade agreements. Certainly these problems call out for redress, but their solution isn't to increase the monopoly power of "life science" companies in the richest nations.

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Genetic Modification Decision Rule Use the precautionary principle to evaluate the harms of genetic engineering – because the damage that could be done is irreversible, if there’s any risk of the impact at all we win. Sierra Club March 2001 “Genetic Engineering at a Historic Crossroads” Genetic Engineering Committee Report The Genetic Engineering Committee strongly supports application of the precautionary principle to biotechnology issues and recognizes the limits inherent in present systems of risk assessment. Here is cogent statement of the precautionary principle from the Wingspread Consensus Statement on the Precautionary Principle, Jan, 1998: "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically." The participants at the conference said the following about risk assessment: "We believe existing environmental regulations and other decisions, particularly those based on risk assessment, have failed to protect adequately human health and the environment, the larger system of which humans are but a part." Carolyn Raffensperger offered further commentary on risk assessment: "Participants [at the Wingspread conference] noted that current policies such as risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis give the benefit of the doubt to new products and technologies, which may later prove harmful. And when damage occurs, victims and their advocates have the difficult task of proving that a product or activity was responsible." (email by Ms. Raffensperger, 1/28/98) The precautionary principle is of the greatest importance when the damage from a new technology would be irreversible. This is the case with genetic engineering. Once they are released into the environment, genetically engineered organisms cannot be recalled. The Genetic Engineering Committee believes that genetically engineered farm crops are wrongly given the benefit of the doubt in the regulatory process, and that, under the precautionary principle, they should not be released into the environment or allowed to be part of the food supply.

We shouldn’t meddle with genetics because we can never understand all the outcomes – any risk at all of our impact is enough to vote for us. COMTEX Newswire May 25, 2000 “Playing genetic roulette” Nathan Brouwer http://www.spu.edu/falcon

The Falcon, Seattle Pacific U. and U-WIRE Man, in his giddiness over his unlocking of the DNA code, now has the audacity to think he can control and predict all the consequences of his tinkering. Whether you accept an evolutionary or creationist model of Earth, both systems are intricately designed and balanced either by billions of years of evolution or by an all-knowing creator. It seems to be both an arrogant and potentially dangerous attitude to think that humans can get away with permanently changing parts of the natural world. Earlier this century another agricultural advancement promised to revolutionize farming: pesticides. Chemicals such as DDT were thought to be bringing about a new golden era of farming. It was only later discovered that they were causing severe ecological strife, even bringing some species toward extinction. Agricultural genetic engineering has many things to offer, but it may also be a Pandora's box of trouble like DDT. Caution, not scientific exuberance or economic greed, should temper our decisions about how to apply this powerful new technology.

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Genetics Discursive Solvency Public education like that we give by debating about genetic engineering is key to counteract lies in the media. Sierra Club March 2001 “Genetic Engineering at a Historic Crossroads” Genetic Engineering Committee Report Genetic Engineering Committee members have found that the need for public education is great. Because of inadequate reporting by the U.S. media, many otherwise well educated people simply have not been told what genetic engineering is. We hear statements like, "If there is a moratorium on planting genetically engineered crops, doesn't that mean that no crops at all will be planted?" And, "Aren't all farm crops these days genetically engineered?" The supporters of genetic engineering gladly fill this information vacuum with false statements. They claim that the selective breeding of plants and animals that has been done for centuries is genetic engineering. Supporters claim that modern genetic engineering is nothing more than an improved, more precise, high-tech form of conventional plant and animal breeding. Michael Khoo, in a letter published last year in the Toronto Globe and Mail, called this claim ". . . biotechnology's public-relations line that genetic engineering is no different from traditional breeding." His letter continued, "A potato can cross with a different strain of potato but, in 10 million years of evolution, it has never crossed with a chicken. Genetic engineering shatters these natural species boundaries, with completely unpredictable results. As a result of these risks, the British Medical Association has recently called for an open-ended moratorium on GE planting."

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A2: Fish Farming Solves Genetically modified fish farms do even more damage to the ocean and destroy biodiversity. Greenpeace International, Online “Aquaculture Threat to Food Security” accessed April 8, 2003 Farming the sea is being increasingly held up as the future of sustainable development and management of the oceans -- humans controlling, shaping and limiting nature and its processes. For many people, whether fishers or environmentalists, this would be a tragic outcome. Even more tragic for what we call natural "biodiversity". The sea remains one of the last great wilderness sanctuaries on the planet. There are many, though, multinational corporate seafood conglomerates among them, who consider that the loss of wilderness is the price that must be paid to ensure their continued profitability. It should not be assumed, however, that progress towards farming the oceans would necessarily bring with it sound husbandry. So far, in the terrestrial as well as in the marine context, it has consisted of ruthless clearance of land and sea. Enthusiasts of farming the seas should reflect that upon land, what has often grown back after repeated attacks upon wilderness has not been rich diverse forest, nor even a sustainable monoculture, but degraded woodland, scrub, poor grazing land and ultimately desert. Are we heading down the same path with the oceans?

Fish in fish farms are fed with other fish, which leads to an overall decrease in the number of fish available and continued ecological destruction. Bill Ballantine November 1999. (marine biologist and grassroots activist) MARINE RESERVES IN NEW ZEALAND:THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT AND THE PRINCIPLES Marine aquaculture can be ecologically sensible, as well as commercially profitable, when the arrangement is simply to put organisms in situations where they can feed themselves efficiently (such as mussel farming. However, a great deal of aquaculture makes no ecological sense at all, since it involves the destruction of food. When caged salmon are fed with pellets made from fish meal obtained by industrial fishing elsewhere, it may be profitable, if the fish pellets are cheap enough and the salmon expensive, but it means less fish. Where large scale habitat destruction is involved (most shrimp farms are created out of mangrove areas) the resulting total loss of edible biomass is even worse. While marine aquaculture may be economic, it is not a better alternative to fishing for the production of food.

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Fossil Fuels Running Out Fossil fuels are being used up at an amazing rate – in 50 years they’ll run out and society will collapse. Joseph George Caldwell November 21 2000 (supervised economic development projects in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Africa, PhD degree in mathematical statistics) "Can America Survive?" The tremendous global population increase has been brought about by the development of technology to utilize the energy stored in fossil fuels, such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Petroleum and gas reserves will be exhausted, however, by about 2050, and coal reserves will not last much beyond that date if industrial development continues to expand worldwide. Look around you. If you live in the US or other economically developed country, every manmade thing you see or see happening is a product of the expenditure of energy, and most of that energy is derived from fossil fuels. To establish and maintain our present lifestyle requires prodigious amounts of energy – an amount equivalent to about 8,000 kilograms of oil annually for each man, woman, and child living in the country. Pre-agricultural man lived “off the land,” consuming only the bounty of nature. Agricultural man could produce about 10 calories of energy with the expenditure of about one calorie of energy. Industrial man, it has been estimated, uses over ten calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food! The present system is not only exquisitely wasteful, but it is completely unsustainable. Most of what you see in the industrial world is a transitory illusion made possible by a one-time windfall supply of energy from fossil fuels that were accumulated over millions of years. When the fossil fuel reserves deplete in about 50 years, the modern world will simply disappear along with them.

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Fossil Fuels Running Out Fossil fuels are being depleted at an amazing rate, and using them all will cause devastating global warming. Joseph George Caldwell November 21 2000 (supervised economic development projects in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Africa, PhD degree in mathematical statistics) "Can America Survive?" These tables show that even at current rates of production, it is projected that oil and gas reserves will be exhausted in the next 50 years, and coal reserves within about 200 years. People argue about just exactly what the true size of the reserves is, but the point is that before very long industrialized man will have exhausted the fossil fuels. These projections are somewhat conjectural, since the burning of all of the oil, gas, and coal reserves, accompanied by the burning of much of the world’s forests, would add such a large amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere that some sort of major climatic change would be expected to occur before exhaustion of the reserves. The planet’s oil reserves are about half used up. The “bell-shaped” production curve of the planet’s coal and petroleum ages was made famous in 1960 by M. King Hubbert, principal fuels geologist of the US Geological Survey. (See Gerard Piel, Only One World, p. 176 for an illustration of Hubbert’s curves / Hubbert’s cycles.)

It’s inevitable that eventually we will run out of fossil fuels. Steve Helle June 13, 1999, University Unitarian Universalist Society “Living Within Limits – Part 1 Thinking Globally”

Hardin indicates that we trick our selves over and over again into thinking that resources are infinite by confusing them with "reserves". For example, in the early 1970’s we had a fuel shortage that caused the price of petroleum products to increase dramatically. The supply of most petroleum products was short and consumers had to wait in long lines at gas stations. This put a great focus on the fossil fuel supplies in the world. It was pointed out by various experts that we only had (and the number varies) from 20 to a couple of hundred of years of petroleum supplies left. Here we are 25 years later and we have more fossil fuel available to us than ever before. Why? The answer is in realizing the differences between "reserves" and "resources". "Resources" are defined as the total amount of a given useful item (in this case fossil fuel) whether we know about it or not. "Reserves" are defined as the amount of an item that has been discovered or we have reason to believe exists. In the last 25 years we have discovered a larger and larger fraction of the overall "resource" of fossil fuels, which has given us larger and larger "reserves". However, the total amount of the resource (i.e. the total amount of the fossil fuel that exists in the world) has not increased. Science tell us that fossil fuels can only increase very slowly by natural processes that covert organic life into fossil fuels, which takes millions of years. Any resource that is used faster than its regeneration rate will eventually run out. The time it runs out is very hard to predict because we never really know the total extent of "resources". All we really know is the extent of the "reserves" and this changes with new discoveries. At the rate that we are now using fossil fuel resources, we still have predictions that they will last any where from a few decades to a couple of centuries. They may last several centuries ahead or maybe a couple of millennia. However, they will eventually run out. If you think about any of these time frames with respect to the overall age of the world or even the million or so years that humans have inhabited the earth, it is only a drop in the bucket. Two millennia (which is roughly the time since Christ supposedly inhabited the world) is only 1/5 of 1% of the million or years or so that humans have inhabited the earth. That 1 million years is only 1/5,000 of the 5 billion years or so that Earth has existed. The point is, that at any positive usage rate, a given resource will be gone in the "blink of an eye".

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Fossil Fuel Exhaustion Impact Depletion of fossil fuels will cause economic collapse and resource wars. Tony Boys, March 24 2001 A "New Millennium" – Where the hell are we going: "Prosperity" or "Collapse"?presentation given at the International Green Forum in Aoyama, Tokyo What runs our current economy and society? Oil, natural gas and coal: the fossil fuels, with a little nuclear power, some hydropower, and a few other bits and pieces… 40/20/20/10/10: Oil/Coal/Natural Gas/Nuclear/hydroelectricity + renewables, etc. Oil is really important for several reasons… It's fairly clean, burns efficiently, it's a liquid, etc. How much oil are we currently using? ? World oil consumption Oct-Dec 2000 76.4 Mb/d (27.9 Gb/yr) [Up approx. 11 Mb/d since 1990] ? World oil consumption predicted by IEA (1996) for 2010 and 2020: 92-97 Mb/d (33.58 – 35.40 Gb/yr) In 1996, the IEA forecasted that, "World demand is projected to rise from 70 million barrels at present to between 92 and 97 million barrels of oil per day in 2010." Two years later (1998), the IEA reported, "Fossil fuels are expected to meet 95% of additional global energy demand from 1995 to 2020." Oh, so only 5% is supposed to be from alternative and renewable energy sources??[8] (See table) The IEA also says that demand will rise at 1.8% per year to 112 Mb/d by 2020 under a scenario with prices rising to $25/b(!). But if peak production in 2006-2007 is around 32 Gb/yr (87.7 Mb/d), where does that leave us? And look again at the 2020 column; 19.1 Mb/d in "unidentified unconventional". In other words, "non-existent" – a shortfall![9] What goes up must come down: The peak of world oil production in five or six years, market predominance of OPEC in about seven years. (See graph) Oil certainly won't be cheap then. That means the end of cheap and abundant (= easily available) oil. Oil production due to decline 3-6% per year. What does that tell you about the prognosis for economic growth? When oil becomes scarce (therefore expensive) aren't there going to be supply disruptions? (Oil shocks, resource wars – remember the Gulf War?)

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Fossil Fuels Cause Global Warming Burning fossil fuels causes global warming. DAVID J. FRIEDMAN May 7, 2003 (SENIOR ENGINEER, CLEAN VEHICLES PROGRAM, UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS, Federal Document Clearing House Congressional Testimony FUTURE OF HYDROGEN FUEL CELL) Environmental Impacts The cars and trucks we drive every day were responsible for over 20% of the global warming emissions produced by the United States during 2000: 1.5 billion tons (358 million metric tons, carbon equivalent) of the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. Most of these gases will stay in the atmosphere for more than 100 years, contributing to an increase in the earth's average surface temperature. This is projected to rise 2.5 to 10.4F (1.4 to 5.8C) between 1990 and 2100, if no major efforts are undertaken to reduce emissions of global warming gases. As the earth continues to warm, we face a great risk that the climate will change in ways that threaten our health, our economy, our farms and forests, beaches and wetlands, and other natural habitats. Cars and trucks are also major contributors to air pollution. Regulations have helped clean up passenger vehicles over the past three decades. However, rising demand for travel and increased vehicle ownership will outpace even the standards on the books through this decade. Cars and trucks will need to clean up their act even more if we are to eliminate the threat air pollution poses to public health-- especially to our children and the elderly. Finally, producing and distributing the gasoline that went to fuel our cars and trucks in the year 2000 resulted in the emission of 848,000 tons of smog-forming pollutants and 392,000 tons of benzene-equivalent toxic chemicals, in addition to the pollutants emitted from the tailpipes of vehicles. Altogether, cars and trucks are the largest single source of air pollution in most urban areas. As with US oil use and global warming emissions, upstream air pollution is expected to continue to rise significantly over the next two decades, posing the greatest health threat to children, the elderly, and other vulnerable members of our population. Gasoline and oil distribution also leads to water and ground pollution and catastrophic oil spills such as the Exxon Valdez that harm the entire ecosystem.

Fossil fuel emissions from cars alone cause global warming. Jacques Leslie October 1997 Dawn of the Hydrogen Age Wired magazine http://hotwired.wired.com/collections/space_exploration/5.10_hydrogen1.html The Harvard School of Public Health estimates that in the US alone, one kind of car emissions fine particulates - causes 50,000 to 60,000 deaths a year; several other types of vehicle emissions are also thought lethal, but no mortality estimates exist for them. In addition, automotive use of fossil fuels accounts for 20 percent of the nation's carbon-dioxide emissions, the most significant greenhouse gas. If the US vehicle fleet switches from ICEs burning fossil fuel to fuel cell engines using hydrogen derived from renewable sources - which may be possible within several decades - levels of both kinds of car emissions would drop to zero. Even if the hydrogen is produced from natural gas, as is common now, vehicular air pollution would end and greenhouse-gas emissions would drop by more than 60 percent.

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Oil Dependence Now The U.S. depends on other countries for oil, and these countries are in constant danger of collapse. San Antonio Express-News March 8, 2003, The (forgotten) energy policy by Analisa Nazareno Despite an Arab oil embargo that pounded the nation's economy into recession and efforts since then to curtail dependence on foreign oil, the United States imports even more oil today than it did 30 years ago. In the late 1970s, when oil prices spiked because of turmoil in Iran, the nation's motorists and corporations consumed 17 million barrels of oil a day, with 40 percent from foreign sources. Today, the nation consumes an additional 2 million barrels a day, and nearly 60 percent comes from foreign sources - with Middle East nations as the greatest source and volatile Venezuela as another big supplier. And with the nation at the brink of war against Iraq, economists and environmentalists alike are calling for renewed focus on the nation's energy plan. "We're not in an energy crisis now, but the stage is set for tragedy," said Joe Fulton, the director for research and environmental management for City Public Service. "The energy policy that the president introduced in 2001 was the beginning of an energy plan, but that's been put in the drawer, and it's gathering dust and it needs to be pulled out and discussed. "Venezuela is on the verge of anarchy. The Middle East is in a state of perpetual turmoil. And Nigeria has its problems. Our main sources of oil are in geopolitically unstable places in this world, and there needs to be a plan that addresses this."

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Oil Dependence Causes War Oil dependence will require more involvement in the Middle East, which increases anti-Western sentiment and makes peace impossible. Leonardo Maugeri August 2003 Group Senior Vice President for Corporate Strategies and Planning for the Italian energy company eni. “Not in Oil's Name” Foreign Affairs

Like the Greek god Proteus, the oil market is escaping control by constantly assuming different forms, which makes political manipulation of oil difficult, indeed useless. It is also dangerous because of the concentration of oil reserves in the highly sensitive Middle East. A hypothetical Western search for oil security through control of oil resources would perpetuate the Arabs' and Muslims' perception of a looming threat to their future, thereby increasing anti-Western sentiment and diverting the countries of the Middle East from confronting their own problems. Oil security and scarcity are simply divisive and confusing myths. Western governments must explain clearly to their constituencies that oil is prone to price volatility, which makes occasional high prices unavoidable. Furthermore, they must disabuse their citizens of "bonanza" oil expectations and promote more careful consumption habits and investment in new energy technology. The West must also commit to a long-term strategy of containment and rollback of any violent or terrorist mutations of Islamic doctrine, without confusing them with Islam. It must also assist Middle Eastern civil societies in their search for a different future, without seeming to pose a choice between two extremes: a Western social model that is not part of their culture and an authoritarian model that does not accommodate freedom and individual rights. This dialogue needs to be reinforced by Western aid to develop economic activities other than oil. Throughout the 1990s, this task was relegated to private companies or international institutions, which were constrained by restrictive financial and social criteria that only increased Middle Eastern discomfort with the West. Of course, there is no easy or immediate solution to the Middle East dilemma. Throughout history, the shaping and consolidation of national identities has been a prolonged process fraught with considerable suffering. The countries of the Middle East are relatively new, forged mainly after World War I, and Western states must ready themselves for the long road ahead, on which they must avoid either underestimating the strength of Middle Eastern states or exaggerating the threats that they pose. Western governments must also overcome their misguided obsession with oil security so that they can begin to cope more impartially with the Middle East's problems. Ultimately, Western nations can prevail in helping to bring about a better future for the Middle East, but only if they debunk the oil myths and hold fast to their deepest values of freedom, selfdetermination, and tolerance, and the awareness that there is no absolute truth in human affairs. [para.]

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Oil Dependence Destroys Economy The US has a huge oil dependency – an oil shock would wreck the US and world economy. Columbus Dispatch January 9, 2003 Keeping oil flowing is a vital interest for U.S. and the world As if protecting the lifeblood of the U.S. economy is an illegitimate or shameful pursuit. It isn't. Protecting oil supplies is a matter of life and death. There is no reason to be ashamed of this or to be coy about it. If Saddam's acquisition of weapons of mass destruction increases the likelihood that he will use them to seize control of Mideast oil or cause serious oil-export disruptions as a result of regional war, then the United States has little choice but to act. Indeed, the Persian Gulf War was mainly about protecting Saudi Arabia's oil and not about freeing Kuwait from Iraq's invasion. Every American above the age of 10 understands that the U.S. economy and the American way of life depend on a steady receipt of overseas oil. The United States frequently is faulted for consuming 25 percent of the world's oil production. But that criticism ignores the fact that the United States generates 30 percent of the world total of goods and services. The U.S. economy, including its banking and investment systems and its rock-steady currency, is a gigantic engine that keeps the entire world turning. If the lights ever go out in the United States, the entire world will be plunged into darkness. Like it or not, oil dependence is a fact of American life and for the next few decades nothing -not conservation, not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, not developing alternative energy sources -- is going to change that.

Europe depends on the Middle East for oil even more than the US. Malaysian Business April 1, 2003 A strike for oil By Bishen Bedi The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Europe depends more heavily on Persian Gulf and North African oil than the US. In 2001, roughly 35 per cent of OECD oil imports came from the Persian Gulf mainly from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait. About one-third came from Africa, mainly Libya and Algeria. The rest was sourced from Russia. Japan imports over three-quarters of its oil supplies from the Persian Gulf, mainly from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and Qatar. The scale of oil dependence of Japan and OECD Europe on Persian Gulf oil is staggering for the prospects of the world economy going forward.

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Oil Dependence Destroys Economy Having oil supplies from the Middle East cut off would wreck the US economy – all past examples prove. Coon and Phillips 2002 (Charli E, Senior Policy Analyst for Energy and the Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, James Research Fellow in Middle Eastern Affairs in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, at The Heritage Foundation. April 24, Backgrounder #1540 “Strengthening National Energy Security by Reducing Dependence on Imported Oil” http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/BG1540.cfm)

The Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) predicts that the United States will become increasingly dependent on oil imports from the volatile Middle East, with imports from this region increasing from about 24 percent of total oil imports in 2000 to about 50 percent by 2020.4 This level compares with the 15 percent and 23 percent of oil it imported from that region during the 1973-1974 and 1979-1980 Middle Eastern oil crises, respectively.5 But as evidenced by the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1979 Iranian revolution, an abrupt and prolonged loss of Middle Eastern oil wreaks havoc on the U.S. economy, increasing unemployment and boosting inflation. Oil peaked at $39 a barrel in 1981, contributing to double-digit interest rates, inflation at 9 percent, and unemployment close to 8 percent.6 Government actions made things even worse as gas rationing, price controls, and the heavy hand of regulation interfered with energy markets.7 The recessions of the 1970s, the early 1980s, and the early 1990s all were preceded by a rise in oil prices. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter called the energy crisis "a clear and present danger to our national security."8 Twenty years later, in a response to a bipartisan request from 11 U.S. Senators, the U.S. Department of Commerce conducted an investigation into the nation's increasing oil imports. That study, released in November 1999, concluded "that petroleum imports threaten to impair the national security."9 Yet the nation is even more dependent on foreign oil today than it was in the 1970s, when Congress and the White House began to discuss energy security and national security in a serious manner.

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Oil Terrorism Impacts Oil spills as a result of environmental terrorism can cause water shortages and destroy ecosystems and endangered species – the Gulf War proves. James M. Stuhltrager 2003 Staff Attorney, Mid-Atlantic Environmental Law Center at Widener University School of Law COMBATING TERRORISM IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL TRENCHES Widener Law Symposium As the events of September 2001 have demonstrated, terrorism has taken a new form. n1 Seemingly innocent, everyday items and occurrences are now potential weapons of mass destruction. Nearly every day, the press reports new threats that are emerging in our backyards. Examples include: trucks and vehicles used as conventional bombs; the destruction of nuclear power plants to serve as "dirty bombs"; and the poisoning of water supplies with cyanide. n2 I propose that oil, and the threat of oil pollution as a weapon of environmental terrorism, must be added to that list. n3 Oil, or more precisely, petroleum and its byproducts, have been used as a weapon for thousands of years. The earliest recorded use of oil as a weapon occurred more than 5,000 years ago. In 3000 B.C., the people of Mesopotamia-what is now modern-day Iraq-discovered that, when set on fire, the viscous liquid substance that percolated up through cracks in the earth was a powerful weapon. n4 "Greek Fire"-a gelatinous flammable liquid composed of [*402] the crude petroleum, its byproduct naphtha, and sulfur-was used by the Byzantine Empire to insure the Byzantine navy's control of the sea for centuries. n5 The Persian Gulf War raised the use of petroleum as a weapon to a new level. On January 22, 1991, Iraqi forces released crude oil into the Persian Gulf. n6 The United States government placed the initial estimate of the amount of oil released at six million barrels. n7 Initially, it was estimated that the resulting oil slick in the Persian Gulf was 70 miles long by 30 miles wide, and up to 15 inches deep. n8 The immediate impact of the spill was the threat to both the cooling water intakes of the numerous vessels plying the sea lanes of the Gulf and the desalination plants that provided potable water to much of the Arabian Peninsula, including the coalition forces massed against Iraq. n9 However, the oil spill also had long lasting effects on the Persian Gulf's ecosystem. The spill resulted in the reduction of the Persian Gulf's nascent commercial fishing and shellfishing industries. n10 The spill also threatened the existence of numerous rare and endangered species in the Gulf region. n11 As the events in Iraq have demonstrated, the use of oil pollution as a weapon of war is now a palpable threat. Accordingly, its use as a weapon of environmental terrorism cannot be discounted. In fact, we face the threat of oil pollution every day. Approximately 5,000 oil tankers, each with an average capacity of 70,000 cubic meters of oil, ply the oceans. n12 Although neither accidental nor intentional discharges of oil are common, when they do occur, the results are devastating. n13

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Global Warming Impacts Global warming causes flooding, famine, and species extinction. JENNIFER WOODWARD FALL, 1989 The American University TURNING DOWN THE HEAT: WHAT UNITED STATES LAWS CAN DO TO HELP EASE GLOBAL WARMING.

Although many of the effects of global warming will vary in different parts of the world, most consequences of a warmer Earth will be universal. n86 The rise in global mean temperatures could cause the world's oceans to become warmer and to expand. n87 For instance, warmer atmospheric and oceanic temperatures could cause polar sea ice and glacial packs to melt, resulting in a rise in sea levels. n88 Rising sea levels could cause low-lying land masses -- many of which are highly populated -- to disappear beneath the sea. n89 In addition, global warming could shift rainfall patterns, causing massive crop failure as valuable farmland turns to dust. n90 Thus, certain animal and plant species face potential extinction as global warming and its effects alter their habitats. n91

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Warming Causes Water Shortage Global warming causes water shortages and conflict over use. Daniel B. Botkin 1991 (Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies, University of California, UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, Global Warming: What It Is, What Is Controversial About It, and What We Might Do in Response to It ) Global warming would lead to an increase in water demand and a decrease in available water. The climate models predict rainfall less reliably than temperature. Some projections suggest rainfall will increase while others suggest rainfall will decrease. But even those projections that suggest that rainfall will increase also suggest that rising temperatures will increase water evaporation from forests, grasslands, and cropland to such an extent that the water lost from soils would exceed the amount added from additional rainfall. As a result, much of the land will become drier. The effects of a drier climate will be felt in commercial as well as agricultural and urban water use. Surface runoff would decrease, leading to a decline in stream and river flow and a decline in lake levels. This could lead to more frequent episodes of river water levels too low for transport of goods by boats as occurred recently on the Mississippi river. Conflicts over water resources for agricultural and urban use would be especially acute. [*137] Increased competition for water use could create an increased conflict between the maintenance of natural ecosystems and the needs of agriculture and urban development. For example, as sea level rises, increased fresh water flow would be required to maintain fresh and brackish water ecosystems along the coasts, but this water demand would conflict with agricultural pressures. n42 Such problems would be especially severe in California which already has serious conflicts over water supplies. Pressures to build new reservoirs would create additional conflicts between nature conservation and demands for societal uses of water.

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Warming Causes Hunger Global warming causes crop failures and famine. Daniel B. Botkin 1991 (Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies, University of California, UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, Global Warming: What It Is, What Is Controversial About It, and What We Might Do in Response to It )

The EPA forecasts dire consequences for crops if global warming occurs. For example, in California, crop yields could be reduced by 20 to 40%, depending on crop type and location. Corn production is estimated to decrease between 14 and 31%; tomatoes between 5 and 15%. n44 In the warmer parts of the southeast of the United States, agricultural yields might decline by as much as 91% and between 10 and 57% of the farmland might be taken out of production. n45 Some agricultural experts have suggested that the positive effect of carbon dioxide on plants will benefit crops, leading to an increase in production that will at least compensate for decreases due to changes in temperature. This is only likely if temperature and moisture impacts remain small while the fertilization effect is large. In addition to increased temperatures, the increases in the variability of climate could also have negative effects on agriculture. For example, corn, soybeans, wheat, and sorghum are sensitive to high temperatures, especially when flowers are formed. n46 An increase in climate variability could lead to an increasing chance of high temperatures during this part of the growing season, with a resulting decline in crop yields even if there were little overall increase in average temperatures. Increases in the chance of early and late frosts also could lead to a decrease in crop yields. n47 [*139] Global warming could also change the distribution and abundance of crop pests. These changes could increase overwintering of insect pests in some areas, leading to an increase in crop destruction by these pests. n48 At the present we live in a fortunate time where the best climates for agriculture tend to occur where the best soils occur, as in the North American midwest. With the onset of global warming, the best climates for agriculture may shift so that they occur over poorer soils. In North America, a northward movement of climate would place good agricultural climates over Canada where, due to the effects of ice age glaciers, soils are not in general as fertile as they are in the midwest of the United States.

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A2: Global Warming Doesn’t Exist The scientific consensus is that global warming a real threat. Denee A. DiLuigi Spring, 2002 (Golden Gate University School of Law, San Francisco, California Golden Gate University, KYOTO'S SO-CALLED "FATAL FLAWS": A POTENTIAL SPRINGBOARD FOR DOMESTIC GREENHOUSE GAS REGULATION The overwhelming majority of the scientific community believes that the research on global warming proves the global environment will suffer adversely in the long term. Such broad scientific and public awareness of the global warming issue is primarily a result of the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). n27 [*699] The IPCC was established in 1988 and is composed of over 2000 scientists from over 100 countries. n28 The IPCC has released a number of reports citing strong evidence that the major source of global warming over the last 50 years is anthropogenic in nature. n29 The IPCC's third report on global warming, issued early in 2001 and authored by 700 expert scientists, concluded that unless the international community limits and reduces GHG emissions, the earth's average temperature will rise anywhere from 2<degree>F to 10<degree>F over the next century. n30 Additionally, the IPCC projects that the climate changes over the next 100 years will be more significant than those of the past 100 years. n31 In an attempt to refute the IPCC's third report, President George W. Bush requested and received a second opinion from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). n32 The NAS, however, confirmed the IPCC's findings, stating: The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue . . . Despite the uncertainties, there is general agreement that the [*700] observed warming is real and particularly strong within the past twenty years. n33

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A2: Nuclear Power Solves Nuclear power generates too much waste to be viable long-term. Steve Helle June 13, 1999, University Unitarian Universalist Society “Living Within Limits – Part 1 Thinking Globally”

It is often argued that that humankind will discover alternatives for fossil fuels before they run out. And we may. For quite awhile during the mid part of this century nuclear fuels were thought to be promising. As a result, nuclear resources are now used to generate a great deal of power throughout the world. Hardin points out that the real limiting factor in utilizing nuclear power for fuel is that it generates a waste that must be safely handled and monitored for an extremely long period of time. The half life of most nuclear wastes is on the order of 100,000 years. No society has ever managed to last more than a millennia or two. No one government has been able to stay stable for more than several centuries. How can we guarantee that nuclear waste that will be dangerous for 100,000 years will be properly stored and protected? In addition, those nuclear wastes will continue to grow and grow as long as we rely on nuclear power for energy production. Accordingly, nuclear waste management is "exponential growth" problem. For these reasons, Hardin concludes that nuclear power is not feasible as a permanent alternative to fossil fuels.

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A2: Nuclear Power Solves Nuclear reactors create an even larger environmental problem, take as much energy to maintain as they take to produce, and screw over the future generations. Joseph George Caldwell November 21 2000 (supervised economic development projects in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Africa, PhD degree in mathematical statistics) "Can America Survive?" Unlike fusion, fission nuclear energy has been used commercially for decades to generate electricity. Fission nuclear energy, however, is also extremely problematic. First, it generates large amounts of radioactive waste. Fission reactors work by splitting uranium atoms into other atoms. Just as with fusion, some matter is converted to energy in this process, resulting in the production of large amounts of energy. Unfortunately, the atoms produced by the fission process are highly radioactive. No solution to the problem of disposing of the radioactive waste from nuclear fission has ever been found. There are now large amounts of radioactive waste from nuclear reactors stored in temporary storage facilities around the world. These waste products require extremely long times, e.g., tens of thousands of years, to deteriorate into harmless products. Unless a solution is found to the problem of disposing of nuclear waste, continued use of fission is causing an environmental disaster of large proportions. In fact, because the cost of eliminating the radioactive waste (or storing it for thousands of years) is not known, it is not known whether nuclear fission has an energy yield of greater than one. It may well be the case that the current generation is imposing on future generations an energy cost (for storage of radioactive waste from nuclear fission) that far exceeds the amount of energy that we are obtaining from nuclear fission. Mankind’s current generation has clearly discounted the cost to future generations to essentially zero, or it w ould not use nuclear fission until a method was found for eliminating the radioactive waste.

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A2: Nuclear Power Solves When fossil fuels run out, people will probably move to nuclear power, which results in nuclear war anyway. Joseph George Caldwell November 21 2000 (supervised economic development projects in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Africa, PhD degree in mathematical statistics) "Can America Survive?" The basic approach to the energy problem (i.e., the depletion of fossil fuels in a few decades) by the world governments is to ignore it. There is much talk of alternatives to fossil fuels and fission nuclear energy, such as solar energy and fusion energy, but it is just talk. Despite much investment and research, alternative technologies have not been developed. They are in the realm of science fiction or “new age” literature. Isaac Asimov conceived a universe parallel to our own with which energy could be exchanged. Edgar Cayce describes crystal power plants in Atlantis that collected energy from the sun and other sources. Alan F. Alford (Gods of the New Millennium, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1996) describes pyramid-energy sources in the ancient world. These alternatives are not too promising, to say the least! Clearly, mankind is facing some difficult decisions. Either reduce global population size to a level that is supportable by the annual budget of solar energy, or use nuclear fission to generate energy, thereby producing long-lasting radioactive waste and the material used to produce nuclear bombs. Since no steps are being taken by world governments to accomplish the former (i.e., a human population of size that can be supported by solar energy), it is pretty clear where we are headed: more people and more nuclear energy. Human population will continue to expand, and mankind will continue to use nuclear energy and generate nuclear waste. Industrial man will not be denied energy, or he will cease to exist. The fact that nuclear reactors generate radioactive waste and waste heat will not deter mankind in the least from using them. But the fact that the most promising type of nuclear reactor – the fast breeder reactor – generates large amounts of plutonium will have a significant impact on man’s future. The availability of large amounts of plutonium significantly increases the likelihood of nuclear war.

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A2: Fusion Power Solves Fusion power is technologically impossible, inefficient, and even worse for the environment – it can’t cover for the loss of fossil fuels. Joseph George Caldwell November 21 2000 (supervised economic development projects in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Africa, PhD degree in mathematical statistics) "Can America Survive?" There are two basic types of nuclear energy: fusion and fission. Today’s nuclear reactors are all fission reactors, i.e., they generate energy by splitting atoms. Fusion nuclear energy is generated by joining together, or fusing, hydrogen atoms into helium atoms. When this fusion takes place, some matter is converted to energy, in accordance with Einstein’s famous e=mc2 equation. Fusion energy is the type of energy produced by the sun. The sun is, in effect, simply a large helium factory. The problem with fusion is that it is extremely difficult to start and maintain a fusion reaction. Although the technical feasibility of producing a fusion reaction has been established, the goal of maintaining a fusion reaction for a long time and developing a commercial fusion reactor has remained elusive. Despite the expenditure of billions of dollars and decades of time, it is not clear that a commercial fusion reactor will ever be developed. Even if it is, fusion reactors are problematic. First, they are very inefficient. They consume a great deal of energy in order to produce just a little more than that consumed. They generate large amounts of heat, which is disposed into the aquatic environment. Finally, the fusion reaction eventually makes the entire fusion reactor radioactive, resulting in a massive and never-ending environmental problem of radioactive waste disposal. In view of the extremely serious drawbacks of nuclear fusion, and the failure to develop it despite massive investment, it would be folly to count on nuclear fusion as an alternative to fossil fuels.

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A2: Natural Gas Solves Natural gas is dangerous to transport and increases foreign dependence. U.S. News & World Report July 14, 2003 The New Gas Station By Marianne Lavelle The goldfish trick did little to persuade the people of Vallejo that it would be safe for supertankers to dock close to their shore on north San Francisco Bay. Last year, residents were shown a video of a man pouring liquefied natural gas (LNG) into a fishbowl. Since LNG evaporates instantly, the goldfish weren't harmed. But what about the people who live near a terminal where LNG is unloaded from the tankers and converted into a flammable gas every day? No matter how many safety demonstrations they staged, energy giant Shell and engineering firm Bechtel never were able to dispel community fears and abandoned their plans to import LNG there early this year. It was just one skirmish in what is shaping up to be the energy battle of the next decade, thanks to the growing U.S. appetite for natural gas. The days when North America was able to produce its ow n natural gas are ending. Without a new supply from overseas, many experts believe the economy will suffer debilitating price spikes for this crucial fuel. "There is no way we can be selfsufficient," Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told a congressional committee recently. Greenspan decided to speak out after observing that the price of contracts for natural gas deliveries several years out were skyrocketing past those of oil. Even now, with natural gas selling at nearly double the price of a year ago, supply and demand are out of whack. Not so slick. Shipping natural gas from overseas is not easy or cheap, however. Marine terminals must be built, and security of this potentially hazardous cargo must be addressed. And with foreign oil dependence already a concern, a move toward LNG would propel the nation into a new era of reliance on countries like Algeria, Nigeria, and Trinidad.

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Water Shortages Now Population pressures guarantee coming water shortages. Sandra Postel October 1998 (director of the Global Water Policy Project, The Coming Age of Water Scarcity Interviewed by Jim Motavalli and Elaine Robbins http://www.emagazine.com/september-october_1998/0998conversations.html) The basic problem is that water is a finite resource. It's renewable, but it's finite, and so water supplies per person tend to decrease as population increases. We're at a point now where we're about to see a big jump in the number of people in the world living in so-called "water-stressed" countries, where the renewable supply per person is below the level considered adequate to meet all food needs, ecological needs, industrial needs, household and drinking water needs. We currently have about 460 million people living in these countries, and that number is going to jump up to about three billion over the next 30 years. It raises tons of issues about water and agriculture, growing enough food, providing for all the material needs that people demand as incomes increase, and providing drinking water. A billion people don't have clean water, and two billion don't have adequate sanitation. This is still the cause of 80 percent of the diseases in developing countries.

Within twenty years, 1.8 billion people will face water shortages. International Water Management Institute, accessed October 5, 2003 Projected Water Scarcity in 2025 http://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/home/wsmap.htm By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity. Most countries in the Middle East and North Africa can be classified as having absolute water scarcity today. By 2025, these countries will be joined by Pakistan, South Africa, and large parts of India and China. This means that they will not have sufficient water resources to maintain their current level of per capita food production from irrigated agriculture—even at high levels of irrigation efficiency—and also to meet reasonable water needs for domestic, industrial, and environmental purposes. To sustain their needs, water will have to be transferred out of agriculture into other sectors, making these countries or regions increasingly dependent on imported food.

There are water shortages now – desalination is key to solve. Ann Marie Harmony November 21 2003 Executive Director, CEO, Practical Ocean Energy Management Systems, Inc. Is There Enough Renewable Ocean Energy? Roughly one-sixth of the world’s population, 1.1 billion people, lack access to safe water. Today, 31 countries are short of water. Many others have shortages in certain parts, like the United States and China. By the year 2025, the number of countries with water shortages will grow to 48. Seawater desalination provided by low-cost ocean energy is an answer.

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Water Shortages Now Water shortages are hitting the United States and many other countries. PR Newswire February 4, 2002 Growing Water Shortage Across the United States Leads to the Birth of a New Industry ... Waterless Technology

Water shortages have hit cities and regional pockets across the nation, resulting in caps on water usage that affect everything from washing your car to the time of day a sprinkler can run to the size of your toilet and the volume of water it holds. In the wake of this growing concern, a new industry has been born called Waterless Technology. DWG International(TM) has responded with a suite of products that offers consumers the opportunity to perform multiple everyday tasks without water. Their most popular product DRI WASH 'n GUARD(R) cleans, seals, polishes and protects vehicles (cars, trucks, vans, boats, airplanes) without using a single drop of water. "Water shortage and water conservation are issues that will eventually impact all of us. Like it or not our lives are being changed. DWG makes these changes easier," says Drew Earl, DWG International(TM) Executive Coordinator. "I'm proud DWG has begun to address this critical environmental problem. Collectively we are conserving billions of gallons of water!" The United States is not exempt from the water crisis, according to Earl. Water shortages have hit areas such as Maine, Minnesota, Florida and Washington. "Water tables are low, riverbeds are running to a trickle and run-off from melting snow has diminished. These states and regions have never had to contend with water shortages before," Earl says. Many regions of the U.S. have been facing a water crisis for several years. With the supply of sanitary drinking water scarce, everyday activities such as washing the family car are facing prohibition in many communities across the country, explains Earl. Conditions like these have given way to a burgeoning demand for waterless products. To meet this demand DWG has launched an entire line of waterless cleaning products allowing people to clean glass, mirrors, countertops, tile, appliances, carpet, fabric, upholstery, metal, jewelry, leather, vinyl and tires. "It's amazing to me what these products can do and how much water I'm able to save," says Saundra Beatty, who has used DRI WASH 'n GUARD(R) for several years. "I now know that one car wash wastes 150 gallons of water! How many people do you know who can say they washed their car without using a single drop of water?" According to Water, The Drop of Life, by Peter Swanson, "By the year 2020, nearly 50 nations will suffer severe water shortages...By 2030, many cities that have existed for centuries will simply dry up."

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Water Shortage Causes War Water shortages are going to hit the entire world soon, which will cause disease, starvation, and war for billions of people. Michael McCarthy March 5, 2003 “Water Scarcity Could Affect Billions: Is This the Biggest Crisis of All?” the lndependent http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0305-05.htm Glug-glug: Not normally a sound of foreboding. But mankind's most serious challenge in the 21st century might not be war or hunger or disease or even the collapse of civic order, a UN report says; it may be the lack of fresh water. Population growth, pollution and climate change, all accelerating, are likely to combine to produce a drastic decline in water supply in the coming decades, according to the World Water Development Report, published today. And of course that supply is already problematic for up to a third of the world's population. At present 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water and 2.4 billion lack access to proper sanitation, nearly all of them in the developing countries. Yet the fact that these figures are likely to worsen remorselessly has not been properly grasped by the world community, the report says. "Despite widely available evidence of the crisis, political commitment to reverse these trends has been lacking." Faced with "inertia at the leadership level and a world population not fully aware of the scale of the problem", the global water crisis will reach unprecedented heights in the years ahead, the report says, with growing per capita scarcity in many parts of the developing world. And that means hunger, disease and death. The report makes an alarming prediction. By the middle of the century, it says that, in the worst case, no fewer than seven billion people in 60 countries may be faced with water scarcity, although if the right policies are followed this may be brought down to two billion people in 48 nations.

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No Space Travel Now NASA needs to become more cost efficient to bring space travel to the people. The Scotsman August 6, 2003, ANOTHER THING: NO 55 SPACE TRAVEL by Louisa Pearson

At one time the lure of space was firmly backed by public enthusiasm. In the 1930s, fictional characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon reflected that interest and ignited the imagination of thousands of youngsters. And by the time of Yuri Gargarin's first manned spaceflight in 1961 and the first moon landing in 1969, the final frontier was rarely out of the news. But when it became clear that visiting other planets wouldn't automatically follow in rapid succession, interest seemed to wane. But if Nasa's current projects aren't generating as much excitement, it's clear the childhood dream of becoming an astronaut has not vanished altogether. The world's two first space tourists, Dennis Tito, left, and Mark Shuttleworth, each spent upwards of GBP 14m for a week in space. N'Sync singer Lance Bass's dream was cut short after being asked to leave Russia's cosmonaut training programme. Crude violations of his contract were cited for the decision, the singer's fans blamed paperwork problems, but at the end of the day it looked like he couldn't come up with the GBP 13m needed to secure his seat. It's clear there would need to be a significant reduction in prices for the average person to afford a trip into space. But there may be other ways - last September it was reported that Pepsi was planning a reality game show where the prize would be the chance to go into orbit with the Russian space agency. Perhaps that would just be the first step into the real commercialisation of space. Space probes could carry company logos like Formula One cars, the first pioneers would knock Big Brother off the ratings if cameras were allowed into their homes. But until that happens, summer holidays in space remain the exclusive domain of very rich science fiction fans.

Funding problems and delays are stopping NASA’s space missions. Sunday Times August 31, 2003, Space: the final phut by Stuart Wavell In part, Aldiss blames the first moon landing, which hit the circulation of SF magazines. Reality could not match the dream. "Science fiction centred around the idea of manned space travel. And now the dream has gone. I think that sort of future has passed." However, he still thinks manned space flight to Mars is a "great idea", if only as a stepping stone to Jupiter's intriguing satellites. Aldiss is incredulous that most of Nasa's funding goes into the International Space Station, due to cost more than Pounds 70 billion over the next three decades. "The idea behind the station is not scientific but practical - to keep the Russians interested instead of assisting China or Japan," he says. While Nasa's shuttle craft, which the Columbia inquiry board said could probably not be safely operated for "more than a few years" based on Nasa's abysmal record, are grounded, the ISS is off limits. And the agency now has to digest 29 recommendations before scheduling any future missions.

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No Space Travel Now The manned space program is on the brink of being killed now. The Houston Chronicle August 27, 2003, Bush implored to set new space course Lawmakers say tough choices await president by KAREN MASTERSON

Since taking office in January 2001, Bush has been hugely successful at forcing an agenda that includes improving education, boosting defense spending, removing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and cutting taxes. But his commitment to NASA has been tepid. And his chosen head for the agency, administrator Sean O'Keefe, has focused more on fixing the agency's accounting problems than articulating its future. Many observers say the outcome of the investigation board's work means Bush and O'Keefe now must make tough decisions that they've so far avoided. "I'm disappointed in the president," said Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Beaumont, whose district includes Johnson Space Center. "I hoped he'd champion a new set of goals. But we seem to have gotten a slowdown in where we are going." The report blamed the loss of Columbia and its seven astronauts on a management system that failed to heed warnings about damage caused by a chunk of insulating foam during liftoff. Absent direction from the administration, key lawmakers have come to their own conclusions. Florida Republican Dave Weldon, whose district includes Kennedy Space Center, said he will ask Bush to increase NASA's budget by 25 percent over the next three years, largely to accelerate production of a new orbital space plane. Others say the shuttle program should be killed. "I believe it is likely that we will conclude that a shift in emphasis toward unmanned flight is reasonable for both safety and research value," said Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Research, which competes with the shuttle program for funding authorizations.

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Now Is Key for Space Now is a key time for NASA to get a boost and regain public enthusiasm for space travel. U.S. News & World Report September 1, 2003 Nasa's Next Step By Thomas K. Grose But once fingers have been pointed and fixes recommended, the spotlight will move beyond Columbia to how much money NASA needs to rebuild its manned program--and just what its mission should be. "It's a critical juncture for NASA," Launius says. Critics in Congress and elsewhere say it's time to revitalize the agency and make the exorbitant costs of space travel more palatable by investing it with a new, overarching goal: perhaps colonizing the moon. Or exploring Mars. Or both. "They need to come up with a goal that recaptures the excitement of the American people," says Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican. Underwhelmed. NASA certainly hasn't managed that with its current focus: using the shuttles to build and maintain the space station. Since construction began in 1998, 250 miles above Earth, NASA has tried to make it look as routine as building a downtown office tower. "The ideal space mission is routine," explains Keith Cowing, editor of the NASA Watch Web site. But underwhelmed Americans showed little interest in the space program--until the fatal mishap. And although the ISS is meant as an orbiting lab for cutting-edge science, budget cuts have curtailed research. It's not worth the cost or risk, critics argue. Neal Lane, a former science adviser to President Clinton, says that "the space station on its own is not a sufficiently exciting or bold enough goal" to justify the dangers of space travel.

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Space Travel Snowballs If we can get to nearby planets, we can mine resources from them to get to farther ones. Leonard David November 14 2000 Senior Space Writer “Deep Space Exploration - Looking for Planetary Paydirt” http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/space_mining_0111141.html GOLDEN, COLORADO -- Here's the claim: A "miner" breakthrough is needed to develop and utilize the resources of space, be they from asteroids, the Moon or Mars. The solar system is a heaven -sent treasure trove -- a bounty, ready and waiting, of metals and materials that can fortify humankind's outward reach into the cosmos. Experts from NASA, federal research labs, industry, universities, and private groups met here October 24-26 at the Colorado School of Mines, taking part in a "Space Resources Utilization Roundtable." New spacecraft data clearly picture the inner and outer solar system as a prospector's paradise.

We can get resources for further space travel from Mars or the moon. Leonard David November 14 2000 Senior Space Writer “Deep Space Exploration - Looking for Planetary Paydirt” Planetary geologist, Jeffrey Taylor of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, said space resources are essential for space settlement. He is working on a plan of action to promote planetary prospecting. Celestial campsites on the Moon or Mars that support more than a few thousand people require use of local, down-and-dirty resources to build and sustain those far-flung housing projects and generate products for export, Taylor argues. In the case of setting up a Martian settlement, Taylor said, it may be cost effective to ship out needed water, oxygen, hydrogen, major metals, and food from a lively lunar operation, at least initially. "As we begin to settle the Moon and Mars, we must also keep track of changing economic conditions, such as launch costs or substitutes of one material for another," he said.

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Space Exploration Solves Everything Extinction is inevitable unless we expand to space. Aside from survival, space exploration promotes hegemony, economic growth, technological advances, and world peace. The Arizona Republic, 1999 (Sylvia Dahlby, December 18th, HEADLINE: Lander's failure no reason to take eyes off stars")

At a time when we face serious domestic and economic problems, the cost of space exploration may seem too high. But planetary exploration delivers many immediate returns and long-term benefits, from geological meteorological and environmental sciences to aviations, computers, and telecommunications. Space technology has given unprecedented advances in agriculture, manufacturing, automotives, consumer electronics, medicine and other fields of business and industry. Space science promotes advanced education, a skilled workforce, and high-paying jobs. As a nation, we also benefit from international prestige and leadership. Space science promotes visionary thinking, lofty ideas, principles and values, such as cooperation, commitment, and faith. Space exploration promises the next generation of American scientists, engineers and soldiers' peaceful missions, and a challenge to learn and create a more hopeful future. Space science also promotes opportunities for the United States to do what we do best: invent, innovate and lead The history of the United States has a rich tradition of space exploration. Who could ever forget the elation and national pride of Apollo's moon landing? The photo of Earth from the surface of the moon served as a unifying force for Americans and the people of all nations. U.S.-led space missions continue to promote world peace through international cooperation in science and technology. Human history is replete with great civilizations with traditions of science and space exploration. Whether Chinese, East Indian, native American, Islamic, Judaic or Christian, all the world's religions reflect the same story of man's quest for enlightenment and knowledge. The Egyptians built might pyramids to challenge time itself. The Mayans mapped the drift of the constellations and charted the eclipse with astonishing precision. In ancient Sumeria, Greece and the Roman Empire, the starts and planets inspired art, architecture and culture, and that spirit persists in modern times. It is the nature of life itself to push outward and grow. Anthropologist Loren Eisley suggested that perhaps it is human nature to spread the seeds of Earthly life to other worlds, just as the dandelions scatter their seeds to the wind. With evidence that the dinosaur's demise is the result of a meteor collision, other scientists have suggested that the colonization of other worlds is the only hedge against inevitable human extinction.

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Space Exploration Moral Imperative There’s a moral imperative to get to space before we destroy the environment. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap1.html

There is only one solution. Humans must remove themselves from the Earth's ecosystem before they destroy it. We can build and colonize worlds of our own making in space. The asteroids alone represent enough building material to build over 1000 space colonies with a habitable surface area the same size as the Earth's ( including the 72% of the surface covered by oceans). This is enough habitation space to allow the entire human population to live in any manner they wish, without infringing on the rights of others who want to live differently. The advantages of living in these space colonies will be delved into more fully in the following chapters. The colonization of space by humanity is inevitable. The only question is will we leave this Earth to colonize space because we want to save this place which gave us life from destruction, or will we leave because we have destroyed the Earth to such an extent it will no longer support us. Leaving before humanity destroys the Earth is the only moral path. To flee the Earth and all its troubles after we have plundered and pillaged the Earth to the fullest extent possible, would burden all mankind with a grievous sin, a sin so terrible we would never forgive ourselves. Our children would never forgive us. If there be other life in the universe and we eventually do make contact with older and wiser alien species, they will be appalled by what we did to our mother Earth and they will look upon all humanity with the utmost contempt and mistrust. These aliens will say to one another, "Humans had the ability to leave their birth place, take their place among the advanced races of the universe, and yet, they maliciously destroyed their mother when they could have saved her. What kind of selfish, arrogant and untrustworthy beings humans must be to be capable of doing such a dark deed."

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Space Exploration Solves All Critiques Their alternative doesn’t solve, because people won’t be willing to change deeply held beliefs – however, colonizing space will require rethinking on all our current mindsets, which will solve any destructive ones like those they criticize. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap6.html

There is ALWAYS something wrong with a corporation that doesn't allow it's employees to criticize the management or listen to constructive ideas. To continue to work for such a corporation in this era of rapid technological change is not a good idea. In times of rapid technological change, government systems, economic systems, and religious systems have a greater potential of becoming extinction traps for their followers because these followers will be left hopelessly behind as they faithfully cling to the non-competitive system. Luckily, not many people put as much stock in these other systems as they do their own religious belief system and therefore have an easier time telling when something is wrong with their nonreligious belief systems. Unfortunately people have a tendency to refrain from changing these systems when they first notice the system is broken. A lot of human lives have been lost as a result, and a lot more lives will be lost in the future for the same reason. The colonization of space can help with the false hope extinction traps in several ways. Space colonization can help by raising mankind's general level of awareness. On Earth many things are still given to us, the air we breath, the water we drink, gravity, protection from radiation, etc.. In space we will be required to create from scratch a livable environment. Nothing will be given to us. The space colonists will be very aware every action they take will absolutely have consequences. This heightened level of awareness will spread from the space colonies to Earth to bring about a generalized heightened level of awareness among the Earth-dwelling humans. This generalized heightening of humanity's level of awareness will gradually bring about an increased resistance (one might say a partial immunity) to the really stupid false hope extinction traps. If nothing else it will require the purveyors of false doctrines to work much harder to gain a following. Secondly, and more importantly, the colonization of space will require a paradigm shift in every aspect of human tradition, helping to break humans of the bad habit of relying on institutions (government, corporate, religion) to provide leadership and answers to the larger questions.

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A2: Other Planets Uninhabitable New information found shows that there are other planets like earth out there that we could live on. The Hamilton Spectator January 31, 2003 A plethora of planets; Discoveries coming so fast that textbooks are outdated Alexandra Witze Just last week, scientists added the 105th entry to their list of planets beyond the solar system. These are bizarre places: big, gassy balls like Jupiter, including at least one orbiting so close to a star that it's hot enough to vapourize iron. Even Klingons wouldn't want to live on these worlds. But scientists can't wait to find out more about them. New discoveries, including the recent announcement of the most distant planet known, are helping astronomers understand the weird new worlds. Soon, scientists think, they may even achieve the long-sought goal of discovering a small, rocky planet like our own. "We stand on the verge of being able to find planets like Earth," Melissa McGrath, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said during a recent meeting in Seattle. For centuries, scholars have wondered whether planets orbit the billions of other stars in the Milky Way. Today, planet discoveries are flooding in so quickly that textbooks are constantly outdated. <she continues> Seager predicted that by 2010, astronomers will have found the first Earthlike planets and enter a new wave of understanding. "These," she says, "are very exciting times."

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A2: We’ll Find Aliens

Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap6.html Spacefaring extraterrestrials will have long since learned complete control of matter and energy, simultaneous processing of multiple thought streams; possessing intellects beyond what we are even capable of imagining; and routinely perform feats so extraordinary (from a human view point) that humans would believe them to be some sort of magic. We humans have no chance at all of standing up to such beings. On the bright side we probably don't have anything they want. So if such beings exist, humans should try to stay out of their way to avoid being stepped on. Our descendents, the transhuman super-beings, who will create themselves during the Great Transformation of Earth Life, will with sufficient time and experience be able to counter any threat posed by hostile extraterestrials. And if our descendents behave themselves in the meantime, they will eventually spread Earth-life throughout the universe. Life from Earth will then be like an eternal flame, never to be extinguished.

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A2: We’ll Have Wars With Colonies Earth governments will know colonies could win any war, which will prevent conflict. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap6.html One scenario that could band together all of the space colonies to wage a coordinated bolide attack against Earth is aggression by an Earth government against a space colony. Any Earth government should know a war against a space colony would be suicide and something to be avoided at all cost and therefore would not be likely to start such a war (This is the main reason why Earth governments are likely to oppose private efforts to colonize space: They won't be able to control the private space colonists and the colonists won't be intimidated by any Earth government either, which in their eyes means private colonies will become a threat to governments on Earth).

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A2: China Relations on Space China supports space exploration – they won’t oppose the results of it. XINHUA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE February 2, 2003 Chinese expert deeply regrets tragic incident of Columbia BEIJING, Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- Chen Maozhang, member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, on Sunday deeply regretted the tragic incident of US space shuttle Columbia, saying such incident would not shake the mankind's space exploration program. Chen, who also serves as professor of Beihang University (the original University of Aeronautic and Astronautic Science and Technology in China), told Xinhua that the mankind's space exploration is a great cause that would suffer various setbacks. "But the mankind will not give up the dream of space exploration. Facing the setbacks, the mankind need to find out the cause of the accident and make improvement," he added. US space shuttle Columbia broke apart into flames as it streaked over Texas toward its landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, killing all seven astronauts. Six Americans and the first Israeli astronaut were on board. Four of the seven astronauts were on their first shuttle flight.

China isn’t a threat – they can’t challenge the US military. CATO January 16 2003 “CATO HANDBOOK FOR CONGRESS POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE 108TH CONGRESS” p://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb108/hb108-57.pdf China is a normal, albeit sometimes difficult, rising great power. China’s behavior can sometimes pose challenges, but the country is not a dangerous threat to U.S. security. China’s military spending is a tiny fraction of U.S. defense spending. It will take decades before China can even come close to current U.S. spending levels. (China officially spends $19 billion on defense, but the actual figure is somewhere between $40 billion and $60 billion. In contrast, U.S. defense spending for fiscal year 2003 is $397 billion.) China’s weapons systems are no match for those of the United States—although China is making a serious effort to modernize its armed forces.

China will try to get along with the rest of the world – they won’t go to war. CATO January 16 2003 “CATO HANDBOOK FOR CONGRESS POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE 108TH CONGRESS” p://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb108/hb108-57.pdf Painting China as an economic and military adversary is dangerous and misguided. Free trade is mutually beneficial—both China and other countries gain from trade liberalization. There is no doubt that, as the Chinese economy grows, so will the Chinese military budget. But that is not unusual for a large nation-state, and thus far China’s military spending and its military modernization effort have been relatively modest. It is true that no one can be certain how the PRC will behave on security issues in the future. Unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, however, the PRC is not a messianic, expansionist power; it is a normal rising (or reawakening) great power. At times, that can be difficult for other countries to deal with, but such a country does not pose a malignant security threat.

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A2: Nuclear Power Solves Space Nuclear material in space will doom the space program forever if there is an accident, and the alternatives are cheaper and safer. Karl Grossman February 06, 2003 Nukes-in-Space In Columbia's Wake, Space Daily http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03i.html In contrast, NASA's renewed emphasis on nuclear power in space "is not only dangerous but politically unwise," says Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York and author of best-selling books including "Hyperspace." "The only thing that can kill the U.S. space program is a nuclear disaster. The American people will not tolerate a Chernobyl in the sky. That would doom the space program." "NASA hasn't learned its lesson from its history involving space nuclear power," says Kaku, "and a hallmark of science is that you learn from previous mistakes. NASA doggedly pursues its fantasy of nuclear power in space. We have to save NASA from itself." He cites "alternatives" space nuclear power. "Some of these alternatives may delay the space program a bit. But the planets are not going to go away. What's the rush? I'd rather explore the universe slower than not at all if there is a nuclear disaster." Dr. Ross McCluney, a former NASA scientist now principal research scientist at the Florida Solar Energy Center, says NASA's push for the use of nuclear power in space is "an example of tunnel vision, focusing too narrowly on what appears to be a good engineering solution but not on the longer-term human and environmental risks and the law of unint ended consequences. You think you're in control of everything and then things happen beyond your control. If your project is inherently benign, an unexpected error can be tolerated. But when you have at your project's core something inherently dangerous, then the consequences of unexpected failures can be great." Jack Dixon, for 30 years an aerospace engineer in the U.S., takes issue with those against nuclear power in space for being critical of it for "politically correct," anti-nuclear reasons. His criticism is cost--what he says is an enormous cost. The solar sail system "may be implemented at about 10% of the cost of nuclear and quickly." It is "simple and relatively low tech." He says: "Serious questions need to be asked: Where will they test the nuclear rocket? How much will it cost? What would be the impacts of a launch accident? These nuclearization of space plans are getting dangerous and out of control."

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A2: Nuclear Power Solves Space The stigma attached to nuclear power in space will prevent it from being used. By Greg Clark May 21 2000 Staff Writer Will Nuclear Power Put Humans On Mars? http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/nuclearmars_000521.ht ml For 25 years, nuclear has been a dirty word, even in space transportation. Despite the fact that nuclear propulsion has consistently come up as one of the most-promising propulsion concepts for human missions beyond Earth orbit, little more than study has been done since the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications, or NERVA, program was killed in 1972. Started in 1959, and conducted vigorously throughout the 1960s by NASA and the Atomic Energy Commission, the program built and tested 20 nuclear-reactor rocket engines at the federal government's Nevada Test Site. The total cost of the program was $1.4 billion, a figure that is equivalent to about $7 billion today. The rockets, all of which were operated in the open air at the Nevada Test Site, ranged in output from 50,000 to 250,000 pounds of thrust. In comparison, the liquid-fueled rocket engines clustered at the rear end of the space shuttle produce about 400,000 pounds of thrust each, while the combined jet engines on a Boeing 747 yield about 220,000 pounds of thrust at full takeoff power. Advocates of nuclear-powered rocketry blame a small but vocal and vehement faction of activists for creating a public climate that has prohibited space agencies from flying nuclearreactor rockets.

Public opposition to nuclear space travel will block its use. Brian Rudo March 5 2003 Nuclear Propulsion and What It Means to Space Exploration http://www.redcolony.com/articles/030305text.html In reality the implications were much less beneficial to mankind. With the nuclear power disasters of the twentieth century, notably Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the public has withdrawn from nuclear power. Further problems that have halted nuclear power generation have resulted from the storage of nuclear waste. Public disfavor with anything nuclear has extended itself into space. When the Cassini probe launched in 1997, its 73 pounds of plutonium sparked protests that called into question any future nuclear project in space. Protesters contended that an error in launch or an encounter with Earth later on in the voyage could result in dangerous radioactivity raining down from the sky. What the protestors failed to realize was the actual risk involved: the increase in radioactivity that would result from the destruction of Cassini would have been equivalent to a 15,000th of a normal lifetime absorption of radioactivity. There is most likely more radioactivity in a tanning booth or dental X-ray.

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A2: Nuclear Power Solves Space The existing programs for nuclear powered space travel will never solve. Brian Rudo March 5 2003 Nuclear Propulsion and What It Means to Space Exploration http://www.redcolony.com/articles/030305text.html So, while we should expect to see some form of advancement in nuclear propulsion in the near future, most probably in NASA’s Prometheus nuclear electric propulsion project, we should not expect this to significantly impact space travel as we know it. Manned flight in particular would receive little benefit from the Prometheus project. In fact, Dr. Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society and Pioneer Astronautics, believes that the only real benefit for manned exploration would be from the construction of small nuclear reactors for the project. These reactors are ideal for the Mars Direct plan, which ambitiously aims to send humans to Mars within ten years of the program start – for an average of a billion dollars a year if the program were maintained for ten flights to Mars, one per every two-year launch window. This pocket change would produce a safe program that could maintain a manned presence on Mars cheaply and reliably. Unfortunately, it would utilize only conventional propulsion, mostly because nuclear electric propulsion will not hold promise for relatively large spacecraft and relatively short duration flights (See Also: Mars Direct). Therefore, despite the great promise to propulsion that nuclear technology has showed, it seems that only the most limited benefits are to be had in the near future. Long duration flights, like a probe to another star system, will see extreme benefits from the Prometheus project. Mars rovers and missions will also see a great benefit, but most of that benefit will reside on the staying capacity, endurance, and raw power given to missions once they land, not in any actual propulsion gains. Despite its many benefits and its evident value, Project Prometheus is merely a poor substitute for NERVA and its nuclear thermal propulsion – a system we had working in the 1960s but that was forgotten.

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Asteroid = Extinction There are hundreds of asteroids out there that we don’t know about, which could hit us at any time. Collisions are common. Courier Mail March 18, 2000 Final frontier yields secrets of life Rodney Chester IT is a rock the size of Bribie Island travelling through space. And if it were to hit the Earth, it would mean the end of human life on the planet. Fortunately, it is 245 million kilometres from Earth and is not on a collision path, unlike an estimated 700 yet-to-be-discovered "near-Earth asteroids", any of which could be heading straight for us without our knowledge. This asteroid called Eros is the centre of man's efforts to understand the rocks that threaten the planet from the depths of space. NASA has spent $325 million on a mission to study this 33km-long, peanut-shaped rock for two reasons. An asteroid like Eros could one day wipe out human life in the same way that an asteroid's impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. And it is probably asteroids and comets that carried the building blocks of life to Earth.

Asteroids are the primary threat to human survival – even small ones have huge destructive potential equal to 15 nuclear weapons. Sydney Morning Herald October 18, 1999 Judy Wilkinson The Day The Earth Was Hit PERHAPS Ronald Reagan's Star Wars theory wasn't so loony after all. This program provides a convincing argument that life on Earth is one stray meteorite away from extinction. It tracks the cataclysm that unfolded in the early hours of June 20, 1908, in Tunguska, Siberia. Survivors say they saw a fireball screaming through the sky towards them. Thinking it was the end of the world, they prayed into a night which was illuminated as if it were day. The events at Tunguska have been described as the largest of Earth's encounters with cosmic objects, and the jury is still out on whether it was an asteroid, a comet or something else. The confusion surrounding this event was caused by the absence of a crater. Yet the man who developed the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller, says there is a phenomenon called "big effect, no crater". Ninety years on, scientists are still baffled over the cause, despite more than 150 theories being put forward. One fact they all agree on is that at 15 megatonnes, the explosion that laid flat 2,000 square kilometres of forest, incinerated thousands of reindeer and vaporised homes, was about 1,000 times larger than the Hiroshima bomb. It was so great that a shock wave, travelling at the speed of a passenger jet, spread out as far as Britain. Many astronomers, scientists, explosion experts and even NASA officials say the events at Tunguska expose an underestimated threat to our existence. The nearest source of danger is the main asteroid belt the planet travels through every 300 years. And some scientists believe it was matter from this "cosmic shooting gallery" that hit Tunguska.

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Asteroid = Extinction A big asteroid would cause human extinction. Here’s how it goes down… Michael Paine November 5 1999 How an Asteroid Impact Causes Extinction http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/asteroid_paine_october. html Imagine: NASA scientists announce they have detected a 10-mile-wide asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. They calculate it will hit Southeast Asia in two weeks. There is no chance of Bruce Willis being sent on a beefed -up space shuttle to blow up the asteroid. Earthlings willhave to ride out the impact. The world economy grinds to a halt as people take to the hills. Anarchy sets in, civilization breaks down. Accusations fly over the lack of warning -- where was Spaceguard, the proposed international search effort for large asteroids? People in Brazil feel less vulnerable than most of the world's population. They are on the opposite side of the Earth from the predicted impact point. But one hour after the impact Brazilians notice some brilliant meteors. Then more meteors. Soon the sky gets brighter and hotter from the overwhelming number of meteors. Within a few minutes trees ignite from the fierce radiant heat. Millions of fragments of rock, ejected into space by the blast, are making a fiery return all over the planet. Only people hiding underground survive the deadly fireworks display. Within three hours, however, massive shock waves from the impact travel through the Earth's crust and converge on Brazil at the same time. The ground shakes so violently that the ground fractures and molten rock spews from deep underground. Maybe Brazil wasn't the best place to be after all. The survivors of the firestorms, tsunami and massive earthquakes emerge to a devastated landscape. Within a few days the Sun vanishes behind a dark thick cloud -- a combination of soot from the firestorms, dust thrown up by the impact and a toxic smog from chemical reactions. Photosynthesis in plants and algae ceases and temperatures plummet. A long, sunless Arctic winter seems mild compared to the new conditions on most of the planet. After a year or so the dust settles and sunlight begins to filter through the clouds. The Earth's surface starts warming up. But the elevated carbon dioxide levels created by the fires (and, by chance, vaporization of huge quantities of limestone at the impact site) results in a runway greenhouse effect. Those creatures that managed to survive the deep freeze now have to cope with being cooked. Many species of plants and animals vanish. The few hundred thousand human survivors find themselves reverting to a Stone Age existence.

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Space Solves Asteroids Moving to space means we’ll use near-earth objects as colonies, so they can’t hit the planet. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap6.html The colonization of space will completely eliminate the threat of a natural bolide impact with the Earth. All Earth-orbit-crossing objects and near-Earth objects will be used as building material for the space colonies and other space structures (see chapter 10). Once space colonies are manned, the only remaining threat to the Earth from bolides will be from the space colonies using bolides as weapons against targets on Earth. This is unlikely because the Earth won't have much for which the colonies are willing to war with Earth. Most of the space colonies will be separate communities with separate governments and would not allow just one colony to attack Earth. It would also take a long time to move a large bolide into position to attack a target on Earth - plenty of time for all the colonies and Earth to know what is happening and put a stop to it.

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A2: No Planet-Killers Coming Even if there aren’t any asteroids big enough to cause extinction, there are many smaller ones which we DON’T KNOW ABOUT, and would have the same impact as a nuclear weapon. Toronto Star July 21, 2002 No big asteroid threat for centuries Terence Dickinson So far, the searches have identified all the 10-kilometre-class asteroids, the so-called globalextinction objects, and none of them will come close to the Earth for the next few hundred years at least. "What we worry about are the smaller ones, one to two kilometres in diameter, that we haven't identified yet," said asteroid expert Brian Marsden of Harvard University. Marsden was speaking at a recent conference on space objects that threaten the Earth held in Washington D.C. He noted that about half of the estimated 1,200 one-kilometre-or-larger asteroids that come near enough to Earth to be potentially dangerous have been identified so far. He expects that 90 per cent of them will be found and tracked by the end of the decade. The explosion from the impact of an asteroid one kilometre wide would be powerful enough to incinerate a city the size of Toronto and to do severe damage over a much broader area. That's why astronomers want to identify all of these objects as soon as possible. And then there are the thousands of smaller asteroids out there. Just last month, for instance, a "small" asteroid 100 metres across whizzed midway between the Earth and the moon. It's the largest space boulder ever recorded that close to Earth. The disturbing aspect of that incident is that the asteroid, now designated 2002MN, was not discovered until three days after it passed its closest point to Earth. This is because it approached us from an astronomical blind spot in the same general direction as the sun. On a cosmic scale, the Earth is a very small target. But from time to time renegade chunks from the asteroid belt do score a direct hit. It happened on June 30, 1908, when a 30-metre asteroid (about the size of a 10-storey building) plunged into the atmosphere over central Siberia, broke apart and exploded before reaching the ground. Known as the Tunguska event, the explosion had the force of a 10-megaton nuclear blast and levelled more than one million hectares of Siberian forest.

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A2: No Planet-Killers Coming Even a small asteroid hitting would be like a nuclear blast, which could lead to a miscalculation and nuclear war. Richard Stenger October 3, 2002 Asteroid could start nuke war http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/10/03/asteroid.hearing/index.html Scientists estimate that near the Earth's orbital path are slightly more than 1,000 asteroids 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter or larger that could cause global catastrophes if they hit their mark. NASA expects to conclude a census of such large near-Earth objects, or NEOs, in 2008 and has already identified almost half of the predicted population. Collisions with such monster rocks take place only once every 1 million years or so. Better to worry about those the size of cars, which hit every few weeks, or those the size of whales, which hit every few centuries, said U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon Worden. An asteroid 5 to 10 meters in diameter exploded in June over the Mediterranean Sea, releasing as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II, Worden told the House Committee on Science. "Imagine that the bright flash accompanied by a damaging shock wave had occurred over India or Pakistan," said Worden. He noted that at the time the two countries were near the brink of war and that either could have mistaken it for a surprise attack. 'Nuclear horror' "The resulting panic in the nuclear-armed and hair-triggered opposing forces could have been the spark that ignited a nuclear horror we have avoided for over a half century." And, he said, if a space boulder in the 100-meter range detonated over a major city, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people might die. His point was that it wouldn't take a so-called "dinosaur killer" asteroid to cause a major catastrophe.

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A2: We Never Get Hit Collisions on a smaller scale are common and a planet killer could come by at any time. Courier Mail March 18, 2000 Final frontier yields secrets of life Rodney Chester

Asteroids are to be found at the start of life, and at the end. It is not unusual for bits of asteroids, known as meteorites, to hit Earth. On average, about two meteorites a day come down somewhere in Australia. Fortunately, large impacts are not as common. About every 100 years, an object, either a comet or an asteroid, measuring about 50m smacks into the Earth causing major but local damage. A comet about 60m wide destroyed a 40km patch of a Siberian forest in 1908, and would have caused thousands of casualties had it hit a city rather than an uninhabited zone. Earth is hit by an object bigger than 350m about every 15,000 years, with the impact likely to destroy an area the size of south-east Queensland. Every 250,000 years, an object bigger than 1700m in diameter hits, wiping out an area at least the size of Queensland. A recent study downgraded the chances of a catastrophic collision, but still estimated a 1 percent chance that an asteroid would cause global catastrophe in the next 1000 years. The object that sent the world into a global winter and wiped out the dinosaurs was probably about a third of the size of Eros.

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A2: Deflect the Asteroid Current plans can’t effectively deflect an asteroid, which would kill billions or worse. The Times June 4, 1998, “Saving the Earth could be trickier than we thought” by Nigel Hawkes, Science Editor SAVING the Earth from being hit by an asteroid may be harder than believed - although anyone who has seen the film Deep Impact might believe that it was hard enough. Some asteroids are so loosely put together that they could soak up the blast of a nuclear explosion without much effect, according to calculations by Erik Asphaug, of the University of California in Santa Cruz, and colleagues. The threat to Earth from asteroids is being taken seriously by some astronomers. A direct hit from a big asteroid could kill billions of people. Such an impact is said by many to have caused the demise of the dinosaurs 64 million years ago. If spotted soon enough, asteroids could be shifted away from the Earth or broken up by crashing another object into them, or exploding nuclear warheads near by. But, in an analysis in Nature , Dr Asphaug casts doubt on how easy this would be. The nature of many asteroids, loosely assembled piles of rubble held together by gravity, means that they could dampen the shock waves from an explosion, limiting its effectiveness. "It's a lot more difficult to nudge these asteroids around than we had thought," Dr Asphaug said. "More work needs to be done before we can decide whether nuclear warheads provide a viable deterrent." To determine the effects, astronomers need to know a lot more about asteroids' internal structure, he says. "In case we ever identify an asteroid or comet on a collision course, it would be best to know our enemy."

And that flows our way anyway, because to effectively deflect the asteroid, we’d need a strong space program. That makes this a new advantage for us, because not only do we escape the asteroid, but we also stop it from causing billions of deaths on earth.

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Economic Collapse Turns Case Economic collapse completely destroys environmental laws. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap1.html

With most of their wealth and manufacturing base now gone these formerly wealthy nations will reform their business laws and tax laws in order to stimulate their economies. You can bet your bottom dollar one of the first groups of laws to be rewritten will be the environmental laws. Environmental laws will be one of the main scapegoats offered up by politicians and businesses to explain why the economy is so bad . It will be about this time that you will be given the choice, the environment or your life. Of course this time the shoe will be on the other foot as the environmental movements based in the new ly wealthy third word nations will be viciously prodding YOU, to sacrifice yourself and your family for the sake of the Earth's ecosystem . During economic booms the Earth's ecosystem will be protected to what extent it is practical to do so, and in economic recessions some of what was previously protected will be released to be exploited, until there is nothing left to protect. The environmental movement cannot stop the destruction of the Earth's ecosystem. Environmental activism can only delay the inevitable. For this delay and the education of the people of the Earth on environmental matters, the environmentalists should be commended! However it doesn't do anyone any good to fight the good battle for environmental responsibility and in the end loose the w ar. The environmentalists, and everybody else for that matter, need to find a permanent solution to the destruction of the Earth's ecosystem .

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Exploration Solves Economy Space exploration helps all parts of the economy with tourism, mining, and energy production, guaranteeing economic growth. The Nation (Thailand) March 23, 2001 Beam 'em up, Scottie! They're ready to pay THE "space economy" may spark the next cycle of the global economic boom, or more specifically the next US boom, following the collapse of the digital economy. Billions of people around the globe are waiting for the moment the Russian space station Mir falls back to Earth today. For a moment at least, they will be able to forget the economic slowdown in the US and Japan, and the fading of the information technology revolution that brought robust economic growth to the US and, to varying degrees. the rest of the world. <> Nobody knows how long it will take to fully commercialise the conquest of space, but it may not be so far away. The US Congress has already passed the Commercial Space Act, legalising private manned space flight, and has directed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to consider opening the International Space Station commercial activity. A new wave of space exploration is emerging. Part of this is a space race sponsored by the St. Louis-based X-PRIZE Foundation, which will award $10 million to the first private group that launches a manned spacecraft into sub-orbital flight, then repeats the flight in two weeks. The winner would essentially have to build a cheaper version of the Space Shuttle that can be used several times a week instead of a few times a year. In the running for the prize are Rotary Rocket Company, Kelly Space and Technology, Pioneer Rocketplane, and Advent Launch Services. Many believe tourism is a potentially lucrative segment of the space industry. Virginia-based LunaCorp wants to give people a chance to explore the Moon without leaving Earth. According to WWW.discovery.com, the company is trying to raise $100 million to land two robotic vehicles on the Moon. LunaCorp's Rovers will be equipped with panoramic video cameras and sophisticated software that will enable them to transmit 360-degree images back to Earth, along with data on everything from the lunar temperature to the roughness of the terrain. The Rovers will provide realistic special effects for moon rides in theme parks and science centres. Another idea that has been put forward is to mine the Moon and asteroids, which some believe will yield precious stones. Former astronaut Jack Schmidt, a geologist, has proposed mining lunar soil and heating it to extract Helium 3, an isotope difficult to obtain on Earth. Theoretically, there's enough on the Moon to generate 10,000 times as much energy as the Earth's entire remaining reserves of fossil fuel. Others want to manufacture semiconductors in space, believing the zero-gravity conditions and other factors would produce better products than those manufactured on Earth. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are eager to try making drugs in space.

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Nanotech is Coming Now There are already plans for a computer based on nanotechnology. Plain Dealer January 3, 2000 HEWLETT-PACKARD TEAM LOOKS AT NANOTECHNOLOGY FOR THE NEXT LEAP FORWARD

Stan Williams is convinced that the future of the computer is just a few atoms wide. Williams, a researcher at Hewlett-Packard, heads a team developing a new kind of computer memory using nanotechnology, the art of manipulating material on a molecular scale. The memory, in the form of crisscrossing wires, will be just 100 nanometers across (a nanometer equals one-billionth of a meter, or about the width of two atoms). It will hold 16 bits of data. That is not much - just enough to hold a couple of words. But if it works, it could presage a quantum leap in the speed and power of all kinds of computer chips, including microprocessors. "Nanotech should make it possible to build computers 1 billion times as powerful as they are now," said Williams.

There will be nanotech assemblers in 20 years. The Age March 1, 2002 THE NEXT Frontier by Sean Nicholls In Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, a handy device called a "maker" sits neatly in the corner of people's apartments. It's the size of a dishwasher or a bar fridge, and will manufacture just about anything you want from clothing to food - at the issue of a couple of voice commands. Scientists are working on their own version of a maker today, only they're calling it a Santa Claus machine. Using molecular nanotechnology they expect - some say within 20 or 30 years - to be able to manufacture most things from the first atom upwards, absolutely free of charge. Mind you, it's likely someone will quickly develop a payment model soon afterwards.

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Nanotechnology is Inevitable Nanotech can be delayed but never stopped. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap2.html Many other types of nanites and bulk-proccess nanotechnologies will be invented and used by humans in addition to those mentioned. Admittedly, the examples given for each aria of nanotechnology are from a time which nanotechnology is an mature technology, perhaps decades from now. But nanotechnology is coming on the human scene faster than most people would wish for. All nanotechnology, whether it be the primitive versions or the advanced versions, posses great potential for both constructive and destructive uses. It may be possible to slow down nanotechnology for a few decades but it will be absolutely impossible to hold back nanotechnology for long.

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Rogue Nanites Cause Extinction Rogue nanites will either devour the entire earth or enough ecosystems to cause complete collapse. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap6.html Another serious nanite extinction trap is the rogue nanite trap. Rogue nanites are ordinary "good" nanites that have escaped from their human masters. The most common nanite of this type that always gets a mention in the nanite literature is the rogue dissembler nanite. Dissembler nanites are members of the builder nanite group. Dissembler nanites take things apart to provide the raw material needed to make something. Most advanced nanites will have the abilities of locomotion, self replication, and the ability to extract the energy they need from their environment. They are, in effect, alive. Life (even brainless life) tends to advance, and becoming a rogue nanite would be an advancement over remaining in human control. This escape would not be a conscious action by the nanite but it would have the same effect as a conscious action. The rogue nanite would be free from human control, able to spread throughout the Earth's ecosystem and multiply. If these rogue nanites were successful in the Earth's ecosystem (read: multiply at a rate faster than their depletion rate), they would wreak havoc on the Earth's ecosystem by disassembling everything in their path. It is conceivable that these rogue dissembler nanites could (if no way was found to stop them) destroy all life on Earth (except themselves) by disassembling it. Further, dissembler nanites could render the Earth uninhabitable by disassembling just a few key elements of the Earth's ecosystem, with out having to disassemble the entire upper crust of the Earth.

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Space Solves Bio-Weapons We have to get off the rock to avoid extinction through bio-warfare. World News Forecast February 5 2003 For the growing number of people who have decided Earth is not a safe domicile since Sep 11, a symposium on space colonization is long overdue. The widespread fears of bioterrorism and general mood of insecurity since the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon have given new life and urgency to the notion of living in space. The 1st Symposium on Space Colonization is one of five related space symposia at a conference-cum-trade show organized by the Space Technologies and Applications International Forum. The event brings together representatives of the world's space agencies, militaries and private concerns to swap ideas and explore collaboration opportunities. The other symposia cover nuclear propulsion, human space exploration, next generation space transportation, thermophysics and microgravity. The gloomiest of the supporters of space colonization see it as a means of escaping Armageddon on Planet Earth. Their view holds that the end could arrive gradually from the accumulation of nuclear wastes and atmospheric pollution, or suddenly because of a nuclear cataclysm or a genetically-engineered virus. Special interest groups see space colonization as a means of escaping anything they find unpalatable on earth. The Artemis Project, for one, is a private venture to establish a permanent, self-supporting community on the Moon. Both groups believe governments are moving too slowly to bring space colonization within reach.

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Nano Helps Quantum Theory Nanotechnology will allow huge new strides in quantum theory. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap2.html

One very important aspect of nanotechnology that is many times overlooked by other books and articles that deal with the subject of nanotechnology is: nanotechnology will make common devices that operate by utilizing the laws of quantum mechanics. Nanotechnology will be capable of building architectures so small that the principle forces acting upon these architectures will be quantum-mechanical effects. Some of these quantum level architectures will form the basis of quantum computers, very efficient lasers, very efficient photovoltaic devices...and possibly even devices that can cause an action to occur a great distance away or even in another time (hyper-light drives for spacecraft?). The quantum level devices that can cause an action to occur a great distance away or even in another time, are at this time pure speculation. Quantum computers and very efficient lasers that are physically smaller than the wave length of light they emit, are already a reality, at least in the laboratory. Nanotechnology will make these and other quantum level devises not yet invented, easy to manufacture and bring their operating efficiencies to nearly 100%. Nanotechnology that operates on the quantum mechanical level will have stunning capabilities.

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Space Solves Nano Space colonies are key to surviving the dangers of nanotech. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap6.html

The colonization of space can help us avoid the nanotechnology extinction trap. Nanite detectors will be built into the structure of the space colony from the very beginning and guardian nanites will be added later as an additional layer of protection. On Earth guardian nanites would either interfere with the Earth's ecosystem or be unable to function because of interference by micro-organisms in the Earth's ecosystem. In space, research on potentially dangerous nanite types should be performed only on specially designed nanite research colonies, separated by large distances from any other colony. Earth doesn't have this advantage. Every place on Earth is connected to every place on Earth. The self-contained micro-environments on space colonies will be an protection, in addition to the nanite detectors and the guardian nanites, that would slow and in most cases stop the spread of rogue nanites and nanite weapons. Space is the only place you will want to be when nanotechnology is a mature technology.

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No Hydrogen Fuel Now Hydrogen fuel is too expensive to be effectively produced now. Penner 2002 (S.S., Center for Energy Research August 27, “Steps Toward the Hydrogen Economy”, http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/487.html)

Our current industrial system relies on the use of fossil fuels as primary energy source. Based on market selection of the lowest cost source, hydrogen is produced mostly from the fossil fuels natural gas (48% of the total), heavy oils and naphtha (30%) and coal (18%) and by electrolysis (4%) as a by-product of chlorine production.** Locations of low -cost electricity supplies provide minor additions through electrolysis with electricity generated from fossil or nuclear fuels or at hydroelectric power stations. The hydrogen -production procedures include steam reforming, partial oxidation, as well as plasma pyrolysis, and generally lead to H2 at year 2000 costs of $5 to $15 per GJ of hydrogen energy, i.e. costs of about 3 times or more of the current cost of natural gas. The fossil-fuel-based hydrogen economy is currently undergoing rapid changes because the need to minimize air pollution in our urban centers has served to focus attention on the desirability of replacing gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles by fuel-cell systems. To the extent that this conversion proves to be economically viable, an important step will have been taken in implementing the ideals of the hydrogen economy. During the year 2001, world-wide hydrogen production amounted to about 5 X 1011m 3 under standard conditions and thus carried an energy of combustion equaling about 2% of that supplied by fossil-fuel use.**

Hydrogen fuel isn’t capable of being put into wide use with current infrastructure. Jacques Leslie October 1997 Dawn of the Hydrogen Age Wired magazine http://hotwired.wired.com/collections/space_exploration/5.10_hydrogen1.html Yet shifting to hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars will not be easy. True enough, hydrogen is already used in all sorts of processing, from the hardening of fats and oils - hydrogenation - to, ironically enough, oil refining. But hydrogen, like gasoline, must be manufactured: it bonds so easily with other elements that it doesn't exist naturally on Earth in pure form. The trouble is that while gasoline is sold in 200,000filling stations across the US, the hydrogen infrastructure is minuscule. The result is a chicken-and-egg dilemma: What manufacturers will market hydrogenpowered cars if hydrogen isn't available to drivers? What hydrogen producers will build more plants if hydrogen cars aren't on the road? And without hydrogen fuel, who will buy hydrogenpowered cars?

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A2: There’s Hydrogen Research Now Current hydrogen research won’t solve – it’s still too bad for the environment to be effective. Gary Gallon February 15, 2003 Hydrogen-Fueled Car Wrong Decision http://evworld.com/databases/storybuilder.cfm?storyid=494&subcookie=1 First, the primary sources of today's hydrogen are fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) and as by-products from petrochemical processes. In other words, fuel cell companies are getting their hydrogen from the oil and gas industry. More oil and gas will be needed in order for hydrogen to be stripped out of them. Secondly, stripping hydrogen out of water is energy intensive. Massive amounts of new coal-fired and nuclear electricity will be required to separate hydrogen from water. That means more oil and gas and coal will be needed, not less, to achieve President Bush's clean hydrogen fuel goal. So, while no pollution is generated in the urban areas by the cars burning hydrogen fuel, whole new rural areas will be polluted from new coal-fired, oil and gas-fired, and nuclear-powered electricity plants. This sounds like a scenario right out of Vice President Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy that he negotiated secretly with ENRON and other oil, coal and gas companies. In fact, it will take almost as much BTU-energy to separate, prepare, and store hydrogen from water, as the actual energy that will be generated by the hydrogen fuel.

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Japan Developing Hydrogen Japan is developing hydrogen technology – now is a key time to regain leadership on hydrogen. Toronto Star March 3, 2003 Hydrogen build-up The need for a hydrogen-delivery infrastructure - fuelling stations, long-haul pipelines, and maintenance - puts companies such as Shell Canada and Enbridge Inc. in the power seat. Sensing a "willingness and openness" that didn't exist as recently as two years ago, Rasul hopes to push this sector in a hydrogen-friendly direction. "For Canada, the challenge is how to continue to benefit from an industry it has leadership in," says Rasul. But the gap is narrow ing. He points out Japan, which, as part of its own $2.4 billion commitment toward Kyoto, has launched a government program that could one day see Ballard fuel-cell systems replacing traditional hot-water furnaces in thousands, even millions, of Tokyo and Osaka homes. "The Japanese have come a long way, and I'm very impressed with the progress they've made. Now, we're still ahead, but we have to continue to find a way to stay ahead."

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Fossil Fuels Key to Electricity Fossil fuels are a main source of energy in the U.S. Ann Marie Harmony November 21 2003 Executive Director, CEO, Practical Ocean Energy Management Systems, Inc. Is There Enough Renewable Ocean Energy?

The US consumes roughly 25%, or one quarter, of the world’s annual electrical power output. Between 60 and 80% of all electricity outside the United States powers lightbulbs. The Department of Energy (DOE) found that lighting accounts for about 7% of total energy use in the U.S. (electricity, natural gas, gasoline, etc.). 75% of the energy used in North America comes from the burning of non-renewable fossil fuels. North American homes alone use over $40 billion worth of fuel and $75 billion worth of electricity every year. That energy use emits 25,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, per house, per year.

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Hydrogen Fuel Key to Space Hydrogen is the best type of fuel for space travel. NASA December 14 2003, Propulsion Systems of the Future VASIMR is a plasma-based propulsion system. An electric power source is used to ionize fuel into plasma. Electric fields heat and accelerate the plasma while the magnetic fields direct the plasma in the proper direction as it is ejected from the engine, creating thrust for the spacecraft. The engine can even vary the amount of thrust generated, allowing it to increase or decrease its acceleration. It even features an "afterburner" mode that sacrifices fuel efficiency for additional speed. Possible fuels for the VASIMR engine could include hydrogen, helium, and deuterium. The use of hydrogen as the fuel for the VASIMR project has many side benefits, according to researcher Franklin Chang-Diaz. In addition to being the director of the Advanced Space Propulsion Laboratory, Chang-Diaz is an astronaut who has flown into space on seven missions, more than any other NASA astronaut. "We're likely to find hydrogen pretty much anywhere we go in the solar system," he said. What this means is that a VASIMR -powered spacecraft could be launched with only enough fuel to get to its destination, such as Mars, and then pick up more hydrogen upon arrival to serve as fuel for the return trip home. Another benefit of hydrogen fuel is that hydrogen is the best known radiation shield, so the fuel for the VASIMR engine could also be used to protect the crew from harmful effects of radiation exposure during the flight.

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Hydrogen Solves Fuel Crisis Hydrogen fuel will solve the worldwide energy crisis. RAPID June 16, 2003 EU unveils vision for the energy source of the 21st century: hydrogen and fuel cell technology

Because hydrogen and fuel cells will provide Europe with the opportunity to solve its energy, climate change and air pollution problems. World-wide demand for energy is forecast to grow at the alarming rate of 1.8 % per year for the period 2000-2030. Fossil fuel is confined to a few areas of the world, and as those reserves are diminishing, they will become increasingly expensive. At the same time, environmental needs demand a reduction in greenhouse gasses and toxic emissions. Hydrogen technology can contribute to security and diversity of energy supply, greenhouse gas reductions, air quality, industrial competitiveness, and to meeting the growing energy demand in developing countries.

Hydrogen is key to solve foreign oil dependence. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall April 2003 How Hydrogen Can Save America http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/hydrogen_pr.html

There's only one way to insulate the US from the corrosive power of oil, and that's to develop an alternative energy resource that's readily available domestically. Looking at the options - coal, natural gas, wind, water, solar, and nuclear - there's only one thing that can provide a wholesale substitute for foreign oil within a decade: hydrogen. Hydrogen stores energy more effectively than current batteries, burns twice as efficiently in a fuel cell as gasoline does in an internal combustion engine (more than making up for the energy required to produce it), and leaves only water behind. It's plentiful, clean, and - critically - capable of powering cars. Like manned space flight in 1961, hydrogen power is proven but primitive, a technology ripe for acceleration and then deployment. (For that, thank the Apollo program itself, which spurred the development of early fuel cells.)

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Hydrogen Fuel Solves Pollution Hydrogen fuel solves the pollution caused by fossil fuel burning. Jacques Leslie October 1997 Dawn of the Hydrogen Age Wired magazine http://hotwired.wired.com/collections/space_exploration/5.10_hydrogen1.html

At Ballard, the exhaust-drinking routine has grown so tiresome that when I ask for a sip, Paul Lancaster, Ballard's treasurer, doesn't even offer me a glass: he suggests I cup my hands under the bus's exhaust pipe. The pipe points straight down, presumably because its effluence is not a noxious gas that must be spewed into the atmosphere in hopes that it will dissipate. I bend over, and, within a few seconds, I collect several teaspoons of warm, clear liquid. As I begin to drink, I try to imagine a mountain stream, but the water is disappointingly bland. "Like distilled water," Lancaster explains, and I realize that what I'm drinking is, in a sense, exactly that - the pure product of the union of hydrogen, the element that powers fuel cells, and oxygen in the engine. In some engine designs, even the exhaust water becomes an asset, recirculated to aid in internal processes. One tenet of the coming hydrogen age, according to businessman-cum-fuel cell visionary Joe Maceda, is that "pollution is a measure of inefficiency, and inefficiency is lost profit."

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Hydrogen Increases Hegemony Hydrogen power leads to democracy promotion, helping less developed countries, and increased US hegemony. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall April 2003 How Hydrogen Can Save America http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/hydrogen_pr.html Imagine how the hydrogen economy will change geopolitics. OPEC will no longer be a factor in foreign policy. Relations with oil-producing nations will be based on common interests. The US will be free to promote democracy in countries like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar will be dismantled and naval forces in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf sent home. Even at that point, the transition will be far from complete. It will take decades to get every conventional car off the road, and even longer before hydrogen can be mass-produced using clean energy. In the long run, automobile fuel cells themselves might be tied to the grid, making it possible for vehicles to feed power into the system rather than simply consume energy. That is, electrical meters might run backward some of the time. Futurist Amory Lovins envisions a peer-topeer energy network in which spot power is distributed to users from the nearest source, be it a utility station or a station wagon. Such a system would make the grid more efficient and power less expensive. This cheaper energy could be sold in bulk to businesses looking to cut costs, creating further momentum for the new fuel system. In time, US fuel cell and hydrogen -extraction technology will provide enormous opportunities for developing nations like China and India, which will be the fastest-growing consumers of energy in coming decades. Because they don't have an adequate petroleum-based infrastructure today, these nations will be quick to take full advantage of hydrogen, leapfrogging developed countries. Cheaper than oil, the new fuel will empower poor countries, reducing their trade deficits and security threats. The stakes are higher today than they were in Sputnik's wake. Unlike space travel, energy independence bears directly on US self-determination. The dangerous turmoil in the Middle East, the growing national security budget, the promise of technology that needs only a financial push - all these things make this the right moment to launch an Apollo-scale commitment to hydrogen power. The fate of the republic depends on it.

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Hydrogen Solves Dedevelopment Hydrogen power leads to a change in the world where we can have higher standards of living without impacting the environment. Jacques Leslie October 1997 Dawn of the Hydrogen Age Wired magazine http://hotwired.wired.com/collections/space_exploration/5.10_hydrogen1.html In addition, just as computer telecommunications has promoted information decentralization and dematerialization, fuel cells promise to untie energy consumers from centralized power generators - you might say that energy wants to be free. "The information revolution and the coming energy revolution are similar in that we are using human ingenuity to replace energy and raw materials," says Joseph J. Romm, acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the US Department of Energy. "We can use information technology to avoid travel and transportation, and we can use energy technology to reduce energy consumption, pollution, and our use of natural resources. Both revolutions represent a fundamental transition to a world in which we are not resource constrained, yet we have a higher standard of living."

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A2: EU Relations The U.S. and Europe are working together on hydrogen technology now in spite of differences. New York Times June 17, 2003, Europe and U.S. Will Share Research on Hydrogen Fuel By PAUL MELLER The European Union and the United States agreed today to pool their research efforts into hydrogen fuel cells, despite their widely differing views on what the technology will mean for energy policy. While the European Union views the fuel cells as a way to harness renewable power sources like solar or wind energy, the United States is focusing on ways to use it along with fossil fuels and nuclear energy. "This agreement lays out the framework for our two entities to collaborate on a matter important to both the U.S. and the European Union: hydrogen research," said the United States secretary of energy, Spencer Abraham, at a meeting today with his European counterparts in Brussels. Mr. Abraham said other countries would be invited to join the cooperation agreement later. "The United States is looking forward to working together on a broad international basis, including countries such as Japan," he said.

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Renewables Solve Poverty Renewable energy is key to solve poverty and energy in the developing world. Adrian Bradbrook April, 2002 Bonython Professor of Law, University of Adelaide “Green Power Schemes: The Need for a Legislative Base” Melbourne University Law Review In the past decade, the need to ensure a greater utilisation of renewable energy resources has assumed a much greater urgency, both in Australia and other developed countries, as a result of the climate change issue. Research has shown that between 57 and 75 per cent of all anthropogenic atmospheric carbon emissions (depending on each country's energy mix) is due to the burning of fossil fuels for electricity generation. n13 In contrast, apart from a very minor carbon release associated with the construction of renewable energy plants, the use of renewable energy entirely eliminates carbon emissions. Thus, for all effective purposes, there can be no final resolution of global warming unless the energy issue associated with electricity is addressed both nationally and internationally. Renewable energy development is also vital from the standpoint of sustainable development, particularly in developing countries. This issue was addressed by the United Nations in its recent report, World Energy Assessment. The report found that the deployment of renewable energy resources is essential to ensure long-term availability of energy services, to reduce poverty, to expand access to modern energy services and to ensure rural electrification. n14

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OTEC Increases Fishing OTEC feeds plankton which feed fish. The Weekend Australian September 22, 2001 Feed the food that feeds fish to feed people by Stephen Brook The plan by the students and Sydney University professor Ian Jones will be presented to the Japanese Government in November, and will be examined in detail by academics and philanthropists who may invest some of the $600 million needed to build a barge to house the necessary equipment. The process, known as ocean thermal energy conversion, creates food for phytoplankton, itself a ready food source for stocks of fish. Floating ocean nourishment plants on barges over deep water would produce ammonia, a compound of hydrogen and nitrogen which can be absorbed by plants as energy.

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OTEC Solves Energy OTEC is more energy efficient than other current technologies. Marshall T. Savage, 1993 founder of the First Millennial Foundation The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, pg. 33

The pulsing heart of Aquarius is an OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Converter). The OTEC produces electrical power by exploiting the temperature differential between warm surface waters and cold deep waters. Aquarius has a long tap root that penetrates to the cold deep waters of the sea. By taking in warm water from the surface and sucking up cold water from the depths, OTECs generate electrical power. Most power generating facilities conform to the zero -sum rules. They consume more energy than they produce. A typical nuclear power plant consumes 3000 calories of energy for every 1000 it produces. This is not unlike the thermodynamics of a cow who consumes three pounds of grain for every pound of milk she produces. Unlike conventional power plants, OTECs are net energy producers. An OTEC consumes only 700 calories of energy for every 1000 it produces.

OTEC consumes energy only from the sun, so it’s effectively infinite. Marshall T. Savage, 1993 founder of the First Millennial Foundation The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, pg. 33-34

This is a characteristic that OTECs share with most solar powered devices, including green plants. The OTEC consumes no fuel, so the only energy the system requires is that needed to construct and operate it. Byvirtue of its ability to absorb solar energy, and to use that energy to impose higher states of order on the materials in its environment, the OTEC, like a living plant, is able to operate in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics. Of course, the law is not violated in the broader universe, since the sun is providing the energy, and it is running down, just as the law demands. But it will be a long time before we have to include the fusion engine of the sun in our calculations of local entropy. For the time being, we can consider sunlightas a free good, outside the limits of our earthbound system of energy accounting.

OTECs can draw energy from the ocean and can produce ten times as much energy as all other methods combined. Marshall T. Savage, 1993 founder of the First Millennial Foundation The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, pg. 35

All heat engines function on the simple proposition that energy will flow from a warmer to a cooler body. In conventional power plants, the temperature difference is hundreds of degrees. An OTEC operates on a temperature difference of only 40 degrees. In the tropical seas, surface waters, bathed in the intense light of the equatorial sun, are heated to 80°+ F. (26.6° C.); deep waters, condemned to centuries in utter darkness, are cooled to 40°F (4.44° C.). This difference in temperature is enough to run a thermal engine, albeit at low efficiency. (The greater the difference in temperature, the more efficient the engine.) A typical fossil fuel plant will convert 40% of the energy available in the fuel to electricity.27 An OTEC, will convert only 2.5% of the available energy to electricity.28 Usually, this would seem a ridiculously low level of efficiency not warranting any consideration as a realistic source of energy-but there is nothing usual about the sea. At sea, even very low levels of thermal efficiency are rendered practical by the sheer size of the available resource. Expressed in electrical terms, the energy resource of the oceans represents a renewable power base of over 200 million megawatts.29 By comparison, the global installed electrical capacity in 1978 was only one million megawatts.30 In other words, the total electrical output of mankind represents only a half of one percent of the power latent in the world's oceans. Even at very low levels of net efficiency, OTECs could produce ten times as much electrical energy as every other current power source combined.

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OTEC Solves Energy There is enough potential energy from OTEC to replace all other forms of power, while avoiding warming and pollution. Patrick Takahashi and Andrew Trenka, 1996 Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and Pacific International Center for High Technology Research, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, , pg. 1-2 The oceans occupy almost three-quarters of the earth's surface and represent an enormous source of nonpolluting, inexhaustible energy. They can provide an alternative energy source that can be utilized to offset reliance on combustion of fossil fuels and their resultant environmental problems of global warming and air pollution. While many of the major developed nations have conducted exploratory research and development, and even installed a few commercial facilities, the total operational power available, with the exception of a French tidal power plant, is far less than 100 megawatts. Conversely, the projected available ocean power far exceeds the ultimate energy consumption of mankind, making this option extremely attractive, especially when the environmental implications are considered.

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OTEC Solves Fossil Fuels OTEC has the potential to replace fossil fuels. THOMAS H. DANIEL, September 2000 (Scientific/Technical Director of the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INTERNATIONAL, Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion: An Extensive, Environmentally Benign Source of Energy for the Future) OTEC represents a tremendous potential energy resource for the future. Figure 4 shows contours of the annual average temperature difference between the sea surface and 1000 m depth for the world ocean. OTEC is feasible with temperature differences of 20ºC or greater, so all of the area between these contours in Figure 4, i.e. most of the area of the tropical ocean, is available for extraction of energy. Though the relatively small available temperature difference limits the achievable thermodynamic efficiency to less than 3%, various methods yield estimates that about 10 TW (1013 watts) of continuous electrical output could be extracted from this resource without significantly changing the thermal structure of the ocean[1]. The sun continues to replace heat removed from the surface layer, and the tremendous mass of the cold deep ocean water (the average temperature of the ocean is 3.5ºC!) represents an essentially inexhaustible heat sink. OTEC could thus potentially supply most of the present energy consumption for all human activities, which was estimated at 386 EJ/yr in 1997 (1 EJ = 1018 J, 386 EJ/yr ˜ 1.22 x 1013 W = 12.2 TW)[6]. Other non-nuclear alternatives to fossil fuel energy sources, such as hydroelectric, wind, photovoltaic, geothermal, waves and tides each have, with presently available technology, at least two orders of magnitude less potential than OTEC[7].

OTEC would replace fossil fuels for developing nations. Robert Cohen APRIL 1, 1992 Ph.D. from Cornell University REVITALIZING THE U.S. OCEAN ENERGY R&D PROGRAM TESTIMONY TO THE ENERGY AND WATER DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE http://csf.colorado.edu/authors/Cohen.Robert/Revitalizingoc.energyR&D.html Attractive early OTEC electrical markets are found in land-based locations where OTEC-derived electricity can be generated on shore and substituted for presently oil-derived electricity. Such U.S. OTEC markets include Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands, and there is a large, near-term OTEC electrical market in many developing countries having access to the major oceans. A Science Applications International Corp. study report by Dunbar (Potential for ocean thermal energy conversion as a renewable energy source for developing nations, 1981) documents many attractive early markets where OTEC-derived electricity could be substituted for presently oil derived electicity or used to expand the electrical supply. That report indicates that there are about 60 developing nations -- including Brazil-- with access to a viable ocean thermal energy resource within their exclusive economic zones. The Dunbar study also identified about 30 territories of developed nations -- such as Puerto Rico, Tahiti, and the Virgin Islands -which are similarly situated. For each megawatt of existing oil-derived electricity replaced by OTEC generation, about 40 barrels per day of oil would be conserved. An early market penetration of some 50,000 megawatts could be achieved in such locations, amounting to a daily global savings of 2 million barrels of oil. Also, likely coproducts of OTEC plants and of OTEC technology have considerable potential in developing countries. They include coastal cooling, fresh water production, mariculture, solar ponds, and bottoming cycles.

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OTEC Solves Nuclear Power OTEC would make nuclear power unnecessary. Robert Cohen February 1994 Ph.D. from Cornell University Reflections on the stat us of federal ocean energy R&D in the United States http://csf.colorado.edu/authors/Cohen.Robert/otecfunding-94.html There is a further complication, which is more precisely a form of demonology, to somehow account for why the Reagan and Bush Administrations singled out the ocean energy budget and have tried for the past twelve years (and have almost succeeded) to zero it. Frankly, although I have hesitated to say so in public, I've frequently suspected -- ut am unable to document -- that the U.S. nuclear establishment (as reflected in the negative bias of the Reagan and Bush Administrations toward OTEC) opposes an active U.S. program to develop OTEC, a perceivable baseload alternative to nuclear. Note the parallelism of the enclosed articles regarding the British wave energy programme to a possible U.S. conspiracy against developing OTEC technology. The article from The Ecologist documents allegations that the British nuclear lobby opposed British funding of R&D on the renewables. Indeed, in at least one of his writings, Alvin Weinberg recognizes OTEC as the major potential competitor of nuclear when it comes to the really large global energy sources. Also, I've sensed a subjective antagonism toward OTEC technology on the part of many (but not all) nuclear energy people I've encountered, consistent with there being a possible covert conspiracy against funding OTEC. In any event, I know of no valid rationale as to why the Reagan and Bush Administrations tried to zero the ocean energy program, considering that OTEC is potentially one of only several energy sources that have the potential for ultimately supplying a substantial fraction of global energy needs. Accordingly, I think it is important that the United States proceed on an R&D path to explore OTEC viability and reduce the costs of OTEC technology as rapidly as possible so as to improve and hasten its commercial prospects. Following the expenditure on OTEC R&D of about a quarter of a billion dollars, I see no demonstrable technological show-stoppers so far, and so far OTEC technology looks like it will be economic for certain markets (defined above) in the relatively near term and has good prospects for becoming economic in the longer-term markets.

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OTEC Solves Global Warming OTEC counteracts the negative effects of fossil fuels and solves global warming. Maria Bechtel and Erik Netz 1997 OTEC - Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion One of the most critical problems of the next century will certainly be global warming. OTEC is unique among all energy generation the technologies in that not only does it generate no carbon dioxide whatsoever, but it actually counteracts the effects of fossil fuel use. OTEC involves bringing up mineral-rich water from the depths of the oceans. This water will promote growth of photosynthetic phytoplankton. These organisms will absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into their bodies, and when they die, or when the animals, which eat them, die, the carbon dioxide will be sequestered in the depths of the oceans. The effect is not small. Each 100megawatt OTEC plant will cause the absorption of an amount of carbon dioxide equivalent to that produce by fossil fuel power plant of roughly the same capacity. No other energy technology ever imagined can do this. OTEC plants construction, with laying pipes in coastal waters may cause localised damage to reefs and near-shore marine ecosystems.

National intervention to increase renewable energy use solves global warming. Adrian Bradbrook April, 2002 Bonython Professor of Law, University of Adelaide “Green Power Schemes: The Need for a Legislative Base” Melbourne University Law Review In the past decade, the need to ensure a greater utilisation of renewable energy resources has assumed a much greater urgency, both in Australia and other developed countries, as a result of the climate change issue. Research has shown that between 57 and 75 per cent of all anthropogenic atmospheric carbon emissions (depending on each country's energy mix) is due to the burning of fossil fuels for electricity gen eration. n13 In contrast, apart from a very minor carbon release associated with the construction of renewable energy plants, the use of renewable energy entirely eliminates carbon emissions. Thus, for all effective purposes, there can be no final resolution of global warming unless the energy issue associated with electricity is addressed both nationally and internationally. Renewable energy development is also vital from the standpoint of sustainable development, particularly in developing countries. This issue was addressed by the United Nations in its recent report, World Energy Assessment. The report found that the deployment of renewable energy resources is essential to ensure long-term availability of energy services, to reduce poverty, to expand access to modern energy services and to ensure rural electrification. n14

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OTEC Solves Water Shortages OTEC produces fresh water and prevents damage to the environment. Braun 2003 (Harry, Chairman of the Hydrogen Political Action Committee June 18, “SAVING OCEAN ECOSYSTEMS WHILE MAKING AMERICA ENERGY INDEPENDENT” http://www.phoenixproject.net/releases/prpdf/oceand.pdf)

OTEC systems use the solar-heated seawater near the surface of the oceans and the very cold water that is about 1,500 feet below the surface, to generate electricity. Because these elements are constant, OTEC systems can operate 24-houyrs a day, 7 days a week, regardless of weather conditions. And because the cold deep water is nutrient -rich, once it is brought to the surface, it can then react with the sunlight allowing the populations of fish and other sea life to explode. Even more amazing is the fact that once the cold water is used by the OTEC ship to condense the vaporized solar-heated sea water that is located near the surface, immense amounts of fresh water is produced as a by-product. As such, the deployment of these sea-based solar hydrogen energy systems fundamentally protect the ocean ecosystems from over-fishing and oil spills, and providing vast quantities pollution-free hydrogen, seafood and fresh water in the process. OTEC was initially conceived in the 1880s by the French physicist, d’Arsonval, and the first OTEC power plant was build on Cuba in the 1930s. The OTEC ship concept on the left below was developed in the 1980s by the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. The OTEC design on the right was developed by TRW, and other OTEC designs have developed by Grumman, Lockheed and the University of Hawaii. Note that all of the OTEC designs are characterized by a cold water pipe that is used to pump up the near freezing water found deep below the surface.

OTEC can produce large quantities of fresh water. Maria Bechtel and Erik Netz 1997 OTEC - Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion As the peoples of the world grown more prosperous, there will be a demand for higher quality food. Industry agriculture and commerce will require more fresh water. It is possible to use this resource to produce fresh water instead of producing electric power if there is a large ask for fresh water. The fresh water appearances when the cold water is put into contact with the vapour from the warm water stream in a large box. The vapours condense on the secondary heat exchangers, leaving the salt behind the warm water stream. The yield of fresh water from a 100-megawatt power plant would be approximately 33,000,000 cubic meter per year, comparable to a flow of a medium-sized river. This is enough to support the city of Norrköping with water during a whole year. This water is completely salt-free, suitable for all agricultural, commercial, industrial and domestic uses. Besides desalinised water you also can get by-products as ammonia, methanol. Hydrogen can be electrolysed from seawater and mixed with nitrogen to from ammonia for easy transportation from the floating plants.

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OTEC Solves Water Shortages OTEC puts out fresh water as a bi-product – this is as efficient as desalination in creating fresh water. Aquarius Rising February 1, 1998,, planned research and eco-tourist facility of the First Millennial Foundation, http://www.trellis.demon.co.uk/otec.html, accessed August 8, 2003.

The first bi-product is nutrient rich cold water from the deep ocean. The cold "waste" water from the OTEC is utilised in two ways. Primarily the cold water is discharged into large contained ponds where multi-species mariculture is performed, producing harvest yields which far surpass naturally occurring cold water upwelling zones, just like agriculture on land. The cold water is also available as chilled water for either air conditioning systems or more importantly for refrigeration systems, most likely linked with creating cold storage facilities for preserving seafood. When the cold water has been used it is released to the deep ocean. The second bi-product is fresh water. A small 1 MW OTEC is capable of producing some 4,500 cubic meters of fresh water per day, enough to supply a population of 20,000 with fresh water. OTEC-produced fresh water compares very favourably with standard desalination plants, in terms of both quality and production costs.

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OTEC Creates Hydrogen OTEC can produce hydrogen fuel. Vega 1999 (Luis, Ph.D, http://www.otecnews.org/articles/vega/12_hydrogen_production.html) Several means of energy transport and delivery from plants deployed throughout the tropical oceans have been considered. OTEC energy could be transported via electrical, chemical, thermal and electrochemical carriers. The technical evaluation of non-electrical carriers leads to the consideration of hydrogen produced using electricity and desalinated water generated with OTEC technology. The product would be transported, from the OTEC plantship located at distances of 1,600 km (selected to represent the nominal distance from the tropical oceans to major industrialized centers throughout the world) to the port facility in liquid form to be primarily used as a transportation fuel. A 100 MW-net plantship can be configured to yield (by electrolysis) 1300 kg per hour of liquid hydrogen. Unfortunately, the production cost of liquid hydrogen delivered to the harbor would be equivalent to a $250 barrel-of-crude-oil (approximately 10 times present cost). The situation is similar for the other energy carriers considered in the literature. Presently, the only energy carrier that is cost-effective for OTEC energy is the submarine power cable. This situation might be different if the external costs of energy production and consumption are accounted for.

OTEC can solve much of the world’s hydrogen needs. Eric Bender August 13, 2001 Oceans of Power Is ocean thermal energy conversion finally ready to pump up? http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_bender081301.asp

Further off on the horizon, Krock suggests that OTEC plantships could crank out hydrogen as the world economy starts to shift toward that fuel. Using the cold water as a heat sink could aid the process of liquefying hydrogen, he points out. Robert Cohen, a Boulder, CO, consultant who was program manager for the Department of Energy's ocean energy program, retains his enthusiasm for ocean thermal energy. "OTEC could eventually provide a significant fraction of global energy needs," Cohen says, both by generating electricity and in creating energy-intensive fuels such as hydrogen.

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Companies Will do OTEC Companies want to develop OTEC – the only thing stopping them is the government. B.C. Weare, 2003. "U.S. OTEC Regulations not Budging." Science; Vol. 387, pp. 947-949. For years commercial industries have asked the United States government for approval to develop Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion facilities, and for years they have been ignored. It is a silent atrocity as businesses are being denied the right to develop OTEC facilities, the companies realize the implications of running out of fossil fuels and they are attempting to take preventative measures but the United States government is sheltering them from the rights they need… Some companies trusted that the U.S. would quickly remove restrictions on OTEC and made facilities to be run under U.S. mandates and under U.S. control assuming the mandates would be lifted and that the companies could begin profiting off of their facilities. In contrast, the United States has still not lifted their 1981 mandates, and all but one of these OTEC facilities has been shut down.

The plan is a green energy policy that will be accepted easily by businesses – past examples prove businesses will go along with it. Adrian Bradbrook April, 2002 Bonython Professor of Law, University of Adelaide “Green Power Schemes: The Need for a Legislative Base” Melbourne University Law Review In contrast, green power schemes have been introduced without legislation and political controversy. Such schemes have empowered proponents of sustainable energy development by enabling them to make a personal contribution to further the cause. They have also enabled industries and businesses that enter into a scheme to promote themselves in their publicity as environmentally friendly. Such schemes have proved to be popular where they have been introduced and have met or even exceeded the initial expectations of their proponents. n39 Green power schemes are seen to be consistent with and a natural extension of other 'green' schemes introduced in the field of product labelling, packaging and advertising. n40 Being voluntary in nature, such schemes are also consistent with the general approach in a number of developed countries, including Australia, of 'light-handed regulation' in environmental management and with the preferred approach of seeking voluntary agreements to resolve environmental problems. n41 This preference for voluntary agreements appears to be particularly true in the energy context. The most recent illustration is the 1999 agreement with the building industry, represented by the Australian Building Energy Council, to [*23] encourage voluntary best practices in energy efficient building design, construction and operation by way of a code of practice. n42 This approach can be contrasted with that in the United States, where environmental solutions are almost invariably imposed by legislation. n43

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Government Can Encourage OTEC If OTEC is started on a small scale, more businesses will see the benefits and follow. Thomas H. Daniel, January 2000 (Ph.D., The Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority “Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC)” UN Atlas of the Oceans”) OTEC has tremendous potential to supply the world’s energy. This potential is estimated to be about 1013 watts of baseload power generation [20]. However, OTEC systems must overcome the significant hurdle of high initial capital costs for construction and the perception of significant risk compared to conventional fossil fuel plants. These obstacles can be overcome only by progressing beyond the present experimental testing and evaluation of small-scale demonstration plants to the construction of pilot-sized and, eventually, commerical-sized plants to demonstrate economic feasibility. As a UN Development Program study determined, the confidence to build commercial-sized OTEC plants will not develop until investors have the demonstration of a 5-megawatt pilot plant operating for 5 years. This demonstration will require a significant investment with little potential near-term return. For the near-term future development of OTEC systems, isolated niche markets with high conventional energy costs and a need for energy independence may provide a viable venue for market penetration in the size range of 1 MW to 15 MW. These may provide the demonstration required for penetration into larger markets where economically competitive plants of 50 - 400 MW will be viable.

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DOE Can Solve The DOE can commercialize OTEC and make it widely used. Robert Cohen June 21, 2001 PUBLIC COMMENTS TO THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY At a DOE hearing in Denver, Colorado

DOE should finish the job of commercializing OTEC. The United States still has the opportunity to supply leadership and keep ahead of foreign competition. OTEC technology has the potential for supplying a significant fraction of global energy needs in an economically viable and environmentally acceptable fashion, while adding diversity to our energy mix. The United States cannot afford to ignore that potential.

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A2: Too Expensive for Businesses OTEC will be competitive with fossil and nuclear power. Kobayashi 2002 (Hiroki SP Project Team, Hitachi Zosen Corporation October 17, “Water” from the Ocean with OTEC”) A new era in the technology of OTEC has come. Although the density of the energy is comparatively poor, the ocean provides us a huge amount of thermal energy. Today, the new OTEC technology makes it possible to extract the energy practically from the ocean. The area suitable for OTEC ranges around the world from the tropics to semi-tropics. An advantage of the OTEC technology should be emphasized on not only its tremendous potential for power generation but also the convenient feature that can disperse the power plant with proper cost of the electricity generation. The cost will become competitive with that of the conventional fossil fuel burning power plant s as well as nuclear in the near future.

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A2: No Locations Anywhere in a tropical zone will work for OTEC – that’s 60 million square kilometers worth of space. Richard Crews December 28 1997 OTEC Sites http://www.trellis.demon.co.uk/reports/otec_sites.html OTECs can be sited anywhere across about 60 million square kilometers (23 million square miles) of tropical oceans-anywhere there is deep (and, therefore, cold) water lying under warm surface water. This generally means at latitudes within about 20 or 25 degrees of the equatorvery roughly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. (For meteorological reasons this zone is somewhat contracted along the west coasts of continents and expanded along the east coasts.) Surface water in these regions, warmed by the sun, generally stays at 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit) or above. Ocean water more than 1,000 meters (0.6 miles) below the surface is generally at about four degrees C (39 degrees F). Since the average ocean depth is about 4,000 meters (2.5 miles), there is a vast reservoir of cold deep water under tropical skies-some 180 million cubic kilometers (43 million cubic miles). And even this inconceivably vast resource is constantly being renewed by deep cold-water flows from the polar regions. The warmth of the surface water is constantly renewed by the heat of the Sun. The tropical ocean surface functions as an efficient solar collector. Over 90 percent of the radiant energy that falls on it is absorbed and serves to warm the water. The vastness of this energy resource can be appreciated by the realization that the absorbed solar energy per day is equivalent to over 1,000 times the current worldwide human energy consumption.

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A2: Causes Global Cooling Even if all of the world’s energy needs were powered by OTEC, it would only reduce sea temperatures by less than 1 percent. Braun 2002 (Harry, Chairman of the Hydrogen Political Action Committee, September 20, “OTEC CAN SAVE THE OCEANS”)

It follows that all of the impending environmental problems that will result if those remaining fossil fuels are extracted, shipped and burned could be avoided. Moreover, professor Zener calculated that even if 100 percent of the world's energy needs were provided by OTEC systems, and even assuming the entire world was consuming energy at the rate that the U.S. does, the surface temperature of the tropical oceans would only be lowered by less than one degree Centigrade. Given the current concerns regarding global warming, this slight drop in ocean temperatures could another important by-product of the large-scale deployment of OTEC systems.

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Politically Unpopular Energy policy results in political gridlock due to opposing interests. John D. Podesta August 2003 VISITING PROFESSOR OF LAW AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER “The Future of Energy Policy” Foreign Affairs

Unfortunately, energy policymaking in the United States in recent years has been neither decisive nor strategic. U.S. energy policy is reminiscent of Mark Twain's quip about the weather: everyone talks about it, but no one does anything. This inertia has deep roots. Vested interests -in the oil, utility, and transportation industries, for example -- have been powerful economic and political players, protecting the status quo and brooking little interference from the outside. Similarly, the environmental lobby has proved itself able to block proposals it opposes but less successful in advancing initiatives it favors. As a consequence, little progress has been made toward breaking the gridlock.

Hydrogen power is too new to be politically popular. Inside Energy June 16, 2003 NAS panel hears variety of viewpoints on producing, using hydrogen energy by David Jones He noted that obstacles include technology barriers (inadequate on-board storage systems for hydrogen, and prices for hydrogen and fuel cells that far exceed the cost of gasoline and internal combustion engines) and economic and institutional barriers (perceived risk of hydrogen technology, lack of uniform standards and lack of awareness of hydrogen and its benefits). Public concerns about energy security and automobile emissions are not enough to bring hydrogen energy into the mainstream. ''I don't think we'll ride a wave of [desire for] public benefits. We have to have industry make money off of hydrogen,'' he told panel members, adding that at this point, ''the technology is too immature and too inferior to what people are used to.''

There is opposition to any changes in energy sources. Jacques Leslie October 1997 Dawn of the Hydrogen Age Wired magazine http://hotwired.wired.com/collections/space_exploration/5.10_hydrogen1.html

The irony is that for all of this technology's potential benefits, the one thing it notably lacks is strong public support. As William Hoagland, president of the fledgling advocacy group Hydrogen 2000, points out, "There are a lot of political and other forces supporting the conventional fuel structure, and we don't have a hydrogen industry or a public constituency asking for change." The US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel cell research and development over several decades, but in recent years, as that investment hasfinally borne fruit, the public perception - well represented in Congress - is that fuel cells are a stagnant technology. "The last few years have created a lag between what fuel cells can do, what funding ought to be, and what everybody's understanding of them is," Romm says.

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Increases Economy We solve for uncertainty over global warming, which was hurting business confidence. John D. Podesta August 2003 VISITING PROFESSOR OF LAW AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER “The Future of Energy Policy” Foreign Affairs Uncertainty is the bane of long-term investors, and investment in such technologies today is discouraged by corporate uncertainty about climate change. Many U.S. companies -particularly those with operations in other countries -- are prepared to embark on aggressive and innovative strategies to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. But without a market signal to justify this course, they wait. Meanwhile, investments in carbon-intensive facilities such as coal-fired power plants are held back in the United States by the specter of significant carbon costs in the future, which are surely coming.

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Decreases Hegemony When OTEC becomes viable worldwide it will cause other countries to replace the United States in control of energy supplies, which will destroy our hegemony. Helfferich 1991 (Carla, April 24, “The Someday Energy Barons” http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF10/1027.html)

The Alaska Natural Energy Institute's newsletter crossed my desk the other day, and set me thinking. ANEI apparently believes that civilized life will be possible after oil is gone, and that intelligent life exists right now ---that is, people are smart enough to develop alternative energy technologies while they still have oil to burn. I hope both are true, but my musings ran instead toward post -petroleum geopolitics: What corners of the world will replace the Middle East as global powers controlling the new energy resources? Answering that question requires predicting what the new resources are likely to be. If coal or natural gas replaces oil as fuel and chemical feedstock of choice, the United States (especially Alaska) will be well off. We have abundant supplies of both coal and natural gas. But if worldwide concerns--and regulations---clamp down on greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants, those faithful old combustibles won't look so good. Then, replacing names like Qatar or Bahrain in discussions of global energy leaders, talk may turn to Raratonga or Pukapuka. In the United States, Texas and Alaska may take a back seat to Hawaii. Thanks to their location, these Pacific islands are bathed in warm waters, with sea- surface temperatures near 24°C (75°F). But they are also surprisingly close to cold water. Chilly salt water, consistently near temperatures of 4°C (39°F), flows nearby at the bottom of the deep ocean. With essentially unlimited supplies of seawater at two different temperatures, many fortunate islands are perfectly situated to take advantage of ocean thermal energy conversion. Taylor A. Pryor, a government planner from Cook Islands, explained this OTEC technology informally in the March/April issue of Pacific Magazine. Big pipes are sunk so their deep ends lie in the cold water, another pipe taps surface waters "so both warm and cold seawater can be pumped ashore. On shore is a structure housing two heat exchangers---one a condenser, the other an evaporator---plus a turbogenerator. Inside the exchangers is ammonia, a volatile substance that will vaporize at 24 degrees and liquefy at 4 degrees. When it vaporizes, there is a modest pressure increase, which is what can be induced to drive the turbine. Once that work is done, the ammonia is chilled, returned to its liquid form and the cycle begins again." Pryor wasn't selling a science-fiction scheme. An experimental OTEC plant is working right now on the island of Hawaii. It's discussed in some detail in the March/April issue of another magazine, Sea Frontiers. That article indicates the experiment isn't a perfect success; the cost of electricity generated in the process depends on the life cycle of the equipment, and no one yet knows how long the plant components will last. But even optimistic estimates come out with kilowatt-hour costs higher than those for standard oil-burning generators consuming $20 a barrel oil. However, the Hawaiian OTEC plant generates more than plain electricity, and its byproducts are valuable. Most of them are luxury foods in high demand--even salmon thrive in the cold, clean, but nutrient -rich water from the deep sea. Ocean Farms of Hawaii, a neighboring commercial venture using OTEC's cold sea water, estimates eventual salmon production of 4 million pounds a year. Such pricey products improve OTEC economics, but don't turn OTEC sites into international energy exporters. However, as Taylor Pryor noted, OTEC-generated electricity can be used to split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is top candidate for ultimate fuel, what we'll use when everything else is gone, and the subject of extensive efforts to make it useful sooner. (The Alaska Natural Energy Institute, for example, is presently organizing the world's first hydrogen-powered vehicles competition.) Someday, supertankers loaded with transportable forms of hydrogen may sail from the South Pacific, the new energy capital of the world.

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A2: Private Actor CP Perm solves best – combination of public and private interests is best for energy policy. John D. Podesta August 2003 VISITING PROFESSOR OF LAW AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER “The Future of Energy Policy” Foreign Affairs Both public and private leadership will be needed to put together the technological innovation and political will to transform the American and world energy systems. Market mechanisms can help address the various economic, environmental, and security interests at stake. Aligning the interests of key stakeholders can build a coalition with enough political muscle to break the status quo. As President George W. Bush put it in his first address to Congress, government has an important role, but not one so large as to crowd out initiative and hard work, private charity, and the private economy. With the public and private sectors working together properly, government incentives and private initiatives can "hurry the future." A broad-based, cooperative coalition for change is the missing, indispensable ingredient in transforming a strategic energy vision into reality. Long-time antagonists who are willing to set aside historical divisions and think boldly can create a shared vision for the future that goes beyond the lowest common denominator. Wherever one sits on the political spectrum, it is clear that we need to act, and we need to act in coalition.

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A2: ‘Technology’ is Bad Moving away from technology denies what it is to be human and causes extinction. Rex Stephens 2003 Quantum Theorist, The Preparation, http://www.thepreparation.net/Chap4.html For humanity to attempt to revert to a lower level of technology would be to stop humanity's process of significant advancement and would eventually lead to the extinction of the human race. Our lack of technological progress would set us up for an extinction trap because we would be living a lie, denying what we are, and as a result, our decisions would not be based upon reality but instead based upon denial. This happened just a few years ago during the China's cultural revolution. Nearly every person in China was forced to work at agricultural or manufacturing jobs with only the most primitive technology and tools to do their jobs. As a result of this misguided attempt to create a better society by going backwards in technology, China (Cambodia, Cuba, etc.) have still not fully recovered technologically, economically, or socially.

Technology should be embraced, not criticized. Criticism is escapism from the way things are going to be and doesn’t solve. Drexler ’86 (K. Eric, Research Fellow @ Institute of Molecular Manufacturing “Engines of Creation” http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html) The habit of neglecting or denying the possibility of technological advance is a common problem. Some people believe in snugly fitting limits because they have heard respected people spin plausible-sounding arguments for them. Yet it seems that some people must be responding more to wish than to fact, after this century of accelerating advance. Snug limits would simplify our future, making it easier to understand and more comfortable to think about. A belief in snug limits also relieves a person of certain concerns and responsibilities. After all, if natural forces will halt the technology race in a convenient and automatic fashion, then we needn't try to understand and control it. Best of all, this escape doesn't feel like escapism. To contemplate visions of global decline must give the feeling of facing harsh facts without flinching. Yet such a future would be nothing really new: it would force us toward the familiar miseries of the European past or the Third World present. Genuine courage requires facing reality, facing accelerating change in a world that has no automatic brakes. This poses intellectual, moral, and political challenges of greater substance. Warnings of bogus limits do double harm. First, they discredit the very idea of limits, blunting an intellectual tool that we will need to understand our future. But worse, such warnings distract attention from our real problems. In the Western world there is a lively political tradition that fosters suspicion of technology. To the extent that it first disciplines its suspicions by testing them against reality and then chooses workable strategies for guiding change, this tradition can contribute mightily to the survival of life and civilization. But people concerned about technology and the future are a limited resource. The world cannot afford to have their efforts squandered in futile campaigns to sweep back the global tide of technology with the narrow broom of Western protest movements. The coming problems demand more subtle strategies. No one can yet say for certain what problems will prove to be most important, or what strategies will prove best for solving them. Yet we can already see novel problems of great importance, and we can discern strategies with varying degrees of promise. In short, we can see enough about the future to identify goals worth pursuing.

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A2: Environmental Critiques Environmentalists should like OTEC – it’s sustainable and better than the alternative (nuclear power). Robert Cohen February 1994 Ph.D. from Cornell University Reflections on the status of federal ocean energy R&D in the United States http://csf.colorado.edu/authors/Cohen.Robert/otecfunding-94.html

Some leading environmentalists and energy people such as my friend Bob Williams -- still perceive OTEC as a large, "central-station" option, which they don't like -- compared to dispersed energy options -- because of its possible relationship to electrical utilities. Indeed, Denis Hayes, when he was head of SERI, took a televised pot shot at ocean thermal and solar thermal, calling them both "turkeys". However, as events developed it is turning out that the commercial evolution of OTEC technology will probably be via small (Ñ 5 MWe) land-based plants at island locations in places like Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and in many developing nations, most of which are mainly relying on imported oil to generate their electricity. Some of those early electricity markets will also use OTEC coproducts such as fresh water, coastal cooling, and mariculture, and there will also be the development of OTEC-like "bottoming cycles" to conserve fuel. If they could only be made aware of that scenario -- rather than recalling our development scenario of the 1970s -- one might expect environmentalists to become natural proponents of OTEC, since its development scenario can now be perceived as that of an "appropriate technology". Also, the environmentalists should welcome OTEC as a baseload alternative to nuclear, one that also has the potential (someday) of becoming a major global energy source for supplying hydrogen (and other fuels and energy-intensive products) to dispersed markets.

Perm solves best – moderation avoids local resentment and solves better. New Scientist June 21, 2003 A greyer shade of green by Fred Pearce Several factors are driving this sea change. First, there is an admission that hard-line conservation has a chequered history, with more failures than successes, and that it often breeds resentment in local communities. Secondly, there's the realisation that western environmentalists, however well-meaning, have no right to ride roughshod over local sensibilities. Finally, they are riding the current fashion wave: the idea that environmental protection and economic development don't have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, there are conservation strategies that allow them to reinforce each other. And this ethos of "sustainable development", first made popular at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro ten years ago, is taking many environmentalists in directions they had never anticipated.

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There are ethical as well as practical objections to hard-line conservation. Dogmatic environmentalism, says Martin, is "in some ways as narrow and selfish as the imperialism of old. Imperialism imposed a system of development that took little or no account of the rights and needs of local people. Too often, that same charge can be levelled against conservation projects." The charge is especially potent against WWF, whose founders, including royals such as Prince Philip, were white hunters-turned-conservationists. Most environmentalists outside the hard-core animal rights groups say they are in favour of conserving traditional cultures. In practice that usually involves preserving their hunting traditions. So WWF quietly supports the Inuit, who hunt polar bears, and the Gwich'in people, who hunt caribou as the animals travel through northern Canada and Alaska on one of the greatest mammal migrations left on Earth.

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Topicality Our Ocean’s number one resource is the solar energy it gathers. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 2003. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. Environmental Impact Analysis. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Ocean Minerals and Energy. “The oceans cover a little more than 70 percent of the Earth's surface. This makes them the world's largest solar energy collector and energy storage system. On an average day, 60 million square kilometers…of tropical seas absorb an amount of solar radiation equal in heat content to about 250 billion barrels of oil. If less than one-tenth of one percent of this stored solar energy could be converted into electric power, it would supply more than 20 times the total amount of electricity consumed in the United States on any given day. This makes thermal energy undoubtedly the most valuable resource in the water.”

Water is a resource. Elroy Bos and Ger Bergkamp October 2001 (the communication officer and the freshwater management advisor at the Wetlands and Water Resources Programme of the IUCN) 2020 Focus 9 (Overcoming Water Scarcity and Quality Constraints), Brief 6 of 14, WATER AND THE ENVIRONMENT Water is a scarce resource. If we continue to overuse and pollute our water and destroy our natural ecosystems, we may fulfill the prediction that 30 percent of the world's population will not have enough water by 2025.

Climate change impacts natural resources. John D. Podesta August 2003 VISITING PROFESSOR OF LAW AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY LAW CENTER “The Future of Energy Policy” Foreign Affairs

Furthermore, global climate change disproportionately hurts the poor. Half of all jobs worldwide depend directly on natural resources that are potentially affected by human-induced climate change: fisheries, forests, and agriculture. For example, 70 million people in Bangladesh live in crowded lowlands near the sea, and very large populations in Indonesia and Malaysia are similarly threatened by rising sea levels. In Africa, we can already see agricultural productivity diminished by drought, less availability of potable water, and intensifying hunger and malnutrition. Mass flight from such conditions could destabilize fragile governments and erode investments in poverty reduction.

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