geoss

UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFF

GEOSS AFFIRMATIVE FIRST AFFIRMATIVE CONSTRUCTIVE

1AC: Inherency 1/2............................................................................................................................................................................. 61AC: Inherency 2/2............................................................................................................................................................................. 71AC: Plan Text 1/1.............................................................................................................................................................................. 81AC: Climate Advantage 1/6........................................................................................................................................................... 91AC: Climate Advantage 2/6........................................................................................................................................................ 101AC: Climate Advantage 3/6........................................................................................................................................................ 111AC: Climate Advantage 4/6........................................................................................................................................................ 121AC: Climate Advantage 5/6........................................................................................................................................................ 131AC: Climate Advantage 6/6........................................................................................................................................................ 141AC Disasters Advantage 1/5....................................................................................................................................................... 151AC Disasters Advantage 2/5....................................................................................................................................................... 161AC Disasters Advantage 3/5....................................................................................................................................................... 171AC Disasters Advantage 4/5....................................................................................................................................................... 181AC Disasters Advantage 5/5....................................................................................................................................................... 191AC: Solvency 1/3............................................................................................................................................................................ 201AC: Solvency 2/3............................................................................................................................................................................ 211AC: Solvency 3/3............................................................................................................................................................................ 22

INHERENCYInherency: Decline Now................................................................................................................................................................. 23Inherency: Disaster Management................................................................................................................................................ 24Inherency: No New Satellites........................................................................................................................................................ 25Inherency: NOAA............................................................................................................................................................................. 25Inherency: Crashed Satellites........................................................................................................................................................ 26

SOLVENCYSolvency: Climate Remote sensing key..................................................................................................................................27Solvency: Climate............................................................................................................................................................................. 28Solvency: Climate............................................................................................................................................................................. 29Solvency: Climate............................................................................................................................................................................. 30Solvency: Climate............................................................................................................................................................................. 31Solvency: Climate (Polar Observation)..................................................................................................................................31Solvency: Climate (Forests).......................................................................................................................................................... 32Solvency: Climate (Verification)............................................................................................................................................... 32Solvency: Climate and Natural Disasters.............................................................................................................................. 33Solvency: Warming AT: GCOS key, not GEOSS....................................................................................................................34Solvency Advocate: Climate......................................................................................................................................................... 35Solvency: Data Transparency- US Key................................................................................................................................... 36Solvency: Disasters........................................................................................................................................................................... 37Solvency: Disasters........................................................................................................................................................................... 38Solvency: Disasters........................................................................................................................................................................... 39Solvency: Disasters........................................................................................................................................................................... 40Solvency: Disasters........................................................................................................................................................................... 41Solvency: Disasters........................................................................................................................................................................... 42Solvency: Disasters........................................................................................................................................................................... 43Solvency: Disasters........................................................................................................................................................................... 44Solvency: Disasters (landslide).................................................................................................................................................... 45

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UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFFSolvency: Environment................................................................................................................................................................... 46Solvency: GEOSS............................................................................................................................................................................. 47Solvency: Grassroots........................................................................................................................................................................ 48Solvency: Now Key.......................................................................................................................................................................... 49Solvency: Racism.............................................................................................................................................................................. 50Solves Weather Forecasting.......................................................................................................................................................... 51AT: US not key.................................................................................................................................................................................. 52AT: Tech fails..................................................................................................................................................................................... 53AT: ITAR............................................................................................................................................................................................. 54AT: ITAR............................................................................................................................................................................................. 55Other Solvency Mechanisms: FIEOS: Solves Disaster Prep...........................................................................................56Other Solvency Mechanisms FIEOS Solvency – How it works.....................................................................................56Solvency Mechanism: FEIOS Weather....................................................................................................................................56Solvency Mechanism: FEIOS Disease...................................................................................................................................... 57FIEOS Solvency................................................................................................................................................................................. 57FIEOS Solves – Lay Users............................................................................................................................................................. 57Solvency Mechanism: FEIOS Famine....................................................................................................................................... 58Solvency Mechanism: Microsatellite.......................................................................................................................................59Solvency Mechanism: Microsat Space debris I/l...............................................................................................................60

DISASTERS ADVANTAGEDisasters Advantage: Poverty I/L................................................................................................................................................ 61Disasters Advantage: Poverty I/L................................................................................................................................................ 62Disasters Advantage Katrina......................................................................................................................................................... 63Disasters Advantage Katrina......................................................................................................................................................... 64Disasters Advantage: Katrina........................................................................................................................................................ 65Disasters Advantage: Katrina........................................................................................................................................................ 66Disasters Advantage: Katrina........................................................................................................................................................ 67Disasters Advantage: Katrina........................................................................................................................................................ 68Disasters Advantage: Katrina........................................................................................................................................................ 69AT: Katrina not about race............................................................................................................................................................. 70

CLIMATE CHANGE ADVANTAGEClimate Change Advantage: ACC now..................................................................................................................................... 71Climate Change Advantage: Data key..................................................................................................................................... 72Internal Link: Worsen Natural Disasters.............................................................................................................................. 73Climate Change Advantage :Ocean Biodiv I/L....................................................................................................................74AT: We already have climate science......................................................................................................................................75AT: Satellites cause warming........................................................................................................................................................ 76AT: Satellites cause warming........................................................................................................................................................ 77AT: Biodiversity Impact Defense................................................................................................................................................ 78AT: Warming Not Anthropogenic (1/2)................................................................................................................................79AT: Warming Not Anthropogenic (2/2)................................................................................................................................80AT: Models Wrong........................................................................................................................................................................... 81AT: Models Wrong........................................................................................................................................................................... 82AT: Warming Inevitable................................................................................................................................................................. 83AT: Warming Impact Defense...................................................................................................................................................... 84AT: Warming Good:CO2 Fertilization.....................................................................................................................................85AT: Warming Good:CO2 Fertilization.....................................................................................................................................86

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UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFF2AC ADD-ONSAdd- On: Air Pollution (No Impact)......................................................................................................................................... 87Add- On: Biodiversity..................................................................................................................................................................... 88Add- On: Disease.............................................................................................................................................................................. 89Add- On: Disease- 1AR Extension............................................................................................................................................. 90Add- On: Disease (Avian Flu) (No Impact)...........................................................................................................................91Add- On: Disease (Insect borne) (No Impact).....................................................................................................................92Add- On: Disease (Water borne) (No Impact)....................................................................................................................93Add-On Environmental Leadership 1/2................................................................................................................................94Add-On Environmental Leadership 2/2................................................................................................................................95Add- On: Health (No Impact)....................................................................................................................................................... 96Add- On: Famine (No Impact)......................................................................................................................................................97Add- On: Famine- 1AR Extension.............................................................................................................................................. 98Add- On: Oceans............................................................................................................................................................................... 99

AT DISADVANTAGESAT: DA - Non-Unique.................................................................................................................................................................. 100AT: DAs............................................................................................................................................................................................. 101AT: DAs............................................................................................................................................................................................. 102AT: Economy................................................................................................................................................................................... 103AT: Economy................................................................................................................................................................................... 104AT: Economy................................................................................................................................................................................... 105AT: Economy................................................................................................................................................................................... 106Politics: Controversy Inevitable................................................................................................................................................ 107Politics: Controversy inevitable................................................................................................................................................. 108Politics: Winners Win................................................................................................................................................................... 109Politics: Climate Change key to base.................................................................................................................................... 110Politics: Plan not perceived......................................................................................................................................................... 111Politics: Plan = Bipart................................................................................................................................................................... 112Politics: Plan uncontroversial..................................................................................................................................................... 113Politics Plan Popular: CBO......................................................................................................................................................... 114AT: Militarization DA: Non-Unique....................................................................................................................................... 115AT: Militarization DA No Brink............................................................................................................................................... 115AT: Militarization DA: It’s Good............................................................................................................................................. 116AT: Militarization DA: No link................................................................................................................................................. 117AT: Space Debris............................................................................................................................................................................ 118

AT: COUNTERPLANSAT: Privatization CP/Coercion K............................................................................................................................................. 119AT: Privatization CP/Coercion K............................................................................................................................................. 120AT: Privatization CP..................................................................................................................................................................... 121AT: Privatization CP..................................................................................................................................................................... 122AT: International Actor Counterplans................................................................................................................................. 123AT: SCIER CP................................................................................................................................................................................ 124AT: Carbon Capture CP............................................................................................................................................................... 125AT: Carbon Capture CP............................................................................................................................................................... 126AT: Carbon Capture CP............................................................................................................................................................... 127AT: ITAR CP................................................................................................................................................................................... 128

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AT:KRITIKSAT: K.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 129AT: K.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 130AT K................................................................................................................................................................................................... 131AT K................................................................................................................................................................................................... 132AT: K Plan k/ to Empowerment................................................................................................................................................ 133AT: K - Plan k/ to alt..................................................................................................................................................................... 134AT: K Perm...................................................................................................................................................................................... 135AT: K Perm Solves Grassroots.................................................................................................................................................. 136AT: Capitalism K Perm: Empowerment.................................................................................................................................137AT: Capitalism K Cap Good...................................................................................................................................................... 138AT: Capitalism K Cap Good...................................................................................................................................................... 139AT: Capitalism K:– inequalities................................................................................................................................................ 140At: Critical Geography.................................................................................................................................................................. 141AT: Environmental Security K.................................................................................................................................................. 142AT: Environmental Security K.................................................................................................................................................. 143AT: Environmental Security K.................................................................................................................................................. 144AT: Environmental Security K.................................................................................................................................................. 145AT: Environmental Security K.................................................................................................................................................. 146AT: Environmental Security K.................................................................................................................................................. 147AT: Environmental Security K.................................................................................................................................................. 148A2 Science K - Perm..................................................................................................................................................................... 149A2 Science K - Perm..................................................................................................................................................................... 150AT: Tech K....................................................................................................................................................................................... 151AT: Weather Security K............................................................................................................................................................... 152AT: Weather Security K............................................................................................................................................................... 153AT: Structural Violence K........................................................................................................................................................... 154AT: Structural Violence K........................................................................................................................................................... 155AT: Structural Violence............................................................................................................................................................... 156AT: Structural Violence K Link Turn.................................................................................................................................... 157AT: Structural Violence K: No Root Cause......................................................................................................................... 158AT: Structural Violence K Extinction First.........................................................................................................................159

NEGATIVE SUPPLEMENTNEG Supplement:You’ll need to sort this for your own use.......................................................................................160Free Trade Good............................................................................................................................................................................ 160Free Trade Good............................................................................................................................................................................ 161EXT: 1NC 4: A2: “Your evidence is based on CHina”.....................................................................................................162NEG: ITAR....................................................................................................................................................................................... 163NEG: ITAR....................................................................................................................................................................................... 164NEG: ITAR....................................................................................................................................................................................... 165NEG: ITAR....................................................................................................................................................................................... 166NEG: ITAR....................................................................................................................................................................................... 167Weather security K Link Extensions....................................................................................................................................... 168Weather security K Impact extensions............................................................................................................................... 169Weather security K Alternative extensions...................................................................................................................... 170Weather security K Alternative extensions...................................................................................................................... 171

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UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFFWeather security K AT: Cede the Political.........................................................................................................................172Weather security K AT: Cede the Political.........................................................................................................................173The argu Weather security K AT: Cede the Political.....................................................................................................174Structural Violence K Impact Outweighs........................................................................................................................... 175SCIER CP Solvency........................................................................................................................................................................ 176Disasters Advantage CP: SCIER Solvency...........................................................................................................................177Spending link: Satellites cost $$................................................................................................................................................178Geoengineering CP........................................................................................................................................................................ 179India CP............................................................................................................................................................................................. 180Multilateral CP (Russia, Cuba, Venezuela).........................................................................................................................181Multilateral CP (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine)........................................................................................................................ 182Neg: K Gender Key to solve....................................................................................................................................................... 183Militarization DA Impact............................................................................................................................................................. 184Militarization DA Impact............................................................................................................................................................. 185Militarization CP............................................................................................................................................................................. 186

Special thanks to the elite members of Seal Team 6: Austin Landes, Robert Torres, Mike Raposo, and Jessica Yu

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1AC: Inherency 1/2

Our capacity to observe earth is diminishing now: current budget increases are insufficient to maintain and expand the development of environmental monitoring.Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications

from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11820.html)

The extensive scientific and societal contributions of the NOAA-NASA-USGS satellite observing capabilities are evidenced by the thousands of scientific publications and applications of the data for environmental forecasts, a record of accomplishment mentioned in Chapter 1 and detailed with numerous examples in Part III of this

report. As noted in Chapter 1, perhaps the largest impact of space-based observations to date has been improved weather forecasting and the many societal benefits stemming from that capability (Hollingsworth et al., 2005). The National Weather Service’s current practice of providing 10-day weather forecasts is a familiar reminder of the scientific gains made in the past decade. Space-based observations have also figured prominently in climate research (NRC, 2004). Factors that drive climate change are usefully separated into forcings and feedbacks. A climate forcing is an energy imbalance imposed on the climate system externally or by human activities. Examples include changes in solar energy output, volcanic emissions, deliberate land modification, and anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, aerosols, and their precursors. A climate feedback is an internal climate process that amplifies or dampens the climate response to a specific forcing. An example is the increase in atmospheric water vapor that is triggered by warming due to rising carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations, which acts to further amplify the warming because of the greenhouse properties of water vapor. Observations of key climate forcings and feedbacks, diagnostics (e.g., temperature, sea level), and the consequences of climate change (e.g., sea ice decrease) have helped to identify potentially dangerous changes in Earth’s climate. These observations have catalyzed climate research and enabled substantial improvements in climate models. In fact, these improvements have brought into existence a class of Earth system models1 that couple atmosphere, ocean, land, and cryosphere systems. These models not only provide better estimates of spatially and temporally resolved patterns of climate change but also provide a basis for addressing other environmental challenges, such as changes in

biogeochemical cycles of carbon and nitrogen and the effects of these changes now and in the future (Figure 2.5). Despite these advances, the extraordinary foundation of global observations is in decline. Between 2006 and the end of the decade, the number of operating sensors and instruments will likely decrease by around 40 percent, given that most satellites in NASA’s current fleet are

well past their nominal lifetimes. Furthermore, the replacement sensors on the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), when they exist, are generally less capable than their EOS counterparts. This decreased quantity of space-borne assets will persist into the early part of the next decade (see Figures 2.3 and 2.4). Partly causing and certainly amplifying the observational collapse of space-based measurements is the decline in NASA’s Earth science budget. From 2000 to 2006, this part of NASA’s budget decreased by more than 30 percent when adjusted for inflation (Figure 2.6). This

reduction, if it persists, translates to approximately $4 billion less to develop Earth science missions over the next decade. That decrease could mean, for example, some 8 to 12 fewer space-based research missions and perhaps $1 billion less for associated research and analysis. The NASA-NOAA EOS satellite system, launched beginning in the late 1990s, is aging, and the existing plan for the future is entirely inadequate to meet the coming challenges. The NOAA budget has been growing (see Figure 2.7), but this growth is now swamped by the large cost overruns in the NPOESS program. It also appears likely that the GOES-R program will experience cost growth.2 Completing even the descoped NPOESS program will require several billion dollars beyond the funding planned as recently as December 2005.3 Thus, NPOESS represents a major lien on future budgets, one that is so great that the agency’s ability to provide observations in support of climate research or other noncore missions will be severely compromised. Among the many missions expected to cease over the next few years, the committee has identified several in NOAA and NASA that are providing critical information now and that need to be sustained into the next decade—both to continue important time series and to provide the foundation necessary for the recommended future observations. In NOAA, many observational capabilities need to be restored to NPOESS, but this topic must be considered as part of a reexamination of the logic, costs, and benefits of the current (September 2006) NPOESS and GOES-R plan. The reexamination of NPOESS and GOES-R will be conducted by a fast-track NRC study to be conducted and concluded in 2007. The present committee’s analysis of the implications of NPOESS instrument descopes and cancellations is hampered by the absence of information about changes in key sensors. In particular, the Conical-Scanning Microwave Imager/Sounder (CMIS) instrument on NPOESS, which was to have provided continuity of records of sea-surface temperature and sea ice—time series critical to global climate studies—has been canceled, and the specifications for its replacement, the Microwave Imager/Sounder (MIS), are not yet

known.4 Similarly, the mitigation plan for the now-demanifested altimeter, ALT, is not yet known. The continuity of several measurements is of sufficient importance to climate research, ozone monitoring, or operational weather systems to deserve immediate attention. Those for climate include total solar irradiance and Earth radiation; for ozone, ozone limb sounding capability and total solar irradiance; and for weather,

sea-surface vector winds and temperature and water vapor soundings from geostationary and polar orbits. As detailed in the committee’s interim report (NRC, 2005), the substitution of passive microwave sensor data for active scatterometry data would worsen El Niño and hurricane forecasts and weather forecasts in coastal areas.5 Nevertheless, given the precarious status of existing surface wind measurements,6 it is imperative that a measurement capability, such as the one on MetOp, be available to prevent a data gap when the NASA QuikSCAT mission terminates.

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http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11820.html


1AC: Inherency 2/2

GEOSS can address climate change data needs, but more US support is critically lacking. Lewis et. Al. 2010 (James A., senior fellow and director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS; Sarah O. Ladislaw, CSIS Senior Fellow, Energy and National Security Program; and Denise E. Zheng, CSIS; Earth Observation for Climate Change: A Report of the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program, csis.org/files/publication/100608_Lewis_EarthObservation_WEB.pdf)

GCOS, GEO, CEOS, and GEOSS have made valuable contributions to improving our ability to monitor climate change, but they do not add up to a comprehensive approach for responding to climate challenges. In April 2009, the WMO released the

Progress Report on the Implementation of the Global Observing System for Climate in Support of the UNFCCC 2004–2008.12 The report concludes that while implementation of observation systems in support of the UNFCCC has progressed significantly over the last five years, “sustaining the funding of many important systems is fragile, there has been only limited progress in filling observing system gaps in developing countries, and there is still a long way to go to achieve a fully implemented global observing system for climate [p. ii].” The future of the GCOS is important, given the lack of progress in other areas of global cooperation on climate issues. The UN negotiations in Copenhagen did not yield global agreement, and reaching global agreement (especially one that actually has any effect) will be a

long, drawn-out process. In the interim, American leadership in creating an expanded multilateral system for sharing, analyzing, and operationalizing climate data will strengthen global understanding of climate issues and help build a collaborative approach and common understandings that will support future negotiation. Even if nations are unable to agree upon a coordinated approach to mitigation, the need to address climate change will still exist, and understanding the effect of inaction on the future course of climate change remains essential.

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1AC: Plan Text 1/1

Plan text: The United States Congress should provide all necessary funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to fulfill developmental requirements for the United States’ component of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems.

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1AC: Climate Advantage 1/6

Advantage __ is Global Climate Change:

The earth continues to warm as an increasing rate: newest science confirms.Associated Press June 29 (2011, “World still warming up, researchers warn”)

WASHINGTON — The world’s climate is not only continuing to warm, it’s adding heat-trapping greenhouse gases faster, researchers said yesterday. The global temperature has been warmer than the 20th century average every month for more than 25 years, they said at a teleconference. “The indicators show unequivocally that the world continues to warm,’’ Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, said in releasing the annual State of the Climate report for 2010. “There is a clear and unmistakable signal from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans,’’ added Peter Thorne of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, North Carolina State University. Carbon dioxide increased by 2.60 parts per million in the atmosphere in 2010, which is more than the average annual increase seen from 1980-2010, Karl added. Carbon dioxide is the major greenhouse gas accumulating in the air that atmospheric scientists blame for warming the climate. The warmer conditions are consistent with events such as heat waves and extreme rainfall, Karl said at a teleconference. However, it is more difficult to make a direct connection with events such as tornado outbreaks, he said. “Any single weather event is driven by a number of factors, from local conditions to global climate patterns and trends. Climate change is one of these,’’ he said. “It is very likely that large-scale changes in climate, such as increased moisture in the atmosphere and warming temperatures, have influenced . . . many different types of extreme events, such as heavy rainfall, flooding, heat

waves and droughts. The report, being published by the American Meteorological Society, lists 2010 as tied with 2005 for the warmest year on record, according to studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

Warming is happening – Sea ice, Glaciers, Ice Sheets, and Tropical Regions. Kills coral reefs and phytoplanktonHansen 2009, heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University (James, December, Storms of My Grandchildren, 164-166)In addition to paleoclimate data, my talk covered ongoing observations of five phenomena, all of which imply that an appropriate initial target should be no higher than

350 ppm. In brief, here are the five observations.(1) The area of Arctic sea ice has been declining faster than mod els predicted . The end-of-summer sea ice area was 40 percent less in 2007 than in the late 1970s when accurate satellite measurements began. Continued growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide surely will result in an ice-free end-of-summerArctic within several decades, with detrimental effects on wildlife and indigenous

people. It is difficult to imagine how the Greenland ice sheet could survive if Arctic sea ice is lost entirely in the warm season. Retention of warm season sea ice likely requiresrestoration of the planet's energy balance. At present our best estimate is there is about 0.5 watt per square meter more energy coming into the planet than is being emitted to space as heat radiation. A reduction

of carbon dioxide amount from the current 387 ppm to 350 ppm, all other things being unchanged, would increase outgoing radiation by 0.5 watt, restoring planetary energy balance. (2) Mountain glaciers are disappearing all over the world. If business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions continue , most of the glaciers will be gone within fifty years. Rivers originating in glacier regions provide fresh water for billions of people. If the glaciers disappear, there will be heavy snowmelt and floods in the spring, but many dry rivers in the late summer and fall. The melting of glaciers is proceeding rapidly at current atmospheric composition. Probably the

best we can hope is that the restoration of the planet's energy balance may halt glacier recession.(3) The Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are each losing mass at more than 100 cubic kilometers per year, and sea level is rising at more than 3 centimeters per decade. Clearly the ice sheets are unstable with the present climate forcing. Ice shelves around Antarctica are melting rapidly. It is difficult to say how far carbon

dioxide must be reduced to stabilize the ice sheets, but clearly 387 ppm is too much.(4) Data show that subtropical regions have expanded poleward by 4 degrees of latitude on average. Such expansion is an expected effect of global warming, but the change has been faster than predicted. Dry regions have expanded in the southern United States, the Mediterranean, and Australia. Fire frequency and area in

the western United States have increased by 300 percent over the past several decades. Lake Powell and Lake Mead are now only half full. Climate change is a

major cause of these regional shifts, althoughforest management practices and increased usage of freshwater aggravate the resulting problems.(5) Coral reefs , where a quarter of all marine biological species are located, are suffering from multiple stresses, with two of the most important stresses,

ocean acidification and warming surface water, caused by increasing carbon dioxide. As carbon dioxide in the air

increases, the ocean dissolves some of the carbon dioxide, becoming more acidic. This makes it more difficult for animals with carbonate shells or skeletons to survive—indeed, sufficiently acidic water dissolves carbonates. Ongoing studies suggest that coral reefs would have a better chance of surviving modern stresses if carbon dioxide were reduced to less than 350 ppm.I am often asked: If we want to maintain Holocene-like climate, why should the target carbon dioxide not be close to the preindustrial amount, say 300 ppm or 280 ppm? The reason, in part, is that there are other climate forcings besides carbon dioxide, and we do not expect those to return to preindustrial levels. There is no plan to remove all roadways, buildings, and other human-made effects on

the planet's surface. Nor will we prevent all activities that produce aerosols. Until we know all forcings and understand their net effect, it is premature to be more specific than "less than 350 ppm," and it is unnecessary for policy purposes. It will take time to turn carbon dioxide around and for it to begin to

approach 350 ppm. By then, if we have been making appropriate measurements, our knowledge should be much improved and we will have extensive empirical ev idence on real-world changes. Also our best current estimate for the planet's mean energy imbalance over the past decade, thus averaged over the solar cycle, is about +0.5 watt per square meter. Reducing carbon dioxide to 350 ppm would increase emission to space 0.5 watt per square meter, restoring the planet's energy balance, to first approximation.

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And, warming is anthropogenic; the scientific consensus is steadily growing to unanimity.Lichter, Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and President of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, 2008 [Dr. S. Robert Lichter, April 24 2008, Statistical Assessment Service, “Climate Scientists Agree on Warming, Disagree on Dangers, and Don’t Trust the Media’s Coverage of Climate Change”, <http://stats.org/stories/2008/global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html>]

Over eight out of ten American climate scientists believe that human activity contributes to global warming , according to a new survey released by the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University. The researchers also report that belief in human-induced warming has more than doubled since the last major survey of American climate scientists in 1991. However, the survey finds that scientists are still debating the dynamics and dangers of global warming, and only three percent trust newspaper or television coverage of climate change. The survey, which was conducted for STATS by Harris Interactive®, also found increased concern among climate scientists since the Gallup organization asked them many of the same questions in 1991. Between March 19 through May 28, 2007 Harris Interactive conducted a mail survey of a random sample of 489 self-identified members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union who are listed in the current edition of American Men and Women of Science. A random sample of this size carries a theoretical sampling error of +/- four percentage points. A detailed description of the study’s methodology as well as that of the earlier Gallup survey is available on request. Major Findings Scientists agree that humans cause global warming Ninety-seven percent of the climate scientists surveyed believe “global average temperatures have increased” during the past century. Eighty-four percent say they personally believe human-induced warming is occurring, and 74% agree that “currently available scientific evidence” substantiates its occurrence. Only 5% believe that that human activity does not contribute to greenhouse warming; the rest are unsure. Scientists still debate the dangers A slight majority (54%) believe the warming measured over the last 100 years is not “within the range of natural temperature fluctuation.” A slight majority (56%) see at least a 50-50 chance that global temperatures will rise two degrees Celsius or more during the next 50 to 100 years. (The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cites this increase as the point beyond which additional warming would produce major environmental disruptions.) Based on current trends, 41% of scientists believe global climate change will pose a very great danger to the earth in the next 50 to 100 years, compared to 13% who see relatively little danger. Another 44% rate climate change as moderately dangerous. Seventy percent see climate change as very difficult to manage over the next 50 to 100 years, compared to only 5% who see it as not very difficult to manage. Another 23% see moderate difficulty in managing these changes. A need to know more Overall, only 5% describe the study of global climate change as a “fully mature” science, but 51% describe it as “fairly mature,” while 40% see it as still an “emerging” science. However, over two out of three (69%) believe there is at least a 50-50 chance that the debate over the role of human activity in global warming will be settled in the next 10 to 20 years. Only 29% express a “great deal of confidence” that scientists understand the size and extent of anthropogenic [human] sources of greenhouse gases,” and only 32% are confident about our understanding of the archeological climate evidence. Climate scientists are skeptical of the media Only 1% of climate scientists rate either broadcast or cable television news about climate change as “very reliable.” Another 31% say broadcast news is “somewhat reliable,” compared to 25% for cable news. (The remainder rate TV news as “not very” or “not at all” reliable.) Local newspapers are rated as very reliable by 3% and somewhat reliable by 33% of scientists. Even the national press (New York Times, Wall St. Journal etc) is rated as very reliable by only 11%, although another 56% say it is at least somewhat reliable. Former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” rates better than any traditional news source, with 26% finding it “very reliable” and 38% as somewhat reliable. Other non-traditional information sources fare poorly: No more than 1% of climate experts rate the doomsday movie “The Day After Tomorrow” or Michael Crichton’s novel

“State of Fear” as very reliable. Are climate scientists being pressured to deny or advance global warming? Five percent of climate scientists say they have been pressured by public officials or government agencies to “deny, minimize or discount evidence of human- induced global warming,” Three percent say they have been pressured by funders, and two percent perceived pressure from supervisors at work. Just three percent report that they were pressured by public officials or government agencies to “embellish, play up or overstate” evidence of

global warming: Two percent report such pressure from funders, and two percent from supervisors. Changing scientific opinion In 1991 the Gallup organization conducted a telephone survey on global climate change among 400 scientists drawn from membership lists of the American Meteorological Association and the American Geophysical Union. We repeated several of their questions verbatim, in order to measure changes in scientific opinion over time. On a variety of questions, opinion has consistently shifted toward increased belief in and concern about global warming. A mong the changes: In 1991 only 60% of climate scientists believed that average global temperatures were up, compared to 97% today. In 1991 only a minority (41%) of climate scientists agreed that then-current scientific evidence “substantiates the occurrence of human-induced warming,” compared tothree out of four (74%) today. The proportion of those who see at least a 50-50 chance that global temperatures will rise two degrees Celsius has increased from 47% to 56% since 1991. The proportion of scientists who have a great deal of confidence in our understanding of the human-induced sources of global climate change rose from 22% in 1991 to 29% in 2007. Similarly, the proportion voicing confidence in our understanding of the archeological climate evidence rose from20% to 32%. Despite these expressions of uncertainty, however, the proportion which rating the chances at 50-50 or better that the role of human behavior will be settled in the near future rose from 47% in 1991 to 69% in 2007.

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We’re reaching a tipping point – action now is critical to prevent positive feedbacksHansen 2009, heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University (James, December, Storms of My Grandchildren, 72-74)Ice sheet response to global warming is quite the contrary. Ice sheet size changes little at first, and thus sea level changes only slowly. As the planet gets warmer, the area on the ice sheet with summer melt increases. And as

the ocean warms, ice "shelves"—tongues of the ice sheet that reach out into the ocean and are grounded on the ocean floor—also begin to melt. As ice shelves dis appear and the ice sheet is "softened up" by surface warming and meltwater, movement of ice and discharge of giant icebergs via ice "streams" become more rapid, leading to the possibility that large portions of the ice sheet will collapse. If we continue burning fossil fuels at current rates, ice sheet collapse and sea level rise of at least several meters is a dead cer tainty . We know this from paleoclimate records showing how large the ice sheets were as a function of global temperature . The only question is how fast ice sheet disintegration will occur.Once ice sheets begin to collapse, sea level can rise rapidly. For example, about 14,000 years

ago, as Earth emerged from the last ice age and became warmer, sea level rose at an average rate of 1 meter every 20 or 25 years, a rate that continued for several centuries. The danger today is that we may allow ocean warming and "soft ening up" of ice sheets to reach a point such that the dynamical process of collapse takes over. And then it would be too late—we cannot tie a rope or build a wall around a mile-thick ice sheet.The third source of inertia is our fossil-fuel-based energy

system. The transitions from wood to coal to oil to gas each required several decades—and recently, as oil and gas supplies tightened, we have begun moving back toward more coal use. Indeed, coal is again the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions.The upshot regarding energy

system inertia is this: Humanity to day is heavily dependent on fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—for most of our energy. When we realize that it is necessary to phase out fos sil fuels, that transition will not be quick—it will take at least sev eral decades to replace our enormous

fossil fuel infrastructure. In the meantime more greenhouse gas emissions and more climate change will be occurring.Climate feedbacks interact with inertia. Feedbacks (as discussed in chapter 3) are responses to climate change that can either amplify or diminish the climate change. There is no inherent reason for our climate to be dominated by amplifying feedbacks.

Indeed, on very long time scales important diminishing feedbacks come into play (see chapters 8 and 10).However, it turns out that amplifying feedbacks are dominant on time scales from decades to hundreds of thousands of years. Water (including water vapor, ice, and snow) plays a big role. A colder planet has a brighter surface and absorbs less sunlight, mainly because of the high reflectivity of ice and snow surfaces. A warmer planet has more greenhouse gases in the air, especially water vapor, as well as darker vegetated land areas . Dominance of these two amplifying feedbacks, the planet's surface reflectivity and the amount of greenhouse gases in the air, is the reason climate whipsawed between glacial and interglacial states in response to small insolation changes caused by slight perturbations of Earth's orbit.Amplifying feedbacks that were expected to occur only slowly have begun to come into play in the past few years. These feedbacks gases from melting permafrost and Arctic continental shelves, and include significant reduction in ice sheets, release of greenhouse movement of climatic zones with resulting changes in vegetation distributions. These feedbacks were not incorporated in most cli mate simulations, such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet these "slow" feedbacks are already be ginning to emerge in the real world. Rats! That is a problem. Climate inertia causes more warming to be in the pipeline. Feedbacks will amplify that warming. So "inertia" was a

Trojan horse—it only seemed like a friend. It lulled us to sleep, and we did not see what was happening. Now we have a situ ation with big impacts on the horizon—possibly including ice sheet collapse, ecosystem collapse, and species extinction, the dangers of which I will discuss later.What to do? If

we run around as if our hair is on fire, flapping our arms, people will not take us seriously. Besides, we are not in a hopeless situation. Rational, feasible actions could avert disastrous consequences, if the actions are prompt and strategic. Feedbacks work in both directions—if

a forcing is negative, amplifying feedbacks will increase the cooling effect.If we wish to stabilize Earth's climate, we do not need to return its atmospheric composition to preindustrial levels. What we must do, to first order, is reduce the planet's energy imbalance to near zero. Of

course, the climate then would be stabilized at its current state, not at its preindustrial state. Climate may need to be a tad cooler than today, if, for example, we want ice sheets to be stable. That may require a slight additional adjustment of the human-made climate forcing. But let's not get ahead of the story.

And positive feedbacks cause extinction.Hansen 2009, heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University (James, December, Storms of My Grandchildren, 236)The paleoclimate record does not provide a case with a climate forcing of the magnitude and speed that will occur if fossil fuels are all burned. Models are nowhere near the stage at which they can predict reliably when major ice sheet disintegration will begin. Nor can we say how close we are to

methane hydrate instability. But these are questions of when, not if. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the ice sheets almost surely will melt entirely, with the final sea level rise about 75 meters (250 feet), with most of that possibly occurring within a time scale of centuries. Methane hydrates are likely to be more extensive and vulnerable now than they were in the early Cenozoic. It is difficult to imagine how the methane hydrates could survive, once the ocean has had time to warm. In that event a PETM-like warming could be added on top of the

fossil fuel warming. After the ice is gone, would Earth proceed to the Venus syndrome, a runaway greenhouse effect that would destroy all life on the planet , perhaps permanently ? While that is difficult to say based on present information,

I've come to conclude that if we burn all reserves of oil, gas, and coal, there is a substantial chance we will initiate the run away greenhouse . If we also burn the tar sands and tar shale , I believe the Venus syndrome is a dead certainty.

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This will cause massive biodiversity loss that results in extinctionHansen 2009, heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University (James, December, Storms of My Grandchildren, 147)

The current extinction rate is at least one hundred times greater than the average natural rate . So the concern that

humans may have initiated the sixth mass extinction is easy to understand. However, the outcome is still very much up in the air, and human-made cli mate change is likely to be the determining factor. I will argue that if we continue on a business-as- usual path, with a global warming of several degrees Celsius, then we will drive a large fraction of species, conceivably all species, to extinction. On the other hand, just as in the case of ice sheet stability , if we bring atmospheric composition under control in the near future, it is still possible to keep human-caused extinctions to a moderate level.

Only a prioritization of Earth observation satellites can provide the necessary data, verification, and political will to solve global climate change. Lewis et. Al. 2010 (James A., senior fellow and director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS; Sarah O. Ladislaw, CSIS Senior Fellow, Energy and National Security Program; and Denise E. Zheng, CSIS; Earth Observation for Climate Change: A Report of the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program, csis.org/files/publication/100608_Lewis_EarthObservation_WEB.pdf)

Climate change poses a dilemma for space policy. If we accept that climate change poses credible and major risks to regional stability, national

security, and economic health, the United States needs to reconsider how it spends its money for civil space. Earth observation data are critical to understanding the causes and effects of climate change and quantifying changing conditions in the environment. The shortage of satellites actually designed and in orbit to measure climate change is unacceptable if we

are serious about climate change. Until this year, U.S. space policy was on autopilot. The Bush space policy did not differ mark- edly from the space policy of Jimmy Carter. The hallmark of this period was heavy investment in the shuttle and space station. The commitment to these 1970s technologies eroded public interest in space. A science reporter for a national newspaper said that when he wrote on the unmanned Mars explorers, thousands of readers would look at the story on the newspaper’s Web site, but when he wrote about the shuttle, there would be only a few hundred “hits.” The overlong commitment to the shuttle and the station ended in final years of the Bush administration, but unfortunately it was replaced with an unworkable vision for manned exploration that would have consumed a major portion of the space budget. In fact, a mission to Mars is beyond the technical capabilities of any nation. Leonardo da Vinci could draw helicopters and aircraft, but they were made of wood and cloth. Until breakthroughs in materials, chemistry, and physics, his ideas could not be implemented. The same is now true for manned planetary exploration. Our propulsion and life support systems will not support a manned flight to Mars. In contrast, a return to the Moon is achievable. The dilemma is that NASA would need another $150 billion to return to the moon more than 40 years after the first visit. There is no doubt that a return to the moon would bring prestige to the United States and that if another nation such as China was to get there beforehand it will be interpreted as another sign of U.S. decline. Years of a static approach to space policy have put us in this uncomfortable situation.

From the perspective of the national interest, however, the United States would be better served by building and maintaining a robust space capacity for monitoring climate change. This is a question of priorities. Manned flight should remain a priority, but not the first priority. Earth observation data is critical to understanding the causes and effects of climate change and quantifying changing conditions in the environment. The paucity of satellites actually designed and in orbit to measure climate change is disturbing. The United States does not have a robust climate-monitoring infrastructure. In fact, the current infrastructure is in decline. Until that decline is reversed and an adequate space infrastructure put in place, building and launching satellites specifically designed for monitoring climate change should be the first priority for civil space spending. Manned spaceflight provides prestige, but Earth observation is crucial for security and economic well-being. The United States should continue to fund as a priority a more robust and adequate space infrastructure to measure climate change, building and orbiting satellites specifically designed to carry advanced sensors for such monitoring. Satellites provide globally consistent observations and the means to make simultaneous observations of diverse measurements that are essential for climate studies. They supply high-accuracy global observations of the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface that cannot be acquired by any other method. Satellite instruments supply accurate measurements on a near-daily basis for long periods and across broad geographic regions. They can reveal global patterns that ground or air sensors would be unable to detect—as in the case of data from NASA satellites that showed us the amount of pollution arriving in North America from Asia as equal to 15 percent of local

emissions of the United States and Canada. This sort of data is crucial to effective management of emissions—the United States, for example, could put in place regulations to decrease emissions and find them neutralized by pollution from other regions.15 Satellites allow us to monitor the pattern of ice-sheet thickening and thinning. While Arctic ice once increased a few centimeters every year, it now melts

at a rate of more than one meter annually. This knowledge would not exist without satellite laser altimetry from NASA’s ICESat satellite.16 Satellite observations serve an indispensable role—they have provided unprecedented knowledge of inaccessible regions. Of the 44 essential climate variables (ECV) recognized as necessary to support the needs of the parties to the UNFCCC for the purposes of the Convention, 26 depend on

satellite observations. But deployments of new and replacement satellites have not kept pace with the termination of older systems. Innovation and investment in Earth observation technology have failed to keep pace with global needs for monitoring and verification. Much of our data comes from satellites put in orbit for other purposes, such as weather prediction and monitoring. The sensors on these weather satellites provide valuable data, but they are not optimized for monitoring climate change or for adequately assessing the effect of mitigation efforts. More precise and specialized data are needed to

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understand and predict climate change, and getting these data will require new orbital sensors. Countries have improved many of their climate observation capabilities, but reports suggest little progress in ensuring long-term continuity for several important observing systems. The bulk of climate data is collected by the United States, and NASA’s investment in the Earth Observing System missions has provided the climate-quality data used to establish trends in sea level, ozone concentrations, ocean color,

solar irradiance, Earth’s energy balance, and other key variables. While this investment has made an invaluable contribution, it is not an operational system. Many satellites currently in orbit are operating well past their planned lifetimes. In the next eight years, half of the world’s Earth observation satellites will be past their useful life. One reason for this is that many of the satellites

that provide critical data for monitoring climate change are experimental satellites (such as TRMM—the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission). Satellites built as research efforts provide real benefit, but if they are not replaced when their service life ends and if a permanent operational capability for Earth observation is not put in place, we will face insurmountable problems for observing capabilities and our ability to manage climate change. Many missions and observations for collecting climate data are at risk of interruption. These include measurements of ocean color that are critical for studying phytoplankton bloom and the role of ocean biomass as a carbon source and sink and data on the role of forests in the carbon cycle. Perhaps the most important shortcoming involves the monitoring of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and greenhouse gases. Reduction and regulation of CO2 emissions are part

of every discussion on how to manage climate change, but the crash of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) satellite left the world essentially bereft of the ability to make precise measurements to assess emissions reduction efforts. OCO cost approximately $278 million,17 which was about 2 percent of NASA’s annual budget for manned space flight in 2009. Its loss will cripple global carbon monitoring until we have its replacement, finally funded this year and scheduled for launch

no later than February 2013. Existing GHG monitoring networks and programs are predominantly ground-based, but they are not truly adequate to the task. Ground-based networks are limited because they can only provide disjointed pieces of a larger picture. Moreover, these systems

are aging, and investment for replacement has declined. We now rely on Japan’s GOSAT, the European Space Agency’s SCIAMACHY sensor, and Canada’s microsatellite, CanX-2, for observations of atmospheric concentrations of carbon; however,

these sensors are not advanced enough to meet data requirements needed to understand critical aspects of the carbon cycle, and they are highly constrained by their range of coverage. For example, the carbon produced from a fossil fuel power plant is too small to measure with GOSAT, and low spatial resolution and high uncertainty of measurements limit the monitoring capabilities of SCIAMACHY.18 The implications

are serious for measuring the effectiveness of climate policies. If reduction in GHG emissions (the most significant being carbon dioxide) is the centerpiece of mitigation efforts and a goal for both national legislation and international agreement, we are woefully unprepared to assess the effectiveness of these measures. It will be difficult to assess and adjust CO2-reducing

measures without greater investment in orbiting sensors.19 The need for information has never been greater, but there are significant gaps in global Earth monitoring capabilities.20 Although more than 50 nations operate or plan to operate Earth observation satellites, most of these are basic electro-optical satellites, essentially orbiting digital cameras that lack the necessary sensors for precise climate monitoring. There are only a handful of dedicated satellites for monitoring climate change, and the time has passed when general-purpose weather satellites can meet our informational needs . Japan, Europe, and the United States operate satellites with some of the sensors needed to monitor climate change, but a recent National Academies study found that of

the 26 essential climate variables that can be monitored from space, we have coverage of only 16.21 Only a coordinated federal policy and investment, including revised priorities for our civil space programs, can change this. For most of the last decade, NASA was unable to replace its climate-monitoring satellites. Re- placing these satellites is crucial to avoid a drastic decline in collecting the most valuable information for monitoring climate change. The Obama administration has proposed a budget for NASA’s Earth science programs of $2.4 billion in new funding over the next five years, an increase of more than 60 percent. The new funding, which requires congressional approval, will help replace OCO and allow NASA to replace the twin GRACE satellites that make detailed measurements of Earth’s gravity field that can provide important climate data.

The request for NOAA’s budget for climate-related activities has been increased as well. NOAA will be spending $2.2 billion to maintain and further develop satellites and to support climate research; $435 million has been requested to support

the U.S. Global Change Research Program, with $77 million in new increases for core climate services and observations. Spending on space has always been a question of priorities. Until recently, those priorities were frozen in time, reflecting political needs that were decades out of date. Our national priorities have changed. A new priority, reflecting the new challenges to our security and national interest, involves monitoring and understanding climate change. Debate over climate change is fierce and there are many skeptics, but the signs of major changes are undeniable. Warnings of catastrophe are likely overblown, but we

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do not fully understand the implications of climate change or the utility of various measures to mitigate it. Climate change is occurring, and it creates new risks. In this context, the recent decision to scale back spending on human space flight and increase spending on Earth observation is a better match for national priorities and interests. It updates a space policy that has been badly out of date for years . Observation of climate change began more than a century ago with simple measurements of the Earth’s average temperature. These were interesting, but inadequate. The breakthrough in understanding climate change came with Earth observation satellites. Satellites provide global awareness in ways that other technologies cannot match. The monitoring needed for a serious effort requires observations that can only be done from space. Recommendations Climate change will have pervasive and unavoidable effects on economic and national security. Managing these consequences and mitigating them when possible are new and difficult tasks for governments. Progress in mitigating and adapting to climate change will require the world’s countries to agree to coordinate their actions. Reaching such agreement will be

no easy task. That said, climate change offers a unique opportunity for the United States to engage other nations in pursuing common interests and addressing future challenges. Not only is the United States well positioned to lead on this issue because of its significant space and scientific capacity, it also faces global expectations that it should shoulder the leadership burden for climate change. A commitment to building the space and information infrastructure needed to manage climate change could demonstrate the U.S. leadership, based on competence and advancing the global good, that the world respects and admires. Operationalization is the next step for dealing with climate change—to make the data and knowledge generation by satellites and science easier to use in policymaking. Operationalization requires a new approach. Climate change has largely been an issue of science. The existing vehicles for

international cooperation and data sharing are aimed at the scientific community. Effective global management of climate requires a new approach with three integrated elements—space, networks, and collaboration. Our belief is that a concerted effort to analyze and share data from the many national efforts could significantly advance our understanding of the risks and causes of climate change, better measure the effects of mitigation policies, and guide planning on how to adapt to changes in the environment. Achieving such a concerted effort will require coordination must occur on several different levels if it is to have a meaningful effect. The first—the collection and measurement of relevant data—depends largely on satellites. Without the proper data, it would be very difficult to develop and aggregate a global picture of climate change and its nature and pace. It would be difficult to measure the effects of mitigation efforts, determine when or whether policies are effective, or predict when and how climate effects will affect local communities. The second level is to expand the analysis and sharing of information. In some ways, we are only in the early stages of developing a global enterprise for assessing climate change. Much of the research and analysis conducted thus far has been focused on understanding the nature and pace of climate change, forecasting future changes in Earth’s natural systems based on changes in differ ent variables, and substantiating theories about how human efforts to reduce the effects of climate change might actually have some effect. More work is needed in each area to improve our understanding and update it as the natural environment continues to change. Finally, data must move from the scientific community to the policy community—to governments and policymakers—if data are to guide change. While the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tailored analysis to meet policymakers’ needs in the hopes of reaching a global consensus for action, the challenge today is to extend and strengthen connections between the science and policy communities. A coordinated multinational effort to better inform the policy process can change this. Our belief is that a concerted effort to analyze and share data from the many national efforts could significantly advance our understanding of the risks and causes of climate change, better measure the effects of mitigation, and guide planning on adapting to changes in the environment. To this end, our recommendations follow: The U.S. approach to climate change policy needs to inform decisionmakers and planners in both government and the private sector by providing understandable metrics and analyses of the effectiveness of, and compliance with, mitigation programs and adaption plans. The customers for this should include federal agencies, state and local governments,

private sector users, and other nations. To better serve the national interest, the United States should increase its Earth observation capabilities—especially space-based sensors for carbon monitoring—to improve our ability to understand the carbon cycle and to inform any future international agreement. This means that until these capabilities are adequate for monitoring climate change, investment in Earth observation satellites should take precedence over other space programs. Increased spending on earth observation satellites specifically designed for climate change should be maintained until the current capability shortfall is eliminated. The United States should accelerate, expand, and reinforce a National Climate Service to improve climate information management and decisionmaking. In a related effort, the United States should support the World Meteorological Organization in its efforts to create a World Climate Service System. The United States should complement its national effort by supporting and expanding multilateral efforts to coordinate Earth observation for climate change, building on existing international efforts such as GCOS. This could entail coordinated investment in space and, subsidies for ground facilities in developing countries, recognizing that the United States, EU, Japan, and Canada will bear the largest share of the cost at this time.

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1AC Disasters Advantage 1/5

Advantage __ is Disasters

Natural and technical disasters are increasing at an alarming rate. The globe is becoming a field of intensifying death and destruction.Brunsma and Picou 2008 (David, University of Missouri, and J. Steven, University of South Alabama, Disasters in the Twenty-First Century: Modern Destruction and Future Instruction Social Forces Volume 87, Number 2, December 2008)

Sociologists are becoming increasingly aware of the changing nature of risk in late modernity and the shifting landscape of the sociological study of disasters. This increased "consciousness of catastrophe" is directly related to the empirical fact that the number of "natural" and "technological" disasters have increased substantially over the past 30 years. In the past eight years, some 422 disaster declarations have been issued in the United States alone – etching disasters as an important part of contemporary American experience (Bogues 2008). The number of people and communities affected by this most recent spate of catastrophic events reflects a global intensification of death and destruction that invites analytical and empirical application of a critical sociological imagination. While affecting society as a whole, these "focusing events," or "destabilizing events," have also had an impact on scholarly enterprises, shifting the attention of sociologists from more traditional areas of professional inquiry to the expansion and application of innovative concepts and methods to the study of disasters (Birkland 1997; Picou and Marshall 2007). This paradigm shift means that disaster research is being actively re-imagined throughout the broader discipline.

We have turned away from recognizing the responsibility of the government to care for its most vulnerable populations, especially in the face of uncontrollable environmental changes. The refusal to hold the government responsible for disaster preparedness and response result in the marking of racialized populations as expendable in favor of the smooth functioning of the market.Giroux 2006 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196)

Soon after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the consequences of the long legacy of attacking big government and bleeding the social and public service sectors of the state became glaringly evident as did a government that displayed a "staggering indifference to human suffering" (Herbert 2005). Hurricane Katrina made it abundantly clear that only the government had the power, resources, and authority to address complex undertakings such as dealing with the totality of the economic, environmental, cultural, [End Page 174] and social destruction that impacted the Gulf Coast. Given the Bush administration's disdain for the legacy of the New Deal, important government agencies were viewed scornfully as oversized entitlement programs, stripped of their power, and served up as a dumping ground to provide lucrative administrative jobs for political hacks who were often unqualified to lead such agencies. Not only was FEMA downsized and placed under the Department of Homeland Security but its role in disaster planning and preparation was subordinated to the all-inclusive goal of fighting terrorists. While it was virtually impossible to miss the total failure of the government response in the aftermath

of Katrina, what many people saw as incompetence or failed national leadership was more than that. Something more systemic and deep-rooted was revealed in the wake of Katrina—namely, that the state no longer provided a safety net for the poor, sick, elderly, and homeless. Instead, it had been transformed into a punishing institution intent on dismantling the welfare state and treating the homeless, unemployed, illiterate, and disabled as dispensable populations to be managed, criminalized, and made to disappear into prisons,

ghettos, and the black hole of despair. The Bush administration was not simply unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as it denied that the federal government alone had the resources to address catastrophic events; it actually felt no responsibility for the lives of poor blacks and others marginalized by poverty and relegated to the outskirts of society. Increasingly, the role of the state seems to be about engendering the financial rewards and privileges of only some members of society, while the welfare of those marginalized by race and class is now viewed with criminal contempt. The coupling of the market state with the racial state under George W. Bush means that policies are aggressively pursued to dismantle the welfare state, eliminate affirmative action,

model urban public schools after prisons, aggressively pursue anti-immigrant policies, and incarcerate with impunity Arabs, Muslims, and poor youth of color. The central commitment of the new hyper-neoliberalism is now organized around the best way to remove or make invisible those individuals and groups who are either seen as a drain or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade,

consumerism, and the neoconservative dream of an American empire. This is what I call the new biopolitics of disposability: the poor, especially people of color, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in color-blind America.

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The refusal to engage in disaster preparedness exacerbates the global vulnerability to environmental change, ensuring the global poor can never escape the devastating cycle of poverty. Briceño 08 (Sálvano Director, United Nations, International “Strategy for Disaster Reduction Linking Disaster Risk Reduction and Poverty Reduction” )Disasters are often portrayed as acts of nature, or of a natural order. Yet this is mostly far from reality. The major factors influencing disaster risks are human and social vulnerability, matched with the overall capacity to respond to or reduce the impact of natural hazards. Poverty is therefore a major factor increasing disaster risk, by increasing vulnerability to disasters and reducing existing coping capacities. It is only by addressing these two issues together that we can make the difference between a community trapped in a grinding poverty cycle, and one with secure lives and livelihoods. Another patch of common ground is that the poor suffer the most from disasters.1 94.25% of all people killed by disasters in from 1975-2000 were low income or lower-middle income people. The poorest people comprised 68% of deaths from disasters . These plain numbers are an indictment of socioeconomic inequality, and a telling signpost to where disaster risk reduction must concentrate its efforts as of moral necessity.

Furthermore, drought, cyclones, and flood seasons are repeatedly depriving the poor of their assets, livelihoods, and labour force, all too often locking them into endemic poverty cycles. Even in the poorest communities, however, there is a wealth of knowledge and experience on how to break this negative feedback cycle. From this set of good practices, for instance, water and environmental management emerge as a very prominent link between disaster risk reduction and poverty reduction. The examples of drought risk reduction initiatives highlighted in this publication are equally inspiring, and make intuitive sense. There is a need to further promote these initiatives, so that they can be scaled up or replicated on a wider scale.

Our affirmative is a mechanism by which we can reclaim public spaces to demand transformation of the biopolitics of disposability towards a politics of democratic inclusion. Recognition of the responsibility to transform our relation to natural disaster and how it renders populations vulnerable and expendable is key to transformative politics.

Giroux 2006 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196)Katrina reveals that we are living in dark times. The shadow of authoritarianism remains after the storm clouds and hurricane winds have passed, offering a glimpse of its wreckage and terror. The politics of a disaster that affected Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi is about more than government incompetence, militarization, socio-economic polarization, environmental disaster, and political scandal. Hurricane Katrina broke through the visual blackout of poverty and the pernicious ideology of color-blindness to reveal the government's role in fostering the dire conditions of largely poor African-Americans, who were bearing the hardships incurred by the full wrath of the indifference and violence at work in the racist, neoliberal state. Global neoliberalism and its victims now occupy a space shaped by authoritarian politics, the terrors inflicted by a police state, and a logic of disposability that removes them from government social provisions and the discourse and

privileges of citizenship. One of the most obvious lessons of Katrina—that race and racism still matter in America—is fully operational through a biopolitics in which "sovereignty resides in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who may die" (Mbembe 11-12). Those poor minorities of color and class, unable to contribute to the prevailing consumerist ethic, are vanishing into the sinkhole of poverty in desolate and abandoned enclaves of decaying cities, neighborhoods, and rural spaces, or in America's ever-expanding prison empire. Under the Bush regime, a biopolitics driven by the waste machine of what Zygmunt Bauman defines as "liquid modernity"

registers a new and brutal racism as part of the emergence of a contemporary and savage authoritarianism. [End Page 188] Any viable attempt to challenge the biopolitical project that now shapes American life and culture must do more than unearth the powerful antidemocratic forces that now govern American economics, politics, education, media, and culture; it must also deepen possibilities of individual and collective struggles by fighting for the rebuilding of civil society and the creation of a vast network of democratic public spheres such as schools and the alternative media in order to develop new models of individual and social agency that can expand and deepen the reality of democratic public life. This is a call for a diverse "radical party," following Stanley Aronowitz's exhortation, a party that prioritizes democracy as a global task, views hope as a precondition for political engagement, gives primacy to making the political more pedagogical, and understands the importance of the totality of the struggle

as it informs and articulates within and across a wide range of sites and sectors of everyday life—domestically and globally. Democratically minded citizens and social movements must return to the crucial issue of how race, class, power, and inequality in America contribute to the suffering and hardships experienced daily by the poor, people of color, and working- and middle-class people. The fight for equality offers new challenges in the process of constructing a politics that directly addresses poverty, class domination, and a resurgent racism. Such

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a politics would take seriously what it means to struggle pedagogically and politically over both ideas and material relations of power as they affect diverse individuals and groups at the level of daily life. Such struggles would combine a democratically energized cultural politics of resistance and hope with a politics aimed at offering workers a living wage and all citizens a guaranteed standard of living,

one that provides a decent education, housing, and health care to all residents of the United States. Biopolitics is not just about the reduction of selected elements of the population to the necessities of bare life or worse; it is also potentially about enhancing life by linking hope and a new vision to the struggle for reclaiming the social, providing a language capable of translating individual issues into public considerations, and recognizing that in the age of the new media the terrain of culture is one of the most important pedagogical spheres through which to challenge the most basic precepts of the new authoritarianism . The waste machine of modernity, as Bauman points out, must be challenged within a new understanding of environmental justice, human rights, and democratic politics (2000, 15). Negative globalization with its attachment to the mutually enforcing modalities of militarism and racial segregation must be exposed and dismantled. And this demands new forms of resistance that are both more global and differentiated. But if these struggles are going to emerge, especially in the United States, then we need a politics and pedagogy of hope, one that takes seriously Hannah Arendt's call to use the [End Page 189] public realm to throw light on the "dark times" that threaten to extinguish the very idea of democracy. Against the tyranny of market fundamentalism, religious dogmatism, unchecked militarism, and ideological claims to certainty, an emancipatory biopolitics must enlist education as a crucial force in the struggle over democratic identities, spaces, and ideals. Central to the biopolitics of disposability is the recognition that abiding powerlessness atrophies the public imagination and leads to political paralysis. Consequently, its policies avidly attack critical education at all levels of cultural production in an all-out effort to undermine critical thought, imagination, and substantive agency. To significantly confront the force of a biopolitics in the service of the new authoritarianism, intellectuals, artists, and others in various cultural sites—from schools to higher education to the media—will have to rethink what it means to secure the conditions for critical education both within and outside of the schools. In the context of formal schooling, this means fighting against the corporatization, commercialism, and

privatization of public schools. Higher education has to be defended in the same terms. Against the biopolitics of racial exclusion, the university should be a principal site where dialogue, negotiation, mutual understanding, and respect provide the knowledge and experience for students to develop a shared space for affirming differences while simultaneously learning those shared values necessary for an inclusive democratic society. Similarly, both public and higher education must address with new courage the history of American slavery, the enduring legacy of racism in the United States, and its interface with both political nationalism and the enduring market and religious fundamentalisms at work in contemporary society. Similarly, racism must be not be reduced to a private matter, a case of individual prejudice removed from the dictates of state violence and the broader realm of politics, and left to matters of "taste, preference, and ultimately, of consumer, or lifestyle choice" (Gilroy 2005, 146-

47). What must be instituted and fought for in higher education is a critical and anti-racist pedagogy that unsettles, stirs up human consciousness, "breeds dissatisfaction with the level of both freedom and democracy achieved thus far," and inextricably connects the fates of freedom, democracy, and critical education (Bauman 2003, 14). Hannah Arendt once argued that "the public realm has lost the power of illumination," and one result is that more and more people "have retreated from the world and their obligations within it"

(1955, 4). The public realm is not merely a space where the political, social, economic, and cultural interconnect; it is also the pre-eminent space of public pedagogy—that is, a space where subjectivities are shaped, public commitments are formed, and choices are made. As sites of cultural politics and public pedagogy, public spaces offer a unique opportunity for critically engaged citizens, young people, academics, [End Page 190] teachers, and various intellectuals to engage in pedagogical struggles that provide the conditions for social empowerment. Such struggles can be waged through the new media, films, publications, radio interviews, and a range of other forms of cultural production. It is especially crucial, as Mark Poster has argued, that scholars, teachers, public intellectuals, artists, and cultural theorists take on the challenge of understanding how the

new media technologies construct subjects differently with multiple forms of literacy that engage a range of intellectual capacities (2001). This also means deploying new technologies of communication such as the Internet, camcorder, and cell phone in political and pedagogically strategic ways to build protracted struggles and reclaim the promise of a democracy that insists on racial, gender, and economic equality. The new technoculture is a powerful pedagogical tool that needs to be used, on the one hand, in the struggle against both dominant media and the hegemonic ideologies they produce, circulate, and legitimate, and, on the other hand, as a valuable tool in treating men and women as agents of change, mindful of the consequences of their actions, and utterly capable of pursuing truly egalitarian models of democracy. The promise of a better world cannot be found in modes of authority that lack a vision of social justice, renounce the promise of democracy, and reject the dream of a better future, offering instead of dreams the pale assurance of protection from the nightmare of an all-embracing terrorism. Against this stripped-down legitimation of authority is the promise of public spheres, which in their diverse forms, sites, and content offer pedagogical and political possibilities for strengthening the social bonds of democracy, new spaces within which to cultivate the capacities for critical modes of individual and social agency, and crucial opportunities to form alliances to collectively struggle for a biopolitics that expands the scope of vision, operations of democracy, and the range of democratic institutions—that is, a biopolitics that fights against the terrors of totalitarianism. Such spheres are about more than legal rights guaranteeing freedom of speech; they are also sites that demand a certain kind of citizen informed by particular forms of education, a citizen whose education provides the essential conditions for democratic public spheres to flourish. Cornelius Castoriadis,

the great philosopher of democracy, argues that if public space is not to be experienced not as a private affair, but as a vibrant sphere in which people learn how to participate in and shape public life, then it must be shaped through an education that provides the decisive traits of courage, responsibility, and shame, all of which connect the fate of each individual to the fate of others, the planet, and global democracy (1991, 81-123). In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the biopolitical calculus of massive

power differentials and iniquitous market relations put the scourge of poverty and racism on full display. To confront [End Page 191] the biopolitics of disposability, we need to recognize the dark times in which we live and offer up a vision of hope that creates the conditions for multiple collective and global struggles that refuse to use politics as an act of war and markets as the measure of democracy. Making human beings superfluous is the essence of totalitarianism, and democracy is the antidote in urgent need of being reclaimed. Katrina should keep the hope of such a struggle alive for quite some time because for many of us the images of those floating bodies serve as an desperate reminder of what it means when justice, as the lifeblood of democracy, becomes cold and indifferent in the face of death.

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Earth Observation Satellites decentralize the state monopoly on information, allowing citizen groups to be meaningfully engaged in state politics. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999)The ability to control the flow of information, or what I have called epistemic sovereignty, is central to the exercise of control and authority within a territorial jurisdiction. The transparency and the global perspective of ERS technologies entail multiple, and sometimes contradictory, implications for epistemic sovereignty_ The

primary challenges are from the private sector, global science, and popular movements. On the one hand, ERS contributes to the unbundling, but not the abolition, of territoriality, often deterritorialising state practices. The principle of non-intervention, upon which traditional norms of sovereignty have relied, is at least called into question by the global gaze and the ubiquity of ERS images. On the other hand, ERS has also strengthened the territorial sovereignty of a few developing countries in their remote regions. Yet the greatest contribution of ERS to the reconfiguration of epistemic sovereignty might very well be in its applications to the proliferation of information and political practices beyond the state-most importantly, in the decentralised networks which constitute global science and the local efforts of community, environmental and peace groups.81

While state-funded ERS programmes have their roots in the balance-of-power politics characteristic of the national security state, today they tend to exemplify the sorts of sovereignty bargains required by scientific and environmental co-operation. The availability of high-resolution data on the commercial market has forced states to make a trade-off between traditional security objectives and industrial competitiveness. While none of these developments entails an outright "erosion" of sovereignty, they do highlight the importance of

the epistemic dimension of sovereignty. The control over the flow of information, which is essential to the modern scientific state, appears to be shifting beyond the scientific state. If modernity is interpreted as the enclosure of the globe via the twin institu tions of state sovereignty and private property, then ERS technologies at once epitomise and challenge that trend. On the one hand, by making visible the invisible, satellite imagery

renders nature subject to claims of ownership and control--whether by states or by oil and mining companies. On the other hand, in light of the globality and transparency inherent in ERS technologies and the emphasis on environmental co-operation, ERS has the potential to become a tool in the revisioning of nature as a global commons. Indeed, this is the thrust of much of the discourse surrounding

environmental ERS. Likewise, the commercial availability of high-resolution satellite images opens the door for a host of non-state actors, especially citizens' groups and the news media, to involve themselves in the high-stakes national security issues which were once the sole purview of states' military establishments. There is also an interesting tension between the universal, totalising perspective of the planetary gaze, and the application of ERS technologies to popular sovereignty through the decentralis ation of scientific and political control.

And such mechanisms of participatory democracy are crucial to the creation of responsible and engaged citizens. The alternative is injustice and powerlessness.Dr. Henry A. Giroux 2009 (Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies @ McMaster University; Received his Doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon in 1977. “Obama's View of Education Is Stuck in Reverse,” TruthOut, July 24th, Available at http://www.truthout.org/072409A

Situated within a broader context of issues concerned with social responsibility, politics and the dignity of human life, education should be engaged as a site that offers students the opportunity to involve themselves in the deepest problems of society, to acquire the knowledge, skills and ethical vocabulary necessary for modes of critical dialogue and forms of broadened civic participation. This suggests developing classroom conditions for students to come to terms with their own sense of power and public voice as individual and social agents by enabling them to examine and frame critically what they learn in the classroom "within a more political or

social or intellectual understanding of what's going on" in the interface between their lives and the world at large.(4) At the very least, students need to learn how to take responsibility for their own ideas, take intellectual risks, develop a sense of respect for others different than themselves, and learn how to think critically in order to function in a wider democratic culture. At issue here is providing students with an education that allows them to recognize the dream and promise of a substantive democracy, particularly the idea that as citizens they are "entitled to public services, decent housing, safety, security, support during hard times,

and most importantly, some power over decision making."(5) This is a view of education that treats teachers as critical and supportive intellectuals, not technicians, students as engaged citizens, not consumers, and schools as democratic public spheres, not training sites for the business world. It is also a view of education in which matters of power, equality, civic literacy and justice are central to any viable notion of education that addresses the future in terms of its democratic possibilities, rather than the bottom line.(6)

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Furthermore, only the investment in Earth Observation Satellites allow us to respond to catastrophe not retrospectively, but rather through a connection to our shared communities that provides the basis for the preparation for global environmental change, mitigating inegalitarian sacrifice. Wigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

Is it possible to predict or alleviate the impacts of natural and manmade disasters? From the recent earthquake in China to the cyclone in Myanmar to the rapid changes in our climate to the ongoing violence in Darfur, environmental and national security events are occurring around the globe. Can we learn to adapt to and mitigate the water shortages and droughts that, combined with crop failures and exacerbated by soaring energy prices and a growing demand for biofuels, have led to an unprecedented global food crisis? Will we be able to understand and take actions to minimize the impact of changing climate and associated weather events on the health of human populations—from addressing rising sea levels to the accelerated spread of disease? Will we be able to balance the need for a wider array of alternative energy sources with respect to surging energy prices, simultaneously managing the implementation of carbon emission agreements

including carbon cap and trade agreements? These questions, and many others, demonstrate the complex management challenges presented by global change.1 In order for decisionmakers to address these management challenges, they must have reliable, continuous long-term data about our planet and environment. Earth observations—including sensors in space, on land, in the air, and at sea, as well as associated data management and dissemination systems, Earth system models, and decision support tools—provide the infrastructure to deliver the data needed to understand ongoing global changes. In the half century since the dawn of the space age, space-based technologies from communications satellites to the global position system (GPS)—which underpin the success of globalization in recent

decades—have been instrumental in knitting our civilization more closely together. Similarly, we have started to rely on Earth observations as another global public good. Earth observations are critical in a number of areas including dramatic applications in managing the effect of disasters, monitoring global agricultural productivity, assessing natural conditions including the state of the Earth’s fresh water supplies, and monitoring the indirect effects of global energy policies on Earth’s climate. These are all part of the vast effort involved in understanding and managing the 20 percent to 80 percent of the U.S. economy (representing $2.75 trillion to $11 trillion in 2007) sensitive to weather in the short term, let alone the evolving risk profile associated with longer-term global change. We have successfully

developed and integrated space-based communications and navigation capabilities to bring us closer together. While we have made great strides in developing and using Earth observation capabilities, many challenges remain to provide equivalent accomplishments in the operational and sustained use of Earth observations for global security. While we have started to use Earth observations in predicting and responding to disasters, such as the Indonesian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina, we are far from secure in having an operational ability to systematically monitor, predict, mitigate, or understand in order to take the actions necessary to prevent the challenges caused by the ever-increasing pace of global change. If we are to understand and plan intelligently for global change, we must take every opportunity to build on our past successes and redress our existing shortcomings. Today, there are a number of steps the United States must undertake to deliver on the potential of Earth

observations. First, the United States has the opportunity to demonstrate strong leadership within the U.S. Earth observation community through coherent, integrated planning, budgeting, and management of an Earth observation system providing long-term, continuous data acquisition. Second, the United States must lead the world toward effective international cooperation on Earth observations and, consequently, global change. Like any other kind of strong international leadership, leadership in Earth observations enhances our national foreign policy capabilities from providing data to manage global resources to economic security enabled by Earth observation capacity building. Third, the United States must ensure that Earth observations meet the needs of all users and that the public and

private sectors reinforce—not inhibit—each other to enable us to take advantage of the ingenuity and innovation that the private sector can offer. Rather than learning to adapt to natural and [hu]manmade disasters, the changing climate, the global food crisis, and our growing appetite for energy, dealing only with the consequences after the fact, we need to start focusing our efforts on the Earth observation systems that will better connect humanity and its home, allowing us to prevent, predict, and mitigate the increasingly dramatic impacts of global change on a routine basis.

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The United States must fulfill its commitment to GEOSS in order to provide accurate data and the leadership necessary to resolve the mounting environmental changes we are experiencing. Killeen 2005 Timothy L. Director @ the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “NASA Earth Science” 4-28-05. CQ Congressional Testimony. Accessed Via Lexis/Nexis

The first example is probably well known to you. The ozone "holes" in the Antarctic and Arctic were monitored from space by various NASA satellite systems, including the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS). The diagnosis of the physical and chemical mechanisms responsible for these dangerous changes to our

protective ozone shield was made possible by the combination of observations, modeling, and theory supported by NASA. In fact, it was a NASA high-altitude aircraft that made the "smoking gun" measurements that convinced the scientific and policy communities that chlorine compounds produced by various human activities were centrally responsible for the observed ozone loss. Following these observations, international protocols were put in place that are beginning to ameliorate the global-scale ozone loss. The TOMS instrument has provided an ongoing source of data that permits us to track the level of ozone in the stratosphere, the annual opening and closing of the "ozone

hole," and how this phenomenon is changing over time. These continuing measurements and analyses and the effective regulatory response have led, among other things, to a reduction in projected deaths from skin cancer worldwide. Last week,

President Bush mentioned proposed rules to limit air pollution from coalfired power plants. Air pollution is clearly an important concern. NASA has played a major role in the development of new technologies that can monitor the sources and circulation patterns of air pollution globally. It is another tremendous story of science serving society through innovation. In this case, through an international collaboration, NASA deployed a one-of-a-kind instrument designed to observe global carbon monoxide and its transport from the NASA Terra spacecraft. These animations show the first global observations of air pollution. Sources of carbon monoxide include industrial processes (see, for example, source regions in the Pacific Rim) and fires (for

example in Amazonia). These global-scale data from space have helped change our understanding of the relationship between pollution and air quality - we now know that pollution is not solely or even primarily a local or regional problem. California's air quality is influenced by industrial activity in Asia, and Europe's air quality is influenced by activities here in America. From such pioneering work, operational systems can now be designed to observe pollution events, the global distribution of chemicals and particulate matter in the atmosphere, and the ways in which these substances interact and affect the ability of the atmosphere to sustain life - such a system will undoubtedly underpin future efforts to understand, monitor, and manage air quality globally. Without NASA's commitment to innovation in the Earth sciences, it is hard to believe that such an incredible new capability would be available today. The Promise of Earth Observations in the Next Decade The achievements of the last several decades have laid the foundation for an unprecedented era of discovery and innovation in Earth system science. Advances in observing technologies have been accompanied by vast improvements in computing and data processing. When the Earth Observing System satellites were being designed, processing and archiving the data was a central challenge. The Terra satellite produces about 194 gigabytes of raw data per day, which seemed a daunting prospect at the time of its definition. Now laptop memories are measured in gigabytes, students can work with remote sensing datasets on their laptops, and a large data center like NCAR increases our data holdings by about 1000 gigabytes per day. The next generation of high performance computing systems, which will be deployed during the next five years or so, will be petascale systems, meaning that they will be able to process millions of gigabytes of data. The ongoing revolution in information technology has provided us with capabilities we could hardly conceive of when the current generation of Earth observing satellites was being developed. We have just begun to take advantage of the synergies between these technological areas. The U.S., through NASA, is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this technological opportunity. Example 3: Weather Forecasting

Weather forecasting in the Southern Hemisphere has been dramatically improved through NASA's contributions, and this experience illustrates the power of remote sensing for further global improvements in weather prediction. The lack of surface- based data in the Southern Hemisphere once meant that predictive skill lagged considerably behind that achieved in the Northern Hemisphere. The improvement in the accuracy of Southern Hemisphere weather forecasting is well documented and almost entirely due to the increased use of remote-sensing data. But improvements in the quality of satellite data were not sufficient. Improvements in data assimilation a family of techniques for integrating observational results into predictive models were also necessary. The combination has resulted in rapid improvement in Southern Hemisphere forecasting,

which is now nearly equal to that in northern regions. Data assimilation capabilities continue to advance rapidly. One can now easily conceive of forecast systems that will fuse data from satellites, ground-based systems, databases, and models to provide predictions with unprecedented detail and accuracy - perhaps reaching natural limits of predictability. A new generation of weather forecast models with cloud-resolving spatial resolution is coming on line, and these models show significant promise

for improving forecast skills across the board. Use of new NASA remote sensing data from upcoming missions such as Calipso (Cloud- Aerosol and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite) and CloudSat will be essential to fully validate and tune these new capabilities which will serve the nation in providing improved hurricane and severe storm prediction, and in the development of numerous decision support systems reliant on state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction capabilities. Example 4: Earth System Models Data from NASA missions are central to constructing more comprehensive and detailed models that will more realistically represent the complexity of the Earth system. Cloud observations from MODIS (the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) and precipitation measurements from GPM (the Global Precipitation Mission), for example, are critical to improving the representation of clouds and the water cycle in such models. Observations from MODIS and Landsat are fundamental to

the development of more sophisticated representation of marine and terrestrial ecosystems and atmosphere-land surface interactions. The inclusion of this detail will help in the creation of true Earth system models that will enable detailed investigation of the interactions of Earth system processes and multiple environmental stresses within physically consistent simulated systems. In general terms, Earth system observations represent the only means of validating Earth system model predictions. Our confidence in short-term, regional-scale weather predictions is based on how closely they match observed regional conditions. Assessing the performance of global-scale, longer-term model predictions likewise depends on comparing model results with observational records.

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Scientific confidence in the ability of general circulation models to represent Earth's climate has been greatly enhanced by comparing model results for the last century with the observational records from that period. At the same time, the sparse and uneven nature of past observational records is an ongoing source of uncertainty in the evaluation of model results. The existence of much more comprehensive and consistent global measurements from space such as the data from the NASA Terra, Aqua, and Aura satellites is a giant step forward in this regard, and, if maintained, will enable much more rigorous evaluation of model performance in the future. In summary, Earth system models, with increasing temporal and spatial resolutions and validated predictive capabilities, will be used by industry and governmental decision makers across a host of domains into the foreseeable future. This knowledge base will drive new economies and efficiencies within our society. I believe that requirements flowing from the needs and capabilities of sophisticated Earth system models will be very useful for NASA in developing strategic roadmaps for future missions. C. The Importance of Careful Planning The central role of NASA in supporting Earth system science, the demonstrated success and impact of previous and current NASA missions, and the promise of continued advances in scientific understanding and societal benefits all argue for a careful, analytical approach to major modifications in

the NASA Earth science program. As noted above, the development of space systems is a time-consuming and difficult process. Today's actions and plans will have long-term consequences for our nation's capabilities in this area. The link between plans and actions is one of the most important points I want to address today. From the outside, the interagency planning process seems to be experiencing substantial difficulties in maintaining this link. The NASA Earth science program is part of two major Presidential initiatives, the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). With regard to the CCSP, it is not apparent that the strategies and plans developed through the interagency process are having much impact on NASA decision-making. In January 2004, then- Administrator of NASA, Sean O'Keefe, called for acceleration of the NASA Glory mission because of the direct relevance of the mission to understanding the roles of aerosols in the climate system, which is one of the highest-priority science questions defined in the CCSP research strategy. NASA is now proposing cancellation of the mission. As I have emphasized throughout this testimony, the progress of and benefits from Earth system science research are contingent upon close coordination between research, modeling, and observations. The close coordination of

program planning among the agencies that support these activities is also a necessity. This coordination currently appears to be fragile. The effect of significant redirections in NASA and reduction in NASA's Earth science effort are equally worrisome in the case of the Administration's GEOSS initiative, which is focused on improving the international coordination of environmental observing systems. Both NASA and NOAA satellite programs are vital to this effort. The science community is very supportive of the GEOSS concept and goals. There are over 100 space-based remote-sensing systems that are either operating or planned by various nations for the next decade. Collaboration among space systems, between space- and ground-based systems, and between suppliers and users of observational data is critical to avoiding duplication of effort and to getting the most out of the investments in observing technology. The tragic example of the Indian Ocean Tsunami demonstrates the need for such coordination. The tsunami was detected and observed before hitting land, but the absence of effective communication links prevented warnings from reaching those who needed them in time. A functioning GEOSS could lead to major improvements in the rapid availability of data and warnings, and the U.S. is right to make development of such a system a priority. But U.S. credibility and leadership of this initiative will be called into question if our nation is unable or unwilling to coordinate and maintain the U.S. programs that make up the core of our proposed contribution. D. Answers to Questions Posed by the Committee My testimony to this point has outlined my views on a series of key issues for the NASA Earth science program. Much of the text found above is relevant to consideration of the specific questions posed by the Committee in its letter of invitation. In this section, I provide more direct answers to these questions to the extent possible and appropriate. How should NASA prioritize currently planned and future missions? What criteria should NASA use in doing so? I believe that NASA should work with the scientific and technical community and its partner agencies to define a NASA Earth science plan that is fully compatible with the overall CCSP and GEOSS science strategies. In my view, the interaction with the scientific and technical community should include both input from and review by the National Research Council (NRC) and direct interaction with the strong national community of Earth science investigators and the aerospace industry who are very familiar with NASA capabilities and developing technological opportunities. Competitive peer review processes should be used appropriately in assessing the merit of competing approaches and in key decision- making. I believe NASA should also find a means of involving users and potential users of NASA-generated data in this process, perhaps through public comment periods or a series of workshops. Sufficient time should be allotted to this process for a careful and deliberative evaluation of options. This science plan should then guide the process of setting mission priorities. Defining criteria to use in comparing and deciding upon potential missions would be an important part of this planning exercise. I would recommend consideration of a set of criteria that include: -- compatibility with science priorities in the CCSP and GEOSS science plans -- potential scientific return from mission -- technological risk -- direct and indirect societal benefits -- cost. I believe that the decadal planning activity underway at the NRC in response to a request from NASA and NOAA is a valuable step in this process. What are the highest priority unaddressed or unanswered questions in Earth science observations from space? I believe this question is most appropriately addressed through the community process suggested above. There are many important Earth science questions, and prioritizing among them is best done in a deliberative and transparent process that involves extensive input from and discussion by the science community. I would personally cite soil moisture, three-dimensional cloud characteristics, global vector tropospheric winds, pollutant characteristics and transport, carbon fluxes, and aerosol distributions as all high priority measurements to make on a global scale. What have been the most important contributions to society that have come from NASA Earth

sciences over the last decade (or two)? NASA Earth science programs have played a key role in developing our understanding of the Earth as a coupled system of inter- related parts, and in the identification and documentation of a series of global-scale changes in the Earth's environment, including ozone depletion, land use and land cover change, loss of biodiversity, and climate change. Other examples of societal contributions include improved weather forecasting, improved understanding of the large-scale climate variations, such as the El Nino- Southern Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation that alter seasonal patterns of rainfall, and improved understanding of the status of and changes in marine and terrestrial ecosystems that contributes to more effective management of natural resources. What future benefits to the nation (societal applications) are possible that NASA Earth sciences could provide? What gaps in our knowledge must we fill before those future benefits are

possible? In a broad sense, NASA Earth science activities are part of developing a global Earth information system that can provide ongoing and accurate information about the status of and changes in the atmosphere, oceans, and marine and terrestrial ecosystems that sustain life, including the impact of human activities. The continued development of observation systems, sophisticated Earth system models, data assimilation methods, and information technologies holds the promise of much improved predictions of weather and climate variations and much more effective

prediction and warning of natural hazards. Much has already been accomplished to lay the groundwork for such a system, but m any important questions remain. Some of the most important have to do with the functioning and human alteration of the Earth's carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles, and how these cycles interact; the regional manifestation of global scale climate change; and the reactions of ecosystems to simultaneous multiple stresses.

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And finally, the United States’ participation is crucial to successful implementation of GEOSS. Wigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

In July 2003, the United States, under the leadership of Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, Secretary of Energy

Samuel Bodman, and NOAA administrator Conrad Lautenbacher, launched a worldwide effort to develop a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). Today, 72 nations, the European Commission, and 52 other participating organizations are members of the Group on Earth

Observations (GEO), the implementing body for GEOSS. The U.S.-led creation of GEO has been a tremendous scientific, environmental,

and foreign policy achievement. It has engaged—at the ministerial level—governments who have agreed on the value of Earth observations to obtain concrete societal benefits. GEO members have identified nine broad societal benefit areas that are intrinsically reliant on Earth observation products:

disasters, health, energy, climate, agriculture, ecosystems, biodiversity, water, and weather. To date, GEO has focused on coordinating the data from applications in these nine areas, providing easier and more open data access and fostering use of this data for broader development of science, applications, and Earth observation capacity building. This coordination includes promoting architecture and software interoperability allowing the development of standard interoperable formats for collecting, processing, storing, and disseminating the full range of Earth observation data and thematic products. GEO is also developing a Web portal to provide a one-stop source for aggre- gating and accessing all the data from all the systems operated by its members. GEO is focusing on the transition from technology demonstration

systems to a sustainable system for maintaining long-term data acquisition and continuity. GEO is also looking at current and new schemes for funding, including public-private partnerships. Within GEO, the United States has led a growing consensus on making data freely available at low cost, prompting other nations to open up previously unavailable data sets. There was a broad recognition in the November 2007 Cape Town Declaration, agreed upon at the GEO Ministerial Summit in Cape Town, South Africa, that the success of GEOSS will depend on a commitment by all GEO partners to work together to ensure timely, global, and open access to data and products. Individual members made commitments in this direction. For example, Brazil and China offered their China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (CBERS) data free of charge to all African nations, and Brazil is putting a ground station in South Africa to facilitate distribution of that data. The Cape Town Declaration stated that GEO supported “the establishment of a process with the objective to reach a consensus on the implementation of the Data Sharing Principles for GEOSS to be presented to

the next GEO Ministerial Summit,” which is expected to occur before the end of 2010. International cooperation is essential for the creation of GEOSS. The realization of GEOSS will be achieved through the timely combination of observations from around the world and a number of relatively small geographical regions. This will require the contributions of many nations, since no single country has the resources to build the global system of systems needed to address global change. It will also require an understanding of what gaps exist, where capabilities overlap, and where strategic redundancies are required. And it will require a multilateral commitment to leverage the capabilities of all nations that have or

plan to have Earth observation programs. Other nations are making commitments to and large investments in Earth observations, which can complement U.S. Earth observation capabilities and contribute synergistically to a global system of systems. There is strong European political support for monitoring and measuring global change, and the European Global Monitoring of Environment and Security (GMES) Initiative has gathered substantial momentum in the European Union and with European space agencies, as well as wide-ranging participation of European industry. The Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) launched the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) in 2006 and is developing Global Change Observation Mission (GCOM-Water) and planning a GCOM-Climate mission. China is making significant investments in Earth observations, with plans to launch several satellites for Earth resources, meteorology, and oceanography in the next decade. India is developing a suite of instruments and is planning a joint mission with France (Megha-Tropique) focusing on the water cycle in the intertropical region. A list of current and planned Earth observation satellites is included in appendix B. With Europe, China, Japan, India, and other nations making very large investments in Earth observation capabilities, there is tremendous potential for synergistic cooperation and novel ways to leverage new capabilities. For example, the Europeans are now making decisions about the GMES program that could result in the (intentional or unintentional) development of a capability that already exists in other programs elsewhere. In the past, some nations have elected to duplicate capabilities existing elsewhere because they want their own “national” satellite or because they want a better

capability. Another factor driving these decisions about redundancy is data availability. For example, in response to data sharing difficulties and the national security applications of some data, the United States wants to maintain a core capability for land imaging that would be synergistically supplemented with data from other non-U.S sources.

Nonetheless, even today, some satellite capabilities are needlessly duplicated as a result of lack of coordination. The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) grew from an initiative launched at the 1982 G-7 Economic Summit to coordinate space-borne Earth observation missions. The main goal of CEOS is to ensure that critical questions relating to Earth observations and global change are addressed while avoiding the unnecessary duplication of satellite missions related to global change. CEOS has 28 members that have satellite programs and an additional 20 associate members, including UN agencies and organizations that have or plan to have relevant ground facilities, support programs, or satellites. CEOS is a GEO Participating Organization: the GEO Secretariat and many GEO members look to CEOS to help assemble the space segment of GEOSS. The CEOS Strategic Implementation Team is developing several

virtual satellite constellations involving data sharing. While CEOS leads or contributes to a number of GEO tasks, including the “virtual constellation task,” the relationship between GEO and CEOS with respect to the

development of GEOSS is still evolving and could be strengthened. Furthermore, much more needs to be done in order to implement GEOSS. Jason and NPO- ESS are examples of successful international engagement. There are further opportunities for the United States to be proactive in seeking partnerships on cooperative missions and developing interoperable

systems. With the exception of ocean monitoring, the United States has not built the cooperative relationships to transition new sensors and systems (beyond what are essentially technology demonstration missions) to long-term data acquisition and continuity.

Finally, it is widely acknowledged that strong, senior U.S. leadership in the GEO process has been critical to achieving the gains it has made. NOAA administrator Lautenbacher has played a key role in the creation and continuous U.S. leadership in GEO. It is critically important that the United States continue to represent itself in the GEO arena at such a senior

level in order to keep ministerial level officials in other nations engaged and supportive of the creation of GEOSS. The priority that the United States places on GEO as evidenced by the leadership it provides will have a significant impact on the future of GEO .

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NOAA cannot implement new Environmental missions now. Only new missions solve lagging capacity.Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications from

Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11820.html)

Severe budget problems in the NOAA NPOESS program, which carry budget liens against the program well into the next decade, make it difficult for the committee to gauge NOAA’s capacity to implement additional Earth science missions. In view of this uncertainty, the committee recommends an extremely modest set of new operational missions for implementation by NOAA, with relatively small cost implications (Figures 2.12 and 2.13). Nevertheless,

implementation of the set of recommended missions, in concert with the current reduced plan for NPOESS, will ensure substantial continuity, through at least 2020, for all of the environmental data records originally targeted by the NPOESS program (JROC, 2001; see Tables 2.4 and 2.5). Broader issues associated with long-term data records for research and applications are discussed more fully in Chapter 3. In addition, as noted above, a strategy to recover lost NPOESS capabilities, especially those important for climate-related research, is the subject of a follow-on NRC study. The recommended mission set listed in Tables 2.1 and 2.2 reflects an integrated and carefully sequenced plan that addresses urgent societal issues (Figures 2.14 to 2.22). Although the launch order of the missions represents, in a practical sense, a priority order, it is important to recognize that the many factors involved in developing the mission plan preclude such a simple priority setting. As noted above, the committee generally placed technologically ready and less

expensive missions earlier in the sequence of implementation. That strategy reduces the risk of mission failure and makes optimal use of the budget wedge that emerges in the committee’s recommended mission profile (see Figures 2.12 and 2.13). Consideration of each highlighted societal need made it clear to the committee that elimination of any of the recommended missions would severely limit gains with respect to at least one important societal need, and typically several. A change in an individual mission, whether forced by budget or technology, or by changing user priorities, should cause the implementing agencies to consider the ramifications for the resulting program to ensure that unacceptable gaps in measurements, or other problems, are not created.

Earth observation is declining now: Congress has provided too little funding to continue crucial missions. Todd Gerarden March 11 (2011, a Research Assistant at Resources for the Future,

The Glory Launch Failure: The Relationship Between Climate Science And Policy http://www.rff.org/wv/archive/tags/Climate%20Science/default.aspx)

Significant political challenges lie ahead for NASA and the scientific community in their efforts to put in place the promised functionality of Glory and expand Earth observation in the coming years. Of these, budget austerity presents the greatest challenge in the near future. Over the past five months, Congress inadvertently challenged NASA to continue its programs with less funding than necessary by operating on a Continuing Resolution that funded the agency roughly at Fiscal Year (FY) 2010 levels. Last month, President Obama’s FY 2012 budget proposal cut two of four high-priority climate satellites recommended by the National Research Council in 2007. The first of these two missions, known as Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice (DESDynI), would have collected data on surface deformation for earthquake science, responses of terrestrial biomass to land management, and variability in ice flow patterns for improved projections of sea level rise. The second, Climate Absolute Radiance and Refractivity Observatory (CLARREO), was intended for use in verifying and improving existing climate models.

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Inherency: Disaster Management

Despite the potential for remote sensing, systematic use in disaster management has been slow.Kerle and Oppenheimer 02 (Norman Kerle, PhD in geography (volcano remote sensing) from the University of Cambridge, Clive Oppenheimer, PhD (Open University) Volcanology, “Satellite Remote Sensing as a Tool in Lahar Disaster Management”, Volume 26, Issue 2, pages 140–160)

The globe is currently being monitored by some 18 EO satellites of medium to high spatial resolution, providing a continuous stream of image data. The potential of satellite technology in all phases of a disaster has been recognised, yet despite 156 Norman Kerle and Clive Oppenheimer

increasingly sophisticated (and easy-to-use) image analysis software, and the introduction of remote sensing in many areas outside academia, the systematic use of remote sensing in disaster management has been slow. Time is of critical importance, with the value of remote-sensing data diminishing at an exponential rate following a disaster (San Miguel-Ayanz et al., 2000), and any delay aggravating the situation (Luscombe and Hassan, 1993). This is reflected in rapid initial response as a key parameter in proposed dedicated satellite constellations. In several studies it has been argued that initial image acquisition within a few hours of an event is necessary (e.g. Kuroda et al., 1997;

Tobias et al., 2000). Currently, however, non-pointable sensors with long revisit times, delays in (and high cost of) custom image acquisition and

data dissemination continue to undermine the technology’s potential. For example, an emergency image acquisition with RADARSAT requires advance programming, leading to delays of between 31.5 and 58 hours (F. Debroux of Radarsat Intl., pers. comm.). As demonstrated in the Casita case, the utility of remote-sensing data strongly depends on the disaster type and its onset time. Extensive flooding is arguably the easiest to detect, as standing water is readily imaged with radar, which also disregards cloud cover. With available imaging technology, lahars provide a more serious challenge. The typically rapid, unexpected onset leaves no time for satellite reprogramming, while clouds render optical

imagery useless. The currently operational radar sensors, not sufficient in number to provide a fast, global response, also have difficulties in imaging lahars rougher than the Pinatubo-type, ash-derived flow deposits.

Radar’s inability to image damage to infrastructure and lifelines further diminishes its value as an operational tool.

Not having satellites optimized for disaster management prevents us from achieving effective disaster reliefHoldaway 01 (Richard Ph.D and professor at Canterbury University, Is space global disaster warning and monitoring now nearing reality?, Space Policy 17 (2001) 127–132)

The total direct cost to the global economy due to earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters is now in excess of $400 billion each year. Even this large sum excludes indirect costs arising from reduced productivity, destruction of the infrastructure and reduced GNP due to population upheaval or loss. Recent events have included large scale forest fires in Indonesia, earthquakes in Turkey, Taiwan, Greece, Mexico and El Salvador, El Nino-triggered tornadoes, * flooding, landslides and fish stock depletion in

both North and South America, typhoons in Bangladesh and Taiwan, and floods in Venezuela, Mozambique and China. Large populations live under constant threat} for example, 17 of the 20 largest cities in the world are prone to major natural disasters. The nature of disaster monitoring and warning includes an assessment of the risks of disasters, warning of impending disasters (to lessen damage) and rapid response.

Geostationary satellites are widely used to detect and track severe storms and other weather-driven events, while polar-orbiting satellites are better able to detect volcanic eruptions, floods, and in some cases oil spills. The co-ordinated and synergistic use of both classes of satellite can undoubtedly aid in detecting a wider range of disasters, including not only storms, volcanic eruptions and oil spills but also earthquakes, forest fires, landslides, industrial pollution, industrial accidents (nuclear), algae blooms, hurricanes, El Nino * and tsunami. The types and resolutions of sensors required to monitor these events, and the time-scales by which the data are required by the end user varies enormously, and covers the spectrum from visible to long-wave (thermal), from millimetre to kilometre resolution, and from minutes to years in time. Earth observation satellites already play a small role in disaster warning and

monitoring (DMW) and can play a much greater role in the future. The principal limiting factor at present is that most of the existing platforms are not optimised for specific disaster management tasks in terms of temporal and spatial requirements, sensor wavelength range and technique, and orbit characteristics. Therefore the optimum data are rarely available, particularly for the rapid

onset of disasters. The gradual transfer of technology from military to civilian spheres is helping the situation, but matters will not improve until dedicated sensor systems and effective data product turn-around is achieved. In order to achieve meaningful global coverage with revisit rates that are acceptable to those requiring the data, it is necessary to think more widely in terms of the method of obtaining the data. In the case of global coverage, it is clear that sensors are needed in polar orbits, as is the case with satellites similar, for example, E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Holdaway). to ERS-2. However, a single sensor will provide at best 0265-9646/01/$ - see front matter # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 2 6 5 - 9 6 4 6 ( 0 1 ) 0 0 0 0 9 - 1two to three useful passes over a given area of the globe each day, and will not adequately cover the whole globe at sufficient depth of coverage. This is particularly true in the case of the requirement to give regular and frequent warning or coverage of a fast-developing disaster. In this case, guaranteed coverage for every one to two hours may be needed, and perhaps on an even greater frequency. This need for regular coverage can of course be provided using geostationary satellite images. Unfortunately they operate at an altitude of about 22 000 km above the Earth’s surface and

therefore provide poor ground resolution. An alternative solution in principle is to make use of one or more of the upcoming satellite mobile communications constellations. These constellations contain many satellites in a variety of near-polar orbits and are guaranteed to provide global mobile communications on a continuous basis (24 h per day). They are therefore ideal for providing global coverage of Disasters.

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Inherency: No New Satellites

The USFG is not actually implementing or supporting remote sensing satellites in the squoKessler 2008 [J. Christian, former director of the State Department’s Office of Conventional Arms Threat Reduction,lead the process of national security policy regarding commercial and foreign remote sensing satellites, “Leadership in the Remote Sensing Satellite Industry”, North Raven, 2008, http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/files/NOAA_Report_Northraven_final.pdf]

Interviews with executives in U.S. firms that operate satellites to provide imagery and imagery products on a commercial basis, firms that build remote sensing satellites

for domestic and foreign clients, and firms that participate in the launch services industry provide strong evidence that the U.S. Government is not providing effective support and is not in fact actually implementing the enunciated policy of striving to maintain U.S. commercial leadership in all aspects of remote sensing. The main critiques offered by U.S. industry are: U.S. Government agencies remain focused on maintaining their traditional roles and missions, even when that involves new programs that run counter to the purposes of presidential policy. There is no centralized monitoring or

coordination of programs that impact the U.S. remote sensing industry. The U.S. is overly protective of capabilities and technologies, with

the result that foreign governments and firms develop independently the capabilities that they cannot readily acquire from the U.S. The U.S. treats essentially all components and technologies for remote sensing (and all) satellites as munitions items, and those munitions export controls are applied too stringently. U.S. policy requires that a government-go-government agreement must first be negotiated for the export of a remote sensing satellite or certain key technologies before the U.S. firm(s) can be licensed to export the satellite or key system. However, this formal agreement between the U.S. Government and the purchasing government does not guarantee that the required export license(s) will be issued. Thus the purchasing government faces uncertainty even once it has formally agreed to U.S. legal and policy requirements. U.S. regulations concerning imagery or data dissemination would appear to be more liberal than those of major foreign competitors, which generally control imagery distribution on some form of case-by-case basis, rather than providing blanket authorization for most distribution once the satellite system has been authorized for operation. However, U.S. imagery providers state that they confront a sense among clients that the U.S. is more likely to curtail access at some unforeseen point than are the governments of other imagery providers. The U.S. Government is not a strong and effective advocate of U.S. firms in international competitions. U.S. advocacy is handled largely by the Commerce Department. The State and Defense Departments have the legal authority to permit or stop the proposed U.S. export, and advocacy without assertive roles by the State and Defense Department’s can be perceived by the purchasing government as more pro forma than indicative of strong unified U.S. Government support. The priorities for U.S. exports – imagery if possible, if not imagery then satellites delivered on a turn-key basis, and finally the transfer if key components, but not technological knowledge – established in policy make sense to most in industry. However many noted that because foreign governments judge that owning and independently operating their own national reconnaissance systems is necessary for their security interests, U.S. policy does not address the key needs of even close military allies. In sum, in the view of executives in the U.S. remote

sensing related industries, many key practices of the U.S. Government run counter to the stated policy objective of the U.S. Government, and are fostering the developments that policy is intended to minimize.

Inherency: NOAA

NOAA is responsible for climate monitoring and ecosystem management. Unfortunately, it lacks the resources necessary to complete these tasks.

National Research Council 2009 (America's Future in Space: Aligning the Civil Space Program with National Needs, online)

NOAA faces a similar problem. The agency is charged with operating a space program to meet long-term operational meteorological needs as well as increasing requirements in the areas of climate monitoring and ecosystem management . Unfortunately, the agency’s resources are inadequate to fulfill those roles. NASA transferred its responsibilities for monitoring climate change to NOAA a decade ago, with the expectation that the required instrumentation would be flown on the National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System ( NPOESS ), jointly

managed by NOAA and the DOD. NPOESS is now over budget and behind schedule. While some of the climate instruments that had been

removed from NPOESS in recent years have been reinstated, a 2009 NRC report concluded that NPOESS still lacks essential features of a well-designed climate-monitoring system.6 Meanwhile, NASA’s funding for Earth science has declined substantially, leaving the nation with aging and inadequate systems to provide an understanding of the present state and future of Earth’s climate 7 despite the one-time infusion of $450 million in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act package for Earth science. In testimony before the committee, former NOAA administrator , VADM Conrad Lautenbacher , indicated that NOAA was not funded adequately to meet its responsibilities in space, particularly over the long term.

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Inherency: Crashed Satellites

Recently crashed satellites have set back climate science. MSNBC 2009 (Feb 25, Miguel Llanos, Reporter, “Satellite failure delays case of the missing CO2”)

It's a mystery that won't be solved as quickly as climate detectives had hoped. They'd expected instruments aboard a NASA satellite to detect where carbon dioxide emissions go, but the crash of that satellite on takeoff Tuesday could mean a long setback. The $280 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory "was going to provide a revolutionary new view of the way the Earth 'breathes' CO2," said Scott Denning, an atmospheric sciences professor at Colorado State University who planned to analyze data from the mission. "It's a tremendous loss to our science community."

Recent climate satellites have failed to reach orbit: we must increase Earth observation now. Todd Gerarden March 11 (2011, a Research Assistant at Resources for the Future,

The Glory Launch Failure: The Relationship Between Climate Science And Policy http://www.rff.org/wv/archive/tags/Climate%20Science/default.aspx)

The failure of NASA’s Glory satellite launch last Friday dealt a blow to the climate science community and potentially to domestic and international climate policy debate for years to come. The effects of this one mishap are exacerbated by immediate and future political obstacles to effective Earth observation that hinder the scientific community from accurately characterizing climate variability and attributing long-term trends to anthropogenic and natural causes. Early reports suggest Glory did not achieve orbit due to insufficient velocity caused by a malfunction of a fairing that was not jettisoned and, as a

result, weighed the satellite down. This loss represents roughly $424 million, several years of preparation, and three or more years of valuable data for climate scientists. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed due to a similar malfunction in 2009, launched on an earlier evolution of the platform used for the fated Glory. Together, these satellites comprise a loss of almost $700 million and essential data. In addition to the information that would have been collected by Glory, which is described further below, the Orbital Carbon Observatory would have aided scientists in understanding the role of sources and sinks in the global carbon cycle.

Recent loss of climate satellites hampers climate science: now is key for more rigorous climate data. La Times March 7 (2011, NASA launch failure is a blow to climate science)

The crash of a NASA rocket bearing a sophisticated observation satellite has dealt a major setback to scientific efforts aimed at understanding how humans are affecting Earth’s climate. A nine-story Taurus XL rocket carrying the agency’s Glory satellite was launched early Friday from Vandenburg Air Force base. But it crashed into the Pacific Ocean without reaching orbit, after the satellite’s protective casing failed to open. The satellite carried equipment to help scientists understand how the sun and particles of matter in the atmosphere called aerosols affect Earth’s climate.

Scientists said the new instruments would have been able to distinguish more accurately than ever the difference between such natural particles as desert dust, and particles from human activities such as burning coal and using nitrate fertilizers. "The loss of the Glory satellite is a serious setback to our capacity to continue observations critical to understanding and predicting the earth's climate," said Greg Holland, director of the Earth System Laboratory of the

National Center for Atmospheric Research, based in Boulder, Co. The failure of the $424-million mission comes at a time of heightened controversy over the accuracy of climate predictions, with the oil and coal industries attacking the integrity of scientific research and seeking to halt government efforts to limit the burning of fossil fuel. An assessment of thousands of climate-related research papers by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of more than 2500 scientists brought together by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations, concluded in 2007 that the warming of earth’s climate is “unequivocal.” The warming, they asserted with “more than 90% certainty,” is mostly due to the effect of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities. In the U.S., 45% of electrical power is generated by burning coal, the fuel with the highest toxic air pollution and the highest level of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions. Republicans in Congress, along with coal-state Democrats, are seeking

to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. NASA’s Earth observation program has suffered budget cuts in recent years as the agency focused on exploration projects such as the space shuttle and the proposed Mars mission. Four years ago, the National Academy of Sciences warned that budget cutting had put the nation’s ability to monitor severe weather, climate change and fresh-water shortages “at great risk.” (Correction: an earlier version of this post mistakenly attributed the study to the National Science Foundation)

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Solvency: Climate Remote sensing key

Remote sensing satellites are the most accurate way to monitor global climate changePajtok-Tari 2011 [Ilona, Head of Department of Geography, Eszterházy College, Eger, Hungary, “Satellite Observations for Education of Climate Change”,

Jouranl: Arul si apa, http://aerapa.conference.ubbcluj.ro/2011/PDF/Pajtok_Tari.pdf]

The satellites support the climate change in four ways: Firstly the modification of the climate, the so called external forcing

factors are worth mentioning, especially the atmospheric aerosol particles, exhibiting large spatial variability which demands the use of the satellite technology. Secondly, we emphasize the role that helps to justify the changes in such a global covering that would not be possible in any other way especially in the uninhabited regions and the oceans, not allowing the ground-based observations. Testing climate models forms the third group of climatic applications, if these models are able to give back the present value of single variables or its past changes. Finally, testing the model sensitivity is a fourth application. It asks, if the atmospheric short-, and long wave radiation feedbacks, shaping its balance, are equal to their real intensity. This question is really important, because the feedbacks influence the climatic sensitivity. In any case, the balance of these feedbacks in the models sensitivity causes as big uncertainty, as the variability of the greenhouse gas

emissions scenarios. Satellite technology is based on electromagnetic radiation observations. The use of remote sensing techniques from space is advantageous, since this is the only way to observe a wide range of geophysical parameters on a global scale to acceptable accuracy in a consistent and repeatable manner (Silvestrin, 2010). The satellite images have fairly high spatial resolution and high

(though, costly) temporal resolution already achievable over vast areas. This technology allows us to measure locations of the Earth system impossible or difficult to access, mainly by the all-weather day-and-night capability for microwave sensing. This technology is able to measure several parameters at same time and it can be highly automatic, from acquisition to exploitation. One may even state that on a per- measurement basis, usually far less expensive than any other means of geophysical observations (Silvestrin, 2010).

Remote sensing satellites are key to monitoring climate changeISU Spring Magazine 2011 [Cites research done by the ISU geosciences department, “ISU Researchers Use Remote Sensing To Monitor Climate Change”, The Core, http://www.thecoreidaho.com/blog/peyron/isu-researchers-use-remote-sensing-monitor-climate-change]

“Remote sensing is ideally suited for monitoring the effects of a changing climate,” said BCAL director and ISU geosciences

research professor, Nancy Glenn. BCAL, established in 2004, is southern Idaho’s only remote-sensing laboratory. Remote sensing is like taking a DNA fingerprint of the Earth’s surface without touching it, says Glenn. Thanks to the technology, scientists can monitor changes in glaciers, wetlands, vegetation, soil distribution and greenhouse gas emissions over lengthy periods of time. NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—has compiled 30 to 40 years of remote-sensing imagery in a public database, an invaluable resource to Glenn and her team. Because satellites are collecting the same information over and over, scientists have the opportunity to obtain a consistent and unbiased view of the data, she explained. In recent years, Glenn and geosciences research assistant professor, Teki Sankey–along with scientists at the USDA Agricultural Research Service—are using remote-sensing technology to study the effects of climate change on vegetation in the Reynolds Creek Watershed southwest of Nampa. Ultimately, they’d like to develop methods using NASA satellites to monitor the change in vegetation biomass—the amount of living matter—over large areas of the western United States. “In Idaho, we are concerned how climate change affects vegetation, habitat and water availability, so we are developing quantitative methods to monitor these changes,” Glenn said. Glenn’s postdoctoral student, Jessica Mitchell, is using remote sensing to map sagebrush distribution in portions of the vast Idaho National Laboratory site in eastern Idaho, a vibrant habitat for mule deer, grouse, pygmy rabbits and antelope. Mitchell and her INL research team are mounting hyperspectral sensors on unmanned aircraft called UAVs that weigh about 80 pounds and fly 1,000 to 3,000 feet above the ground. “We’re looking at nitrogen in sagebrush to determine the nutritional status of the vegetation. Typically, the more nitrogen you have, the healthier the patches of sagebrush, which indicates a better quality habitat for wildlife,” said Mitchell. That kind of

information is useful to land managers who want to protect rich wildlife habitats. Glenn and Mitchell view their research as tools that can help public and private agencies, the corporate and agricultural communities, and recreationists manage lands effectively in the face of a changing climate.

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Solvency: Climate

Satellites empirically provide the basis for predictions of climate change and weather patterns. Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications from


Scientific breakthroughs are often the result of new exploratory observations, and new technology missions stimulate and advance fundamental knowledge about the planet. Analysis of new observations can both test hypotheses developed to elucidate fundamental mechanisms and lead to the development of models that explain or predict important Earth processes. The data from new technology missions sometimes hint at changes in Earth that are critical to people’s well-being, such as a decline in the ice cover in the Arctic Ocean, development of holes in the protective ozone layer, or a rise in sea level. To determine the long-term implications of such changes or to uncover slowly evolving dynamics, the measurements must be continued,

usually with follow-on missions. For example, the long-term global record of vegetation’s photosynthetic activity a record based on measurements made by multiple sensors is proving to be critical for identifying changes in the length of growing seasons and productivity in response to climate change. Such sustained observations allow scientists to document changes, to determine the processes responsible for changes, and to develop predictions. They also are often needed to allow resource managers to assess the ongoing effects of changes on society. Data from a new technology mission sometimes prove critical for an operational system. Wind speed and direction measurements from NASA’s QuikSCAT mission and precipitation measurements from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), for example, are used in weather forecasting. The need for such measurements to become part of an operational system and to be sustained for many years is a recognized and well-studied challenge, but the record of moving new technology into operational systems is, at best, mixed.1 Another aspect of the connectivity between sustained research observations and operational systems is that the observations and products from those systems, such as the observations used in weather forecasts, are also useful for many research purposes. Likewise, sustained observations, although focused on research questions, clearly include an aspect of monitoring and may be used operationally. Exploratory, sustained, and operational measurements often share the need for new technology, careful calibration, and long-term stability, but there are also important differences among them. The ability to reach across the overlapping categories of exploratory, sustained, and operational Earth observations has not proved very successful, and the recent experience with the National Polar-orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) is particularly problematic and revealing with respect to sustained measurements (Box 3.1). Climate data records (CDRs) are time series of measurements of sufficient length and accuracy to document climate variability and change.2 Such records are invaluable because an examination of the causes of changes in Earth processes often requires long, stable, accurate records of several variables. For example, to investigate links between hurricane intensity and global warming (Emanuel, 2005; Webster et al., 2005) by determining whether there is a connection between the power of hurricanes and a warming ocean, it is necessary to have long and accurate records of both hurricane wind speeds and ocean temperatures; Box 3.2 provides additional examples. In addition to an observation system that routinely makes critical measurements, obtaining CDRs requires a substantial commitment by a team of experts to support data reprocessing, the resolution of differences in sensor characteristics, and evaluation of data for research and applications. For example, measurements of sea-surface temperature were improved through several joint agency efforts (such as the NOAA-NASA Pathfinder program and the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program) and, more recently, by combining infrared measurements with those from a microwave radiometer that can measure through the ubiquitous cloud cover (the GODAE High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Pilot Project, GHRSST-PP3). Calibration and validation in the context of CDRs can be considered a process that encompasses the entire system, from sensor to data product (NRC, 2004b). The objective is to develop a quantitative understanding and characterization of the measurement system and its biases in time and space; this involves a wide array of strategies that depend on the type of sensor and data product. For example, for ocean color, for which the dominant satellite-sensed signal is from the atmosphere, monthly

viewing of the Moon is essential to quantify changes in sensor response. In its interim report (NRC, 2005), this committee recommended that NOAA embrace its new mandate to understand climate variability and change by asserting national leadership in applying new approaches to generate and manage satellite CDRs, developing new community relationships, and ensuring long-term accuracy of satellite data records.4 The committee also noted that NOAA had stated its intention to create CDRs from data gathered by NPOESS. However, as detailed elsewhere in this report (see, for example, Tables 2.4 and 2.5 and discussions in Chapter 9), the NPOESS program has been substantially descoped to a focus only on “core” missions related to weather. Despite obvious consequent limitations on the utility of NPOESS for climate studies, some of the remaining instruments are potentially capable of producing CDRs if the requisite programs and facilities are in place. Therefore, the committee reiterates its previous recommendation (NRC, 2005, p. 8):

Satellites key to solve: Carbon sinks and policy evaluationMSNBC 2009 (Feb 25, Miguel Llanos, Reporter, “Satellite failure delays case of the missing CO2”)

"The key issue for climate science is that about half of fossil fuel emissions are removed from the atmosphere by oceans and land ecosystems" via carbon "sinks," he added. That's important because emissions that don't go into the atmosphere don't add to the greenhouse effect tied to warming temperatures. "In order to have any hope of predicting future CO2 levels we need to know how these carbon 'sinks' work, where they're located, how long the carbon will stay 'sunk' and whether there's anything we can do about it." In effect, mankind has been getting a free 50 percent emissions reduction for

decades but we don't really know why or how. "OCO was going to provide data to let us make maps of the biological and oceanographic processes" that determine that, said Denning, "so it's relevant to policy as well because if the sinks saturate, the CO2 will rise much faster than it has been." Policy and push-pins The policy part is important given that the Obama administration, Congress and most of the world are moving towards regulating carbon and adopting policies to reduce emissions. OCO would have provided policymakers with data on which policies work, said OCO program scientist Ken Jucks. "The question is, 'What impact do they really have?' Truly understanding how the system works will help us understand how best to implement those policies." Phil DeCola, who was the OCO's program scientist for its first six years, echoed the notion that mankind has benefited from the 50-percent mystery. But, he added, "we don't know how much longer this can continue." The hundreds of scientists working on OCO have been like police detectives, "trying to answer the big mystery of where is the missing carbon going," said DeCola, who is now an

adviser at the White House Office of Science and Technology. Losing OCO, DeCola said, limits "the speed at which we can address some of these important structural uncertainties." Just how revolutionary was OCO? "We were hoping to start getting on the order of 100,000 measurements of atmospheric CO2 each day, from all over the world," said Denning. In contrast, the existing land-based CO2 network has fewer than 100 fixed towers. Aircraft also take samples around

28


UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFFthe globe, Denning said, "but the difference is like looking at a map by reconstructing it from 100 push-pins instead of having access to the whole map."

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Solvency: Climate

United States investment of 2.5 billion annually is key to an effective global climate change monitoring regime.Wigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

Science communities have already determined a set of key observables that must be measured in order to effectively monitor the Earth system. The United States has a demonstrated Earth monitoring research capability and operates a highly effective national weather prediction system that has saved countless numbers of lives and billions of dollars. This aggressive research and development program has produced a number of proven sensors and ways of measuring essential variables, providing precise data that have yielded new scientific understanding and short- term forecasting improvements. However, due to structural and budgetary factors, these gains in obtaining new research data have not yet institutionalized plans for the continuous, complete, and comprehensive operational data sets needed to sustain monitoring and understanding of the longer-term—and perhaps much more important—climate changes that lie at the core of many current policy debates. The U.S. government has not yet established a commitment to comprehensive, long-term data acquisition for

all essential variables. Data continuity will be critical for a full understanding of why, how, and how fast the Earth is changing. Similarly, there is not sufficient Earth observation capacity to operationally support many forms of Earth science and resource

management. Furthermore, plans for a future comprehensive, coordinated, and sustainable U.S. Earth observation system to gather data for weather, climate, Earth science, and resource management continuously over longer time scales have not yet been established. Having such a robust, comprehensive U.S. system is both the nation’s responsibility to its citizens and the U.S. contribution to a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and to the UN Framework on Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), which the United States and the international community agree is needed during this time of significant global change. These responsibilities are not fully addressed by the allocation of resources for Earth observations in the United States. The U.S. government is not currently organized to effectively lead, plan, fund, and implement an Earth observation program configured to provide the comprehensive sets of observable data essential for weather, climate, hazards, ecosystems, and related application areas. There is no single federal department, agency, or person in charge of addressing U.S national Earth observation activities as a whole. Instead, responsibilities and budgets are scattered among several federal agencies. This arrangement limits the support for a robust, holistic Earth observation program to meet national needs and the budget sufficient to implement it. This could become a critical issue with the potential implementation of the so-called cap and trade

agreements for the management of carbon emissions. Cap and trade agreements will need both strong verification mechanisms and an understanding of how royalties from cap and trade programs will be managed.

While the current U.S. Earth observation system can maintain, at least for the time being, a basic core capacity, there are a number of essential variables and capabilities that are not in place and for which there are no current plans. Initial estimates indicate that a critical threshold set of essential capabilities would require additional funding of more than $2.5 billion annually.

Plan key to solve warmingWigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

Important questions for energy companies are not only how global change impacts are going to affect costs, supplies, and demand for different sources of energy but also how carbon control schemes, such as “cap and trade,” will affect global economic activity. Energy companies need to know about the severity and frequency of storms for planning and demand forecasting. Earth observation data helps these companies take steps to protect oil and gas supplies, pipelines, off- shore platforms, and terminals. For operations in Arctic areas, energy companies need to know whether permafrost will remain or change in order to properly design new facilities. Changes in air and water quality, loss of biodiversity, and spread of tropical diseases are also a concern in areas in which they operate, such as sub-Saharan Africa. Carbon mitigation is another area of increasing interest for the energy

sector. Carbon capture and sequestration is a mitigation strategy that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as increase oil field production. Earth observations can play a key role in determining whether carbon dioxide is escaping from storage. Further, as more and more energy and other companies become involved in carbon cap and trade agreements, the question of which system—global or national—will be used for verification is unresolved. Earth observations can also help with locating and monitoring arable land suitable for biofuel feedstock production; reforestation; data on oil spills and gas flaring; and the availability of oil, natural gas, geothermal, wind, hydroelectric, and other resources.

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Solvency: Climate

Satellites key to understanding aerosols.Christian Science Monitor March 5 (2011, Pete Spotts, Staff Writer, “An inglorious end for NASA's Glory satellite”)

The $424 million Glory satellite was designed to measure the effect tiny particles called aerosols have on Earth's climate.

Scientists have a broad-brush handle on the effects these particles, from natural and human sources, have on climate. But the effects are so poorly measured that the uncertainties associated with estimates of the effects are virtually as large as the effects themselves. Nor is it clear how much of the atmosphere's aerosol content is human-made or comes from natural sources – from volcanic eruptions to algae in the world's oceans. To help fill the measurement gap, Glory aimed to provide worldwide measurements of the distribution of the sizes, composition, and behavior of these particles at different altitudes and in different regions. It also would have taken the measure of black-carbon soot, a fairly recent addition to the factors that can alter climate.

Plan key to solve climate change.Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications from


Mitigating adverse impacts of climate changeIt is now well understood that changes in the physical climate system over the last century have been driven in large part by human activities and that the human

influence on climate is increasing. Future climate changes may be much more dramatic and dangerous. For example, rising sea levels will

increase coastal flooding during storms, which may become more intense. Effective mitigation of dangerous future climate change and adaptation to changes that are certain to occur even with mitigation efforts require knowledge of how the climate is changing and why. But there is no well-developed climate-monitoring system, and fundamental changes are needed in the U.S.climate observing program. The United States does not have, nor are there clear plans to develop, a long-term global benchmark record of critical climate variables that are accurate over very long time periods, can be tested for systematic errors by future generations, are unaffected by interruption, and are

pinned to international standards. Difficult climate research questions also remain, for example, the cloud-water feedback in climate models. Another example concerns the geographic distribution of the land and ocean sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, which do not simply map with geography, but rather display complex patterns and interactions. As nations seek to develop strategies to manage their carbon emissions and sequestration, the capacity to quantify the present-day regional carbon sources and sinks does not exist.

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Solvency: Climate

NASA capabilities are key for more sophisticated models of climate change.NASA 2010 (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/greenspace/nasas-role.html September 23, 2010 Page Editor: Deborah Bazar NASA Official: Jeffrey Smith)

NASA’s Earth Science program is one of the government’s best-kept secrets. The Agency has spent over 20 years building spacecraft and collecting the measurements that are now used to model climate and the environment across the globe. With 14 operating satellites, 7 missions in development, and about 1700 Research Grants, NASA’s Earth Science program exceeds the combined efforts of all other Earth Science programs in the world. NASA systems are engaged in observing our Earth, from land and ecosystem processes to the oceans to the atmosphere—all of the systems that help determine the Earth’s climate. For example, the A-Train constellation of Earth Observing Satellites circle the Earth collecting data, following one another on nearly-identical orbits, only seconds or minutes apart. This allows for an unprecedented number of observations and measurements to be taken over the same location at about the same time, but with different instruments collecting different types of data. The data can then be merged to create an integrated model of our living Earth. Now, more than ever, NASA can continue this important work of predicting, monitoring, and responding to our Earth’s changing climate.

The development of global climate models has come a long way, but more detailed models are needed that can predict local and regional effects, such as the onset of a growing season, or the proper moisture content of fields for irrigation. Today, these capabilities are in early development by NASA and can be used to greatly improve agricultural practices around the world. The monitoring of greenhouse gas emissions, the local/regional effects of deforestation, ocean pH, and temperature change are also critical factors for NASA missions to measure and fully understand. Finally, how will the world respond to this threat of global change? The tremendous wealth of knowledge and capabilities within NASA may be used to plot a course for our future. These three pillars of NASA Earth Sciences—global prediction, monitoring, and response—will only become more and more important as human expansion, modernization, and urbanization increasingly impact the Earth’s environment.

Solvency: Climate (Polar Observation)

Remote sensing satellites monitor polar ocean activity under layers of ice and efficiently detect possible dangers for people on earth as opposed to sending ships through terrible weather to do the same.Comiso, 91, Laboratory for Hydrospheric Processes, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 971, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA (Journal of Marine Systems, “Satellite remote sensing of the Polar Oceans”)

The advent of satellite remote sensing has opened doors for detailed monitoring of the polar regions at a relatively high temporal resolution. Several sensors have been developed over the years, the most noteworthy of which are the visible, the infrared and the microwave systems. The visible and infrared systems axe most intelligible to the human eye and provide images that have good spatial resolution. However, because of persistent

cloudiness and several months of darkness in the polar regions the most promising sensors appear to be the microwave systems, both passive and active. The passive microwave sensors have been the source of consistently derived ice cover and ice extent data and have provided about fifteen years of global data sets. The Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), on the other hand, is noted for very high resolution and a wide range of applications iricluding ice dynamics and ice/wave interaction studies. Nevertheless, there are applications which require the use of the visible and infrared channels, such as the mapping of chlorophyll pigment

concentrations in the marginal ice zones which require an ocean color scanner. Also, the infrared sensors are most effective for detecting physical temperatures over cloud-free ice and open water surfaces. Furthermore, altimeters could play an important role in mapping ice surface topography and in evaluating ridge and lead statistics. A review of past, present and future satellite systems, methods and techniques of interpretation and potential applications to the study of the polar oceans is presented.

Critical to obtaining a full understanding of the processes occurring in the polar oceans is our ability to monitor such vast, remote and usually inaccessible regions. During maximum ice extent, about 16 x 106 km 2 and 20 x 106 km 2 of ocean surface in the Arctic and the Antarctic, respectively, is covered by sea ice (Zwally et al., 1983; Parkinson et al., 1987;

Gloersen and Campbell, 1988). Along the ice/ocean boundaries, there is also a stretch of more than 50,000 km of marginal ice zone globally, which is an area of very high biological, chemical and physical activity. It would be an overwhelming, if not an impossible, logistical problem to monitor the whole region by ships alone not only because of scale but also because of harsh weather conditions throughout most of the year. Satellite remote sensing has offered not only a promise but already a realization that advanced technology can help meet some of the observational needs. A satellite sensor orbiting about 1000 km above the Earth's surface with a typical swath width of 1200 kin, can provide spatial coverage of the entire polar regions within 1 day, with repeat coverage over the same area in as quickly as an hour and a half.

Depending on the type of sensor, the size of the footprint varies from a few meters to several kilometers.

32


Solvency: Climate (Forests)

Satellite monitoring solves warming: Forest Carbon sinksAsner, 09, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science, 260 Panama Street, Stanford,CA 94305, USA (ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH LETTERS, “Tropical forest carbon assessment: integrating satellite and airborne mapping approaches”)

Large-scale carbon mapping is needed to support the UNFCCC program to reduce deforestation

and forest degradation (REDD). Managers of forested land can potentially increase their carbon credits via detailed monitoring of forest cover, loss and gain (hectares), and periodic estimates of changes in forest carbon density (tons ha−1).

Satellites provide an opportunity to monitor changes in forest carbon caused by deforestation and degradation, but only after initial carbon densities have been assessed. New airborne approaches, especially light detection and ranging (LiDAR), provide a means to estimate forest carbon density over large areas, which greatly assists in the development of practical baselines. Here I present an integrated satellite–airborne mapping approach that supports high-resolution carbon stock assessment and monitoring in tropical forest regions. The approach yields a spatially resolved, regional state-of-the-forest carbon baseline, followed by high-resolution monitoring of forest cover and disturbance to estimate carbon emissions. Rapid advances and decreasing costs in the satellite and airborne mapping sectors are already making high-resolution carbon stock and emissions assessments viable anywhere in the world.

Solvency: Climate (Verification)

Satellites key to solves climate change: VerificationNew Scientist 2010 (Feb 2, “NASA satellite could pave way for policing CO2 emissions” http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18467-nasa-satellite-could-pave-way-for-policing-co2-emissions.html)

Such satellites could verify that countries are complying with any international agreements that cap greenhouse gas emissions, or even that individual power plants are releasing as much greenhouse gases as they claim. Issue of trust That could provide a valuable cross-check for existing information on carbon emissions, which is largely self-reported. "Right now, countries turn in reports, and those reports get reviewed by an executive committee, but there's no independent verification," Kevin Gurney, who studies Earth's carbon cycle at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, told New Scientist. Rob Bradley, director of international climate policy at the World Resources

Institute in Washington, DC, agrees. "Something that's missing from the international climate policy world is trust," he told New Scientist. The uncertainty over self-reports could become a stumbling block in efforts to agree on more stringent carbon-reduction targets and to build confidence in a cap-and-trade market. "When things start getting tough and targets start getting tight and carbon starts costing money, there's a strong incentive to fudge the books," Gurney said. Overall, NASA's Earth science budget got a boost of $1.8 billion, spread over four years, above previous forecasts. The extra funding is slated to go to the OCO's replacement, the development of new satellites, and enhanced climate modeling capabilities, among other projects.

33


Solvency: Climate and Natural Disasters

Space key to solve climate change and natural disasters. Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications from


The development of Earth system science recognizes that changes in Earth result from complex interactions among its components the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and lithosphere and human activities (Crutzen, 2002). Understanding the linkages, dependencies, and interactions among the components requires a systems approach3 to which the unique capabilities of space-based observations are proving essential. From these observations and understanding flow applications; for example, the demonstrated and substantial improvements in weather prediction are largely attributable to improved scientific understanding derived from the interpretation of satellite observations

and their use in weather prediction models (Hollingsworth et al., 2005). Likewise, satellite observations have played a key role in: • The discovery, understanding, and monitoring of the depletion of stratospheric ozone; • Understanding the transport of air pollution between countries and continents; • Determining the rates of glacial and sea ice retreat; • Monitoring land-use change due to both human and natural causes; • Monitoring and understanding changing weather patterns due to land-use change and aerosols; • Determining changes in strain and stress through the earthquake cycle; • Understanding the global-scale effects of El Niño and La Niña on weather patterns and ocean productivity; • Forecasting the development of and tracking hurricanes, typhoons, and other severe storms; and • Assessing damage from natural disasters and targeting relief efforts. Today the world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges: shortages of clean and accessible freshwater, degradation of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, increases in soil erosion, changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, declines in fisheries, and the likelihood of significant changes in climate. These changes are occurring over and above the stresses imposed by the natural variability of a dynamic planet, as well as the effects of past and existing patterns of conflict, poverty, disease, and malnutrition. Further, these changes interact with each other and with natural variability in complex ways that cascade through the environment across local, regional, and global scales. Addressing the environmental challenges will not be possible without increased collaboration between Earth scientists and researchers in other disciplinesincluding the social, behavioral, and economic sciencesand policy experts. It is necessary now to build on the paradigm of Earth system science and strengthen its dual role— science and applications. This duality has always been an element of Earth science, but it must be leveraged more effectively than in the past. Efforts to date have focused on building an understanding of how Earth functions as a system, and the benefits have been clear (Box 1.2). Today, however, only a limited portion of that knowledge is

applied directly in the service of society. Understanding Earth as a living planet and applying that understanding to ensure society’s health, prosperity, safety, and sustainability will depend on establishing a robust, integrated, and flexible system of observations and models yielding information that can be applied to pressing short- and long-term needs. As the complexity and vulnerability of society increase, the value of Earth observations and information becomes greater than ever (Box 1.3). The pressing imperative for sustaining, strengthening, and extending current observational capabilities and other vital aspects of the Earth information system to meet growing socioeconomic

needs and realize opportunities constitutes the motivation for this report and the rationale for its conclusions. A fundamental challenge for the coming decade is to ensure that established societal needs help to guide scientific priorities more effectively and that emerging scientific knowledge is actively applied to obtain societal benefits. New observations and analyses, enhanced understanding and increasingly accurate predictive models, broadened community participation, and improved means for dissemination and use of information are all required. By taking up and meeting this challenge, society will begin to realize the full economic and security benefits that Earth science can help make possible. But wise actions will require information and understanding. The new and needed Earth observations essential to that understanding are the subject of the next chapter.

34



Solvency: Warming AT: GCOS key, not GEOSS

GCOS is part of GEOSS

Lewis et. Al. 2010 (James A., senior fellow and director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at CSIS; Sarah O. Ladislaw, CSIS Senior Fellow, Energy and National Security Program; and Denise E. Zheng, CSIS; Earth Observation for Climate Change: A Report of the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program, csis.org/files/publication/100608_Lewis_EarthObservation_WEB.pdf)

GCOS is buttressed by two organizations that plan and coordinate Earth observation from space. The Committee on Earth

Observation Satellites (CEOS), established by the G-7 in 1984, is the principal body for coordinating Earth observation among national civil space programs. Twenty-eight space agencies along with other national and international organizations participate in CEOS. CEOS supports the Group on Earth Observation (GEO), an operational body established in 2005 to provide “a single, comprehensive and sustained system for Earth Observation.”9 GEO, with a permanent secretariat in Geneva, is a voluntary partnership of governments and international organizations that provides a

framework for coordinated strategies and investments. U.S. leadership was instrumental to the formulation of GEO. GEO’s members include

77 governments, the Europe- an Commission, and 56 “participating organizations.” GEO has met four times since 2005 and has created a ten-year plan to build the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, or GEOSS.10 GEO is the body that coordinates and sets up the architecture for the “system of systems” to ensure complete coverage and compatibility of data. It is a high-level (ministerial) forum for all nations and UN/intergovernmental organizations that contribute or use Earth observation data to work out the details involved in ensuring that

systems are compatible and data are available across the globe. CEOS is one of many contributors to the GEOSS. GEO works from above to ensure that all contributions to the GEOSS are compatible and encourages and coordinates resourcing and planning for the missing pieces.11

35


Solvency Advocate: Climate

NASA and NOAA should form a climate change satellite observing architecture.


Recommendation 2. NASA and NOAA should lead the formation of an international satellite-observing architecture capable of monitoring global climate change and its consequences and support the research needed to interpret and understand the data in time for meaningful policy decisions . The committee recognizes the important role in climate change studies that was assigned to the NPOESS and that is now in question, and the committee also concurs with the recommendations in the NRC report Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond calling for a

compelling program of Earth-monitoring space systems. Therefore, the committee recommends thata. NASA and NOAA, working in concert with the private sector, academe, the public, and international partners, should reverse the deterioration of the U.S. space infrastructure for observing and understanding the climate of Earth and the human influence on it.b. NASA and NOAA, in consultation with the scientific community, should develop and implement a plan for achieving and sustaining global Earth observations. This plan should recognize the complexity of differing agency roles, responsibilities, and capabilities, as well as the lessons from past government efforts.

c. NASA and NOAA should work with the international community to develop an integrated database for sensor information collected by all Earth- monitoring satellites so that researchers and decision makers have uninhibited access to this important information. This is an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate technical leadership in an area of international interest.

d. NASA and NOAA should aggressively pursue technology development that supports high-priority Earth observation missions and foster innovative approaches to meeting future space system needs.e. NASA and NOAA should plan for transitions to continue demonstrably useful research observations on a sustained, or operational, basis.

36


Solvency: Data Transparency- US Key

The United States is crucial for maintaining a framework of open data from remote sensing technology.Wigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

Earth observations can be an effective soft power tool in at least two particular respects: through the peaceful cooperation arising from coordination of civil Earth observation activities and through the use of Earth observation data as a development (including urban, agricultural, and natural resource planning) and disaster

management aid. The United States considers data from civil Earth observation systems to be a global public good and has promoted an open data policy, although users in developing regions may lack the ability to maximize the use of this data without outside assistance. This open data policy, along with the level of U.S. investments in Earth observations and its participation in international fora, has characterized U.S. leadership in multilateral discussions on Earth observations. The U.S.-led creation of the multinational Group on Earth Observations (GEO) has been a tremendous scientific, environmental, and foreign policy achievement. It has engaged governments at the ministerial level who have agreed on the value of Earth observations in obtaining concrete societal benefits. Through its strong leadership at GEO and in the

Committee on Earth Observa- tion Satellites (CEOS), the United States has made progress in engaging the international community in discussions on GEOSS. The United States has also led a growing consensus on making data freely available at low cost, which has prompted other nations (including Brazil, China, and Russia) to open up previously closed data sets.

37


Solvency: Disasters

Remote sensing key to rapid response and early warning systems for disasters.Ostir and Veljanovski 2006. [Kristof and Tatjana, Ostir holds a Doctorates in remote sensing and Veljanovski holds a B.Sc. degree in geodesy from the University of Ljubljana, “APPLICATION OF SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING IN NATURAL HAZARD MANAGEMENT: THE MOUNT MANGART LANDSLIDE CASE STUDy”

http://www.mountaincartography.org/publications/papers/papers_bohinj_06/14_Ostir_Veljanovski.pdf]

The landslide occurred on steep south-east facing slopes, at an average elevation of approximately 1400 m. With respect to slope, elevation and orientation the area affected in the valley was lower and more heterogeneous. The evaluation of land use showed that the landslide occurred mainly in areas covered by deciduous forest (almost three quarters of its surface). The impact zone was again more heterogeneous, half of it being covered with forests. There was also significant damage in

agricultural land and built-up areas. The Mount Mangart landslide study has proven the value of remote sensing technology for monitoring natural disasters and it has in particular proved the usefulness of the Space and Major Disasters Charter. It has shown that remote sensing can be used to estimate the damage and under suitable conditions also in rescue operations. In rescue operations the processing speed is critical and near real time data distribution – achieved today – is very important. In the case of damage estimation the processing speed is less important than the accuracy and quality of results. It has been proven, that remote sensing enables mapping and analyzing topographic and land cover changes caused by a catastrophic event within a considerably short period of time. We also believe that with advanced simulations it can be used to determine hazardous areas and predict the triggering conditions. Satellite remote sensing may therefore be one of the most important steps in the development of an early hazard warning system.

Remote sensing can map and monitor natural hazards effectively: but the provision of image data is lacking.

Joyce et al. 2009, [Karen, Holds a ph. D in geographical sciences, A review of the status of satellite remote sensing and image processing techniques for

mapping natural hazards and disasters, Progress in Physical Geography, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=42ff2398-b74e-471c-b710-eba884fe9018%40sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=113&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d]

The use of remote sensing for mapping and monitoring natural hazards has diversified in recent years owing to an

increase in data availability and technological advances in their interpretation. Remote sensing has proven useful for a range of applications

including the detection of earthquakes, faulting, volcanic activity, landslides, flooding, wildfire, and the damages associated with each. A number of options for processing different data types collected in response to each of these hazards have been reviewed, with commonality being the strong preference for baseline data to be acquired and maintained prevent. It has been noted on several occasions that damage assessment is not possible without an understanding of the initial-state environmental characteristics. Automated techniques are well established for identification of fire and volcanic activity associated with excessive heat, but the operationalization of mapping other hazard and disaster events requires more robust and generic techniques to be

developed and implemented. As the importance of good spatial data is becoming increasingly recognized, remote sensing in the field of hazard assessment and disaster management is likely to grow in future. New earth observation satellites are continually being launched, recognizing prospective market in disaster management but the provision of acquired image data in a rapid response situation remains a challenge both technically and financially. There is also the potential for increased use of airborne platforms to provide the first level of image data in an emergency situation by acquiring, processing and sewing imagery in near-realtime to the end-user. It is not possible to recommend a single data type or processing solution that will work under all

conditions. This is a broad field of applications where some techniques will work better under some circumstances than another. While manual interpretation of many data types for various applications provides a popular mapping solution, this is unlikely to be the way forward for rapid response and emergency events. SAR data and |nSAR techniques, for example, are of considerable value for mapping flooding extent and earth deformations due to volcanic or tectonic activity, but are unable to detect thermal anomalies or concentrations of volcanic gaseous emissions. Optical data offers several advantages over SAR, but is inherently affected by cloud cover, smoke or haze at the time of satellite overpass. The Hexibility provided by a multisensor, multiplatform approach is likely to give the most comprehensive coverage of a disaster event.

38

http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=42ff2398-b74e-471c-b710-eba884fe9018@sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=113&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3D%3D



http://www.mountaincartography.org/publications/papers/papers_bohinj_06/14_Ostir_Veljanovski.pdf



39


Solvency: Disasters

Current system inadequate for disaster preparedness. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

Natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, subsidences, avalanches, landslides, floods, wildfires, volcanic eruptions, extreme weather, coastal

hazards, sea ice and space weather, tsunami, pollution events, are frequently happened in our home planet, resulting in severely losing a large number of life and property, and imposing a large burden on society [13]. For example, on 26 December 2004, 00:58:53 UTC, an 9.0 magnitude earthquake occurred on the seafloor near Aceh in northern Indonesia, causing a huge tsunami wave, hitting the coasts of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Maldives and even Somalia in Africa, resulting in over 280,000 people lost their lives. The town of Lhoknga, near the capital of Banda

Aceh, was completely destroyed by the tsunami. It has been demonstrated that the losses of life and property from natural and human-induced disaster can be reduced through analysis of earth observing data. However, not all of disasters, such as tsunami, earthquake can so far be warned and predicted in advance, consequently, scientists have spent enormous efforts to exhaustively find thread of these complex natural phenomena from earth observing system in order to develop predictive measures so that people have enough time to prepare, plan, and response these disasters. Unfortunately, little progress has been made due to the lack of adequate measurements and the depth with which we fully understand the physics of these phenomena [9]. The current measurements and observations largely can not meet the demands of the disaster analysis. For example, scientists need worldwide underground geophysical data for tsunami and earthquake, volcanic eruption analysis.

Plan key to solving natural disasters.Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications from


Whether hazards such as earthquakes and tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and landslides have consequences that are serious or are truly catastrophic depends on whether they have been anticipated and whether preparations have been made to mitigate their effects. Mitigation is expensive, available resources are limited, and decisions must be made about how to set priorities among these

expenditures. At present, the solid-Earth science required for decision making is hampered by a lack of data a situation perhaps analogous to trying to make reliable weather forecasts before global observations were available. Scientists know the total rates of deformation across fault systems but lack the information to determine reliably which faults are most likely to rupture, let alone when these ruptures will occur. Volcanic eruptions and landslides often have precursors, but the ability to detect and interpret these precursors is severely limited by a lack of observations.

40



Solvency: Disasters

Rate of natural disasters are increasing, most casualties occur in areas without access to information, and there is no current plan to fix this trend. Westen 2000 [Cees Van, Westen holds a doctorial degree in physical geography from the University of Amsterdam, Remote Sensing for Natural Disaster Management, International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Science,

http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXIII/congress/part7/1609_XXXIII-part7.pdf]

However, it is not only the increased exposure of the population to hazards that can explain the increase in natural disasters. There is also a clear trend that the frequency of destructive events, related to atmospheric extremes, such as floods, drought, cyclones, and landslides is increasing. During the last 10 years a total of 3,750 windstorms and floods were recorded, accounting for two-thirds of all events. The number of catastrophes due to earthquakes and volcanic activity (about 100 per year) has remained constant (Munich Re., 1998). Although the time -span is still not long enough to indicate it with certainty, it is a clear indication that climate change shows a clear negative trend in relation with the occurrence of natural disasters, which only will be become more severe in the near future. There seems to be an inverse relationship between the level of development and loss of human lives in the case of a disaster. About 95 percent of the disaster related casualties occur in developing countries, where more than 4.200 million people live. Economic losses attributable to natural hazards in developing countries may represent as much as 10% of their gross national product. In industrialised countries, where warning -systems are more sophisticated, it is more feasible to predict the occurrence of certain natural phenomena, and to carry out massive evacuations. The application of building codes and restrictive zoning also accounts for a lower number of casualties in developed countries. These statistics illustrate well the importance of hazard mitigation. The International community has become aware of the necessity to increase the work on disaster management. The decade 1990-2000 was designated the "International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction" by the general assembly of the United Nations. However, now that we are at the end of the IDNDR, we must conclude that the efforts for reducing the effects for disaster reduction during the last decade have not been sufficient, and have to be enhanced in the next decade.

41


Solvency: Disasters

Remote Sensing is critical to disaster preparedness and relief operations. Westen 2000 [Cees Van, Westen holds a doctorial degree in physical geography from the University of Amsterdam, Remote Sensing for Natural Disaster Management, International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Science,

http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXIII/congress/part7/1609_XXXIII-part7.pdf]

Mitigation of natural disasters can be successful only when detailed knowledge is obtained about the expected frequency,

character, and magnitude of hazardous events in an area. Many types of information that are needed in natural disaster management have an important spatial component. Spatial data are data with a geographic component, such as maps, aerial photography, satellite imagery, GPS data, rainfall data, borehole data etc. Many of these data will have a different projection and co-ordinate system, and need to

be brought to a common map-basis, in order to superimpose them. We now have access to information gathering and organising technologies like remote sensing and

geographic information systems (GIS), which have proven their usefulness in disaster management. • First of all, remote sensing and GIS provides a data base from which the evidence left behind by disasters that have occurred before can be interpreted, and combined with other information to arrive at hazard maps, indicating which areas are potentially dangerous. The zonation of hazard must be the basis for any disaster management project and should supply planners and decision-makers with adequate and understandable information. Remote sensing data, such as satellite images and aerial photos allow us to map the variabilities of terrain properties, such as vegetation, water, and geology, both in space and time. Satellite images give a synoptic overview and provide very useful environmental information, for a wide range of scales, from entire continents to details of a few metres. Secondly, many types of disasters, such as floods, drought, cyclones, volcanic eruptions, etc. will have certain precursors. The satellites can detect the early stages of these events as anomalies in a time series. Images are available at regular short time intervals, and can be used for the prediction of both rapid and slow disasters. • Then, when a disaster occurs, the speed of information collection from air and space borne platforms and the possibility of information dissemination with a matching swiftness make it possible to monitor the occurrence of the disaster. Many disasters may affect large areas and no other tool than remote sensing would provide a matching spatial coverage. Remote sensing also allows monitoring the event during the time of occurrence while the forces are in full swing. The vantage position of satellites makes it ideal for us to think of, plan for and operationally monitor the event. GIS is used as a tool for the planning of evacuation routes, for the design of centres for emergency operations, and for integration of satellite data with other relevant data in the design of disaster warning systems • In the disaster relief phase, GIS is extremely useful in combination with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in search and rescue operations in areas that have been devastated and where it is difficult to orientate. The impact and departure of the disaster event leaves behind an area of immense devastation. Remote sensing can assist in damage assessment and aftermath monitoring, providing a quantitative base for relief operations. • In the disaster rehabilitation phase GIS is used to organise the damage information and the post -disaster census information, and in the evaluation of sites for reconstruction. Remote sensing is used to map the new situation and update the databases used for the

reconstruction of an area, and can help to prevent that such a disaster occurs again. The volume of data needed for disaster management, particularly in the context of integrated development planning, clearly is too much to be handled by manual methods in a timely and effective way. For example, the post disaster damage reports on buildings in an earthquake stricken city, may be thousands. Each one will need to be evaluated separately in order to decide if the building has suffered irreparable damage or not. After that all reports should be combined to derive at a reconstruction zoning within a relatively small period of time.

42


Solvency: Disasters

Remote sensing technology solves decision making committees information problems, allowing them to better handle natural disasters. Joyce et al. 2009, [Karen, Kim C. Wright, Sergey V. Samsonov, and Vincent G. Ambrosia, Joyce Holds a ph. D in geographical sciences, Advances in Geoscience and remote sensing, Geoscience and Remote Sensing. In-Tech Publishing, Vienna. Chapter 15, pg 317 – 346.

http://insar.ca/pubs/Joyce2009_advGRS.pdf]

Disasters are social constructs in that social drivers such as migration (forced and voluntary), conflict, modification of natural buffer system, reliance on shrinking resources, private property rights, urban intensification, artificial protection structures, and economic and political vulnerability are all contributors to people living in

hazardous location or at levels of vulnerability that make a disaster more likely. Remote sensing technology can assist with addressing some of these "disaster drivers", through providing the data required to assist land use planners, emergency managers, and others tasked with disaster management Reduction of risk, and therefore reduction in the probability of a disaster occurring, is an important part of the disaster management cycle. Remote sensing can be applied in disaster reduction initiatives through identification and understanding of hazards (Table 1). This knowledge is then

applied to mitigation activities such as land use planning, engineering structures, building codes and hazard consequences modeling to determine methods for reducing vulnerability (Gregg k Houghton 2006). Note that the sensor examples given in Table 1 and subsequent tables are indicative of current or potential instrument use. Many alternative sensors with similar characteristics could also be used. Understanding of hazards, their magnitude, frequency, duration, location, range and manifestation (e.g. heavy rainfall, tephra, strong winds) has long been accepted as essential to disaster management Although it is primarily sodal factors that

amplify a hazard event into a disaster (Quarantelli 1985, Wisner 2004), improved knowledge of hazards and their potential consequences is essential for decision making about modifying hazard characteristics, or modifying vulnerability of people and assets Remote sensing can be used directly for hazard identification (e.g. flood plain modeling, slope stability and landslide susceptibility), but can also be used to derive hazard-independent information that can be used for disaster reduction (e.g. baseline building, infrastructure, and topographic mapping). An excellent example of the use of remote sensing for hazard identification is provided with LiDAR mapping of active fault location (Begg k Mouslpoulou 2009 in press). Traditionally fault location is conducted using stereo aerial photography interpretation followed by intensive field survey. However the horizonml and vertical resolution provided by airborne LiDAR imagery provides the capability for identifying fault traces and extracting elevation offsets with digiml data in an objective manner. The identification

of many previously unknown faults in northern New Zealand is shown in Figure 2. Remotely sensed data acquisitions can be used to inform land use planning, a key tool that authorities and communities employ to avoid or mitigate hazard risk (Burby 1998). By identifying the location and characteristics of hazards, land use planning methods can be applied to address the risk these hazards pose. Planning methods include mapping hazard zones (location and range of hazard impact) and identifying the probability of occurrence. Hazard maps are applied to developed and green field (undeveloped) land and options for risk treatment determined. Treatment options can include measures such as setback zones (no development within the hazard zone, e.g proximal to active faults or within coastal erosion or inundation zones), or special building codes (e.g. minimum floor heights above base flood level) can be introduced to reduce the risk to assets and people (Godschalk et al. 1998). Understanding of hazard information is one of a number of critical factors influencing

individual and group decision making for risk management (Paton & johnston 2001). Where hazard information is readily available to the public in a variety of fonts, including maps, there is a greater likelihood of public support for risk reduction initiatives introduced through land use planning (Burby 2001). Other methods for land use planning based on remote sensing data include identifying changes in land use on flood plaim to assist with flood hazard modelling ln the dty of London, Canada, Landsat images taken over a 25 year period have been used to determine the sprmd of urban development (Nirupama k Simonovic 2007). The consequent inn-ease in impermeable surface cover facilitated more rapid runoff and less natural absorption of rainfall. When compared with flood hydrographs, the rate of land use change correlates with smaller rainfall events producing flooding. The benefits to future land use planning are that it can be determined how land use changes affect the flood hazard risk, and this will guide future development in a way that mitigates the effects of continued urban sprawl. Collecting asset dam via high resolution remote sensing allows for identification of infrastructure and buildings in hazardous location, which can then be targeted for strengthening or re-location. Asset data is also essential for hazard consequence modeling whereby hazard dam is combined with asset dam and fragility (vulnerability) information to determine potential losses. Building fragility to hazards is based on such factors as construction materials (earthquake, volcanic ash fall, tsunami), engineering design (tsunami, landslide, earthquake), building height (wind), floor arms (earthquake), proximity of other structures and vegetation (fire) and roof pitch angle (ash fall, snow), and floor height (flood, tsunami). Remote sensing methods for collecting building and infrastructure data require high to very high resolution satellite or airborne imagery and is often completed using manual digitizing or more reoently, segmenhtion and object oriented classification Optical imagery B often complemented by LiDAR data, which can not only aid in detecting building edges, but is also used for calculating building heights. Incorporation of remotely sensed dam into a GIS is viml during this phase for recording spatial attributes and combining with other data sets. Remote sensing technology can also be applied to measure the success of risk reduction initiatives. A common method for addressing flood risk is the construction of stopbanks to contain flood waters for an event of a given magnitude. Aerial reconnaissance during maior flooding events can identify whetl\er stopbanks are performing to design standard and identify ares of weakness, overtopping or failure. Monitoring of non-structural risk reduction initiates is also possible. To address coastal hazard erosion and inundation risk. many communities choose non-structural options such as beach renourishment and dune restoration ln Florida, airborne LiDAR captured over time has been applied to measure coastal erosion from hazards, alongside the success of non~structural beach restoration methods through determining changes to beach morphology (Shrestha et al. 2005). Another example of measuxing the effects of risk reduction initiatives is analysing postdisster images of rainfall induced landslides on land under different vegetation covers for large events From analysis of aerial photographs (oblique and vertical) of an event in 2004 which impacted the lower North Island of New Zealand, it was determined that vegetation cover played an important role in reducing loss of productive soil, and

reducing landslide hazard to assets (Hancox k Wright 2005).

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Solvency: Disasters

Satellite remote sensing provides necessary intelligence during natural disasters.Kerle and Oppenheimer 02 (Norman Kerle, PhD in geography (volcano remote sensing) from the University of Cambridge, Clive Oppenheimer, PhD

(Open University) Volcanology, “Satellite Remote Sensing as a Tool in Lahar Disaster Management”, Volume 26, Issue 2, pages 140–160)The overall cost of a disaster, both in terms of economic damage and fatalities, depends on how quickly the event is responded to, and how efficiently response activities are managed. This, however, requires a synoptic overview of the affected area in the critical hours following an event, to allow for an orchestrated disaster response. In particular ‘adverse public health consequences’, that is morbidity and mortality, can be reduced significantly by rapid damage assessment (Garshnek et al.,

1998). During a disaster, however, critical lifelines — in particular roads, telecommunication and power supplies — are frequently incapacitated. This leads to limited information from, and impeded access to, the disaster area, consequently hindering an efficient response. Particularly in remote or mountainous terrain, no ground-based survey can provide the comprehensive and timely information required, and aerial reconnaissance may not be possible for logistical or meteorological reasons (Zimmerman, 1991; Luscombe and Hassan,

1993). Satellite remote sensing is seen as a promising tool to provide the necessary intelligence (Alexander, 1991; Zimmerman, 1991). In this study we investigate the utility of currently operational, non-classified Earth Observation (EO) satellites for lahar disaster management. We consider what information is needed, and which data can be provided by available satellites, both optical and radar, and of high and low spatial resolution. Scientists have frequently noted limitations of satellite technology, chiefly related to low spatial or temporal resolution (detail in the image, and revisit time, respectively), limited utility of optical

data in cloudy situations and delays in data availability (Tobias et al., 2000). In recognition of the potential of space-borne sensors, and to overcome some of those limitations, satellite constellations solely dedicated to hazard research and disaster management have been proposed. Given the ever-increasing number of EO satellites, we explore whether such dedicated constellations are indeed necessary, and what organisational improvements may increase the utility of data collected by already existing and forthcoming governmental and commercial sensors.

Data from military satellites have played a role in disaster management in the past. However, since they are not readily available and, therefore, not a predictable source of imagery, they are not further considered here. The most recent lahar disaster occurred in 1998 at Casita volcano, Nicaragua, when heavy rainfall associated with Hurricane Mitch triggered a small flank collapse, which subsequently

transformed into a lahar. Two towns were completely destroyed, and over 2,500 lives lost. After addressing the kinds of information relevant to lahars that satellite technology can provide, we use Casita as an example to test if data from EO satellites operational at the time could have improved the management of that particular disaster.

Remote sensing data is used to map soil type and other factors to locate where people are most vulnerable to natural disasters.Willige and Carayannis 09 (Barbara Theilen-Willige – professor at Berlin University of Technology (TU Berlin), Institute of Applied Geosciences, George Pararas-Carayannis Tsunami Society, Honolulu, Hawaii, “NATURAL HAZARD ASSESSMENT OF SW MYANMAR - A CONTRIBUTION OF REMOTE SENSING AND GIS METHODS TO THE DETECTION OF AREAS VULNERABLE TO EARTHQUAKES AND TSUNAMI / CYCLONE FLOODING”, Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol. 28, No. 2, page 128 (2009) , http://www.tsunamisociety.org/282ThielenGPCb.pdf)One important factor that must be accounted for in local earthquake hazard studies is a site’s surface and subsurface conditions and expected response in the form of ground motions. Earthquake damage may vary locally, since it depends on the types of structures that are built and the subsurface ground conditions, proximity to faults

and fractures, lithology, and the ground water table (Gupta, 2003). Remote sensing data can be used to map factors that are related to the occurrence of higher earthquake intensities and earthquake-induced secondary effects, such as liquefaction or landslides. Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol. 28, No. 2, page 123 (2009)Past earthquakes indicate that damage and loss of life are mostly concentrated in areas that are underlain by deposits of soft soils and high ground water tables - as exemplified by the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 (Steinwachs, 1988; Pararas-Carayannis, 1985). Soft soils tend to amplify shear waves and ground shaking. Wetlands have a higher damage potential during earthquakes due to longer and higher vibrations. The fundamental phenomenon responsible for the amplification of ground motions over soft

sediments is the trapping of seismic waves due to differences between sediments and the underlying bedrock. With horizontal stratigraphy, the trapping affects body waves, which travel up and down through the surface layers. When the structure is either two or three-dimensional, lateral heterogeneities are present (such as thickness variations in sedimentfilled valleys), this trapping also affects the surface seismic waves. The

interferences between the trapped waves lead to resonance patterns, the shape and the frequency of which are related with the geometrical and mechanical characteristics of the structure (Ehret & Hannich, 2004)

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Solvency: Disasters

Empirically the use of remote sensing satellites have been used for disaster relief.Willige and Carayannis 09 (Barbara Theilen-Willige – professor at Berlin University of Technology (TU Berlin), Institute of Applied Geosciences, George Pararas-Carayannis Tsunami Society, Honolulu, Hawaii, “NATURAL HAZARD ASSESSMENT OF SW MYANMAR - A CONTRIBUTION OF REMOTE SENSING AND GIS METHODS TO THE DETECTION OF AREAS VULNERABLE TO EARTHQUAKES AND TSUNAMI / CYCLONE FLOODING”, Science of Tsunami Hazards, Vol. 28, No. 2, page 128 (2009) , http://www.tsunamisociety.org/282ThielenGPCb.pdf)

The use of satellite SRTM, LANDSAT and GOOGLE EARTH data, integrated into GIS methodology, helped map the areas most susceptible to flooding in the southwest region of Burma/Myanmar. The analysis helped identify coastal areas that are vulnerable to potential tsunami and storm surge inundation. Such collection of data represents a promising new tool for examining and identifying suitable locations for cyclone flooding and tsunami shelters. The use of the described GIS methodology can help visualize some

of the factors that influence local earthquake intensities or are capable of generating secondary hazards. The methodology can also help determine probable fault zones, areas of higher earthquake damage risk, areas with higher groundwater tables and higher slope gradients where mass movements could occur.

Remote sensing is needed for a fast and more efficient response to natural disasters.Kerle and Oppenheimer 02 (Norman Kerle, PhD in geography (volcano remote sensing) from the University of Cambridge, Clive Oppenheimer, PhD

(Open University) Volcanology, “Satellite Remote Sensing as a Tool in Lahar Disaster Management”, Volume 26, Issue 2, pages 140–160)

The Earth is currently being monitored by some 18 (non-classified) optical EO satellites of medium to high spatial resolution (60m or better), and several satellites with

low-resolution optical, or radar sensors, all generating a continuous, vast amount of image data (see Figure 1). The potential of satellite technology for hazard assessment, disaster prevention and preparedness, in-disaster response and management, and post-disaster relief has been emphasised repeatedly (for example, Luscombe and Hassan, 1993; Walter, 1994; Iglseder et al., 1995), and is reflected in over 400 scientific articles on the use of remote sensing in hazard and disaster research between 1972 and 1998 (Showalter, 2001). The advantages of remote-sensing technology listed in Table 1 explain such high expectations. With the ever-increasing number of sensors continuously monitoring the

globe, synoptic coverage, either in the optical or microwave (i.e. radar) region (or both) should, in theory, be obtainable relatively quickly after a disaster, and allow a much more informed response to an event. Additionally, available image archives can provide reference information of the pre-disaster situation. Especially for assessing the situation in more remote places,

which are frequently only reached days or even weeks after an event, a detailed inventory of affected settlements and infrastructure may save many lives and speed up recovery. Note, however, that the required information is disaster specific. Following an earthquake, for

example, information on the spatial extent and the severity of structural damage is needed, as are data on interrupted lifelines and

fires caused by the event. During a flood, measurements of changes in water height over time are as important as the extent of the floodwater itself. In addition, the onset time for different disasters varies greatly, from seconds/minutes (e.g. earthquakes, lahars), to weeks/months (e.g. drought), the latter allowing more time for the acquisition of suitable imagery.

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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/disa.2002.26.issue-2/issuetoc


Solvency: Disasters

Remote Sensing is key to disaster preparedness

Westen 2000 [Cees Van, Westen holds a doctorial degree in physical geography from the University of Amsterdam, Remote Sensing for Natural Disaster Management, International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Science, http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXIII/congress/part7/1609_XXXIII-part7.pdf]Natural disasters are extreme events within the earth's system that result in death or injury to humans, and damage or loss of valuable goods, such as buildings,

communication systems, agricultural land, forest, natural environment etc. The economic losses due to natural disasters have shown an increase with a factor of eight over the past four decades, caused by the increased vulnerability of the global society, but also due to an increase in the number of weather-related disasters. For the management of natural disasters a large amount of multi -temporal spatial data is required. Satellite remote sensing is the ideal tool for disaster management, since it offers information over large areas, and at short time intervals. Although it can be utilised in the various phases of disaster management, such as prevention, preparedness, relief, and reconstruction, in practice up till now it is mostly used for warning and monitoring. During the last decades remote sensing has

become an operational tool in the disaster preparedness and warning phases for cyclones, droughts and floods. The use of remote sensing data is not possible without a proper tool to handle the large amounts of data and combine it with data coming from other sources, such as maps or measurement stations. Therefore, together with the growth of the remote sensing applications, Geographic Information Systems have become increasingly important for disaster management. This chapter gives a review of the use of remote sensing and GIS for a number of major disaster types.

The link between disaster and poverty are clear, only early warning systems utilized by the community help the most vulnerable people.Benn 06 (Hilary, Secretary of State for International Development, Reducing the Risk of Disasters – Helping to Achieve Sustainable Poverty Reduction in a Vulnerable World: A DFID policy paper, pg. 1)

2004 and 2005 saw some of the worst disasters in living memory: from the Asian Tsunami, to droughts in Africa, the hurricanes which

devastated America’s Gulf coast and Central America, and the Pakistan earthquake.These disasters claimed hundreds of thousands of lives,

ruined millions of livelihoods and caused billions of pounds worth of damage. But many of the lives lost could have been saved had simple measures been in place, such as better constructed houses, schools and hospitals and effective early warning systems that could be used by local communities. The number and frequency of disasters is growing. According to Munich Re,one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies, the 1990s saw economic losses from disasters total over US$608 billion – greater than losses over the four previous decades

combined. The number of disasters will increase as climate change and global warming generate more severe weather-related events. The links between disaster and poverty are clear. It is the poorest who are worst affected and suffer most.The capacity to cope and to reduce risk is much more limited in poorer countries. Disasters damage infrastructure and affect productivity and

growth. Rarely do disasters just happen – they often result from failures of development which increase vulnerability. It is vitally important therefore that reducing disaster risk is of central concern to our development as well as our humanitarian work.

Early warning system is essential to alleviating disaster reliefDFID 06 (Department for international development, Reducing the Risk of Disasters – Helping to Achieve Sustainable Poverty Reduction in a Vulnerable World: A DFID policy paper, pg. 10)

Better identification of risk and occurrence of a hazard, coupled with monitoring the levels of vulnerability of a population through the establishment of effective early warning systems is also fundamental. The Famine and Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET) is a good example of a regional initiative aimed at monitoring vulnerability. FEWSNET covers 17 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Afghanistan. The network offers a range of information products, tools and services to provide decision-makers with the up-to-date information

necessary to avert or mitigate the impact of food security shocks.The challenge is to ensure that early warnings result in prompt responses by governments and potentially the international community. It also requires that information is effectively disseminated down to the end user in an accessible form.

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Solvency: Disasters (landslide)

Remote sensing Satellites would the most effective means of natural disaster preparednessOštir and Veljanovski 2006 [ Krištof and Tatjana, Krištof Oštir graduated in physics, and accomplished his postgraduate studies in remote sensing (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) at the University of Ljubljana, and, Tatjana Veljanovski holds a B.Sc. degree in geodesy from the University of Ljubljana, from the field of GIS spatial analysis, “application of satellite remote sensing in natural hazard management: the mount mangart landslide case study”, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana (Slovenia), http://www.mountaincartography.org/publications/papers/papers_bohinj_06/14_Ostir_Veljanovski.pdf]

The disaster below Mount Mangart is a classical case used to show the value of satellite remote sensing. The landslide happened in late November 2000 after several weeks of heavy rainfall and had such extent that it can be clearly detected with the available satellite sensors. SPOT optical images offered a good illustration of the situation and could be compared with the archived data in order to evaluate the damage. Multispectral optical data was supplemented

with radar images, acquired on four dates before and after the event. Due to the rough terrain, it was hard to directly detect the landslide and its consequences on radar imagery; however, the high humidity in the area could be observed even several days after the event. To evaluate the

landslide consequences a detailed GIS analysis of the available satellite images and other data was made. The landslide has been identified on several post event images, most notably on the SPOT panchromatic image, which was used to outline both the landslide and its impact area. The total damage area was estimated to be almost 76 hectares – 26 hectares representing the surface of the landslide and 50 hectares the impact area. The landslide occurred on steep south-east facing slopes, at an average elevation of approximately 1400 m. With respect to slope, elevation and orientation the area affected in the valley was lower and more heterogeneous. The evaluation of land use showed that the landslide occurred mainly in areas covered by deciduous forest (almost three quarters of its surface). The impact zone was again more heterogeneous, half of it being covered with forests. There was also significant damage in agricultural land and built-up

areas. The Mount Mangart landslide study has proven the value of remote sensing technology for monitoring natural disasters and it has in particular proved the usefulness of the Space and Major Disasters Charter. It has shown that remote sensing can be used to estimate the damage and under suitable conditions also in rescue operations. In rescue operations the processing speed is critical and near real time data distribution – achieved today – is very important. In the case of damage estimation the processing speed is less important than the accuracy and quality of results. It has been proven, that remote sensing enables mapping and analysing topographic and land cover changes caused by a catastrophic event within a considerably short period of time. We also believe that with advanced simulations it can be used to determine hazardous areas and

predict the triggering conditions. Satellite remote sensing may therefore be one of the most important steps in the development of an early hazard warning system.

Remote sensing is key to landslide hazard zoning, saves lives and property. Temesgen, Mohammed and Korme, 01 , Departement of Geology and Geophysics, A. A. U., Ethiopia and Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris - B89, (, Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Part C: Solar, Terrestrial & Planetary Science, “Natural hazard assessment using GIS and remote sensing methods, with particular reference to the landslides in the Wondogenet Area, Ethiopia”,)

Landslide processes are part of the normal geomorphic cycles of landscape development. They become hazardous when they interfere with human activities. They are especially serious in developing countries where environmental protection and management are harder to sustain. Over 95% of all disasters and fatalities related to landslide in particular, and mass movement in general occur in developing countries (Hansen, 1984, Chung, 1995). Up to 0.5% of the GNP of these countries have been lost by landslides (Fournier D’Albe, 1976). In the world, annual economic losses due to landslides are estimated to be in the order of two to five billions of US Dollars (Schuster, 1994). Ethiopia has three physiographic regions: two uplifted plateaus, divided by a rift having steep escarpments. The escarpments and the high lands are characterized by rugged and dissected morphologies. Rapid expansion of settlement

and associated needs for plough lands on such morphologies have been changing the land-use abruptly since the last 40 years. By consequence, landslides are becoming an ever more serious problems to the people living on the mountain slopes. Some of the landslide impacts reported in the last few years include those of the Blue Nile gorge in 1995, Woldia-Wudmen in 1996, Dessie in 1996, Wondogenet in 1996, and other types of mass movements

around Metehara in 1974, and Awasa in 1998. The area under study, Wondogenet, is located near the foot of the eastern escarpment of the Main Ethiopian rift

(Fig. 1). Elevation ranges from 1680 to 2600m a.s.1. The climate is humid with relatively high annual rainfall (1200mm/yr). The area has suffered severely from mass movement problems. The severity of this problem has been manifested by causing considerable damage and loss of lives in the recent years (Berhanu Temesgen et al., 1999). This paper mainly evaluates the role of major event controlling

parameters on landslide hazard assessment and mapping as applied to the Wondogent area (Ethiopia). We have developed an approach for landslide hazard zoning, using multi data sets, remote sensing and GIS techniques.

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Solvency: Environment

Space technology empirically solves environmental problems.


The national priorities that informed the committee’s thinking include ensuring national security, providing clean and affordable energy, protecting the environment now and for future generations, educating an engaged citizenry and a capable workforce for the 21st century, sustaining global economic competitiveness, and working internationally to build a safer, more sustainable world. A common element across all these urgent priorities is the significant part that research and

development can play in solving problems and advancing the national enterprise in each area. Instruments in space have documented an accelerating decline in arctic sea ice; mapped the circulation of the world’s oceans; enabled the creation of quantitative three-dimensional data sets to improve the quality of hurricane forecasting; and created new tools to address a host of agricultural, coastal, and urban resource management problems, to cite only a few examples. Such capabilities demonstrate what can be achieved when technologically challenging space problems stimulate innovation that leads to long-term advances with applications beyond the space sector. Civil space activities are central to the R&D enterprise of the nation, often in a transformational way, and thus present powerful opportunities to help address major national objectives.

Observations from space offering unique capabilities for global environmental and land-use monitoring are essential to informed decision making about energy production and climate change policies, and they help provide the understanding required for wise management. The high visibility of space activities attracts students’ attention to science, technology, and mathematics, and space activities are an exciting focus for teaching those subjects. Commercial space-related ventures now figure significantly in global economic competitiveness, and, while government investments to stimulate the nation’s fragile economy will have short-term impacts, R&D investments can be counted on to make longer-term sustainable contributions to the nation’s economic strength. As has countless times proved the case, research in and from space will continue to lead to important future, and not always currently predictable, benefits that hold the promise of progress toward realizing U.S. as well as shared international goals.

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Solvency: GEOSS

GEOSS key to global data sharing and preventing and warning of natural disasters.Owen 2005 (James, January 24, “Satellite Global Disaster Alert System Planned,” National Geographic News)

Next month more than 50 nations will meet in Brussels, Belgium, to finalize plans to link up each country's environmental antennae—a fleet of orbiting satellites and

other Earth observation technology. The systems are currently used to estimate crop yields, detect earthquakes, forecast droughts, predict floods, and monitor air and water quality. Linking the satellites and sensors would enable them to "talk to each other," allowing information to be shared across continents to warn of and respond to natural disasters. Called the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), the program aims to pool all national and regional observation data within the next ten years. Once in place, information would be available instantaneously to all countries. If such a network had already been in place, tens of thousands of lives lost during the Indian Ocean tsunami strikes on December 26 might have been saved. While there was no tsunami alert system in place in the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in

Hawaii detected the earthquake that triggered the deadly waves. The center, operated by the United States National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration

(NOAA), has been criticized by some affected countries, including Thailand. They say more should have been done to raise the alarm. NOAA officials counter that no proper system was in place for these countries to receive a warning in time to avert disaster. Tsunami Detection Earlier this month the Bush administration announced plans to expand tsunami detection and warning capabilities as part of the GEOSS program. "This plan will enable enhanced monitoring, detection, warning and communications that will protect lives and property in the U.S. and a significant part of the world," announced John H. Marburger III, President Bush's science advisor. "World attention has been focused on the vulnerability of those near the edge of oceans, and we have the responsibility to respond," Marburger added. NOAA will deploy 32 new Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (DART) buoys, extending coverage throughout the entire Pacific and Caribbean basins. DART buoys record sea surface heights, with data transmitted via satellites. The draft plan for the U.S. component of GEOSS—the U.S. Integrated Earth Observation System—was published last September. The plan noted benefits of a global monitoring network, including improved weather forecasting and climate change predictions and better protection of water resources. The report stated, for example, that weather- and climate-sensitive industries account for a third of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), or 2.7 trillion dollars and

that improved El Niño forecasts are worth up to 300 million dollars to the U.S. annually. Satellites can help save lives and protect property from natural disasters, report authors noted. Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) are used to detect and monitor forest fires across the Western Hemisphere. The satellites are so sensitive that a blaze can be detected within 15 minutes of igniting. The report stated other satellites could be incorporated to extend fire-alert coverage globally. European Role The European component of GEOSS—Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES)—is a joint initiative of the European Commission and the European Space Agency, based in Paris, France. "As well as areas of environmental concern, such as marine pollution, GMES

covers natural hazards to society—from land fires, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions to avalanches, subsidence, and flooding," said Mike Grimmett, national program manager of the British National Space Centre in London. "People who have their own observing systems, satellite missions, and processing

capabilities will all share information," he added. "We need to get the whole world sharing good, valid data." Grimmett said the Indian Ocean tragedy has highlighted the benefits of Earth observation systems in helping those affected by natural disasters. A GMES project involved with the current tsunami relief effort is Respond. The Europe-wide initiative based in Leicester, England, provides humanitarian organizations with geographic information. Grimmett said,

"[Respond] provides access to maps, satellites images, and other geographic information for regions that are at risk. That can be slow-moving risk, such as desertification and famine. But it also includes reacting to a disaster situation and helping to plan and manage in the aftermath of such an event." Grimmett said the information is published freely on the Respond Web site and that everyone can access it. He added, "It's an example of what will be a part of GEOSS."

US is key to the development of GEOSS- modernization of sensors is crucial for successWigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

The U.S.-led creation of the multinational Group on Earth Observations (GEO) has been a tremendous scientific, environmental, and foreign policy achievement. It has engaged governments at the ministerial level who have agreed on the value of Earth

observations in obtaining concrete societal benefits. Through its strong leadership at GEO and in the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), the United States has made progress in engaging the international community in discussions on GEOSS. The United States has also led a growing consensus on making data freely available at low cost, which has prompted other nations (including Brazil, China, and Russia) to open up previously closed data sets. However, much more needs to be done in order to implement GEOSS. Jason, the oceanography mission to monitor global ocean circulation, and NPOESS, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, are examples of successful international engagement. There are further opportunities for the United States to be proactive

in seeking partnerships on cooperative missions and developing interoperable systems. Further, with the exception of ocean monitoring, the United States has not built the cooperative relationships to transition new sensors and systems beyond what are essentially technology demonstration missions to long-term data acquisition and continuity missions. Additionally, current U.S. export control regulations are a significant structural impediment to and fundamental disincentive for U.S. collaboration with international partners, for international cooperation with the United States, and for the development of GEOSS. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) legislation has created real and perceived obstacles to engagement and cooperation. While ITAR was intended to cover critical, highly sensitive military technologies—a widely agreed on fundamental national right—in practice, the regulations are applied to a much wider array of other technologies. In addition, as individuals in the approval process are criminally liable equally for real and perceived mistakes, decisionmakers have a strong incentive to be excessively cautious. Furthermore, despite the written provisions of ITAR, the regulations are now being applied to data from space systems, not just the space systems

49

UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFFthemselves. These factors have led to the situation where ITAR has forced the international community to develop its own independent capabilities (for example, radar ocean altimetry and Lidar/IMU). Consequently, international companies now lead in several technologies, while U.S. firms are losing access to global markets and in some cases have lost the ability to produce such technologies altogether.

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Solvency: Grassroots

Grassroots efforts solve: pressure US GovernmentLuft 2009 (Rachel E., assistant professor of sociology and women and gender studies at the University of New Orleans, American Quarterly Volume 61, Number 3, September 2009 Beyond Disaster Exceptionalism: Social Movement Developments in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina)

In sum, certain local, regional, national, and international organizers, progressive advocates, and officials have embraced human rights frameworks for challenging the U.S. government’s response to Katrina. Through a variety of tactics—shadow reports, public reports, tribunals, press releases, and popular political education—they exert pressure on the U.S. government, focus domestic and global attention on the Katrina response, bolster human rights claims, build human rights consciousness, and strengthen domestic and global movements for structural change.

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Solvency: Now Key

The US still possesses satellite remote sensing leadership, but other countries are developing better tech. Now is key.Kessler 08 (J. Christian, worked for U.S. Department of State a member of the U.S. Government’s elite Senior Executive Service (SES) led the national policy regarding commercial and foreign remote-sensing satellites.

http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/files/NOAA_Report_Northraven_final.pdf, 2008)The Soviet Union opened space as a new frontier with the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Caught flat-footed, the United States launched a massive response that included science education programs in elementary and secondary schools, the creation of the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) in 1958, and a broad range of new space programs. Among these were programs to use satellites to take imagery of the earth, first secretly for national security purposes, but also for scientific and weather prediction purposes. The U.S. launched six scientific satellites in 1958 alone. These efforts led to the LandSat program in 1972. In September 1999 the U.S. firm SpaceImaging (now merged into GeoEye, Inc.) opened high resolution commercial space remote sensing with the launch of Ikonos, providing 1 meter resolution

imagery for public sale. The U.S. efforts to open this “New Frontier” led many other governments to develop their own space and satellite remote sensing capabilities, resulting in extensive cooperation among national space agencies on civil programs, and an increasingly robust competition in the area of commercially distributed earth imagery. Today general opinion among experts is that U.S. national reconnaissance capabilities continue to be superior to those of any other government, but that the gap between the U.S. and others is narrowing. Civil governmental uses of remote sensing data have grown exponentially since LandSat was initiated, and

the trend has been away from discrete national programs to multi-national cooperative efforts. U.S. leadership turned into partnership. While these partnerships have leveraged substantial capabilities for all participants, one important issue for the United States is whether we remain a leader in those partnerships. U.S. firms invented commercial remote sensing and continue to operate the most capable and

highest resolution electro-optical satellites. The durability of that leadership is in question. Other countries are closing the gap with the U.S. industry on the resolution, quality, and availability of electro-optical imagery. And commercial/governmental partnerships in other countries are now launching and operating synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites with equivalent resolutions but superior technical capabilities, while the U.S. has no commercial high resolution SAR system in prospect. The officially stated policy of the Unites States Government is to maintain U.S. leadership in all aspects of the commercial remote sensing satellite arena. This report will look at the foreign competition, and will examine whether the actions of the U.S. Government provide effective support to that objective or create impediments to the efforts of U.S. firms to maintain their leadership positions.

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Solvency: Racism

We must demand transformation. It’s the only way to solve.Dawson 2006 (Michael, prof of political science, Univ of Chicago, Du Bois Review (2006), 3: 239-249AFTER THE DELUGE: Publics and Publicity in Katrina's Wake)

As righteous as the protests of the NAACP leadership may be, they stand in pale contrast not only to the hundreds of thousands of people who have hit the streets in support of immigrant rights, but also to the vigorous, militant mobilizations of the last century, which emerged out of and were produced by Black civil society and the Black counterpublic. The important lesson seems to have been forgotten by some, that political power and political mobilization are needed not only to win rights, but to safeguard them as well. The work of Black civil society has never proven to be sufficient to secure Black rights but must be paired with active, mass, and independent political action. What Katrina has to teach us, neoliberal fantasies aside, is that, while much has changed with the status of African Americans, that status is still precarious enough that vigorous mass political action remains a necessity, not a luxury. I'll conclude with the words of Frederick Douglass from 1857: Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you will have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words, blows, or both (Douglass cited in Dawson 2001, p. 259).

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Solves Weather Forecasting

Current systems inadequate for weather monitoring. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

Although weather satellite observing system, along with the other associated national and international data management mechanisms, is probably most mature relative to other observing systems, the improvement of accuracy of weather-forecasting, the enhancement of observations (e.g., wind and humidity profiles, precipitation), the improvement of long-term weather forecasting, and the access and

delivery of essential weather forecast products to user for meeting requirements of timely short- and mediumterm forecasts are still urgently essential for societal benefit [6]. The shortcoming of the current earth observing system is that its spatial, temporal-, and spectral resolution and sensing capability can not obtain sufficiently high accurate, gridded worldwide weather [6], resulting in that the different weather users, such as real-time, mobile users, can not dynamically access the desired data in an near instantaneous and global access manner.

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AT: US not key

Other countries’ technology is not sophisticated enough to monitor human greenhouse gases.New Scientist 2010 (Feb 2, “NASA satellite could pave way for policing CO2 emissions” http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18467-nasa-satellite-could-pave-way-for-policing-co2-emissions.html)

Japan's GOSAT satellite, which launched in January 2009, is currently the only satellite in orbit dedicated to measuring carbon dioxide levels. But GOSAT can only measure carbon dioxide emissions in swathes of the atmosphere spanning 87 square kilometres. That is not sharp enough to resolve manmade sources, which can disperse within tens of kilometres. The OCO boasted a resolution of 3 square kilometres and could sense carbon dioxide levels down to 1 part per million (ppm). That means it could have pointed its instruments at cities or power plants, which typically increase local levels of atmospheric CO2 by 1 to 10 ppm, the National Research Council committee said. Technology testbed Still, definitively tracing emissions to manmade sources won't be easy. Natural sources of carbon and winds can confuse signals, committee member Michael Gunson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in an interview last year. The ratio of different isotopes of carbon, a measurement often used on the ground to measure how much carbon is produced by fossil fuels, is too subtle to be detected by the

satellite. But the satellite would nonetheless be the best measurement tool available, he said. "There isn't anything else planned that we think comes close to producing the level of information or data that OCO would provide," he told New Scientist. OCO-2 will fly in a near-polar orbit and will make measurements of the atmosphere in thin strips below its flight path, covering just 7 per cent or

so of the Earth's surface every month. But it could serve as a technology "pathfinder" for follow-on satellites dedicated to policing future climate treaties. "Future greenhouse gas monitoring satellite networks will need sensitivities and spatial resolutions similar to those provided by OCO, but much better spatial coverage, so that they can map the entire Earth at regular intervals," says OCO-2 lead scientist David Crisp of JPL.

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AT: Tech fails

Despite having minor problems, the disadvantages are diminishing and currently sensing satellites are more than adequate to provide necessary disaster relief.Kerle and Oppenheimer 02 (Norman Kerle, PhD in geography (volcano remote sensing) from the University of Cambridge, Clive Oppenheimer, PhD (Open University) Volcanology, “Satellite Remote Sensing as a Tool in Lahar Disaster Management”, Volume 26, Issue 2, pages 140–160)

Despite the high potential of the technology, the disadvantages listed in Table 1 explain its continued under-utilisation (e.g. Walter, 1990; San Miguel-Ayanz et

al., 2000). Some of those disadvantages indicated, however, have already begun to diminish. Ikonos-2, successfully launched in 1999, and eagerly awaited by the disaster response community, is the first non-classified satellite to provide 1m-resolution optical (panchromatic)

imagery at significantly lower cost than previously available data. Several other disadvantages will probably become less relevant as well with future satellites. Because of the varied problems of existing sensors, however, satellite constellations solely dedicated to hazard assessment and disaster management have repeatedly been proposed, most of them including optical and microwave sensors, and characterised by a rapid response time following a disaster, as well as subsequent high temporal and spatial resolution coverage of the scene (see Table 2). Note that some constellations are only theoretical concepts, based on how the ‘perfect’ array of sensors would have to be shaped, while others are actual practical blueprints, specifying technical details as much as the needed organisational structures. Dedicated

satellite constellations have been discussed for more than a decade, yet even with the IDNDR, none has become operational. Currently three systems are actually in the construction stage, of which Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd’s (SSTL) Disaster Management Constellation (DMC), a modest array of five optical, 36m spatial-resolution sensors, is the only one designed for global coverage. COSMO/SkyMed was

devised primarily for the Mediterranean region, FUEGO for southern Europe. Given these limitations, a further detailed assessment of the capabilities of currently operating and forthcoming sensors as tools in disaster response and management is useful. In the following sections we introduce the 1998 Casita lahar disaster, and describe how satellite technology can aid in information collection, and therefore disaster management, by assessing whether image data available at the time could have led to an improved disaster management. The conclusions reached in this study are not strictly limited to the Casita event, nor, indeed, to lahars in general. From a remotesensing viewpoint, mudflow disasters combine some of the major challenges posed by other disasters, which makes them perhaps the most difficult type of calamity to manage. The extensive destruction caused by lahars is similar to flooding, storm and earthquake damage. In addition, lahars frequently occur unexpectedly (again, similar to earthquakes). Lahars are also either directly associated with clouds (when rainfalltriggered), or occur at volcanic structures where, due to orographic reasons, clouds are common. This necessitates all-weather imaging capabilities.

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AT: ITAR

NASA has the capabilities and resources to overcome ITAR restrictionsDinerman 2008 [Taylor, is an author and journalist based in New York City, “ITAR’s Failure”, The Space Review, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1086/1]

The history of the 20th century is littered with failed attempts to control the flow of weapons and weapons technology. There have been a few successes, but they tend to simply slow proliferation and increase the costs. Any nation with enough time and money can buy the means to develop just about any weapon or weapons system it wants. Sometimes moderate gains can be achieved by international means such as the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom), which lasted from the late 1940s until the Clinton Administration abolished it in 1993, or by covert sabotage and other active measures. This last was used by the Reagan administration against the USSR and by the Israelis against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program in the 1980s. ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations), which since 1999 has included not only weapons but communications satellites and virtually all spacecraft and most detailed information about them, has been one of the most spectacular “own goals”, as they say in soccer, in US history. Reduced to its essentials, it was a declaration of economic and technological war by the US government against the US

national interest. ITAR handed over control of an important part of the US high tech economy to a set of hyper-cautious, hyper-

legalistic, and slow-moving bureaucrats. In response to a critical GAO report in January of this year, the late Congressman Tom Lantos (D-CA) complained about “years and years of fundamental mismanagement at the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC).” He was right: the problem goes back to 1999, when Congress

passed the regulatory power from the Department of Commerce to the State Department. Big companies, large organizations such as NASA, and the big

universities have the time and the resources to overcome these obstacles. However, small companies or individual researchers do not. Even large companies have seen their profit margins reduced by the need to waste their recourses coping with these regulations.

ITAR doesn’t impede NASA. Taylor Dinerman 2008 (Taylor, s a well-known and respected space writer regarding military and civilian space activities since 1983. From 1999 until 2003, Mr. Dinerman ran Space Equity.com. Taylor Dinerman has now been writing for a variety of publications including Ad Astra, The Wall Street Journal and the American Spectator. He was a regular contributor with a weekly piece for Jeff Foust's Space Review and now writes for the Hudson Institute New York, March 17,

ITAR’s failure http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1086/1)

Big companies, large organizations such as NASA, and the big universities have the time and the resources to overcome these obstacles. However, small companies or individual researchers do not. Even large companies have seen their profit margins reduced by the need to waste their recourses coping with these regulations.ITAR handed over control of an important part of the US high tech economy to a set of hyper-cautious, hyper-legalistic, and slow-moving bureaucrats.

NASA is exempt from ITAAR. Landry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

The above list does not include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) because, generally, ITAR allows for treatment that is more permissive for U.S. Government agencies. NASA is able to apply several exemptions listed in ITAR. The procedural requirements document for the NASA Export Control Program (NASA 2007) includes a chapter which specifically addresses ITAR

procedures. The chapter lists eleven exemptions from ITAR that are relevant to NASA activities. One specific example refers to Section 126.4

of the ITAR, which refers to shipments by or for U.S. Government agencies. Paragraph (a) of this section allows for the temporary export of any defense articles by or for any U.S. government agency for official use by that agency, or for carrying out foreign

assistance or cooperative projects (U.S. Congress 2009). ITAR does not restrict NASA as much as it does companies in the commercial industry.

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AT: ITAR

ITAR doesn’t affect space innovation.Landry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

Over 40% of the respondents commented that ITAR has little or no effect on innovation. The impact of ITAR is not necessarily in the area of innovation. They explain that there is much innovation in the industry; however, ITAR complaints emerge when trying to market outside of the U.S. or when looking for a launch provider. Some companies do not consider ITAR until after something is invented. ITAR’s effect on marketing is a concept that was mentioned by 29% of respondents. The market is more restricted for lower-tier businesses. For example, a Tier 3 company can sell to Tier 1 and 2 businesses, but it is harder for them to sell to foreign customers. There are many

innovative companies in the U.S., but a restricted market drives costs up and pushes the improvement cycle out. ITAR may cause the innovation process to take a little longer while trying to stay within the rules for communication. This is related to the concern of 29% of respondents that ITAR affects communication and knowledge sharing. ITAR hinders free technical exchange between a company and foreign engineers because a license is required before the communication can happen. When marketing to overseas customers, a company is able to share only a very limited amount of information, which makes their marketing efforts ineffective. Innovation can also occur when knowledge from others is shared or imported. ITAR prevents the sharing of knowledge, which means the U.S. is not always able to know about others’ technologies. The U.S. is unable to benefit from this input to innovation.

ITAR being phased out now.Landry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

The lengthy and unpredictable ITAR process takes much of the blame for foreign contractors phasing out U.S. suppliers for satellites and satellite components. Pierre Chao, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that

interest in ITAR-free satellites is prompted “by the uncertainty embodied with the U.S. ITAR system” (Space Politics 2009). This uncertainty refers to delays in getting approvals for export licenses and related agreements. There is acknowledgement of some progress with the ITAR process. For example, the State Department is already starting to process export license applications more rapidly (Space Politics 2009) – requiring decisions to be made within 60 days of the application (Dinerman 2008).

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Other Solvency Mechanisms: FIEOS: Solves Disaster Prep

FIEOS solves. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

The envisioned FIEOS demonstrates a prospective in cooperative operation of global coverage. The implementation of FIEOS will bring a more timely dissemination of information through webbased observing system for monitoring, predicting, risk assessment, early warning, mitigating, and responding to hazards at local, national, regional, and global levels. For example, the traditional earth observing systems are not capable of collecting high-resolution (less than 3 meter) multispectral data in a specific

wildfire area at a repeat cycle of 15 minutes, while the FIEOS has networked ground-based, air-based and space-based threedimensional observation system. Thereby, high-resolution, multispectral data can be provided in a manner of real-time observations and immediate measurement to a specific event.

Other Solvency Mechanisms FIEOS Solvency – How it works

Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

The envisioned FIEOS is a space-based architecture for the dynamic and comprehensive on-board integration of Earth observing sensors, data processors and communication systems. The implementation strategies suggest a seamless integration of diverse components into a smart, adaptable and robust Earth observation satellite system to enable simultaneous, global measurements and timely analyses of the Earth’s environment for a variety of users (Fig. 1). The architecture consists of multiple layer networked satellites. Each EO satellite is equipped with a different sensor for collection of different data and an on-board data processor that enables it to act autonomously, reacting to significant measurement events on and above the Earth. They collaboratively work together to conduct the range of functions currently performed by a few large satellites today through the use of high performance processing architectures and reconfigurable computing

environments [1], [3-4]. The FIEOS will act autonomously in controlling instruments and spacecraft, while also responding to the commands of the user interested to measure specific events or features. So, users can select instrument parameters on demand and control on-board algorithms to preprocess the data for information extraction. All of the satellites are networked together into an organic measurement system with high speed optical and radio frequency links. User requests are routed to specific instruments maximizing the transfer of data to archive facilities on the ground and on the satellite. Such an earth observing system allows measurement from in situ, air borne or space based sensors to be multiple practical usage that can help in making critical decisions for societal benefits. The optimum earth observing system to meet the specific needs and mandates on specific and achievable societal benefits never

stops. A called event-driven observation in FIEOS has been presented [18]. The operational mode is that each EO sensing system independently collects, analyzes and interprets data using its own sensors and on-board processors. When a sensing system detects an event, e.g., a forest fire, the sensing-satellite rotates its sensing system into position and alters its coverage area via adjusting its system parameters in order to bring the event into focus [13]. Meanwhile, the sensing-satellite informs membersatellites, and the member-satellites adjust their sensors to acquire the event, resulting in a multi-angle, -sensor, -resolution and - spectral observation and analysis of the event. These data sets are merged to a geostationary satellite according to the changes detected. Meanwhile, the geostationary further processes the data to develop other products, e.g., predictions of fire extend after 5

days, weather influence on a fire, pollution caused by a fire, etc. These value-added products are then transmitted to users. The envisioned future intelligent earth observing system (FIEOS) is especially significant for people, who want to learn about the dynamics of, for example, the spread of forest fires, regional to large-scale air quality issues, the spread of the harmful invasive species, etc. [9]. This paper will address the benefit as follow.

Solvency Mechanism: FEIOS Weather

FIEOS Solves. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

The envisioned FIEOS observing system is capable of providing users to near instantaneously access to worldwide weather data for a given point, a path, or an area in time and space anywhere in the world via satellite broadcast or direct send/receive satellite link. Especially, FIEOS provides the weather forecasting data with different levels of scales: macro-scale, smaller-scale, and microscale. At the macro-scale level, users, such as commercial airlines pilot, can obtain weather forecasting information from forecast centers via wireless. At the small-scale level, user can directly obtain weather forecasting products from a forecast or data processing center via either wireless or wire access. Alternatively, the

user can also gain access to the database(s) described weather information to generate his or her own weather products using wireless/wire user software. For those mobile users, including truck drivers, farmers, and private car owners, they can receive the broadcast weather information directly from the forecasting information center using hand-held device. The devices can also be designed to have a direct send/receive satellite transmission capability, and the broadcast center may be local TV, universities, and radio stations, etc.

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Solvency Mechanism: FEIOS Disease

FEIOS Solves Disease. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

The envisioned FIEOS is able to assist field mosquito vector surveillance and control because it is capable of providing bi-

daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, seasonal mosquito distributions and accurate regionalization of mosquito abundance, potentially species

distributions, and precise locations and conditions of disease transmission via observations from the ground-, air- and

spacebased sensing system and intelligent knowledge. Consequently, researchers, service providers, policy makers and the public can understand environmental factors in order to improve surveillance activities (e.g., location of mosquito traps and sentinel chicken flocks) and control (source prevention, spraying, and larviciding), and make decisions and take actions to break the transmission paths. With

intelligent technology, the FIEOS would give us the capability to predict the outbreak of deadly diseases by tracking the environmental factors that contribute to their spread. The envisioned FIEOS is able to assist field mosquito vector surveillance and control because it is capable of providing bidaily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, seasonal mosquito distributions and accurate regionalization of mosquito abundance, potentially species distributions, and precise locations and conditions of disease transmission via observations from the ground-, air- and space-based sensing system and intelligent

knowledge. Consequently, researchers, service providers, policy makers and the public can understand environmental factors in order to improve surveillance activities (e.g., location of mosquito traps and sentinel chicken flocks) and control (source prevention, spraying, and larviciding), and make decisions and take actions to break the transmission paths. With intelligent technology, the FIEOS would give us the capability to predict the outbreak of deadly diseases by tracking the environmental factors that contribute to their spread.

FIEOS Solvency

Key to solve. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

This paper presents an envisioned FIEOS, which is intended to enable simultaneous, global measurements and timely analyses of Earth’s environments for a variety of users through dynamic and comprehensive on-board integration of Earth observing sensors, data processors and communication systems. FIEOS provides the nation with a unique and innovative perspective on the intelligent observing system and its societal benefits in such as (1) reducing losses of life and property; (2) improving human health and well being; (3) improving weather forecasting; (4) supporting sustainable agriculture; and (5) serving lay users. Implementing FIEOS is an exciting opportunity to make lasting improvements in U.S. capacity to deliver specific benefits to our people, our economy and our planet.

FIEOS Solves – Lay Users

Only the plan creates a satellite observation system accessible to normal people. Status quo systems only inform the technoelite, while the plan empowers regular folk. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

The obvious shortcoming of the current earth observing system is that the lay users can not actively be involved. Relatively, one of the benefits of FIEOS lies in its broad range of user communities, including managers and policy makers in the targeted societal benefit areas, scientific researchers, engineers, governmental and non-governmental organizations and international bodies. In particular, FIEOS would serve lay users who directly receive satellite data (in fact, the concept of data means image-based information, rather than traditional remotely sensed data) using their own receiving equipment. The operation appears to the end-users as simple and easy as selecting a TV channel by using a remote control (Fig. 3). Moreover, the authorized users are allowed to upload the user’s command for accessing and retrieving data via on-board data distributor according to the user’s requirement and position [18]. In this fashion, a lay user on the street is able to use a portable wireless device to downlink/access the satellite information of his surroundings from

satellite or from the Internet. Homes in the future are also able to obtain atmospheric data from the satellite network for monitoring their own environments. The FIEOS will enable people not only to see their environment, but also to “shape” their physical surroundings.

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Solvency Mechanism: FEIOS Famine

FIEOS Solves Famine. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

The envisioned FIEOS observing system is expected to provide not only the information mentioned above, but also valued-added products, such as crop production, livestock, aquaculture and fishery statistics; food security and drought projections; nutrient

balances; farming systems; land use and land cover change; and changes in the extent and severity of land degradation and desertification through FIEOS observation from in situ, air and space, intelligent technology as well as integration of early food production

database and production models. Moreover, with FIEOS expert system, FIEOS is also expected to generate global food product prediction, poverty and food monitoring, and international planning, to help us know in advance when droughts would occur and how long they would last and their influences on food product. Especially, FIEOS can monitor and warn those floods that lead to a major destruction of both human life and agricultural land, clearly monitor the progress of these catastrophic events, to help us to see and predict what impact food products during the next several years.

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Solvency Mechanism: Microsatellite

Microsatellites are capable of remote sensingSCHULZ 2011 (Stefan, Professor of Technical University of Berlin, Institute of Aerospace, DLR-TUBSAT: A MICROSATELLITEFOR INTERACTIVE

EARTH OBSERVATION, http://www.vectronic-aerospace.com/files/LaBaule00.pdf 2011)Satellite remote sensing is very useful in areas such as forestry, agriculture, geology, hydrology and mapping in any way. Since 1970 a lot of remote sensing systems

have been launched for imaging the earth, e.g. projects like LANDSAT, SPOT and IRS. Due to the size and costs of these projects remote sensing was limited to governmental organizations which were interested in weather services, military observations and mapping. The attitude of these satellites has to be nadir pointing in order to scan the earth face with linear CCD sensors and the repeat cycle is from 3 to 26 days. They need a high volume of data storage and data transmission. Remote sensing with a resolution in the range of 30 m is good for monitoring environmental processes that change within a period of more than 5 days. Earth observation is going to be a commercial market more and more. With the launch of IKONOS a new era in the field of earth observation began. IKONOS provides panchromatic imaging data with a resolution of 1 m and mulitsprectral of 4 m. These images are radiometrically and geometrically corrected, map projected and will be offered via internet. The satellite has a repeat cycle of one to three days and is capable of

delivering more up to date information.What role do microsatellites have in this business ? 1. Provide a cheap platform that can be configured and launched for a very specific mission within a short time. 2. Take advantage in their mobility of monitoring processes which change fast (within one day), for search actions or for following a target. Microsatellites have a high mobility due to their compactness and small mass which is essential for observing the following category of events: weather phenomena like hurricanes, lightning or polar lights, spectacular fires, volcano eruptions, floods, earth quakes, ship, plane or railway accidents or any other events of this type which e.g. a news agency would like to present in the news. This interesting area is typically only a few square kilometers large and the resolution requirement is of course as high as possible. In this case interactive earth observation means that the user in the ground station receives video images from the satellite and is able to steer the pointing direction of the camera platform interactively via mouse control to the interesting event on the ground (see figure 1). This is appreciated in applications where the target has not been identified clearly in advance, a search action is

involved or a target has to be visually followed for a while. The test satellite DLR-TUBSAT has been designed especially for this purpose and was launched on 26 May 1999 with the Indian rocket PSLV (Polar Spacecraft Launch Vehicle) from the launch site Sriharikota together with KITSAT-3 and the primary payload IRS-P4 (OCEANSAT). The satellite was attached with a ball-lock type separation system to the vehicle equipment bay (VEB) of the upper stage and was separated about 19 min after launch with one meter per second. The final orbit parameters are listed in table

Microsatellites are better than regularDefense industry daily 2011 (Small Is Beautiful: US Military Explores Use of Microsatellites, http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Small-Is-Beautiful-US-Military-Explores-Use-of-Microsatellites-06720/, 2011)

Microsatellites are cheaper to make and launch. Smaller launch vehicles can be used to launch multiple microsatellites into orbit, or microsatellites can piggyback on rockets blasting larger payloads into space. In addition to being faster and cheaper, microsatellites can be used for missions that larger satellites can’t perform, such as setting up a

constellation of communication nodes or conducting in-orbit inspection of larger satellites. They could even be used as anti-satellite weapons to destroy key satellites of opponents. Some observers have judged that the BX-1 microsatellite deployed by China in 2008 was an experimental anti-satellite weapon. The slogan for the small satellite approach is “faster, better, smaller, cheaper” – a slogan that the Pentagon has embraced with gusto.

The US is key to producing tech for microsatellitesDefense industry daily 2011 (Small Is Beautiful: US Military Explores Use of Microsatellites, http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Small-Is-Beautiful-US-Military-Explores-Use-of-Microsatellites-06720/, 2011)

The future of microsatellites can be summed up by the slogan with which we began this discussion – “faster, better, smaller, cheaper.” The US military will continue to work on improving each aspect: getting microsatellites into space faster, improving their performance and durability, making components even smaller, and, above else, making them cheaper to build and deploy. One

area for future research is the miniaturization of propulsion systems. Propulsion systems for early satellites were bulky and expensive.

However, with advances in micro-electromechanical system |PDF] (MEMS) and pulsed plasma thruster technology, small satellites should soon be able to perform just like their larger cousins. The future of microsatellites might look more like DARPA’s System F6, in which constellations of microsatellite components form a network that can perform the tasks of a large satellite. Of course, such a future requires the development of open interface standards to enable the emergence of a such a constellation. However, open interface standards are by definition known to

the public. So as military microsatellites progress, the issue of information security is likely to become front and center. At the same time, the attractiveness of small satellites produced cheaply and launched quickly cannot be denied. In the area of satellites, small is beautiful.

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Solvency Mechanism: Microsat Space debris I/l

Microsatellites are capable of launching nanosatellites into space that de-orbits space debrisNasa 2010 (NASA Ejects Nanosatellite From Microsatellite in Space, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/smallsats/fastsat/10-162.html)

On Dec. 6 at 1:31 a.m. EST, NASA for the first time successfully ejected a nanosatellite from a free-flying microsatellite.

NanoSail-D ejected from the Fast, Affordable, Science and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT, demonstrating the capability to deploy a small cubesat payload from an autonomous microsatellite in space. Nanosatellites or cubesats are typically launched and deployed from a mechanism called a Poly-

PicoSatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD) mounted directly on a launch vehicle. This is the first time NASA has mounted a P-POD on a microsatellite to eject a cubesat. FASTSAT, equipped with six science and technology demonstration payloads, including NanoSail-D, launched Friday, Nov. 19 at 8:25 p.m. EST from Kodiak Island, Alaska. During launch, the NanoSail-D flight unit, about the size of a loaf of bread, was stowed inside FASTSAT in a P-

POD. "The successful ejection of NanoSail-D demonstrates the operational capability of FASTSAT as a cost-effective independent means of placing cubesat payloads into orbit safely," said Mark Boudreaux, FASTSAT project manager at the Marshall Space

Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "With this first step behind us, we have demonstrated we can launch a number of different types of payloads using this common deployment system from an autonomous microsatellite like FASTSAT." "NanoSail D has multiple enabling technology demonstration objectives for this flight," said Joe Casas, FASTSAT project scientist at Marshall. Casas said when the NanoSail-D sail is deployed it will use its large sail made of thin polymer material, a material much thinner than a single human hair, to significantly decrease the time to de-orbit

the small satellite without the use of propellants as most traditional satellites use. The NanoSail-D flight results will help to mature this technology so it could be used on future large spacecraft missions to aid in de-orbiting space debris created by decommissioned satellites without using valuable mission propellants.

Nanosatellites improve military effectivenessUS ARMY 09 (SMDC – ONE Operational Nanosatellite Effect (Technology Demonstration, http://www.smdc.army.mil/FactSheets/SMDC-One.pdf)

USASMDC/ARSTRAT has successfully demonstrated acquisition responsiveness in rapidly designing and developing a militarily relevant low cost spacecraft in 1 year. The Technology Center has taken delivery of eight four-kilogram satellites

at the end of a one-year contract effort. The first SMDC-ONE nanosatellite will be placed into orbit in 2009 and the remaining seven at a later date. Each of these nanosatellites can be placed into a Low Earth Orbit to receive data files from a ground command and control center. The ground station for the first SMDC-ONE demonstration will be at USASMDC/ARSTRAT on Redstone Arsenal, Ala. The primary objective will be to receive data from a ground transmitter and relay that data to a ground station. The intent of this technology demonstration is to build a number of identical satellites and deploy them together into Low Earth Orbit to simulate enhanced tactical communications capability and evaluate nanosat performance. U.S. Army Space & Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command • 8 nanosatellite technology demonstrators delivered to the Army within 12 months • Over-the-horizon communications technology demonstrator for tactical forces • Low cost: Less than $400K/spacecraft • Operational life of greater than 12 months in Low Earth Orbitwww.army.mil/smdc To achieve enhanced capabilities for the warfighter from space, an approach that holds great promise is the deployment of constellations of

nanosat-class satellites into Low Earth Orbit. Because the unit cost for a nanosat is lower (less than $1M), large numbers for each specific mission can be built and deployed on orbit. What a nanosat may lack in performance and reliability when compared on a per-

unit basis to a large traditional military satellite, it makes up by its low cost and constellation proliferation potential. Nanosats deployed in large numbers can provide enhanced capabilities over large latitudinal swaths of the earth or even globally. Because they are low cost, they can be “refreshed” frequently by launching replacements, which allows rapid technology upgrades, reduces the unit reliability requirements, and

allows for manufacturing economies of scale. A nanosat constellation populated by inexpensive spacecraft could be useful in tactical ground operations, humanitarian support, and stability operations. If some satellites are lost, they can be rapidly reconstituted. They can provide coverage over specific regions as well as globally. The use of nanosats in such fashion will enable UAVlike performance for communication from space-borne assets that can provide data directly into theaters of operation

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Disasters Advantage: Poverty I/L

The poor are the most vulnerable in natural disastersDFID 06 (Department for international development, Reducing the Risk of Disasters – Helping to Achieve Sustainable Poverty Reduction in a Vulnerable World: A DFID policy paper, pg. 5)

The potential for a hazard to become a disaster depends on a population’s vulnerability or coping capacity. The poor, women, children, the elderly or the disabled, are often most vulnerable and therefore the worst affected. The level of

vulnerability of an individual or group depends on levels of access to services and alternative coping options. Poverty results in reduced choice. For example, it is often the very poor who are forced to live in marginal, disaster-prone locations. In countries suffering from chronic levels of poverty, or where poverty is compounded by other factors such as conflict or HIV and AIDS, vulnerability to hazards is much higher, exacerbating

disaster risks. HIV and AIDS makes Sub-Saharan Africa, where over 25 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2005, especially vulnerable. 7 Vulnerability also relates to the extent to which a society is exposed to risk, a particular problem for Small Island Developing States. In Grenada, after Hurricane Ivan, 90% of

private dwellings were destroyed or damaged. Vulnerability to disasters relates to potential impacts on individual groups within society, but also, for example, to the degree that infrastructure is affected. Every year, large parts of Africa’s transport network are affected by flooding. The Mozambique floods of 2000 resulted in damage to its roads, which exceeded $32million and damage to its railways costing over $7million.Yet as the Commission for Africa report highlights, transport infrastructure is crucial to bringing Africa out of poverty. 8 The boundary between natural and man-made hazards is often blurred. Hazards can range from an earthquake, which is of natural origin; to a landslide, which can be caused by a combination of deforestation, heavy rains and light earth

tremors; to a chemical spill, which is man-made. Climate change is increasingly blurring the distinction between natural and man-made hazards. Although climatic hazard, such as droughts and floods, would occur regardless, global warming may increasingly modify these types of hazards.

Disasters most affect the poor locking them into endemic poverty cycles.Briceño 08 (Sálvano Director, United Nations, International “Strategy for Disaster Reduction Linking Disaster Risk Reduction and Poverty Reduction” )

Disasters are often portrayed as acts of nature, or of a natural order. Yet this is mostly far from reality. The major factors influencing disaster risks are human and social vulnerability, matched with the overall capacity to respond to or reduce the impact of natural hazards. Poverty is therefore a major factor increasing disaster risk, by increasing vulnerability to disasters and reducing existing coping capacities. It is only by addressing these two issues together that we can make the difference between a community trapped in a grinding poverty cycle, and one with secure lives and livelihoods. Another patch of common ground is that the poor suffer the most from disasters.1 94.25% of all people killed by disasters in from 1975-2000 were low income or lower-middle income people. The poorest people comprised 68% of deaths from disasters . These plain numbers are an indictment of socioeconomic inequality, and a telling signpost to where disaster risk reduction must concentrate its efforts as of moral necessity.

Furthermore, drought, cyclones, and flood seasons are repeatedly depriving the poor of their assets, livelihoods, and labour force, all too often locking them into endemic poverty cycles. Even in the poorest communities, however, there is a wealth of knowledge and experience on how to break this negative feedback cycle. From this set of good practices, for instance, water and environmental management emerge as a very prominent link between disaster risk reduction and poverty reduction. The examples of drought risk reduction initiatives highlighted in this publication are equally inspiring, and make intuitive sense. There is a need to further promote these initiatives, so that they can be scaled up or replicated on a wider scale.

Disasters affect the poor and marginalized disproportionally and often reveal societal inequities Fothergill and Peek 2004 (Alice Fothergill, Department of sociology university of Vermont, Lori A. Peek, Department of Sociology University of Colorodo,

Natural hazards, “Poverty and Disasters in the United States: A review of Recent Sociological findings” Vol. 32 Pg. 103-104)

The review shows that socioeconomic status is a significant predictor in the pre and post-disaster stages, as well as for the physical and psychological impacts. The poor are more likely to perceive hazards as risky; less likely to prepare for hazards or buy insurance; less likely to respond to warnings; more likely to die, suffer injuries, and have proportionately higher material losses; have more psychological trauma; and face more obstacles during the phases of response, recovery, and reconstruction. These differences are significant, and they illustrate a systematic pattern of stratification within the United States. Some findings may seem contradictory, such as the fact that most lower-income groups find disaster threats more serious and risky, possibly due to a lack of power and control over many things in their lives, and yet low-income groups may be less likely to prepare for disasters and to evacuate. However, these findings also make sense in that many preparedness activities and the ability to evacuate require access to economic and social resources that the poor may not readily possess.

Clearly, disasters often reveal larger societal inequities. Researchers are now recognizing and documenting how disaster vulnerability is rooted in pre-existing patterns of community settlement and development (Morrow, 1999). Moreover, the literature shows us that the underlying issue is one embedded in our social structures, which dictate access to resources, power, and information.

Given this knowledge, disasters may be viewed as opportunities to witness, understand, and thus remedy pre-existing social problems. Many disaster scholars have written on the possibility of social change as a result of disasters, while others note that the crisis heightens past problems and solidifies the community’s inequities.

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Disasters Advantage: Poverty I/L

Natural disasters affect the poor most and ethnic minorities the most, often leading to psychological depressionFothergill and Peek 2004 (Alice Fothergill, Department of sociology university of Vermont, Lori A. Peek, Department of Sociology University of Colorodo,

Natural hazards, “Poverty and Disasters in the United States: A review of Recent Sociological findings” Vol. 32 Pg. 94-95)

Poor people were more likely to be financially devastated by the disaster and subsequent relocation than were wealthy or middle class people, thus increasing the likelihood of mental stress for those of low SES. Moreover, the poor were less likely to have access to physical resources and mental health care than middle- or upper-class individuals, further exacerbating emotional vulnerability. In a study of the “tent cities” that were established as temporary housing following Hurricane Andrew, Yelvington (1997) reported that a number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases were evident. Many camp residents, most of whom were poor or working-class ethnic minorities, reported psychological depression and strained familial relations.

Natural disasters further exacerbate povertyDFID 06 (Department for international development, Reducing the Risk of Disasters – Helping to Achieve Sustainable Poverty Reduction in a Vulnerable World: A DFID policy paper, pg. 6)

Disasters affect poor countries and poor people the most. According to UNDP 24 out of 49 LDCs face high levels of disaster risk. Of these, six are hit by between two to eight large disasters every year [see table at Annex B]. Developing countries experience higher levels of mortality.The 6.5 earthquake, which hit central California in 2003, took two lives and injured 40 people. By comparison the 6.6 earthquake, which hit Iran four days later, killed over 40,000 people. Both events

took place in areas with high-density populations. 13 Exposure to disasters increases the vulnerability of the poor, deepening their poverty and preventing them taking advantage of economic opportunities. In Aceh, Indonesia, the 2004 Tsunami is estimated to have increased the proportion of people living below the poverty line from 30% to 50%.A DFID study found that without the 2000-1 drought, poverty in Pakistan would have decreased by 13%.

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Disasters Advantage Katrina

The defunding of state support such as emergency response rely on claims of privatization that hide the violence of the racist superstructure of the United States. Goldberg 2006 (David Theo, Director, University of California Humanities Research Institute Du Bois Review (2006), 3: 83-95 “DEVASTATING DISASTERS: Race in the Shadow(s) of New Orleans”

For at least the past half century, the United States has fashioned itself as committed to racial justice, pointing to the civil rights movement and the wave of nondiscrimination, antisegregationist, and equal rights legislation that followed the series of Supreme Court rulings from the late

1940s onwards. These were important developments, which in many ways shifted the racial ground on which America historically has stood. Less noticed in the political sphere—certainly less celebrated—however, are the counter trends in ideological representation, prevailing political commitment, and dominant social arrangement that these gains prompted as a backlash from the 1980s onwards (Gold 2004). Old segregationist racism, from post-Reconstruction to Brown v. Board of Education (1954), was what can properly be characterized as an activist segregation. It involved for the most part an active intervention in politics, economics, law, and culture, self-consciously designed to produce segregated city, town, and neighborhood spaces. To combat this activism, to undo its pernicious and debilitating effects and implications, the civil rights movement likewise was compelled to act responsively on every social, political, legal, and cultural register. Coalitional antiracist resistance and struggle, perhaps by definition, are activist pursuits. Laws needed changing, the web of racial covenants and redlining that promoted residential segregation needed unraveling, the closed doors of segregated schools and universities had to be unlocked, inaccessible workplaces had to be entered and transformed from the inside out, voting practices reproducing all-White city halls and legislatures had to be dramatically restyled, and voting districts reapportioned (People for the American Way 2005). None of this would have changed on its own, pace economic determinists of one stripe or another. Prompted by the tensions between political pressures at home and abroad, the period from roughly post-World War II to the 1970s was one of tension and contradiction between the ancien régime of racist structures and antiracist possibilities. It was a period of promise and projection, expectation and elevation, denial, and, in some debilitating ways, ultimately dashed hope. It was a period, in short, of desegregating commitment and the seeds of a resegregating mobilization. The logic of the old segregation supposedly was swept aside—only to be replaced by the whisper of the new, the subtle and silent, the informal and insidious, what elsewhere I have characterized as born-again racism (Goldberg 2004). This newly expressed segregation, the newly privatizing segregation at the heart of the model I designate racial americanization, is no longer activist but conservative, a segregation in the literal sense

conservationist. To say that racism in the United States was “born-again” is not to say that it ever disappeared. It shifted its modalities and expression, its articulations and dispositions, its ways of being. The public legalities aimed at undoing explicit racist practice in the name of the state redirected principal racist expression and reproduction to the private sphere,

both institutionally and personally. And, in doing so, it emphatically sought to protect privatized racist expression from state intervention. But this principal form of contemporary racial americanization, of born-again racism, proceeds not simply by reducing the social to the preferential, and the state to the privatizations of (in)civil society. Preferences are not expressed, enacted, and experienced in a political and institutional vacuum. Rather, public spheres—and the state especially—structure the conditions of possibility on the basis of which choices are to be made, preferences pushed, and indeed whether, when,

and what to punish or reward. State structures channel, shape, and mould both the boundaries and the terrain of choice making and their implications; and preferences expressed and enacted reinforce existing state formation even as they inflect and color them. Conservationist segregation thus fashions the model of racial americanization. This model proceeds by undoing the laws, rules, and norms of expectation that the civil rights movement managed to put in place. It attacks those laws, and the social order predicated on them, as unconstitutional, as the only sort of racial discrimination with which we should be concerned today. Embracing race neutrality, racial americanization nevertheless licenses “limited” racial profiling—for purposes of security maintenance, targeted policing, and medical research—as legitimate for combating the moral panics of terror and the disasters producing it, whether socially or naturally prompted. The Racial Privacy Act initiative, first introduced in California and now traveling to other states identified by racial conservationists as racial battlegrounds, embodies even in its title the logic at work. Racial expression was not to be excised from the body politic. Rather, it was to be privatized, and protected in its privatization (Post 2001). In the absence of the civil rights spirit, and now in its active undoing, accordingly, the present period conserves (and deepens) the hold of racial preference schemes historically produced as if they were a part of the nature of things. So racial americanization is produced by a mix of doing nothing special, nothing beyond being guided by the presumptive laws of the market, the determinations of the majority's personal preferences, and the silencing of all racial reference, with the exception especially of racial profiling for purported purposes of crime and terror control. This silencing fails to distinguish between exclusionary racist designs and practices, on the one hand, and redressive or ameliorative racial interventions, on the other, reducing the latter to the former for the most part as the only contemporary racist expressions worth worrying about. William Bennett, self-ascribed arbiter of America's moral virtues, exemplifies the logic in play here. He recently responded to a call-in question on his radio show by saying that, while morally reprehensible and ridiculous, aborting all Black babies would result in a sharp reduction in the U.S. crime rate (Bennett 2005). His “hypothetical” if not hypocritical call, effectively genocidal, is protected as the sort of free speech the wall of privatization around civil society is designed to render critically unreachable. Bennett's “observation” trades on a cache of widespread if no longer explicitly expressed presumptions: that the crime rate in the United States is overwhelmingly fueled by Black criminality, that such criminality is a more or less natural and so inescapable condition of especially the Black poor, but also that it is not unacceptable to issue eugenicist judgments about the implications of hypothetical genocide in the case of African Americans in ways that it would be for most any other group today, Muslims included. This latter presumption trades on the “Africanness” of African Americans, the normalcy, if not naturalness, of early death in the case of the descendants of the despised continent. Hidden from view here is the less extreme logic on which the claim trades, for it is just as surely the case that the aborting of the babies of any ethnoracial background would likely reduce the crime rate, given that some percentage of that rate, large or small, is made up by members of every ethnoracial group. Bennett's racial eugenicism advances itself only at the price of the

expendability of Black lives. Only slightly less extreme, because not quite as explicit, the libertarian pluralist motto of “live and let live” licenses a surplus of possibility and opportunity for the affording few at the expense of the impoverished many. It might more accurately be replaced with the motto, “live free or die,” most explicitly identified with the state of New Hampshire, but which can be interpreted as implying that those who cannot afford the freedom will be

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Disasters Advantage Katrinaleft to perish. There is, as commentators on euthanasia have long pointed out, a thin line between (social) killing and letting die. Between making live and letting die, as Foucault (2003) has put it in Society Must be Defended, are histories whitewashed and refashioned, activist interventions restricted, the racial status quo resurrected, revived, (re-)fixed in place. The privatization of racially exclusionary and debilitating preference expression that articulates racial americanization today makes it more or less unreachable by state intervention. But to secure the shift, to make it truly untouchable by state amelioration, to restrict the competition for social resources in the face of the increasing heterogeneity of society, racial conservationists are keen to supplement their gains by a radical curtailment of state

possibility. In this mode, the current commitment by fundamentalist fiscal radicals to de-fund social programs in education,

health care, emergency management and response, popular culture and the arts through extreme forms of tax reduction, while increasing military, security, and prison expenditures and investments, brings public funding to the point of bankruptcy. Grover Norquist, contemporary Republicans' philosopher-king, has giddily proclaimed that his aim is so to starve government of revenues that he “can drown it in a bathtub” (Dreyfuss 2001). The overwhelming social commitment to upwardly spiraling support for state institutions of violence, their enactment and (re)enforcement—military, policing, homeland security—in the face of an at best static, if not diminishing, treasury burdened most notably by dramatic tax reductions for the wealthiest 1% of the population entails that the increases in such expenditures can

only be supported by squeezing social welfare and support revenues. In the past couple of budget cycles, hyperconservatives have targeted programs for the poor because these programs both offer easy fiscal targets and lend themselves to convenient ideological rationalization. At the same time, defense budgets, whether narrowly or broadly interpreted, continue to expand. Thus, the defense budget for FY2006 amounts to $435 billion, up 5% from the previous year and almost 25% from its 2002 total of $344 billion. The projected $40 billion worth of cuts in the 2006 budget projections focus overwhelmingly on social programs such as student loans, health care, and welfare for the poor, etc. (Washington Post 2005). If one factored into the figure for the defense budget the entire range of institutional apparatuses sustaining military presence at home and around the world, including $35 billion for Homeland Security, funds to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the considerable sums for their respective reconstructions, the total would reach a staggering $900 billion, up roughly 30% since 2002 (Higgs 2004). At the same time, funding for education, health, housing, and transportation, as well as emergency relief, has been cut repeatedly. Since 2003, when it was incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been reduced by 10% (if President Bush had had his way the cuts would have come closer to 25%). These cuts have had a debilitating effect on disaster preparedness and reconstruction, undercutting the agency's ability to sustain support for those most in need, as we witnessed in the wake of Katrina, and leaving to uncoordinated private charities the responsibilities of evacuation, cleanup, reconstruction, and care. The results, as we now know, have been disastrous. As with personal or corporate bankruptcy, this emaciation of the social support sector of government revenues forces a radical restructuring of public programming and state governmentality. The immediate implication of such state restriction, and ultimately devastation, is to redistribute wealth upwards. The point, explicitly articulated by neoconservative pundits and neoliberal politicians, is to put more wealth into the hands of the already wealthy. Expenditures of the wealthy, we have so often been told beguilingly, are supposed to trickle down into jobs for the less well-off. But the mission, as much as any, is also to augment the decision making, social engineering, and effective powers of the well-off. The social effect of state emaciation, accordingly, is not that social spending will end completely. Rather, in being redirected into private hands, it is fashioned by the social and political interests of those with capital to spare. So private (toll) roads, the recent emergence of private electrical grids in the face of blackouts, dramatically expanded privatization of funding for radio stations, policing functions (at least supplementally), certainly schools (in some cases, such as Philadelphia, entire school districts), hospitals, and universities (even public ones) are thrown increasingly into the hands—and so to the discretion of—those who can afford and choose to support them. Even the authoring of key legislation is handed over to corporately sponsored lobbyists—the K Street Project in Washington, D.C.—who craft laws for lawmakers too stretched, low on resources, or corrupt to do so themselves. The effect is not that all funding support for public programming ends, but that funding for almost anything other than explicit behavioral control programs becomes pointedly privatized. The state is reduced to little more than keeping law and order, staving off the violent and, increasingly, even the merely critical, at home and abroad. State interests, on this view, are thus directed, if not reductively determined, by the wealthy with disposable income or investment capital to plunge into political exploits. Now, the elevated factions of social class in a racial state such as the United States have traditionally been White; more precisely, they have represented the

interests of those occupying the structural class position of Whiteness and masculinity. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2000 the top 5% of White wage earners received wages almost double those of the top 5% of Black wage earners. Unsurprisingly, by far the largest contributors to political campaigns in the United States are White men. Under the mandate of radical privatization, funded institutions, programs, and activities thus become dramatically less diverse, both in their programming, scope and commitments, and notably in their employment patterns—even less than they were until only relatively recently, and certainly than they could or ought to be. Hence the fundamentalist conservative outrage expressed by the likes of Abigail Thernstrom, Ward Connerly, and Linda Chavez, as well as the Center for Individual Rights, at the temporary setback in their well-heeled plans regarding the Supreme Court's recent upholding in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) of law schools' limited affirmative action programs for the sake of maintaining a diverse student body. Neoconservative critics committed to a “race-free” America (note, not racist free) have blasted the diversity commitments of the Court's majority as “murdering the Fourteenth Amendment” (Ward Connerly 2003), as “diversity drivel” (Michael Greve), and discriminatory (Linda Chavez), indeed, even “racist” (Abigail Thernstrom) (Chronicle of Higher Education 2003). If it is no longer possible explicitly to restrict demographic diversity, the culture wars can be won by de-

funding progressive cultural commitments, by shrinking the cultural horizons of heterogeneity.

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Disasters Advantage: Katrina

Katrina reveals how racism informs vulnerability to disaster and death; the end result is a racist militarized state where random violence is legitimate.Goldberg 2006 (David Theo, Director, University of California Humanities Research Institute Du Bois Review (2006), 3: 83-95 “DEVASTATING DISASTERS: Race in the Shadow(s) of New Orleans”

The fate of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in late summer 2005 illustrates these trends with furious force. A city of almost half a million, its population when the hurricane hit was 67% African American. One in eight Americans, and double that proportion of Black Americans, now live in poverty. In New Orleans, the poverty rate for Black residents was closer to 50% as a result of the multiplying logic of high racial concentration, which Nancy Denton (1994) has identified more generally. Privatizing the conditions of well-being has meant that wealthy Whites have the best medical care, while the multitude has little or none. The well-off live in gated communities high on the hill, while the poor in the city, as elsewhere, have

lived in polluted neighborhoods vulnerably below sea level with close to no garbage collection and few options for ameliorating their situation. Nationwide, White Americans are 79% less likely than African Americans to live in locations threatened by the significant health hazards prompted by industrial pollution (Pace 2005). The powerful drive larger and larger gas-guzzling SUVs, while the impoverished have had little or no public transportation. The newly rich imbibe imported bottled water, while the struggling drink polluted tap water. The wealthy can dine daily in restaurants, while the poor barely have had anything to eat at all, and can afford nothing by the end of each month, awaiting paychecks or welfare subsistence, or both. The wealthy get tax breaks and stock options, while the poor can't even depend on the most rudimentary of educations. The lives of the rich are guarded

from those of the poor, whose fate is more likely to be prison than work. In the case of Katrina, all of this has meant that the federal resources to make the city less vulnerable to the wrath of nature were rendered less and less available, while urban decadence could ultimately be drowned in its own vulnerabilities. The well-to-do could scramble for safety in their air-conditioned, army-like vehicles, while the poor were reduced to a decaying and, for some, deadly domed stadium. The tens of thousands unable to flee upon the evacuation order in New Orleans as the hurricane bore down were overwhelmingly Black, as became clear at the Superdome and Convention Center. Family and other networks could support

the mobile, while the immobile were left to flounder in a flooded and rotting city, many losing contact even with the family members sharing their fate. The least lucky lost their lives. The wealthier watched from afar, while the poverty-stricken shared the streets with floating bodies (sometimes of their own relatives), excrement, and oil pollution. The privileged seemed to need no medical care, while the poor restricted to the city got close to none, even as doctors from further afield were valiantly (and in some cases vaingloriously) volunteering their help. The rich were free to roam the country, the poor rounded up and subjected to prison-like conditions, even as they were bussed off to safer turf, their “crime” having been nothing more than their abject poverty and the color of their skin. Amartya Sen (1981) has famously argued that famines, far from simply natural disasters, are politically produced: the product of strife, war, political conflict, and turmoil. It is these latter factors that more or less inevitably

impede or prevent the delivery of food and medical aid needed to avoid or alleviate starvation and death. The same could be said in the case of Katrina. In the name of securing the city, post-Katrina New Orleans was quickly turned into an armed military camp. Combat ready forces went door-to-door urban warfare style, some among them even armed with fully loaded AK47s, kicking down locked entrances searching for survivors to evacuate. While critics were rightly bemoaning the dehumanizing conduct of war abroad, few seemed to notice that, for domestic purposes, the United States was mimicking tactics of militarization honed in the desert war. The United States, in short, has taken to turning itself into armed and gated camps at home. Our regime of social truth today is shaped principally by a military mind-set circulated and recirculated by all those retired generals appearing

on the nightly news programs advising the public on how to read the day's events. President Bush even went so far as to make a case for turning over disaster response from civil to military agencies, the latter supplemented by, if not subsidizing, private enterprise. Privately employed soldiers of fortune, recently repatriated by the likes of Blackhawk Security company from tours of duty protecting politicians and corporate entities in Iraq, invaded New Orleans, requisitioning forcibly abandoned apartments in the French Quarter as headquarters, and firing randomly upon perceived looters and loiterers with the tacit blessing of the more constrained National Guard. In the immediate aftermath of Katrina, New Orleans was, in a nutshell, simply Iraq come home.

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Their Impact calculus is fundamentally racist: it relies in the invisibility of tremendous misery and death based on the racialized bodies people inhabit. Their desire to secure the stable global order results in a militaristic and criminalized state.Giroux 2006 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196)

In one of the most blatant displays of racism underscoring the biopolitical "live free or die" agenda in Bush's America, the dominant media increasingly framed the events that unfolded during and immediately after the hurricane by focusing on acts of crime, looting, rape, and murder, allegedly perpetrated by the black residents of New Orleans. In predictable fashion, politicians such as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an order allowing soldiers to shoot to kill looters in an effort to restore calm. Later inquiries revealed

that almost all of these crimes did not take place. The philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, argued that "what motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: 'You see, Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of

civilization!'" (2005). It must be noted that there is more at stake here than the resurgence of old-style racism; there is the recognition that some groups have the power to protect themselves from such stereotypes and others do not, and [End

Page 176] for those who do not—especially poor blacks—racist myths have a way of producing precise, if not deadly, material consequences. Given the public's preoccupation with violence and safety, crime and terror merge in the all-too-familiar equation of black culture with

the culture of criminality, and images of poor blacks are made indistinguishable from images of crime and violence. Criminalizing black behavior and relying on punitive measures to solve social problems do more than legitimate a biopolitics defined increasingly by the authority

of an expanding national security state under George W. Bush. They also legitimize a state in which the police and military, often operating behind closed doors, take on public functions that are not subject to public scrutiny (Bleifuss 2005, 22).3 This becomes particularly dangerous in a democracy when paramilitary or military organisations gain their legitimacy increasingly from an appeal to fear and terror, prompted largely by the presence of those racialized and class-specific groups considered both dangerous and disposable. Within a few days after Katrina struck, New Orleans was under martial law occupied by nearly 65,000 U.S. military personnel. Cries of desperation and help were quickly redefined as the pleas of "refugees," a designation that suggested an alien population lacking both citizenship and legal rights had inhabited the Gulf Coast. Images of thousands of desperate and poor blacks gave way to pictures of combat-ready troops and soldiers with mounted bayonets canvassing houses in order to remove stranded civilians. Embedded journalists now travelled with soldiers on Humvees, armoured carriers, and military

helicopters in downtown USA. What had begun as a botched rescue operation by the federal government was transformed into a military operation. Given the government's propensity to view those who are poor and black with contempt, it was not surprising that the transformation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from disaster area to war zone occurred without any audible dissent from either the general public or the dominant media. New Orleans increasingly came to look like a city in Iraq as scores of private soldiers appeared on the scene—either on contract with the Department of Homeland Security or hired

by wealthy elites to protect their private estates and businesses. Much like Iraq, the Gulf Coast became another recipient of deregulated market capitalism as soon as the flood waters began to recede. The fruits of privatization and an utter disregard for public values were all too visible in the use of private mercenaries and security companies hired to guard federal projects, often indulging in acts of violence that constituted a clear-cut case of vigilantism. Katrina lays bare what many people in the United States do not want to see: large numbers of poor black and brown people struggling to make ends meet, benefiting very little from a social system that makes it difficult to [End Page 177] obtain health insurance, child care, social assistance, cars, savings, and minimum-wage jobs if lucky, and instead offers to black and brown youth inadequate schools, poor public services, and no future, except a possible stint in the penitentiary. As Janet Pelz rightly insists, "These are the people the Republicans have been teaching us to disdain, if not hate, since President Reagan decried the

moral laxness of the Welfare mom" (2005, 1-2). While Pelz's comments provide a crucial context for much of the death and devastation of Katrina, I think to more fully understand this calamity it is important to grasp how the confluence of race and poverty has become part of a new and more insidious set of forces based on a revised set of biopolitical commitments, which have largely denied the sanctity of human life for those populations rendered "at risk" by global neoliberal economies and have instead embraced an emergent security state founded on cultural homogeneity.

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The lack of disaster preparedness is evidence of a biopolitics of disposability, where all life is rendered vulnerable to malignant vulnerability to preventable death,Giroux 2006 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196)

While biopolitics in Foucault and Hardt and Negri addresses the relations between politics and death, biopolitics in their views is less concerned with the primacy of death than with the production of life both as an individual and a social category. In Giorgio Agamben's formulation, the new biopolitics is the deadly administration of what he calls "bare life," and its ultimate incarnation is the Holocaust with its ominous specter of the concentration camp. In this formulation, the Nazi death camps become the primary exemplar of control, the new space of contemporary politics in which individuals are no longer viewed as citizens but are now seen as inmates, stripped of everything, including their right to live. The uniting of power and bare life, the reduction of the individual to homo sacer—the sacred man who under certain states of exception "may be killed and yet not sacrificed"—no [End Page 179] longer represents the far end of political life (1998, 8). That is, in this updated version of the ancient category of homo sacer is the human who stands beyond the confines of both human and divine law—"a human who can be killed without fear of

punishment" (Bauman 2003, 133). According to Agamben, as modern states increasingly suspend their democratic structures, laws, and principles, the very nature of governance changes as "the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to extra-judicial state violence" (Bull 2004, 3). The life unfit for life, unworthy of being lived, as the central category of homo sacer, is no longer marginal to sovereign power but is now central to its form of governance. State violence and totalitarian power, which, in the past, either were generally short-lived or existed on the fringe of politics and history, have now become the rule, rather than the exception, as life is more ruthlessly regulated and placed in the hands of military and state

power. In the current historical moment, as Catherine Mills points out, "all subjects are at least potentially if not actually abandoned by the law and exposed to violence as a constitutive condition of political existence" (2004, 47). Nicholas Mirzoeff has observed that all over the world there is a growing resentment of immigrants and refugees, matched by the emergence of detain-and-deport strategies and coupled with the rise of the camp as the key institution and social model of the new millennium. The "empire of camps," according to Mirzoeff, has become the "exemplary institution of a system of global capitalism that supports the West in its high consumption, low-price consumer lifestyle" (2005, 145). Zygmunt Bauman calls such camps "garrisons of extraterritoriality" and argues that they have become "the dumping grounds for the indisposed of and as yet unrecycled waste of the global frontier-land" (2003, 109). The regime of the camp has increasingly become a key index of modernity and the new world order. The connections among disposability, violence, and death have become common under modernity in those countries where the order of power has become necropolitical. For example, Rosa Linda Fregoso analyzes feminicide as a local expression of global violence against women in the region of the U.S./Mexico border where over one thousand women have been either murdered or disappeared, constituting what amounts to a "politics of gender extermination" (2006, 109). The politics of disposability and necropolitics not only generate widespread violence and ever expanding "garrisons of extraterritoriality" but also have taken on a powerful new significance as a foundation for political sovereignty. Biopolitical commitments to "let die" by abandoning citizens appear increasingly credible in light of the growing authoritarianism in the United States under the Bush

administration (Giroux 2005). [End Page 180] Given the Bush administration's use of illegal wiretaps, the holding of "detainees" illegally and indefinitely in prisons such as Guantanamo, the disappearance, kidnapping, and torture of alleged terrorists, and the ongoing suspension of civil liberties in the United States, Agamben's theory of biopolitics rightly alerts us to the dangers of a government in which the state of emergency becomes the fundamental structure of control over populations. While Agamben's claim that the concentration camp (as opposed to Foucault's panopticon) is now the model for constitutional states captures the contrariness of biopolitical commitments that have less to do with preserving life than with reproducing violence and death, its totalitarian logic is too

narrow and fails in the end to recognize that the threat of violence, bare life, and death is not the only form of biopower in contemporary life. The dialectics of life and death, visibility and invisibility, and privilege and lack in social existence that now constitute the biopolitics of modernity have to be understood in terms of their complexities, specificities, and diverse social formations. For

instance, the diverse ways in which the current articulation of biopower in the United States works to render some groups disposable and to privilege others within a permanent state of emergency need to be specified. Indeed, any viable rendering of contemporary biopolitics must address more specifically how biopower attempts not just to produce and control life in general, as Hardt and Negri insist, or to reduce all inhabitants of the increasing militarized state to the dystopian space of the "death camp," as Agamben argues, but also to privilege some lives over

others. The ongoing tragedy of pain and suffering wrought by the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina reveals a biopolitical agenda in which the logic of disposability and the politics of death are inscribed differently in the order of contemporary power—structured largely around wretched and broad-based racial and class inequalities. I want to further this position by arguing that neoliberalism, privatization, and militarism have become the dominant biopolitics of the mid-twentieth-century social state and that the coupling of a market fundamentalism and contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of capital accumulation, violence, and disposability, especially under the Bush administration, has produced a new and dangerous version of biopolitics.4 While the murder of Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured around the intersection of race and class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the other, has long existed, the new version of biopolitics adds a distinctively different

and more dangerous register. The new biopolitics not only includes state-sanctioned violence but also relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability. As William DiFazio points out, "the state has been so weakened over decades of

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Disasters Advantage: Katrinaprivatization that it . . . increasingly [End Page 181] fails to provide health care, housing, retirement benefits and education to a massive percentage of its population" (2006, 87). While the social contract has been suspended in varying degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush Administration it has been virtually abandoned. Under

such circumstances, the state no longer feels obligated to take measures that prevent hardship, suffering, and death. The state no longer protects its own disadvantaged citizens—they are already seen as dead within a transnational economic and political framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of ruthless politics in which the categories of "citizen" and "democratic representation," once integral to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the government, either because of the persistence of a drastically reduced social contract or because they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed labour. That is no longer true. This new form of biopolitics is conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception in which "vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead" (Mbembe 2003, 40), largely invisible in the global media, or, when disruptively present, defined as redundant, pathological, and dangerous.

Within this wasteland of death and disposability, whole populations are relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls "social homelessness" (2004, 13). While the rich and middle classes in the United States maintain lifestyles produced through vast inequalities of symbolic and material capital, the "free market" provides neither social protection and security nor hope to those who are poor, sick, elderly, and marginalized by race and class. Given the increasing perilous state of the those who are poor and dispossessed in America, it is crucial to reexamine how biopower functions within global neoliberalism and the simultaneous rise of security states organized around cultural (and racial) homogeneity. This task is made all the more urgent by the destruction, politics, and death that followed Hurricane Katrina.

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Refusal to recognize disasters like Katrina is evidence of a biopolitical state, where whole swaths of the population are disposable in favor of market regularity.Giroux 2006 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196)

Biopower in its current shape has produced a new form of biopolitics marked by a cleansed visual and social landscape in which the poor, the elderly, the infirm, and criminalized populations all share a common fate of disappearing from public view. Rendered invisible in deindustrialized communities far removed from the suburbs, barred from the tourist-laden sections of major cities, locked into understaffed nursing homes, interned in bulging prisons built in remote farm communities, hidden in decaying schools in rundown neighborhoods that bear the look of Third World slums, populations of poor black and brown citizens

exist outside of the view of most Americans. They have become the waste-products of the American Dream, if not of modernity itself. The disposable populations serve as an unwelcome reminder that the once vaunted social state no longer exists, the living dead now an apt personification of the death of the social contract in the United States. Having fallen through the large rents in America's social safety nets, they reflect a governmental agenda bent on attacking the poor rather than attacking poverty . That they are largely poor and black undermines the nation's commitment to color-blind ideology. Race remains the "major reason America treats its poor more harshly than any other

advanced country" (Krugman 2005, A27). One of the worst storms in our history shamed us into seeing the plight of poor blacks and other minorities. In less than forty-eight hours, Katrina ruptured the pristine image of America as a largely, white middle-class country modeled after a Disney theme park. Underneath neoliberalism's corporate ethic and market-based fundamentalism, the idea of democracy is disappearing and with it the spaces in which democracy is produced and nurtured. Democratic values, identities, and social relations along with public spaces, the common good, and the obligations of civic responsibility are slowly being overtaken by a market-based notion of

freedom and civic indifference in which it becomes more difficult to translate private woes into social issues and collective action or to insist on a language of the public good. The upshot to the evisceration of all notions of sociality is a sense of total abandonment, resulting in fear, anxiety, and insecurity over one's future. The presence of the racialized poor, their needs, and vulnerabilities—now visible—becomes unbearable. All solutions as a result now focus on shoring up a diminished sense of safety, carefully nurtured by a renewed faith in all things military. Militaristic values and military solutions are profoundly influencing every aspect of American life, ranging from

foreign and domestic policy to the shaping of popular culture and the organization of public schools.7 Faith in democratic governance and cultural pluralism increasingly gives way to military-style uniformity, discipline, and authority coupled with a powerful [End

Page 186] nationalism and a stifling patriotic correctness, all of which undermine the force of a genuine democracy by

claiming that the average citizen does not have the knowledge or authority to see, engage, resist, protest, or make dominant power accountable.8 Lost public spaces and public culture have been replaced with what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls the modern anti-spectacle. According to Mirzoeff, "the modern anti-spectacle now dictates that there is nothing to see and that instead one must keep moving, keep circulating and keep consuming" (2005, 16). Non-stop images coupled with a manufactured culture of fear strip citizens of their visual agency and potential to act as engaged social participants. The visual subject has been reduced to the life-long consumer, always on the go looking for new goods and promising discounts, all the while travelling in spaces that suggest that public space is largely white and middle-class, free of both unproductive consumers and

those individuals marked by the trappings of race, poverty, dependence, and disability. Under the logic of modernization, neoliberalism, and militarization, the category "waste" includes no longer simply material goods but also human beings, particularly those rendered redundant in the new global economy, that is, those who are no longer capable of making a living, who are unable to consume goods, and who depend

upon others for the most basic needs (Bauman 2000, 2003, 2004). Defined primarily through the combined discourses of character, personal responsibility, and cultural homogeneity, entire populations expelled from the benefits of the marketplace are reified as products without any value to be disposed of as "leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking (2004, 27). Even when young black and brown youth try to escape the biopolitics of disposability by joining the military, the seduction of economic security is quickly negated by the horror of senseless violence compounded daily in the streets, roads, and battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan and made

concrete in the form of body bags, mangled bodies, and amputated limbs—rarely to be seen in the narrow ocular vision of the dominant media. With the social state in retreat and the rapacious dynamics of neoliberalism, unchecked by government regulations, the public and private policies of investing in the public good are dismissed as bad business, just as the notion of protecting people from the dire misfortunes of poverty, sickness, or the random blows of fate is viewed as an act of bad faith. Weakness is now a sin, punishable by social exclusion. This is especially true for those racial groups and immigrant populations who have always been at risk economically and politically. Increasingly, such groups have become part of an ever-growing army of the

impoverished and disenfranchised—removed from the prospect of a decent job, productive education, adequate health care, acceptable [End Page 187] child care services, and satisfactory shelter. As the state is transformed into the primary agent of terror and corporate concerns displace democratic values, dominant "power is measured by the speed with which responsibilities can be escaped" (Qtd. in Fearn 2006, 30). With its pathological disdain for social values and public life and its celebration of an unbridled individualism and acquisitiveness, the Bush administration does more than undermine the nature of social obligation and civic responsibility; it also sends a message to those populations who are poor and black—society neither wants, cares about, or needs you (Bauman 1999, 68-69). Katrina revealed with startling and disturbing clarity who these individuals are: African-Americans who occupy the poorest sections of New Orleans, those ghettoized frontier-zones created by racism coupled with economic inequality. Cut out of any long term goals and a decent vision of the future, these are the populations, as Zygmunt Bauman points out, who have been rendered redundant and disposable in the age of neoliberal global capitalism.

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AT: Katrina not about race

Even if the data show Katrina was not a question of race, its salience betrays that race is the important category of analysis. Dawson and Bobo 2005 (Michael, prof of poli sci, University of Chicago, Lawrence, prof of sociology, Stanford University, Du Bois Review (2005), 2:2:155-158 AFTER THE STORM: In the Wake of Katrina)

Efforts to construct a race-neutral or color-blind analysis of Katrina, much like the problem of race more generally, are contradicted by the durable interest in New Orleans and the rebuilding effort. That is, we suspect that much of the reason that Katrina continues to command an unusual degree of salience nationwide is precisely because it revealed so much about the modern state of this nation's historic racial divide. It has already produced an unprecedented level of charitable giving (far exceeding what occurred in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy or the Asian Tsunami). 5 It has challenged America's conscience and self-image in a powerful way. To be sure, its wider political ramifications have yet to be decided. But, it seems fair to say that in the wake of President Bush's fifth trip to the region, there is widespread concern in the White House, and perhaps Republican circles more generally, that the botched handling of the relief effort may have deeper political consequences. This concern runs sufficiently deep that even the Republican-controlled House of Representatives issued a report blasting the inadequacy. The report states: “Our investigation revealed that Katrina was a national failure, an abdication of the most solemn obligation to provide for the common welfare. At every level—individual, corporate, philanthropic, and governmental—we failed to meet the challenge of Katrina.” 6 Although this report sidesteps the question of race, detailed analyses increasingly make it clear that the news footage from the Superdome and the Convention Center were accurate in conveying the “racialized” character of the disaster. Demographer Jon Logan, for example, has shown the sharply unequal impact of the storm. As he explains: “In the city, for example, 75% of residents of damaged area were black, compared to undamaged areas where a majority of residents were white.” 7

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Climate Change Advantage: ACC now

Global Warming is happening nowCSM 1/12(Christian Science Monitor. “Global warming waning? Hardly. 2010 was tied as warmest year on record.” January 12, 2011. http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2011/0112/Global-warming-waning-Hardly.-2010-was-tied-as-warmest-year-on-record?cmpid=ema:nws:Daily%20Auto%2001122011&cmpid=ema:nws:Njc4NzAyNzQxNQS2

Last year tied 2005 as the warmest year on record, federal climatologists said Wednesday, adding that an analysis of the year's data strengthened the notion that greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are continuing to warm Earth's climate. According to a preliminary analysis of year-end data released Wednesday, the global average temperature in 2010 topped the 20th century average by 1.12 degrees Fahrenheit. This caps a decade marked by nine of the 10 warmest years on record and represents the 34th consecutive year in which global average temperatures topped the 20th-century average, according to data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. In addition, the year was the wettest on record globally, although rain and snowfall varied widely from place to place. A moderate-to-strong El Nino pattern in the eastern Pacific and a similarly energetic La Nina that followed played key roles in 2010 in setting up conditions that contributed both to temperature and precipitation patterns during the year. The two patterns alternate over periods of two to seven years in the tropical Pacific. El Nino brings an expanse of warm water from the western Pacific to a region of the ocean off northern South America, while La Nina replaces the warm water with unusually cold water. These swings trigger changes in atmospheric circulation patterns that, while most prominent in the tropics, also affect circulation patters at higher

latitudes as well. But while these natural swings in Earth's climate played important roles in shaping seasonal weather patterns, as well as the year's global-temperature ranking, NOAA officials say, so has global warming – particularly over the past 30 to 40 years. Climate has not stopped warming "There has been some notion people have put forth that the climate stopped warming in about 2005. This years' results show that notion lacks credibility," said David Easterling, who heads the Climatic Data Center's scientific services division. Instead, he says, the year-end analysis "reinforces the notion that we're seeing an influence on the climate by greenhouse gases." That might seem counterintuitive to residents of the US South, for instance, who are still thawing out from heavy snows. But researchers caution against confusing a seasonal storm with climate, which is a decade- to centuries-long average of temperature, precipitation, and other atmospheric conditions.

"Climate change is a global phenomenon and a long-term phenomenon," Dr. Easterling explains. Unusually cold temperatures, such as those the Eastern US has experienced over the past two winters, merely reflect natural variations that are superimposed on the much-longer-term warming trend. Global climate – changing or relatively stable – encompasses much more in time and space than a winter Nor'easter burying New England under a foot or more of snow. Data for 2010 also revealed a warm and wet year on average for the continental United States, according to the data center's analysis. Heavy snow in the East last February and record warmth in the summer along the southeast and into New England "were two fairly remarkable events," said Derek Arndt, who heads the center's climate monitoring branch.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0110/South-in-icy-grip-as-latest-winter-storm-defies-warming-predictions

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/2010/13

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2009/1208/climate-change-scientists-say-this-decade-likely-hottest-on-record


Climate Change Advantage: Data key

Data key to effective global warming policies.

McLenaghan 1/13(Ed McLenaghan is a contributor to the Progressive Pulse. January 13, 2011“Cold Comfort: 2010 Ties for Warmest Year on Record.” http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/author/ed-mclenaghan/)

Both NASA and NOAA recently announced that global temperatures in 2010 tied those in 2005 to make both the warmest years on record. It also means that the aughts started off the millennium with 9 of the 10 warmest years on record. For those who would claim that having the second consecutive cold winter in the US refutes all the evidence to the contrary that the globe is warming, here’s what Daniel Weiss of the Center for American Progress has to say: Hopefully, this new data will finally convince congressional climate-science deniers that global warming is real and that action is urgent. To reject this latest evidence is like ignoring strange spots on a chest X-ray and continuing to smoke. And as my colleague Rob S. posted last month, the consequences of global warming are not uniformly higher temperatures across the globe, but are likely to be more extremes at both ends (just with more extremes at the high end).

Maybe this news will make those at the Locke Foundation reconsider their ill-advised challenge to new EPA rules regulating the emission of carbon emissions in North Carolina.

Data key to adaptation to climate change.Asian Development Bank 2009 [ strongly capitalized, multilateral development bank, “The Economics of Climate Change in Southeast Asia: A Regional Review”, http://www.adb.org/documents/books/economics-climate-change-sea/Economics-Climate-Change.pdf]

Understanding past climate change patterns and monitoring climate change impact are important for identifying

vulnerable areas and designing appropriate adaptation measures. If no action is taken, rising populations and economic growth in the coming years and decades will cause more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and hence global warming and other environmental damage. Projecting future climate change and its impact is therefore critical to the design of effective climate change policies and adaptation and mitigation actions. Environmental scientists and economists have made considerable efforts to develop economic and scientific models to predict the patterns of future climate change and its impact. The most common approaches are the integrated assessment models (IAMs) to simulate human-induced climate change from emissions of GHGs and the socio-economic impact. Numerous IAMs have been developed in the last two decades, each differing in several dimensions. These range from the objective of the modelers (climate change and impact assessment, policy evaluation, or policy optimization); the nature of policy options evaluated (regulatory or economic, single or multiple); the complexity of the economic and climate sectors; the geographical coverage (global, regional, country-specific); the treatment of uncertainty (Box 4.1); and the responsiveness of agents to climate change policies within the model.

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Internal Link: Worsen Natural Disasters

High temps cause devastating storms – Katrina was only the tip of the iceberg.BROWN, Environmental Analyst, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, 2008Lester, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, January

Rising seas are not the only threat that comes with elevated global temperatures. Higher surface water temperatures in the tropical oceans mean more energy radiating into the atmosphere to drive tropical storm systems, leading to more destructive storms. The combination of rising seas, more powerful storms, and stronger storm surges can be devastating.56 Just how devastating this combination can be became evident in late August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina came onshore on the U.S. Gulf Coast near New Orleans. In some Gulf Coast towns, Katrina’s powerful 28-foot-high storm surge did not leave a single structure standing.

New Orleans survived the initial hit but was flooded when the inland levees were breached and water covered everything in large parts of the city except for the rooftops, where thousands of people were stranded. Even in August 2006, a year after the storm had passed, the most damaged areas of the city remained without water, power, sewage disposal, garbage collection, or telecommunications.57 With advance warning of the storm and official urging to evacuate coastal areas, 1 million or so evacuees fled northward into Louisiana or to neighboring states of Texas and Arkansas. Of this total, some 290,000 have not yet returned home and will likely never do so. These storm evacuees are the world’s first large wave of climate refugees.58

Katrina was the most financially destructive hurricane ever to make landfall anywhere. It was one of eight hurricanes that hit the

southeastern United States in 2004 and 2005. As a result of the unprecedented damage, insurance premiums have doubled, tripled, and even in

some especially vulnerable situations gone up 10-fold. This enormous jump in insurance costs is lowering coastal real estate values and driving people and businesses out of highly exposed states like Florida.59

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Climate Change Advantage :Ocean Biodiv I/L

Even absent global warming, CO2 will acidify oceans and collapse biodiversityHealth & Medicine Week, March 3, 2008

. These reefs already are under threat to overfishing and local pollution and unless drastic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is taken soon, these reefs will cease

to exist as we know them." These same greenhouse gas emissions also are creating dramatic buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is rapidly making the world's oceans more acidic, said panelist Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Current CO2 levels of 380 parts per million already are 30 percent higher than pre-industrial values and many scientific models predict that those rates will triple by the end of the century under "business as usual" scenarios. While much of the scientific attention on ocean

acidification has looked at the impact of coral reefs, the potential danger to other marine ecosystems is equally severe, Doney said. "Ocean acidification harms plants and animals that form shells from calcium carbonate," he said. "Calcifying organisms include not just corals, but many plankton, pteropods (marine snails), clams and oysters, and lobsters. Many of these organisms

provide critical food sources or habitats for other organisms and the impact of acidification on food webs and higher trophic levels is not well understood. "Newly emerging evidence suggests that larval and juvenile fish may also be susceptible to changes in ocean pH levels," Doney added. "Ocean acidification is rapidly becoming a real problem." Michael Behrenfeld, an oceanographer from Oregon State University, is studying relationships

between climate and the global activity of ocean plants called phytoplankton. "Phytoplankton are of tremendous human importance because their photosynthesis yields oxygen for us to breathe and they are the base of the ocean food webs that support our global fisheries," Behrenfeld said . "Using NASA satellites, we can track changes in phytoplankton on a global basis and what we find is that warming ocean temperatures are linked to decreasing photosynthesis. Satellites are one of the most important tools we have for understanding the link between climate and ocean biology because they provide measurements of the whole planet on a daily basis, which could never be accomplished by ship. "Unfortunately," he added, "it is at this very time when we need satellites most that we are facing the end of NASA ocean biology satellites because of budget cutbacks

or new priorities. This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. "Instead of facing the end of these critical missions and becoming blind to the changes occurring in our oceans," Behrenfeld said, "we should be building even better ones to see more clearly than we have in the past, and to gauge the potential consequences of climate change on ocean productivity." The panelists also called for greater investment in ocean observing systems that would allow scientists to better measure changing in the ocean ecosystem, including large-scale circulation and coastal upwelling systems around the world . Klaus Keller of Penn State University reported on the economic costs and benefits of effective ocean observing systems to detect changes in the north Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.

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AT: We already have climate science

Climate models must be more precise: Sources and sinks.NASA 2008 (“NASA's Carbon-Sniffing Satellite Sleuth Arrives at Launch Site”http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/view.php?id=35951 November 12, 2008)

While scientists have a good understanding of carbon dioxide emissions resulting from burning fossil fuels, their understanding of carbon dioxide from other human-produced and natural sources is relatively poor. They know from ground measurements that only 40 to 50 percent of the carbon humans emit remains in Earth's atmosphere; the other 50 to 60 percent, they believe, is absorbed by Earth's ocean

and land plants. Scientists do not know, however, precisely where the absorbed carbon dioxide from human emissions is stored, what natural processes are absorbing it, or whether those processes will continue to work to limit increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the future, as they do now. The observatory's space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide will have the precision, resolution and coverage needed to provide the first complete picture of both human and natural sources of carbon dioxide emissions. It will show the places where they are absorbed, known as "sinks," at regional scales everywhere on Earth. Its data will reduce uncertainties in forecasts of how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere and improve the accuracy of global climate change predictions.

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AT: Satellites cause warming

Nasa is a leader in reducing Carbon emissions. Link outweighs the turn. NASA 2010 (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/greenspace/nasas-role.htmlSeptember 23, 2010 Page Editor: Deborah Bazar NASA Official: Jeffrey Smith)

NASA is committed to reducing the environmental impact and carbon footprints of our laboratories and facilities. With diverse backgrounds and interests in everything from life support systems, robotics science, and mechanical engineering to ecology, computer science, and

planetary systems, NASA employees are encouraged and motivated to partake in worker-led green initiatives like voluntary waste cleanup, recycling programs, green seminars and workshops, native landscaping, drought-tolerant gardens, composting, and commute programs. As one of the most technologically advanced agencies, NASA can bring clean and efficient technologies down to Earth to create a better, greener work environment at the facilities and campuses we maintain. As mandated by Presidential Executive Order 13423, goals have been set for Federal facilities to purchase hybrid vehicles, increase alternative fuel use, reduce energy intensity and greenhouse gas emissions, increase usage of renewable energy sources, reduce water consumption, purchase green goods, reduce the use of chemicals and toxins, and practice environmentally-sound electronics acquisition and disposal (see the Fact Sheet that outlines the EO 13423 requirements, pdf 60 KB). As a Federal facility, we are also required to abide by the H.R.6: Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and the Federal Energy Management Program.

Space Launches produce fewer emissions than 2 minutes of US transportation.George Adams 2000 (Chemical Engineering graduate, Oct 31, MadSci Network: Earth Sciences Re: How much pollution does each space launch produce?)

Pollution caused by space launches:

The magnitude of space launch combustion products can be illustrated by a comparison of the amount of fuel consumed by a space shuttle launch with the amount of gasoline consumed in the United States in one day: Space shuttle fuel consumed in a launch: 3.5 million pounds Gasoline consumed in one day in the US - 2,500 million pounds In other words, one space shuttle launch is equivalent to about two minutes of gasoline consumption in the United States. There were 78 space launches worldwide in 1999, almost all much smaller than the space shuttle. The pollution caused by space launches depends not only on the total quantity of the fuels used, but on their chemical composition.. Propellants used for powering space launches are of four types: 1. Solid - Propellants that are a mixture of solid chemicals - a fuel and an oxidizer - that burn at a rapid rate when ignited, expelling hot gasses from a nozzle to achieve thrust. Fireworks are an example of the use of this kind of propellant. The combustion products depend on the chemicals used. The space shuttle uses potassium perchlorate (KClO4) and powdered aluminum. The combustion products are potassium chloride and aluminum oxide 2. Cryogenic - In space propellants, this refers to liquid hydrogen (LH) and liquid oxygen (LOX), which burn when mixed and ignited. LOX is a liquid below -298 degrees F and LH is a liquid below -423 degrees F. They are stored in the space vehicle in insulated tanks and pumped into the rocket engines where they burn to expel hot gases. The LOX/LH combination is by far the most efficient in the amount of thrust per pound of fuel. The combustion product is water vapor. 3. Petroleum - Instead of liquid hydrogen, a purified kerosene is used as the fuel and is mixed with liquid oxygen and burned in the engine. The combustion products are carbon dioxide and water vapor. This fuel system is usually used in launches of smaller rockets where the complications of handling liquid hydrogen are not justified. 4. Hypergolic - fuels and oxidants that ignite on contact without an ignition source. These are generally used for maneuvering after the soak vehicle has reached orbit. The combustion products depend on the chemicals used. The space shuttle uses monomethyl hydrazine (N2CH6) and nitrogen tetroxide (N2O4). The combustion products are nitrogen, water vapor and carbon dioxide. The pollution effects of the four types of fuels are: Solid fuel - The major combustion products of potassium chloride and aluminum oxide and relatively innocuous. Potassium chloride is used as a fertilizer and has medicinal uses. Aluminum oxide is an unreactive compound and is used as an abrasive. Cryogenic - The only combustion product of LH/LOX is water. Petroleum - The combustion products of water and carbon dioxide are harmless except of any possible contribution of carbon dioxide to global warming, but the carbon dioxide from this source would be infinitesimal compared to the energy produced by burning coal and petroleum Hypergolic - The combustion products of this kind of fuel are not a pollution problem. In any event this fuel is used only in small quantities for maneuvering. The space shuttle uses about 2.3 million pounds of solid propellant in the launch boosters and about 1.2 million pounds of LH/LOX in the main engines. A relatively small

amount of hypergolic fuel is used for controlling the shuttle once in orbit. Kerosene/LOX propellant is not used. With regard to possible effect on the ozone layer, the only combustion product that would be suspect is the chloride ion of potassium chloride. Studies have shown that in contrast to organic chlorine (as in banned refrigerants) inorganic chloride does not persist in the altitudes of the ozone layer and is not a factor in ozone depletion.

79


AT: Satellites cause warming

Industrial manufacturing is a small contributor to climate change: release of cooling agents.Clean Technica 2010 (Feb 23, Zachary Shahan, Writer, teacher, community organizer, and city planner, “NASA Says: Automobiles Largest Net Climate Change Culprit“ http://cleantechnica.com/2010/02/23/nasa-says-automobiles-largest-climate-change-culprit/)

Nearly two years ago, I wrote that transportation was “the leading contiributor to greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the country, according to a report by the U.S. Department

of Energy (DOE), and… the fastest growing contributor.” Now, in other terms and looking at additional factors, NASA has determined that automobiles are the largest net contributor to climate change pollution. In other words, when you take into account the climate change (or global warming) gases automobiles emit as well as gases they emit that have a cooling effect, automobiles are the largest contributor to climate change, followed by 2) burning of household biofuels (i.e. wood and animal dung) and 3) raising livestock. The NASA study reports: “Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it. In contrast, the industrial and power sectors release many of the same gases—with a larger contribution to radiative forcing—but they also emit sulfates and other aerosols that cause cooling by reflecting light and altering clouds… In their analysis, motor vehicles emerged as the greatest net contributor to atmospheric warming now and in the near term, with a total radiative forcing of 199 mWm-2 in 2020. The researchers found that the burning of household biofuels—primarily wood and animal dung for home heating and cooking—contribute the second most warming. And raising livestock,

particularly methane-producing cattle, contribute the third most. The industrial sector releases such a high proportion of sulfates and other cooling aerosols that it actually contributes a significant amount of cooling to the system. And biomass burning—which occurs mainly as a result of tropical forest fires, deforestation, savannah and shrub fires—emits large amounts of organic carbon particles that block solar radiation.”

80


AT: Biodiversity Impact DefenseMust act now to mitigate the effects of climate change on the environment—waiting for the ‘green revolution’ to save us will ensure extinction.Cline, William R. (Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development. “Global warming and agriculture” Finance and Development, the quarterly publication of the IMF March 2008, Volume 45, Number 1. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2008/03/cline.htm) March 2008

A technological rescue? There are those who argue that rapid technological change will raise agricultural yields so much by late this century that any reduction caused by global warming would easily be more than offset. But technological change is a false panacea for several reasons. First, the green revolution has already slowed. Calculations based on UN Food and Agricultural Organization data show that grain yields, which rose at an annual rate of 2.7 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, have risen at only a 1.6 percent annual

rate in the past quarter century. Although rising agricultural prices might provide incentives that would slow or reverse this decline, such a response is not assured. Second, even if there is no further slowdown, there is likely to be a close race between rising food demand and rising output. Global food demand is expected to approximately triple by the 2080s

because of higher world population and higher incomes. It also seems quite likely that a sizable share of land will be shifted to the production of biomass for ethanol fuel. As a result, there is a rather precarious balance between supply and demand, which would be seriously worsened by a major adverse shock from global warming. The stakes are large This study's estimates

underscore the importance of coordinated international action to limit carbon dioxide emissions and avert warming and damage that will likely otherwise occur, not only in agriculture but also from sea level rise and increased intensity of hurricanes, among other things. Moreover, it is likely that actual global losses will be worse than those portrayed here. Neither crop nor Ricardian models can account for the influence of what are likely to be increases in extreme weather, such as droughts and floods, and insect pests. Nor do the estimates take account of agricultural losses associated with rising sea levels, a major consideration in countries such as Bangladesh and Egypt. More fundamentally, by taking a snapshot of the 2080s, the estimates do not capture the much greater damage that could be expected from the still more severe global warming that would occur by the 22nd century if no steps are taken to curb carbon

emissions.

81


AT: Warming Not Anthropogenic (1/2)

Warming is anthropogenic – our studies are unanimous and their authors are paid offWeart, 09 - noted historian specializing in the history of modern physics and geophysics and former Director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics and Ph.D. in Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Colorado [12/22/09, Spencer, Climate Change: “The idea of anthropogenic global climate change in the 20th century,” Wiley Interscience, WX]

The rising demands for regulating emissions worried conservative governments in the United States and elsewhere. They set up a mechanism for policy advice, an International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that would include not only scientists but official government representatives, and

that moreover could issue no conclusion except by unanimous consent. It was a recipe for blandness if not paralysis. The first report of the IPCC, issued in 1990, was bland enough. The panel predicted (correctly, as it turned out) that it would take another decade before they could be confident whether greenhouse gas emissions would bring any

temperature rise.[97][107] No matter how else people framed it, climate change remained primarily a scientific puzzle. Thousands of scientists were now working to understand it, and their findings increasingly countered the objections raised by skeptics. To note one of many examples,

independent computer modeling groups in California, Britain, and Germany all retroactively predicted with reasonable accuracy the geographical pattern of atmospheric temperature changes at different levels of the atmosphere since the start of the century. The pattern of heating that the models calculated for the influence of greenhouse gases (the greenhouse signature) matched the observational data fairly well; patterns computed for solar energy changes or other proposed influences did not.[108][109] To be sure, there remained many problems. Everyone knew that cloudiness and aerosols in particular were poorly understood. But independent evidence pointed in the same direction as the models. In particular, the sensitivity of global temperature to the CO2 level in the distant past was found to lie within the range the models claimed.[110] And through the 1990s the actual global temperature kept rising. The unrelenting accumulation of evidence put the IPCC under pressure to reach a firm conclusion in its second report, due in 1995. The first panel had been criticized as too narrow; it was dominated by geophysicists, and nearly all of them

came from a handful of wealthy nations. The IPCC's leaders responded by gradually including more experts from other disciplines - first the life sciences, followed by fields as distant as economics, each with its different approaches and opinions . Field geologists, e.g., in harmony with the fossil fuel industries where many of them worked, were often deeply skeptical about anthropogenic global warming. The IPCC also encouraged and even subsidized participation by scientists from

less-developed nations. The panel was steadily organizing itself into an unprecedented mechanism for assembling scientific information and constructing summary statements. Under the judicious chairmanship of Bert Bolin,

in 19 95 the representatives hammered out a unanimous consensus: not only was the world getting warmer, but the balance of evidence suggests that humanity was exercising a discernible influence on global climate. [108] The weaselly wording showed the strain of political compromises. Nevertheless, as a formal declaration by the assembled scientific experts and governments of the world, this was page-one news in many countries. The process resembled one observed historically in the emergence of parliaments: once a representative body has been created, it tends to gradually acquire status and ultimately a degree of power. A prompt consequence of the IPCC's declaration was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which most industrialized nations pledged to restrain their greenhouse gas emissions. Although in practical terms this turned out to be worth

little more than most diplomatic promises, it constituted a comprehensive governmental endorsement of the idea that anthropogenic global climate change called for a serious response. Many climate scientists were now taking an unequivocal or even activist stance on greenhouse warming. A smaller and dwindling number of skeptics opposed them. Their arguments were h ardly ever published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, but mainly in conservative media and public-relations products funded by corporate and right-wing patrons, mostly in the United States. In the journals

where climate scientists published their research, anthropogenic global warming was treated as a well-established phenomenon.[111] When the IPCC issued its third report in 2001, concluding unanimously that it was likely that greenhouse gases were bringing a sustained warming, it scarcely seemed like news.[112] Some did take note (especially in the intrinsically farsighted insurance industry), and began to frame anthropogenic global climate change as a factor in practical decisions. This could not get far, however, for predicting global warming was a long way from predicting specific climate changes and their impacts. The IPCC had reached its consensus that warming was likely only through grueling negotiations, haggling over every word. Almost the only other thing that all climate experts agreed on was that severe uncertainties remained. For example, data and theory remained inadequate to calculate the effects of aerosol pollution on climate beyond very broad limits. Nobody could be sure whether doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere would raise the average global temperature a mere one degree or a catastrophic six degrees. Worse, the average global temperature meant little: people wanted to know what could happen in their own region. Computer models tended to agree about some regions, e.g., that the American Southwest and the Mediterranean would get less rainfall, mountain snowpacks would dwindle, the Arctic would warm up fastest. But for many regions, little could be said with certainty. This did not prevent some individuals and organizations from exclaiming that the perils were terrible and imminent, while others insisted there were no risks whatsoever. For most people, any connection to their business model or daily lives seemed remote. McKibben lamented that

global warming has not registered in our gut.[113] It was not just that the issue was still commonly framed as a scientific puzzle, although for many citizens that was enough to repel thought. P olitical conservatives and the industry-funded public relations effort in the United States continued working to keep people from framing global climate change as a problem.[114][115] They insisted that global warming was not in fact underway. Or if it was, humans were not causing it. Or if we were, the net results would be benign. Or if not, new technologies would take care of it (by now there were scores of geoengineering proposals, ranging from prosaic reforestation to fantastic schemes to launch a sun shield into

space). Many journalists, pursuing their ideal of unbiased coverage, wrote balanced stories that quoted the few skeptics as often as all the mainstream climate scientists. Both public and official opinion in the United States froze in place. The media in other nations tended to match the views of scientists more closely. The balance of public and official opinion in Europe, Japan, and leading developing nations steadily took global warming more seriously - although not seriously enough to install policies with serious economic consequences.[116][117]

82


AT: Warming Not Anthropogenic (2/2)

CO2 leads to warming – even if it doesn’t ozone depletion is still badWeart, 09 - noted historian specializing in the history of modern physics and geophysics and former Director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics and Ph.D. in Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Colorado [12/22/09, Spencer, Climate Change: “The idea of anthropogenic global climate change in the 20th century,” Wiley Interscience, WX]By the early 1980s, all the main ideas about anthropogenic global climate change were in place. Originally advanced by a few scientists, they were now fully in the public arena. There would be some additions to understanding and reframing of the implications. But from here forward the most important history is about how scientists and the world public responded to the central ideas. The question of global warming had become prominent enough to be included in some public opinion polls. A 1981 survey found that more than a third of American adults claimed they had heard or read about the greenhouse effect. Most of these people, however, would never have brought up the subject by themselves. Few understood how global warming was related to fossil fuels, let alone other sources of greenhouse gases. Among the world's many problems, it did not loom large.[73][74] Among climate scientists, however, concern kept growing. Only an accumulation of arguments of different kinds could move a given scientist's opinion step by step up or down the scale that ranged from possible through probable to near certain. The most persuasive evidence came from the ever more elaborate computer models. They were getting fairly skillful in their reproductions of past and present climates, so it seemed increasingly plausible that their projections of possible future changes should be taken seriously.[75-77] Meanwhile, a wholly different argument came unexpectedly from American, West European, and Soviet teams who

drilled deep into the icecaps of Greenland and Antarctica. The ancient ice revealed that over past glacial cycles, the CO2 and methane content of the atmosphere had risen and fallen in close conjunction with the rises and falls of temperature, pointing to strong feedbacks between

greenhouse gases and climate.[78-83] Adding to the concern were calculations that huge reservoirs of carbon were frozen in the deep permafrost layers of peat in northern tundras and clathrate ices under the seabed. Some speculated that global warming could melt those, leading to massive additional releases of CO2 and methane. These were only two of a number of alarming ideas, raised from the 1980s on, about positive feedbacks: more greenhouse warming, thus more emissions, and so on up.[84]

[85] Still more disturbing were statistical studies by British and American groups that showed that the actual global warming first noticed in the 1930s, which had paused between 1940 and the mid-1970s, had resumed with a vengeance. On average the world was hotter in the 1980s than at any time as far

back as good records went.[86][87] Some climate scientists believed that greenhouse warming was already manifest, but the majority exercised the caution appropriate to their trade. Much remained unknown about the changes in solar energy, aerosols, cloudiness, and many other influences on the climate system.

There were forces working to magnify this skepticism in the public mind. Corporations that feared government regulation of their emissions found allies in political conservatives who saw any claim about an environmental risk as left-wing agitation. During the 1980s, public opinion about global warming became polarized along political lines. The polarization was stronger in the United States than in Western Europe and Japan, where environmentalists were more in the political mainstream and industrialists fought regulation less fiercely. Political polarization increased in 1983 when a group of respected atmospheric scientists announced a new risk to global climate. They warned that smoke from cities torched in a nuclear war would darken the atmosphere, bringing a long nuclear winter that might jeopardize the survival of all humankind.[88] The apocalyptic image of a planet ravaged by nuclear war had been familiar for decades as a science fiction trope, but now explicit calculations offered a realistic mechanism. Even if, as soon emerged, a nuclear autumn was a more likely outcome, it

was now a sober prediction that our policies, driven by fear or greed or simple aggression, could cause an atmospheric catastrophe - as if in punishment for our wickedness. That way of thinking spread more widely after 1985, when a British group announced their discovery of a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. The cause proved to be a buildup of chlorofluorocarbon chemicals, produced in industrial processes and widely used by the public in spray cans. Loss of ozone would mainly mean more skin cancers and other biological harms, but many members of the public got ozone depletion confused with global warming. The true lesson was that human activity, something as simple as using a spray, could change the atmosphere seriously and quickly.[89]

83


AT: Models Wrong

Generally, climate sensitivity predictions have been accurate—if anything sensitivity may be greater than we thoughDr. James S. Risbey, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University, 2008 (“The new climate discourse: Alarmist or alarming?” Global Environmental Change 18:1 February 2008 pp. 26-37)

Whether climate change is worse than ‘we’ (the climate community) thought all depends on what we measure and what we thought. One basic measure of the problem has been the value of climate sensitivity, which is how much temperature increases for a doubling of CO2 concentration. The prevailing estimates of this value have been stable for arguably a century since Arrhenius, with little change in the modern era of understanding (Handel and Risbey, 1992). While there may be a variety of reasons why this value has been stable (van der Sluijs et

al., 1998), by this measure the problem is not worse than we thought. To be sure, recent studies have focused on the uncertainties of this quantity and some have pointed out that the upper bound may be higher than we thought ([Andronova and Schlesinger, 2001], [Piani et al., 2005] and [Torn and Harte, 2006]). Others point to constraints from the paleoclimate record which limit the upper bound (Annan et al., 2005), though studies of the distant past also provide an indication of possible high climate sensitivity (Pagani et al., 2006).

Temperatures and sea levels have risen within IPCC predictionsDr. James S. Risbey, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University, 2008 (“The new climate discourse: Alarmist or alarming?” Global Environmental Change 18:1 February 2008 pp. 26-37)

Another key measure of the climate change problem is the pace of change of the climate system as indicated by warming and sea level rise rates. Temperatures have increased more or less in line with model predictions and expectations; however, they are toward the upper end of IPCC projections (Rahmstorf et al., 2007). The trend for sea level rise is more dramatic however. Sea level rise has been increasing at the very top of the range of projections, so it is ‘worse’ (higher) than our (IPCC) best guess expectations ([Overpeck et al., 2006] and [Rahmstorf et al., 2007]).

Antarctic glaciers are receding faster than models predicted—models don’t account for the cracking and splitting that accelerates melting Richard A. Kerr, PhD in chemical oceanography and recipient of the Geological Society of America Public Service Award, 2006 (“A Worrying Trend of Less Ice, Higher Seas” Science 311:5768 03/24/06 pp. 1698 – 1701)The recent proliferation of galloping glaciers caught researchers unawares. "None of the models [of glacier flow] predict there should be such rapid change," says glaciologist Ian Joughin of the University of Washington, Seattle (see Perspective on p. 1719). "If you look at a textbook, you'll see an ice sheet response time of 1000 years or more." That's because models "treat ice sheets as a big lump of ice," he says. They melt, or they don't melt. In the case of West Antarctica, there is tentative agreement about what is triggering the acceleration of the glaciers. Around the Palmer Peninsula that juts northward from West Antarctica, the world's strongest regional warming of the past 50 years first puddled the surface of ice shelves with meltwater. The meltwater then drove into the ice along growing cracks, breaking up shelves over a few weeks. Without the shelves to hold them back, apparently, the glaciers feeding them sped up (Science, 30 August 2002, p. 1494). To the south, where it's still far too cold for surface melting, a third-of-a-degree warming of the ocean seems to have eaten away at the shelves jutting into the Amundsen Sea. That in turn sped up Pine Island Glacier and its neighbors.

84


AT: Models Wrong

Models have not taken into account the physics of glacial disintegration—melting is worse than models suggestedDr. James S. Risbey, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research and School of Mathematical Sciences, Monash University, 2008 (“The new climate discourse: Alarmist or alarming?” Global Environmental Change 18:1 February 2008 pp. 26-37)

While observed rates of sea level rise are ‘worse’ than expected, what about projected rates of sea level rise? For this issue, we need to look again to ice sheet melt,

particularly as the projections go further out in time. Views of the potential rate at which the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could melt have become ‘worse’ with time ([Zwally et al., 2002], [Alley et al., 2005], [Hansen, 2005], [Overpeck et al., 2006] and [Hansen

et al., 2007a]). Traditional ice sheet models “generally do not incorporate all the physics that may be critical for the wet process of ice sheet disintegration, e.g. modelling of the ice streams that channel flow of continental crevasses and moulins, removal of ice shelves by the warming ocean, and dynamical propagation inland of the thinning and retreat of coastal ice” (Hansen et al., 2007a). As attention has shifted to these processes, and as more has been learned about sea level changes and ice sheets from the

paleoclimate record, concern has risen that the timescales for ice sheet melt may be much shorter than previously thought (Alley et al., 2005).

85


AT: Warming Inevitable

History proves we can overcome warming.Easterbrook, 2006 (Gregg, writer, lecturer, senior editor of The New Republic, and fellow at the Brookings Institution; “Some Convenient Truths,” The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/global-warming)

Here’s a different way of thinking about the greenhouse effect: that action to prevent runaway global warming may prove cheap, practical, effective, and totally consistent with economic growth. Which makes a body wonder: Why is such environmental optimism

absent from American political debate? Greenhouse gases are an air-pollution problem—and all previous air-pollution problems have been reduced faster and more cheaply than predicted, without economic harm. Some of these problems once seemed scary and intractable, just as greenhouse gases seem today. About forty years ago urban smog was increasing so fast that President Lyndon Johnson warned, “Either we stop poisoning our air or we become a nation [in] gas masks groping our way through dying cities.” During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, emissions of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, threatened to deplete the stratospheric ozone layer. As recently as George H.

W. Bush’s administration, acid rain was said to threaten a “new silent spring” of dead Appalachian forests. But in each case, strong regulations were enacted, and what happened? Since 1970, smog-forming air pollution has declined by a third to a half. Emissions of CFCs have been nearly eliminated, and studies suggest that ozone-layer replenishment is beginning. Acid rain, meanwhile, has declined by a third since 1990, while Appalachian forest health has improved sharply. Most progress against air pollution has been cheaper than expected. Smog controls on automobiles, for example, were predicted to cost thousands of dollars for each vehicle. Today’s new cars emit less than 2 percent as much smog-forming pollution as the cars of 1970, and the cars are still as affordable today as they were then. Acid-rain control has cost about 10 percent of what was predicted in 1990, when Congress enacted new rules. At that time, opponents said the regulations would cause a “clean-air recession”; instead, the economy boomed. Greenhouse gases, being global, are the biggest air-pollution problem ever faced. And because widespread fossil-fuel use is inevitable for some time to come, the best-case scenario for the next few decades may be a

slowing of the rate of greenhouse-gas buildup, to prevent runaway climate change. Still, the basic pattern observed in all other forms of air-pollution control—rapid progress at low cost—should repeat for greenhouse-gas controls.

86


AT: Warming Impact Defense

Global warming’s more devastating than a nuclear war.REUTERS, 2007Global Warming Impact Like 'Nuclear War', http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/09/12/3791

Climate change could have global security implications on a par with nuclear war unless urgent action is taken, a report said on

Wednesday. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) security think-tank said global warming would hit crop yields and water availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to regional strife. While everyone had now started to recognize the threat posed by climate change, no one was taking effective leadership to tackle it and no one could tell precisely when and where it would hit

hardest, it added. "The most recent international moves towards combating global warming represent a recognition ... that if the emission of greenhouse gases ... is allowed to continue unchecked, the effects will be catastrophic -- on the level of nuclear war," the IISS report said. "Even if the international community succeeds in adopting comprehensive and effective measures to mitigate climate change, there will still be unavoidable impacts from global warming on the environment, economies and human security," it added. Scientists say global

average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due to burning fossil fuels for power and transport. The IISS report said the effects would cause a host of problems including rising sea levels, forced migration, freak storms, droughts, floods, extinctions, wildfires, disease epidemics, crop failures and famines. The impact was already being felt -- particularly in conflicts in Kenya and Sudan -- and more was expected in places from Asia to Latin America as dwindling resources led to competition between haves and have nots.

"We can all see that climate change is a threat to global security, and you can judge some of the more obvious causes and areas," said IISS

transnational threat specialist Nigel Inkster. "What is much harder to do is see how to cope with them." The report, an annual survey of the impact of

world events on global security, said conflicts and state collapses due to climate change would reduce the world's ability to tackle the causes and to reduce the effects of global warming. State failures would increase the gap between rich and poor and heighten racial and ethnic tensions which in turn would produce fertile breeding grounds for more conflict. Urban areas would not be exempt from the fallout as falling crop yields due to reduced water and rising temperatures would push food prices higher, IISS said. Overall,

it said 65 countries were likely to lose over 15 percent of their agricultural output by 2100 at a time when the world's population was

expected to head from six billion now to nine billion people. "Fundamental environmental issues of food, water and energy security ultimately lie behind many present security concerns, and climate change will magnify all three," it added.

Climate change is worse than all other impacts—scale and urgency ensureBurke, Tom (former statutory advisor to the British Government on biodiversity and member of the European Environmental Bureau. Speech to the Royal College of Physicians: “Climate change and health” http://www.e3g.org/index.php/programmes/climate-articles/climate-change-and-health/) 1/29/2008

There are three ways in which climate change is different from any other problem that humanity has ever faced. The first is the sheer scale of the problem. Climate change threatens to undermine the prosperity, security and well being of literally every single one of the six and a half billion people on the planet. No other problem does this. Millions of us

are threatened daily by crime and conflict, but millions more lead lives of peaceful security. Many more of us lead poorly educated lives of

unhealthy poverty but millions of others lead lives of well educated, healthy affluence. No-one will escape the consequences of a rapidly changing climate. Second is the urgency. To have any chance of avoiding dangerous climate change total global carbon emissions have to peak within a decade and then decline rapidly. And they have to do this while meeting the rapidly expanding need for energy to fuel economic development. No-one will trade-off energy security for climate security so we must achieve both together. Because agriculture, deforestation and land-use changes produce large carbon emissions which are very difficult to control this means, in effect, that we must develop a carbon neutral global energy system by around the middle of the century. This will require transformational changes in energy technologies on a scale that makes the Apollo or Manhattan Projects look unambitious.

87


AT: Warming Good:CO2 Fertilization

Global warming happening now – heat waves tank agricultural supplies and independently kills thousands.BROWN, Environmental Analyst, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, 2008Lester, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, January

Two scientists in India, K. S. Kavi Kumar and Jyoti Parikh, assessed the effect of higher temperatures on wheat and rice yields. Basing their model on data from 10 sites, they concluded that in north India a 1-degree Celsius rise in mean temperature did not meaningfully reduce wheat yields, but a 2-degree rise lowered yields at almost all the sites. When they looked at temperature change alone, a 2-degree Celsius rise led to a decline in irrigated wheat yields ranging from

37 percent to 58 percent. When they combined the negative effects of higher temperature with the positive effects of CO2 fertilization, the decline in yields among the various sites ranged from 8 percent to 38 percent. For a country projected to add 500 million people by mid-century, this is a troubling prospect.20

Climate change leads to crop failures—detrimental effects of higher temperatures overcomes any benefits of CO2 fertilization. Brown, Lester (World-renowned environmental analyst and head of the non-profit research organization the Earth Policy Institute based in Washington DC. p.52: “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization” http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/pb3ch3.pdf) 2008

Agriculture as it exists today has been shaped by a climate system that has changed little over farming’s 11,000-year history. Crops were developed to maximize yields

in this long-standing climatic regime. As the temperature rises, agriculture will be increasingly out of sync with its natural environment. Nowhere is this more evident than in the relationship between temperature and crop yields. Since crops in many countries are grown at or near their thermal optimum, even a relatively minor increase during the growing season of 1 or 2 degrees Celsius can shrink the grain harvest in major food-producing regions, such as the North China Plain, the Gangetic

Plain of India, and the U.S. CornBelt.16 Higher temperatures can reduce or even halt photosynthesis, prevent pollination, and lead to crop dehydration. Although the elevated concentrations of atmospheric CO 2 that raise temperature can also raise crop yields, the detrimental effect of higher temperatures on yields overrides the CO 2 fertilization effect for the major crops. In a study of local ecosystem sustainability, Mohan Wali and his colleagues at Ohio State University noted that as temperature rises, photosynthetic activity in plants increases until the temperature reaches 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit).The rate of photosynthesis then plateaus until the temperature hits 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit), whereupon it begins to decline, until at 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), photosynthesis ceases entirely.17 The most vulnerable part of a plant’s life cycle is the pollination period. Of the world’s three food staples—rice, wheat, and corn—corn is particularly vulnerable. In order for corn to reproduce, pollen must fall from the tassel to the strands of silk that emerge from the end of each ear of corn. Each of these silk

strands is attached to a kernel site on the cob. If the kernel is to develop, a grain of pollen must fall on the silk strand and then journey to the kernel site. When temperatures are uncommonly high, the silk strands quickly dry out and turn brown, unable to play their role in the fertilization process. The effects of temperature on rice pollination have been studied in detail in the Philippines. Scientists there report that

the pollination of rice falls from 100 percent at 34 degrees Celsius to near zero at 40 degrees Celsius, leading to crop failure.

88


AT: Warming Good:CO2 Fertilization

Climate change destroys food production—even carbon fertilization has a net-negative outcome in a world of higher temperaturesStern, 2007 Nicholas (British economist and academic. He was the Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 2000 to 2003, and was recently a civil servant and government economic advisor in the United Kingdom. “Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.” http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm) 2007

Food production will be particularly sensitive to climate change, because crop yields depend in large part on prevailing climate conditions (temperature and rainfall patterns). Agriculture currently accounts for 24% of world output, employs 22% of the global population, and occupies 40% of the land area. 75% of the poorest people in the world (the one billion people who live on less than $1 a day) live in rural areas and rely on agriculture for their livelihood.29 Low levels of warming in mid to high latitudes (US, Europe, Australia, Siberia and some parts of China) may improve the

conditions for crop growth by extending the growing season30 and/or opening up new areas for agriculture. Further warming will have increasingly negative impacts – the classic “hill function” (refer back to Box 3.1) - as damaging temperature thresholds are reached more often and water shortages limit growth in regions such as Southern Europe and Western USA.31 High temperature episodes can reduce yields by up to half if they coincide with a critical phase in the crop cycle like flowering (Figure 3.4).32 The impacts of climate change on agriculture depend crucially on the size of the

“carbon fertilisation” effect (Box 3.4). Carbon dioxide is a basic building block for plant growth. Rising concentrations in the atmosphere may enhance the initial benefits of warming and even offset reductions in yield due to heat and water stress. Work based on the original predictions for the carbon fertilisation effect suggests that yields of several cereals (wheat and rice in particular) will increase for 2 or 3°C of

warming globally, according to some models, but then start to fall once temperatures reach 3 or 4°C.33 Maize shows greater declines in yield

with rising temperatures because its different physiology makes it less responsive to the direct effects of rising carbon dioxide. Correspondingly, world cereal production only falls marginally (1 – 2%) for warming up to 4°C (Box 3.4).34 But the latest analysis from crops

grown in more realistic field conditions suggests that the effect is likely to be no more than half that typically included in crop models.35 When a weak carbon fertilisation effect is used, worldwide cereal production declines by 5% for a 2°C rise in temperature and 10% for a 4°C rise. By 4°C, entire regions may be too hot and dry to grow crops, including parts of Australia. Agricultural collapse across large areas of the world is possible at even higher temperatures (5 or 6°C) but clear empirical evidence is still limited.

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Add- On: Air Pollution (No Impact)

Remote sensing is important to observing air quality and harmful elements in Earth’s atmosphere.Martin, 08, Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada B3H 3J5, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA, USA (Atmospheric Environment, “Satellite remote sensing of surface air quality”)

Common pollutants in surface (i.e. ground-level) air include aerosols, ozone (O3), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and sulfur dioxide (SO2). O3 is produced in the troposphere by photochemical oxidation of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and CO in the presence of nitrogen oxide radicals (NOx ≡ NO + NO2). Aerosols can enter the atmosphere as primary particles, or can be produced chemically in the atmosphere from a variety of compounds including organics as well as oxidation products of NOx and SO2. NO2, SO2, and CO are themselves also toxic and regulated

by environmental protection agencies. Satellite remote sensing is reducing uncertainty in the spatial distribution of these deleterious species and the processes affecting them. The formation of O3 and aerosols depends in a complicated manner upon the sources of

their precursors. Air quality management is impeded by uncertainty in traditional “bottom-up” emission inventories based on application of emission factors to activity rates. This review includes satellite remote sensing of O3 and aerosol precursors that provide constraints on emission inventories through a “top-down” approach based on inverse modeling of observations. Remote sensing refers to the use of electromagnetic radiation to acquire information without being in physical contact with the object, which in this case is the atmosphere. This review focuses on satellite remote sensing of the composition of the boundary layer over land, which is of direct relevance for surface air quality due to rapid vertical mixing during the day. Long-range transport in the free troposphere of trace gases and aerosols is also an issue of growing concern (Keating and Zhuber, 2007). However, discussion of such observations would detract from the focus of this article. Recent reviews with more emphasis on observations in the free troposphere and over ocean are available elsewhere ([King et al., 1999], [IGAC, 2007] and [Fishman et al., 2008]). A recent workshop, entitled Air Quality Remote Sensing from Space: Defining an Optimum Observing Strategy, was a milestone in assessing air quality applications from space (Edwards, 2006). Recommendations from the workshop are available at

http://www.acd.ucar.edu/Events/Meetings/Air_Quality_Remote_Sensing/Reports/AQRSinputDS.pdf. Satellite remote sensing of trace gases and aerosols for air quality applications has a rich history. Lyons and Husar (1976) presented an image from the GOES satellite showing a large area of haze covering the Midwest United States. Todd et al. (1979) applied land use information from the Landsat satellite complemented with ground-based monitors to determine population exposure to air pollution. Fraser et al. (1984) used GOES observations to conduct the first retrieval of aerosol optical depth over land and applied it to examine a haze event over the eastern United States. Fishman et al. (1987) used O3 columns retrieved from the TOMS satellite instrument to examine a surface O3 episode over the eastern United States. This review focuses on current satellite instruments specifically designed for tropospheric trace gases and aerosols.

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Add- On: Biodiversity

Remote sensing is key to biodiversityUnderwood and Ustin 07 (Emma Underwood, Dept. of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Susan Ustin, California Space Institute Center of Excellence, University of California, SOURCEBOOK ON REMOTE SENSING AND BIODIVERSITY INDICATORS, http://www.lib.udec.cl/archivos_descargas_pdf/pdf_publicaciones_2007_2006/Pauchard_y_Maheu_Giroux_2007_Sourcebook_on_remote_sensing_and_biodiversity_indicators.pdf)

Almost every ecosystem on Earth has serious problems with Invasive Alien Species (IAS), with invasions into natural systems representing a key threat to global biodiversity and ecosystem functioning as well as incurring economic costs (Mooney & Cleland 2001; Pimentel et al. 2005). Remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) technologies offer potentially

valuable tools for mapping and monitoring IAS as well as providing data inputs for predicting areas susceptible to invasion. Cost effective, large scale, and long term documentation and monitoring of IAS are recognized as fundamental research needs (Johnson 1999) which are increasingly being addressed. Over the last decade the number of publications on remote sensing applications to invasion biology has grown from 20 to 80 publications (Joshi et al. 2004). The indicators in the beginning of this chapter outline a number of IAS indicators, both direct and indirect, across a range of scales that can be

provided by remote sensing. The IAS problem and exchange of species between areas is by its nature global in extent, however, detection and invasion processes occur at more localized scales such as at the site or landscape scale, which is where remote sensing can contribute adequate mapping accuracies to be considered for operational use. Once IAS have become established in a region remote sensing, in comparison to field based techniques, allows an entire region to be mapped simultaneously, image-derived locations of IAS provide a permanent record that can be input into GIS databases for control activities, and repeated acquisitions allow trends in IAS abundance and distribution patterns to be efficiently monitored over

time. In contrast, in areas where an IAS does not yet occur, prevention is the most efficient way of dealing with problematic species. Consequently, using remote sensing techniques to map points at risk is valuable, such as mapping airstrips in remote locations or

seaports. Alternatively, once an IAS is established in a region mapping potential pathways with imagery can help prevent spread into new areas. For example, roads, hiking and horse trails, and offroad vehicle trails can be mapped—which disperse seeds on vehicle tires or on footwear. Similarly, boat launches can be identified since turbines on boat engines can spread fragments of aquatic invasive plants as well as small invasive aquatic animals such as snails.

Biodiversity loss will cause planetary extinction Diner 94 – Judge Advocate General’s Corps of US Army[David N., Military Law Review, Winter, 143 Mil. L. Rev. 161, LN] bg No species has ever dominated its fellow species as man has. In most cases, people have assumed the God-like power of life and death -- extinction or survival -- over the plants and animals ofthe world. For most of history, mankind pursued this domination with a single-minded determination to master the world, tame the wilderness, and exploit nature for the maximum benefit of the human race.

n67 In past mass extinction episodes, as many as ninety percent of the existing species perished, and yet the world moved forward, and new species replaced the old. So why should the world be concerned now? The prime reason is the world's survival. Like all animal life, humans live off of other species. At some point, the number of species could decline to the point at which the ecosystem fails, and then humans also would become extinct. No one knows how many [*171] species the world needs

to support human life, and to find out -- by allowing certain species to become extinct -- would not be sound policy. In addition to food, species offer many direct and indirect benefits to mankind. n68 2. Ecological Value. -- Ecological value is the value that species have in maintaining the environment. Pest, n69 erosion, and flood control are prime benefits certain species provide to man. Plants and animals also provide additional ecological services -- pollution control, n70 oxygen production, sewage treatment, and biodegradation. n71 3. Scientific and Utilitarian Value. -- Scientific value is the use of species for research into the physical processes of the world. n72 Without plants and animals, a large portion of basic scientific research would be impossible. Utilitarian value is the direct utility humans draw from plants and animals. n73 Only a fraction of the [*172] earth's species have been examined, and mankind may someday desperately need the species that it is exterminating today. To accept that the snail darter, harelip sucker, or Dismal Swamp southeastern shrew n74 could save mankind may be difficult for some. Many, if not most, species are useless to man in a direct utilitarian sense. Nonetheless, they may be critical in an indirect role, because their extirpations could affect a directly useful species negatively. In a closely interconnected ecosystem, the loss of a species affects other species dependent on it. n75 Moreover, as the number of species decline, the effect of each new extinction on the remaining species increases dramatically. n76 4. Biological Diversity. -- The main premise of species preservation is that diversity is better than simplicity. n77 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 a stress. . . . [l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist collapse better than a simple, unbranched

circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." n79 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 wings, [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss .

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Add- On: Disease

Remote sensing satellites are the most essential tool for predicting and preventing pandemic and epidemic outbreaksFord et al 2009 [ Dr Ford is Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of New England, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA (R.R. Colwell) Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA (R.R. Colwell) Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA (J.B. Rose) Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, New York, USA (S.S. Morse) Oxford University, Oxford, UK (D.J. Rogers) University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA (T.L. Yates) 1Deceased., Using Satellite Images of Environmental Changes to

Predict Infectious Disease Outbreaks, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819876/, ]

Current modeling of infectious diseases is by necessity retrospective. Environmental parameters measured by remote satellite imaging show the greatest promise for providing global coverage of changing environmental conditions. With current imaging technologies, we can measure sea surface temperature, sea surface height, chlorophyll A levels, and a variety of vegetation and soil indices, in addition to many other

physical, biologic, and chemical parameters of the earth’s surface and atmosphere. A variety of these parameters can be incorporated in complex

mathematical models, together with biotic and ecologic variables of the pathogen and host life cycles, to correlate environment with outbreaks of disease (Figure 2). However, we are still far from being able to accurately predict future disease events on the basis of existing environmental conditions.

Successful predictive modeling of disease and the establishment of early warning systems have reached a critical junction in development. As we improve our understanding of the biology and ecology of the pathogen, vectors, and hosts, our ability to accurately link

environmental variables, particularly those related to climate change, will improve. What has become clear over the past few years is that satellite imaging can play a critical role in disease prediction and, therefore, inform our response to future outbreaks. We conclude that

infectious disease events may be closely linked to environmental and global change. Satellite imaging may be critical for effective disease prediction and thus future mitigation of epidemic and pandemic diseases. We cannot stress too strongly our belief that a strong global satellite program is essential for future disease prediction.

Infections disease spread risks global extinction Steinbruner 98 – Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution[John D., “Biological weapons: A plague upon all houses,” Foreign Policy, Dec 22, LN]

It is a considerable comfort and undoubtedly a key to our survival that, so far, the main lines of defense against this threat have not depended on explicit policies or organized efforts. In the

long course of evolution, the human body has developed physical barriers and a biochemical immune system whose sophistication and effectiveness exceed anything we could design or as yet even fully understand. But evolution is a sword that cuts both ways: New diseases emerge, while old diseases mutate and adapt. Throughout history, there have been epidemics during which human immunity has broken down on an epic scale. An infectious agent believed to have been the plague bacterium killed an estimated 20 million people over a four-year period in the fourteenth century, including nearly one-quarter of Western

Europe's population at the time. Since its recognized appearance in 1981, some 20 variations of the HIVvirus have infected an estimated 29.4 million worldwide, with 1.5 million people currently dying of aids each year. Malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera-once thought to be under control-are now making a comeback. As we enter the twenty-first century, changing conditions have enhanced the potential for widespread contagion. The rapid growth rate of the total world population, the unprecedented freedom of movement across international borders, and scientific advances that expand the capability for the

deliberate manipulation of pathogens are all cause for worry that the problem might be greater in the future than it has ever been in the past. The threat of infectious pathogens is not just an issue of public health, but a fundamental security problem for the species as a whole.

92

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819876/


Add- On: Disease- 1AR Extension

Plan key to solve diseaseCommittee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications from


improving human health

Environmental factors have strong influences on a broad array of human health effects, including infectious diseases,

skin cancers, or chronic and acute illnesses resulting from contamination of air, food, and water. Public health decision making has benefited from the continued availability of satellite-derived data on land use, land cover, oceans, weather, climate, and atmospheric pollutants. However, the stresses of global environmental change and growing rates of resource consumption now spur greater demands for collection and analyses of data that describe how environmental factors are related to patterns of morbidity and mortality. Further improvements in the application of remote sensing technologies will allow better understanding of disease risk and prediction of disease outbreaks, more rapid detection of environmental changes that affect human health, identification of spatial variability in environmental health risk, targeted interventions to reduce vulnerability to health risks, and enhanced knowledge of human health-environment interactions.

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Add- On: Disease (Avian Flu) (No Impact)

Remote sensing satellites can predict and map out bird blue hotspots in order to prevent its spreadFord et al 2009 [ Dr Ford is Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of New England, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA (R.R. Colwell) Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA (R.R. Colwell) Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA (J.B. Rose) Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, New York, USA (S.S. Morse) Oxford University, Oxford, UK (D.J. Rogers) University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA (T.L. Yates) 1Deceased., Using Satellite Images of Environmental Changes to

Predict Infectious Disease Outbreaks, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819876/, ]

The scientific community has a relative consensus that epidemic and pandemic disease risks will be exacerbated by environmental changes that destabilize weather patterns, change distribution of vectors, and increase transport and transmission risk. Predictive modeling may lead to improved understanding and potentially prevent future epidemic and pandemic disease. Many respiratory infections are well known as highly climate dependent or seasonal. Although we are not yet able to predict their incidence with great precision, we may well be able to do this in the future. Meningococcal meningitis (caused by Neisseria meningitidis) in Africa is probably the best known example. In the disease-endemic so-called meningitis belt (an area running across sub-Saharan Africa from Senegal to Ethiopia), this is classically a dry season disease, which ceases with the beginning of

the rainy season, likely as a result of changes in host susceptibility (19). Many other infectious diseases show strong seasonality or association with climatic conditions (20). Perhaps one of the most interesting is influenza, which is thought of as a wintertime disease in temperate climates but shows both winter and summer peaks in subtropical and tropical regions (21). Although the reasons for seasonality are often poorly understood, the close dependence of such diseases on climatic conditions suggests that these, too, are likely to be amenable to prediction by modeling and remote sensing (22). When we

consider influenza, it is hard not to think about the future risks from pandemic influenza. Public health agencies in the United States and around the world are focusing on influenza preparedness, notably concerning influenza virus A subtype H5N1, which has captured attention because it causes severe disease and death in humans but as yet has demonstrated only very limited and inefficient human-to-human transmission. The severity of the disease raises images of the 1918 influenza epidemic on an unimaginably vast scale if the virus were to adapt to more efficient human-to-human transmission. Can predictive modeling using satellite or other imaging of environmental variables help in prediction of future influenza pandemics?

Xiangming Xiao at the University of New Hampshire was funded in 2006 by the National Institutes for Health to lead a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional team to use remote satellite imaging to track avian flu. Xiao et al. have used satellite image–derived vegetation

indices to map paddy rice agriculture in southern Asia (23). They believe that a similar approach can be used in conjunction with the more traditional approach of analyzing bird migration patterns and poultry production (24,25) to map potential hot spots of virus transmission (26).

94



Add- On: Disease (Insect borne) (No Impact)

Remote sensing satellites can predict insect borne diseases by means of evaluating the climate of a region to predict high risk areasKalluri et al 2007 [ Kalluri S, Raytheon Company, Gilruth P Division of Early Warning and Assessment , Rogers D, Professor of Ecology, Szczur M, Deputy Associate Director, National Library of Medicine, (2007) Surveillance of Arthropod Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases Using Remote Sensing Techniques: A Review. PLoS Pathog 3(10): e116. doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.0030116

A complex set of biotic and abiotic factors influence the emergence and spread of vector-borne diseases. While it is not possible

to predict the evolution of new vector-borne pathogens, remote sensing techniques can aid in determining the influence of abiotic environmental factors on their spread. Although multitemporal satellite data are available for an extended time period, the availability of

georeferenced and spatially explicit disease data for the same temporal record is still less common, especially in developing countries that have a high burden of vector-borne diseases. Other issues that are impacting the routine use of remote sensing in epidemiology include accessibility to high resolution and low-cost imagery [87,88], as well as issues with data continuity in terms of consistencies in spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions among satellite sensors during different years. Unforeseen problems, such as the failure of Landsat 7 satellite and delays in the launch of new earth observing satellites such as the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, as well as shifting priorities of space agencies, could impact our ability to routinely use satellite data in epidemiology and other applications [89]. However, these issues with remote sensing data are not unique to epidemiological

applications alone. It should be noted that the use of remote sensing techniques for modeling and forecasting vector-borne diseases is an emerging field, and a sustained use of these applications could be ensured by collaboration between remote sensing scientists and epidemiologists from the onset of research projects [87]. Remotely sensed environmental variables such as air temperature, humidity, and rainfall should be processed and made available to epidemiologists in real-time and in a format that they can readily use as inputs to their modeling by agencies and organizations that collect and

archive satellite data. Within the United States, remote sensing data have potential applications in modeling risk from West Nile fever, dengue fever, and Lyme disease. The potential for epidemic dengue transmission within the United States still exists because of the presence of A. albopictus and A. aegypti mosquitoes that transmit the disease [1]. Application of remote sensing techniques to map areas at risk for dengue fever within the United States is yet to be done. The predictive maps of diseases need to be verified on the ground for accuracy. While several studies have shown correlations between global climate change and variations in the number of people infected with a particular vector-borne disease, it not yet clear how much change in disease would have occurred without environmental change. Efforts therefore should also focus on the development of stochastic, process-based models that rely on vector biology as predictors of diseases and their risk, instead of statistical models that do not clearly explain causal relationships between satellite data and disease. Nevertheless, simple statistical models could be a good starting point for linking the limited number of environmental variables that can be derived from satellite data with spatial and temporal patterns of diseases and vectors. Simple statistical models could help deduce the epidemiological processes from an analysis of the observed spatial patterns of the disease and the environment. Remote sensing of vector ecosystems and interpretation of these patterns is likely to provide both challenges and opportunities in epidemiology. In addition to vector biology, social and behavioral patterns such as the time spent outside, which increases risk of exposure to anthropophilic vectors, types of house constructions, the use of nets and other repellents, as well as the availability of basic sanitation and primary

healthcare facilities, which are related to socioeconomic conditions, are important in disease prevention and control. Disease patterns have been shown to be closely linked to poverty and social inequalities [90]. These factors cannot be inferred from remote sensing techniques alone. While the studies reviewed in this paper demonstrate the efficacy of remote sensing and other geospatial technologies in disease surveillance, there are however, several factors

that need to be considered for these technologies to be routinely adopted for public health management. These include the availability of resources for gathering, processing, and modeling geospatial data, training of personnel on the proper interpretation of results, cost effectiveness of these surveillance techniques, and the continuous availability of remote sensing data in a timely manner. It should also be emphasized that the allocation of resources for these novel monitoring

techniques should not come at the cost of basic disease prevention and management activities at the community level.

95


Add- On: Disease (Water borne) (No Impact)

Remote sensing satellites can predict water borne epidemics up to months in advanceFord et al 2009 [ Dr Ford is Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of New England, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA (R.R. Colwell) Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA (R.R. Colwell) Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA (J.B. Rose) Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, New York, New York, USA (S.S. Morse) Oxford University, Oxford, UK (D.J. Rogers) University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA (T.L. Yates) 1Deceased., Using Satellite Images of Environmental Changes to Predict Infectious Disease Outbreaks,

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819876/, ]

Effective prediction depends on many factors, not just the prediction of an event. Cholera may be the most studied and best understood of the waterborne diseases and, perhaps in hindsight, we could have predicted the occurrence of cholera in South America in 1991 (9). Models for cholera prediction,

although country specific, are constantly improving. For example, considerable work has gone into predicting outbreaks of cholera in Bangladesh. Remote imaging technologies developed by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration have been used to relate sea surface temperature, sea surface height, and chlorophyll A levels to cholera outbreaks (Figure 1) (R.R. Colwell and J. Calkins, unpub. data). This process used a composite environmental model that demonstrated a remarkable similarity between predicted rates based on these 3 parameters and actual cholera incidence. These data are far from perfect and considerable uncertainty still remains. For example, rates of cholera were much higher than predicted in January 1998 and January 1999, yet many of the predicted peaks closely aligned with actual incidence. Because the model is constantly being improved

and the satellite data are becoming increasingly accurate through ground truthing (real-time collection of information on location), we believe that satellite imaging provides tremendous promise for prediction of cholera, weeks and even months in advance of an epidemic.

Knowing when an outbreak is likely to occur can inform public health workers to stress basic hygiene and sanitation

and to implement simple mitigation efforts such as filtration of water with sari cloth, which in some areas is credited with reducing deaths from cholera by >50% (10). Although remote sensing technology is currently still a research tool, the example of cholera prediction through its

use provides a compelling argument to maintain and adequately fund our satellite programs; unless this is done, this extraordinary effort at disease prediction will fail. Some of the critical needs that must be met to predict the effect of environmental change on waterborne disease include the following: 1) better knowledge of disease incidence and pathogen excretion; 2) better characterization of the pathogens in sources (e.g., combined sewer overflows, septic tanks) and these sources’ vulnerabilities to climate change; 3) better monitoring of sewage indicators to gather source, transport, and exposure information (event monitoring); 4) improved understanding of sediments and other pathogen reservoirs; 5) more quantitative data for risk assessment; and 6) better health surveillance data. In turn, this information can be used to better use ground truthing in combination with remote sensing technologies as predictors of waterborne disease outbreaks.

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Add-On Environmental Leadership 1/2Obama’s leadership on adaptation spurs global environmental cooperation – legislative backing key to sending a global signalDon Shepard 10, Natural Resources/Water Resources University Laboratory Teacher & Former Financial Representative and Army National Guard Accountant “U.S. Environmental Policy and Leadership”, Bright Hub, 1-6

The Bush administration’s failure to see the big picture in reference to global environmental change can clearly be seen in the resulting outcomes of his eight years as president. The withdrawal of the U.S. from the Kyoto treaty is both an important symbol of American isolationism from Europe and a direct link as to why the country (and perhaps the world as a whole) has not reduced greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants that affect the global environment. The Kyoto agreement is not without flaws but the unwillingness to negotiate, or inaction, was not conducive to a good outcome for the global environment. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) the United States greenhouse gas emissions went up by 1.4% in 2007. An article in the LA times states carbon dioxide emissions rose by nearly 2.0% in the U.S. in 2007 while Denmark’s went down by 8%, the U.K. and Germany 3%, and France and Australia 2%. Granted, this is only a single year, but considering the breadth of the consequences and that Bush had been in office since 2000, these numbers sum up rather well the effect of his administration on global environmental change. The ironic nature of the Bush administration’s response to environmental change is that the best aspect of it is reflected in policy’s that did not take effect. The administration made a habit of changing environmental regulations, many of which have been overturned by the Supreme Court. It's a tribute to our system that these efforts were not allowed to come to fruition. An example is the blocking of “changes to the rules that govern what kind of logging, mining or other activities can be allowed in national forests.” (Shogren, 2007) Carol Browner, head of the EPA in the Clinton administration and Obama energy “czarina”, is quoted as saying: "As dreadful as the Bush administration has been with respect to clean

air and forests and all these environmental issues, the courts have been really our savior. And have time and time again in the last years [it has] stepped in." (Shogren, 2007) Another example of Bush environmental policy being thwarted is President Obama’s retracting of regulations inserted by Bush before he left office. One such regulation “would have opened 2 million acres of public land in Wyoming,

Colorado, and Utah for oil-shale drilling.” (O'Carroll, 2009) It appears that Bush was mired in the old ways of pitting the environment against the economy. In an April 2008 speech Bush states “The Kyoto Protocol would have required the United States to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of this agreement, however, would have been to limit our economic growth…” (The White House Office of the Press

Secretary, 2008) I maintain that this did not have to be, and that Obama has offered a glaring contrast to this outdated thinking. Obama campaigned on stimulating the economy in part by creating “green” jobs and fostering energy efficiency that will both save money and reduce fossil fuel use. There are numerous goals and programs of the new administration that were never considered by the Bush administration. These include a national Renewable Portfolio Standard, proposing a carbon cap and trade system, and already making it so states such as California can pass their own automobile fuel mileage standards that will likely be followed by other states. One of the biggest and perhaps controversial measures thus far is the April Environmental Protection Agency ruling making carbon dioxide a pollutant. A fairly novel idea being studied is to provide incentives for land owners (and money for planting in government owned forest land) to plant trees that can provide sinks for carbon. This is being carried out by a new department called the Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets. (Wilkinson, 2009) Even with these goals and very early achievements it is unclear if the overall “political will”, no matter how

different from the last eight years, is sufficient to tackle the challenges of global environmental change, particularly when the will of the

presidential administration may not be enough. There are many representatives who do not share Obama’s enthusiasm for environmental issues. As pointed out previously, there have already been compromises made that have decreased funding for environmental initiatives. The American people can help by not letting the environmental agenda once again take a back seat, though only time will tell just how strong the will and influence of the Obama administration is. The U.S. is the world superpower. I argue that the latest world economic troubles only serve to accentuate the extent to which this is true, as economies of the world are suffering due to the domino effect triggered by the collapse of the U.S. housing market. The Kyoto treaty was only a piece of paper without the U.S. on board. The other major polluting nations such as China and India will not take the problem of global environmental change seriously until America does. Copenhagen is a chance to right the ship before it is too late. Our nation is just as capable of steering the ship in the right direction as it is in the wrong direction. This means allowing Earth to take the helm, and remembering humanity adapts to her, not her to humanity. Dissapointment seems to be the predominant reaction from environmental organizations to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. Indeed, no binding agreement, or even a pledge to make a

binding agreement in 2010 was achieved. This was not, however, the true test of the Obama administration's environmental policy. The real test is whether Obama can get a legitimate climate bill through the Senate. U.S. environmental leadership can still be the beacon it needs to be with a strong message from our lawmakers.

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Add-On Environmental Leadership 2/2US environmental leadership’s key to prevent extinction – necessary to address the collapse of Biodiversity, Oceans, and Soil Ashok Khosla 9, IUCN President, International Union for Conservation of Nature, (“A new President for the United States: We have a dream”, 1-29-09)A rejuvenated America, with a renewed purpose, commitment and energy to make its contribution once again towards a better world could well be the turning point that can reverse the current decline in the state of the global economy, the health of its life support systems and the morale of people everywhere. This extraordinary change in regime brings with it the promise of a deep change in attitudes and aspirations of Americans, a change that will lead, hopefully, to new directions in their nation's

policies and action. In particular, we can hope that from being a very reluctant partner in global discussions, especially on issues relating to

environment and sustainable development, the United States will become an active leader in international efforts to address the Millennial threats now confronting civilization and even the survival of the human species.

For the conservation of biodiversity, so essential to maintaining life on Earth, this promise of change has come not a moment too soon. It would be a mistake to put all of our hopes on the shoulder of one young man, however capable he might be. The environmental challenges the world is facing cannot be addressed by one country, let alone by one man. At the same time, an inspired US President guided by competent people, who does not shy away from exercising the true responsibilities and leadership his country is capable of, could do a lot to spur the international community into action. To paraphrase one of his illustrious predecessors, "the world asks for action and action now." What was

true in President Roosevelt's America 77 years ago is even more appropriate today. From IUCN's perspective, the first signals are encouraging. The US has seriously begun to discuss constructive engagement in climate change debates. With Copenhagen a mere 11 months away,

this commitment is long overdue and certainly very welcome. Many governments still worry that if they set tough standards to control carbon emissions, their industry and agriculture will become uncompetitive, a fear that leads to a foot-dragging "you go first" attitude that is blocking progress. A positive intervention by the United States could provide the vital catalyst that moves the basis of the present negotiations beyond the narrowly defined national interests that lie at the heart of the current impasse. The logjam in international negotiations on climate change should not be difficult to break if the US were to lead the industrialized countries to agree that much of their wealth has been acquired at the expense of the environment (in this case greenhouse gases emitted over the

past two hundred years) and that with the some of the benefits that this wealth has brought, comes the obligation to deal with the

problems that have resulted as side-effects. With equitable entitlement to the common resources of the planet, an agreement that is fair and acceptable to all nations should be easy enough to achieve. Caps on emissions and sharing of energy efficient

technologies are simply in the interest of everyone, rich or poor. And both rich and poor must now be ready to adopt less destructive technologies – based on renewables, efficiency and sustainability – both as a goal with intrinsic merit and also as an example to others. But climate is not the only critical global environmental issue that this new administration

will have to deal with. Conservation of biodiversity, a crucial prerequisite for the wellbeing of all humanity, no less

America, needs as much attention, and just as urgently. The United States' self-interest in conserving living natural resources strongly converges with the global common good in every sphere: in the oceans, by arresting the precipitate decline of fish stocks and the alarming rise of acidification; on land, by regenerating the health of our soils, forests and rivers; and in the atmosphere by reducing the massive emission of pollutants from our wasteful industries, construction, agriculture and transport systems.

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Add- On: Health (No Impact)

Improved capacity key to monitoring threats to human health. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]The average life of people living in 21st century has been twice as long as the people living last century. Improvement of environmental factors such as sanitation and

clean water, the propagation and breakout of infectious disaster, etc, is an important factor to increase the life. For those diseases, such as infectious diseases, that are influenced by environmental factors, the application of earth observing system provides an additional avenue, by which the environmental information related to diseases can be extracted and then transformed into measures of environment factors impacting human health and well-being [9]. For example, West Nile Virus (WNV) was first detected in the United States from tissues of dead birds in New York City in 1999, but it originated from Africa in 1937. Our research group has deployed an initial research in mosquito vector surveillance and control via the integration of Landsat-7 ETM+ imagery in combination with the other ancillary data (such as USGS DEM, Radarsat SAR imagery) to estimate the spatial distribution and density of mosquito populations and measured environmental factors related to mosquito habitant e.g., land surface temperature, rainfall, vegetation index [2]. The research results demonstrated that the improvement must be carried out via superior temporal resolution imagery because some adult mosquito life cycle, e.g., California mosquito, is only 10 days at 80° F, and 14 days at 70° F, and some of adult male mosquitoes is 6-7 days (some of adult female mosquitoes is 2-16 weeks), while the Landsat 7 ETM+ repeat cycle is 16 days, which do not cover an entire life cycle of mosquito. MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) onboard the Terra satellite provides a unique chances for investigating short life cycle targets to improve and

enhance our understanding to mosquito breeding because of its 1.2 day temporal resolution and high spectral resolution (36 bands). However the ground resolution of MODIS is too low so that it is hard to obtain high density of parameters related to mosquito vectors.

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Add- On: Famine (No Impact)

Improved Earth monitoring satellite capability key to sustainable ag, food. Guoqing Zhou, Batten College of Engineering and Technology, Old Dominion University, 2007. [“From Global Earth Observation System of Satellites to Intelligent Earth Observing Satellite System for its Social Benefit,” SPRS Commission Technique I. Symposium, Marne-la-Vallée , FRANCE]

World population will increase by roughly 50% in the next 50 years, which presents increasing demands on crucial resources like food [15]. Food product is influenced by factors, such as water and weather patterns in the changing climatic conditions, agricultural technologies, market forces and investment [14]. Agriculturists around world measure information related to food products, such as soil type, timely and accurate seasonal and longer-term trends of climatic conditions, e.g., temperature, humidity, and rainfall patterns using earth observing system. Although the current high resolution satellite imagery can provide tremendous knowledge to generate forecast for the food product, the improvement of observations, models, and predictions of critical parameters (such as weather, salinity, erosion and soil loss, fires, pests and invasive species) are essential to help us to mitigate these effects on farms.

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Add- On: Famine- 1AR Extension

Plan key to solve famineWigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

Earth observation systems have been used in some form or another by the agricultural sector for quite some time. Modern uses of Earth observations include measurement of product performance, crop yields, and the effectiveness of drought-resistant crop strains, seeds, and germplasms. Earth observations have been particularly valuable in understanding when, what, and why something happened with a particular crop. Earth observations are used to determine why a given customer’s specific crop did not perform as

expected and for the environmental stewardship of genetically modified crops used in the field. More recently, as growing demand for biofuels has precipitated a global food crisis, the need for agricultural companies and government planners to access Earth observation products to look at trends over cultivated areas around the world has become imperative.

Remote Sensing Satellites are key to agricultural predictions and resource managementSatellite Imaging Corporation 2008 [Satellite Imaging Corporation, is the official Value Added Reseller (VAR) of imaging and geospatial data, “Agriculture”, http://www.satimagingcorp.com/svc/agriculture.html]

With increasing population pressure throughout the world and the need for increased agricultural production there is a definite need for improved management of the world's agricultural resources. To make this happen it is first necessary to obtain reliable data on not only the types, but also

the quality, quantity and location of these resources. Satellite or Aerial Remote Sensing (RS) technology has been and always will continue to be a very important factor in the improvement of the present systems of acquiring and generating agricultural and resources data. Agriculture surveys are presently conducted throughout the world in order to gather information and statistics on crops, rangeland, livestock and other related agricultural resources.

This information of data is most important for the implementation of effective management decisions. Agricultural survey is needed for planning and allocation of the limited resources to different sectors of the economy. Satellite Imaging Corporation provides satellite imagery data at different spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions for agriculture and crop assessment,

crop health, change detection, environmental analysis, irrigated landscape mapping, yield determination and soils analysis. Scheduling and timing of image acquisition is very important and will hinge on the main goals and the type of information that the end user is hoping to gain. Images can show variations in organic matter and drainage patterns. Soils higher in organic matter can be differentiated from lighter sandier soil that has a lower organic matter content.

This Geospatial information is valuable when used in conjunction with ancillary data to define management zones for a field. Once data has been collected it can be implemented into a mapping environment such as GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for management and control of agricultural resources

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Add- On: Oceans

Plan key to ocean survivalCommittee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications from


Maintaining healthy and productive Oceans

A warming ocean raises sea level, alters precipitation patterns, may cause stronger storms, and may accelerate the melting of sea ice and glaciers. The increased acidity of Earth’s oceans due to rising CO2 levels portends dramatic adverse impacts for ocean biological productivity. These changes will be critical for all, but for none more than those living in coastal regions.

Over the last few decades a concerted effort to develop satellite measurements of the ocean has revolutionized understanding of ocean circulation, air-sea interaction, and ocean productivity. Just at the point that capabilities have been realized to make major contributions to climate predictions on times scales of seasons to decades and to monitor the changes in the ocean’s health, we are in danger of losing many ocean satellite observations because of programmatic failures or a lack of will to sustain the measurements.

Ocean destruction will ensure planetary extinction Craig 03 – Associate Professor at Indiana University School of Law[Robin Kundis, “Taking Steps Toward Marine Wilderness Protection”, McGeorge Law Review, Winter, 34 McGeorge L. Rev. 155, LN]Biodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems, but these arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values - the most economically valuable ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide - coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other environmental fluctuations, services worth more than ten times the reefs' value for food production. 856 Waste treatment is another significant, non-extractive ecosystem function

that intact coral reef ecosystems provide. 857 More generally, "ocean ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as other lessabundant but necessary elements." 858 In a very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the planet's ability to support life. Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystem's ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity, "indicating that more diverse ecosystems are more stable." 859 Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity. [*265] Most ecologists agree that the complexity of interactions and degree of interrelatedness among component species is higher on coral reefs than in any other marine environment. This implies that the ecosystem functioning that produces the most highly valued components is also complex and that many otherwise insignificant species have strong effects on sustaining the rest of the reef system. 860 Thus, maintaining and restoring the biodiversity of marine ecosystems is critical to maintaining and restoring the ecosystem services that they provide. Non-use biodiversity values for marine ecosystems have been calculated in the wake of marine disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. 861 Similar calculations could derive preservation values for marine wilderness. However, economic value, or economic value equivalents, should not be "the sole or even primary justification for conservation of ocean ecosystems. Ethical arguments also have considerable force and merit." 862 At the forefront of such arguments should be a recognition of how little we know about the sea - and about the actual effect of human activities on marine ecosystems. The United States has traditionally failed to protect marine ecosystems because it was difficult to detect anthropogenic harm to the oceans, but we now know that such harm is occurring - even though we are not completely sure about causation or about how to fix every problem. Ecosystems like the NWHI coral reef ecosystem should inspire lawmakers and policymakers to admit that most of the time we really do not know what we are doing to the sea and hence should be preserving marine wilderness

whenever we can - especially when the United States has within its territory relatively pristine marine ecosystems that may be unique in the world. We may not know much aboutthe sea, but we do know this much: if we kill the ocean we kill ourselves, and we will take most of the biosphere with us. The Black Sea is almostdead, 863 its once-complex and productive ecosystem almost entirely replaced by a monoculture of comb jellies, "starving out fish and dolphins, emptying fishermen's nets, and converting the web of life into brainless, wraith-like blobs of jelly." 864 More importantly, the Black Sea is not necessarily unique.

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AT: DA - Non-Unique

NASA successfully sent a ocean-monitoring satellite and is planning another launch in 2013.William G. Hartenstein June 10 (2011, NASA launches satellite at Vandenberg to measure ocean salinity Ventura County Star http://www.vcstar.com/news/2011/jun/10/nasa-launches-satellite-at-vandenberg-to-measure/#ixzz1QgTmiLvG )

AP/ William G. Hartenstein A Delta II rocket launched Friday with the Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft payload from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc. The rocket

carrying an Earth-observing satellite is on a mission to measure the saltiness of the ocean from space. After failing twice in a row to put an earth sciences satellite into orbit, NASA successfully launched this morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base a satellite designed to measure salinity in the Earth's oceans. The Aquarius/SAC-D mission, a joint effort on the part of NASA and CONAE, Argentina's space science agency, lifted off on schedule at 7:20 a.m. today at the base near Lompoc, reached a speed of over 10,000 mph within minutes, and was in orbit over the poles an hour later. NASA officials said the Aquarius established communication with its handlers on the ground in Florida and unfurled its solar power arrays. Due to heavy fog, only the first two or three seconds of ignition was visible to observers watching from a field about two miles away. But a large contingent of Argentinean officials and media representatives chatted excitedly as the 137-foot Delta II rocket rumbled briefly and vanished into the clouds. "Everyone in Argentina has been following the launch of this mission on television and public media," said Hector Timerman, Argentina's foreign minister. "The president was watching. This is not a success just for

the scientists, it's important to the whole country." The Argentine space agency built and will operate in conjunction with NASA the satellite platform that houses scientific instruments from five nations to collect environmental data on the Earth, its atmosphere and oceans. Measuring the oceans' salinity will help scientists better understand the impact of climate change. The largest and most significant of those instruments is the Aquarius itself. Using a combination of two instruments — a sophisticated radiometer, to measure microwave emissions from the ocean surface, and a scatterometer, to factor in ocean roughness — the Aquarius will measure the salinity of the surface of the ocean over a ribbon about 150 kilometers, or 93 miles, wide. The satellite will survey the entire globe every seven days. This will allow oceanographers to map ocean currents more accurately and completely than is possible now with an existing network of ship measurements and ocean buoys focused mostly on northern oceans. The salinity measurements will also allow scientists to better understand how weather patterns could be altered by climate change. "Is the global water cycle changing? Many climate forecasting models suggest that it will change as the climate warms up," explained the lead scientist on the mission, Gary Lagerloef of the Earth and Space Research group in Seattle. "Measuring changes in

rainfall over the ocean is very difficult, but salinity is an important parameter that gives us an indication of what is going on." Lagerloef and other climate researchers are eager to see what is happening with rainfall and evaporation in areas such as the Pacific near Indonesia, which is one of the wettest parts of the world, and where the El Niño ocean pattern that often brings wet winters to California originates. "El Niño, La Niña, and other natural climate events produce huge regional shifts in rainfall and temp and have a large salinity footprint," said Bill Patzert, an oceans and climate expert at JPL, not affiliated with the Aquarius mission. "Using Aquarius salinities, other NASA data, and

state-of-the-art modeling, the aim is to improve our skill in forecasting these severe climate events that impact everyone on the planet." Two previous earth satellite launches from Vandenberg failed when the clamshell fairing that protects the satellite during launch did not open. In March, the launch of the

satellite that was meant to measure solar radiation failed, and a satellite that was going to measure carbon emissions failed last year. Both satellites fell to Earth, at a cost of $700 million, according to NASA figures. Both those missions flew on a relatively new rocket, the Taurus XL. Friday's mission was powered by the larger and more expensive Delta II rocket, part of a launch system that dates back to the 1960s. "This mission would not have flown on a Taurus XL, but it does fit on a Delta II," said Amit Sen, the project manager for the Aquarius mission with the NASA-affiliated Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He said the decision to use the Delta II rocket, which has put 58 satellites into orbit, including the satellite that powers Google

Earth, was made years ago. Although NASA is scheduled to replace one of the fallen satellites with a launch in 2013, NASA has exercised an option in its contract that will allow it to use a different rocket than the Taurus XL if it chooses, according to Michael Frelich, head of NASA's earth sciences division in Washington, D.C. The Aquarius mission cost about $400 million, according to Charles Gay, a NASA administrator.

Obama pushing environmental satellites now. New Scientist 2010 (Feb 2, “NASA satellite could pave way for policing CO2 emissions” http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18467-nasa-satellite-could-pave-way-for-policing-co2-emissions.html)

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory was lost in February 2009 when a protective fairing atop the probe's Taurus XL rocket failed to separate

during launch, and the satellite fell into the Pacific Ocean. The loss was seen as a setback by climate scientists, who hoped the probe's unprecedented spatial resolution and sensitivity would help reveal how the Earth absorbs and emits carbon dioxide.

Less than half of the carbon released since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution has ended up in the atmosphere, but the carbon "sinks" that have absorbed the remainder are not well understood. The satellite would have had the added bonus of testing whether space probes could be used to measure carbon dioxide emissions from cities and power plants, the US National Research Council said in a letter report to NASA administrator Charles Bolden last year. Now, the White House has given the green light for a carbon copy to be flown, providing $170 million towards the effort in its proposed 2011 budget (pdf).

"The good news in this budget is the president has decided that this is an important mission for both science and understanding our climate," NASA science chief Edward Weiler said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday. The replacement, called OCO-2, could fly as early as February 2013.Sharp resolution

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Their disadvantage claims are fundamentally racist: by portraying whites as the primary victims of catastrophe, the negative reinforces the racialized American order. Goldberg 2006 (David Theo, Director, University of California Humanities Research Institute Du Bois Review (2006), 3: 83-95 “DEVASTATING DISASTERS: Race in the Shadow(s) of New Orleans”

Underlying these effects, prompting them both directly and indirectly, is a set of ideological presumptions and at least implicit discursive articulations that define racial americanization. Most basically, homogenized apartness is taken as the norm of a deracialized—a declaratively raceless—polity. It is taken as the assumed, the natural, the given. Integration, or even desegregation, accordingly comes over as unnatural, literally absurd, and irrational in the prevailing order of things, requiring intervention by the state at the cost of liberty: the freedom to choose where one lives or is educated, whom one hires or works with, where one hangs out, worships, or may be laid to rest. Racial americanists often ask what is so wrong with wanting to live only among one's own, among those culturally (and so presumptively racially) like oneself. Besides the fact that such presumed homogeneity necessarily takes for granted the coherence, purity, boundedness, and racial identity of cultural likeness, such homogeneity can only be purchased with the coin of severe repression, by purging difference and denying its influence, if not its miscegenating seed. Homogeneity produces an ethnoracial class the insistent extension of which necessitates segregation. If the suburb of Gretna, a bridge away across the Mississippi, was to maintain its self-promoting fantasy as a safe haven, the African American inhabitants of New Orleans had to be kept at arm's length by forcibly closing the bridge, even at the cost

of drowning those seeking refuge as Katrina floodwaters lapped at their waists (Cadenhead 2005). The second assumption is that standards of civility, sociality, morality, self-determination, and well-being are represented overwhelmingly as White, that is, as those associated with the structure of Whiteness. These are assumed as the norm, as the criteria of judgment, as representing what everyone else should aspire to. It was the Blackness of the Superdome inhabitants and street looters that the media stressed (“they are so Black,” declared Wolf Blitzer of CNN, in an ambiguous mix of paternalistic pathos and disgusting disdain

[CNN 2005]), their slothfulness and gangsterism, their lack of civility, and their inability to fend for themselves. Third, Whites are projected as the real victims of the excess of antiracist pathos (of leftist antiracist racism, of political correctness, of liberal soft-headedness, of the ideology of egalitarianism). New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was repeatedly portrayed as incompetent, as too slow to the response, as having no effective emergency plan in place. By contrast, until his incompetence proved irrepressible and he had to go, becoming the fall guy for an incompetent and morally bankrupt administration, the

narcissistically out-of-place head of FEMA, Michael Brown, was lauded publicly by the president for the “heckuva job he was doing.” We find, in a nutshell, within this contrast all the ironies surrounding affirmative action and its criticisms: a Black, democratically elected official chastised for failing to deliver emergency resources that he has repeatedly been denied, despite his plaintive pleas through the media when his official requests fell on deaf ears and empty offices; by contrast, a White, politically connected FEMA director lacking any of the competencies or qualities for the position to which he had been appointed solely because of his fundraising support for the president's re-election campaign. The deeper tragedy is that, in the New Orleans of tomorrow, a Black mayor will be far less likely to be elected because of the racial facelift the city is undergoing in its redesign. Urban regeneration and gentrification, we have long known, produce racial reapportionment and political “rectification.” The difference this time around, in contrast, say, to the DeLay-ing tactics used recently in Texas, also to devastating effect, will concern only the means of delivery. Residential segregation tends to be reflected in and reinforced by what we might call “political segregation.” African American voters tend overwhelmingly to vote for Democratic Party candidates. Of the 225 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, none is Black, and the three Hispanics are all Cuban American. Of the more than 3500 Republican members of state legislatures, just sixteen are Black and thirteen Hispanic. Democrats who are not White, by contrast, number sixty-seven in the U.S. House of Representatives, and account for 20% of Democratic state legislators. In recent presidential elections, Republicans accordingly have taken to strategies of discouraging Blacks from voting, going so far as to intimidate elderly Black people from showing up at polling booths, or requiring forms of voter identification that unduly burden poor (and so disproportionately Black or Hispanic) voters (Haines 2005). Thus uniformed state troopers in swing states such as Florida have asserted themselves visibly in the doorways of polling stations to remind African Americans of the historical horrors of casting a vote, and older Black people, registered Democrats all, have been visited at home by investigators on trumped-up charges of voter fraud. Even where Republicans have gestured at diversifying their voter base (much as they might their investment portfolio), their overriding strategy in the face of rapidly heterogenizing multiculture has been twofold. First, because White voters tend largely to vote Republican, to ensure that they vote in elections. And, second, to reproduce White legislative majorities—by running almost exclusively White candidates—at more or less all levels of elected government. New

Orleans is simply a more costly version of the recent Texas reapportionment strategy. By any means necessary? So, in terms of the institutionalization and reproduction of racial americanization, these new forms of segregation have managed to informally impose what used to be formally produced, both to realize and virtualize segregative exclusions. Race continues to define, globally as domestically, where one can go, what one can do, how one is seen and treated, one's social, economic, political, legal, and cultural, in short: one's daily experience and prospects. Global circulation, like local city space, is increasingly contradictory: as there is greater heterogeneity and multiplicity, so segregation is refined; as visible openness and accessibility are enlarged, so exclusionary totalization is extended; as interaction is increased, so access is monitored, traversal is policed, and intercourse comes under surveillance. As boundaries and borders become more permeable, they are refixed in the social imaginary, shifting from the visible to the virtual, from the formalized to the experiential, from the legal to the cultural and economic.

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AT: DAsNational (including now “homeland”) security has become the abiding insomnia of American paranoia. Where segregation has been privatized, along with much else in American life, its logic has come to dominate U.S. foreign policy. Segregation was never about the complete dislocation of one racially conceived group from another—a final solution of another sort—so much as it was conceived as a logic of ongoing control. Blacks were to be excluded from the social life of Whiteness for all purposes other than menial services, demeaning labor, and sometimes social entertainment, including sexual experimentation or satisfaction. The logic in the case of New Orleans is of the same order. One's presence is warranted only in so far and for so long as one services some material condition or ideological figuration of local urban or national interests, even if simply to take the edge off the charge of racism, which everyone cringes at, even as they perpetuate the structure and practices of its reproduction. Racial americanization is, in the deepest sense, a form of crisis creation and control, manipulation and management, personally and politically, individually and institutionally, ideologically and representationally. In short, the state, in the silently circulated name of racial americanization, is being deva-stated. Compassionate conservativism is passionate only about forcing a narrowly ideological agenda

on us all, and compassionate about nothing else than the calculation of narrow self-interest. The state is in the process of being structurally transformed from a robust set of institutional apparatuses concerned above all to advance the welfare of its citizens into a structure troubled only with securing the most elevated private interests from the perceived contamination and threat of those deemed for various reasons not to belong, to have little or no standing, the welfare of whom is calculated to cost too much, economically or politically. New Orleans has simply drawn this contemporary socioracial dynamic and its debilitating effects momentarily out of the shadows and placed it into the blinding light of day.

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AT: Economy

Weather monitoring is key to prevent economic and violent instability worldwide.Wigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

The stresses on the Earth’s systems are growing more severe at an ever-increasing pace, adding to the already significant economic variability arising from current challenges such as weather forecasting and resource management. The effects of these added pressures are already being felt and will have major implications for national security, the economy, natural resource management, and the security of

water, food, and energy for decades to come. Today, U.S. public- (civil and national security) and private-sector users who want to understand global change or identify ways to predict, prevent, and mitigate its impacts are all intrinsically reliant on civil Earth observation systems (used in modeling, computation, and decision support tools) and data (collected from sensors on satellites, unpiloted

aircraft, buoys, and other platforms). Earth observation products— including satellite weather information—provide, at a minimum, an additional $30 billion to the U.S. economy annually. In the future, Earth observation capabilities will be even more critical for governments and industry to monitor, understand, and adapt more quickly to global change and track and respond to consequences of past, present, and future policy choices. The national security community is increasingly concerned about the impacts of global change leading to instabilities and conflicts within, between, and among nations. This applies to stable as well as volatile regions.

Plan key to private sector stabilityWigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

Concerns about global change, the vulnerability of societal infrastructure to sea-level rise and coastal inundations; changes in frequency, intensity, and probability of extreme events; and pro- longed extreme conditions such as droughts have long been of paramount concern, often considered unavoidable risks and unexpected “Acts of God.” However, in recent years, Earth observations have provided a key to better understanding of these events and in so doing have given the private sector an unprecedented opportunity to predict, manage, and mitigate such risks. Beyond more traditional business issues, greater private-sector interest in good corporate citizenship has increased attention to changes in air and water quality, loss of biodiversity, and spread of tropical diseases—other areas addressed by Earth observations. As a result, industries are increasingly using and relying on publicly financed Earth observation systems to help them make critical business decisions related to current activities and future plans.

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Plan key to the economy.Wigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

Recent studies have estimated that between 39 percent6 and 16.2 percent of the total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) of $14.2 trillion is weather sensitive—some $5.5 to $2.3 trillion—an amount on the same scale as the entire 2009 U.S. federal budget. According to a CSIS analysis, Earth observation products—including satellite weather information—provide, at a minimum, an additional $30 billion to the U.S. economy annually.8 This is across more than 10 sectors, including financial firms, insurance and reinsurance firms, the transportation industry, energy companies, and manufacturing. It should be noted that, much like Global Positioning System (GPS) and telecommunications, the amount of economic utility that can be derived from Earth observation systems grows as new applications and products are created. Given federal Earth observation expenditures of approximately $2.5 billion, the annual rate of return exceeds 10 to 1, comparable

to the return on investment for satellite telecommunications. Scaling this up from the $13.13 trillion U.S. GDP to a global economy of $66 trillion, Earth observations may generate approximately $170 billion of annual economic activity. Hence, Earth observations appear to be a global public good. This analysis is considered to be quite conservative. It was based on a steady state environment, including only weather and climate effects and ignoring solid Earth and other types of Earth observations, and it did not take into account impacts from disasters. Functionally, the ultimate value of vastly increased capabilities in drought, climate, storms, blizzard, insect infestations and flood prediction; mineral, forest, fisheries, water, agriculture, grazing, fossil fuel, and wildlife management; or better natural disaster prediction, is in aggregate, very hard to estimate.

To maximize the benefits of Earth observations, the private sector has expressed a need for more accurate information at regional and local scales; higher spatial and temporal data resolutions; and a better understanding of the changing hazards, consequences, assets, and resiliencies associated with global change. They also point to the need for accuracy and timeliness of the information. More importantly, with the reliance on Earth observations growing, the private sector is concerned about how dependent it may become on a system that may be decaying—particularly one that is not strongly committed to long-term data acquisition and continuity. Industry requires continuity of these capabilities and more certainty about their availability in the future.

Plan key to stave off economic losses due to disasters.Wigbels et. Al., 2008 (Lyn, G. Ryan Faith, and Vincent Sabathier; Senior Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Center for Aerospace Policy Research at George Mason University; research analyst at the space foundation at CSIS; senior associate with the CSIS Technology and Public Policy Program EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND GLOBAL CHANGE Why? Where Are We? What Next?, A Report of CSIS Space Initiatives, csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/080725_wigbels_earthobservation_web.pdf)

One-third of total insurance risk is related to catastrophes. This risk has been growing at a rate of 10 percent to 15 percent per year and has doubled over the last five years (this alone could suggest that the need for investment in Earth observation capabilities has also doubled). In 2004 and 2005, financial losses directly attributable to natural and manmade catastrophes were $141 billion and $225 billion, respectively (in 2008 dollars). Most insurance companies use modeling companies

to assess risk and have changed from looking retrospectively at historical weather data and simply extending past trends indefinitely into the future to acquiring Earth observation data and projecting future losses using sophisticated computer models. Recently, the global insurance industry has accepted the impact of global change on insurance rates not only for disasters. The survival of the insurance industry relies on its ability to make predictions of the economic impact of future events, and their financial interests are interdependent with understanding global change. Never- theless, the insurance industry, particularly in the United States, has had a limited commitment to research and is wholly dependent on public sources of Earth observation data.

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Plan key to economic competitivenessCommittee on Earth Science and Applications from Space 2007 (National Research Council, Earth Science and Applications from


improving Weather forecastsTesting and systematically improving forecasts of weather with respect to meteorological, chemical, and radiative change places unprecedented demands on technical innovation, computational capacity, and developments in assimilation and modeling that are required for effective and timely decision and response structures.

Weather forecasting has set in place the clearest and most effective example of the operational structure required, but future progress depends on a renewed emphasis on innovation and strategic investment in weather forecasting in its broader context. The United States has lost leadership to the Europeans in the international arena in an array of pivotal capabilities, such as medium-range weather forecasting. Without leadership in these and other forecasting capabilities, the United States stands to lose economic competitiveness.

Remote sensing gives both tangible and intangible (priceless) benefits and is largely cost-effective.

Harris, 03, Department of Geography, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, UK (Space Policy, “Current policy issues in remote sensing: report by the International Policy Advisory Committee of ISPRS”)

The benefits of remote sensing are both tangible and intangible. The intangible benefits are far more numerous than the tangible ones and

typically are long term social benefits, not easy to convert to monetary values. In India, for example, satellite remote sensing data have been extensively used in many fields of development such as mapping, environmental impact assessment, disaster management, pollution control, communications, environmental forecasting, urban planning, source-finding for drinking water and associated water conservation planning, in addition to research applications including global change. All of these applications are helping immensely in the Indian national effort toward sustainable development. The Indian experience indicates that, when compared to conventional methods, satellite remote sensing methods are cheaper and faster at least by a factor of 2–3, and more in some cases. The social benefits are intangible.

Depending on the area of application, some benefits could be immediate, some short term and many are long term. For example, during the 1970s, coastal cyclones on the Indian east coast resulted in thousands of deaths. Since the 1970s very few deaths have been reported because of improved meteorological forecasting combined with early warning systems that help in evacuating the people of the area to shelter homes. This is an example of immediate benefit, here saving human lives, which cannot be equated with monetary benefit. Locating drinking water sources for villages (with no existing source) is a short-term benefit. Arresting land degradation and restoring its past productive status is a long-term benefit. Benefits are often expressed as economic benefits. However, a pure GDP approach only recognizes the “kinetic energy” of a nation to produce wealth, it does not properly value the “potential energy”, i.e. the wealth stored in its people and natural resources. If there were a way to value this potential energy (like oil in the ground) and apply remote sensing information as an “economic multiplier” more investment could be made or at the least justified. There is a role for

international organisations to develop improved means of estimating the wealth of nations. Satellite remote sensing data can be seen as an information raw material on which wealth can be built.

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AT: Economy

Status Quo is cutting weather satellite funding but the plan avoids restarting the program which is key to saving moneyNYT 2011 [Justin Gillis, Environmental Science Reporter for the New York Times, “ Weather Satellites on the Chopping Block “, NYT, 4/14/11, http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/weather-satellites-on-the-chopping-block/]

As my colleagues Eric Lichtblau, Ron Nixon and I report in summary form in Thursday morning’s paper, the budget deal moving through Capitol Hill slashes funds that the Obama administration requested for a satellite program considered vital for the nation’s weather forecasting. That raises the prospect of less accurate forecasts and other problems, some of them potentially life-threatening, starting in 2016. Jane

Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, warned at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that the cutbacks would probably lead to a serious gap in satellite data, undermining National Weather Service forecasts. Research by her agency suggests that without the type of capability that the proposed satellites were expected to provide, the weather service might fumble forecasts of future events similar to the huge snowstorms that hit Washington and New York the last two winters. “It’s a big risk,” said Daniel Sobien, head of the union that represents government weather forecasters. Forecasters would still have access to data from satellites not affected by the cutbacks, but those would offer less detailed coverage of the country, which is

why the weather forecasts would become less accurate. The potential coverage gap would be limited to 18 months or so — but only if Congress agreed to restore as much as $1 billion in funds needed for the satellite program in the budget year that begins in October. Many people on Capitol Hill, including some Republicans, support doing that, but given the pressures on the budget and the political tensions over federal spending, that is by no means a certainty. So the situation raises the prospect of a deterioration in weather forecasts that might last for years. Dr. Lubchenco warned that

even if Congress restarted the program, the government would probably wind up spending $3 or $4 for every dollar saved by halting it this year. “We have to cancel the contracts — we have to let people go,” she said. “These are very sophisticated, skilled workers. Then you need to bring the programs back up.” Satellites and other government-run instruments provide virtually all weather data used to make forecasts in the United States,

including those on television, radio and in newspapers. Like all satellites, weather satellites wear out and have to be replaced regularly. Planning and building them takes years, and any hiccup in that program means the government can lose access to vital data a few years down the road. A coverage gap is not an absolute certainty; it will depend on how quickly the satellites that are already in the sky in 2016 wear out. But with the cutback, Dr.

Lubchenco said, a gap will become pretty likely. The program that is being cut is an attempt by the Obama administration to clean up a decade long mess in putting new weather satellites into orbit. A plan by the Clinton and Bush administrations to combine military and civilian weather satellites ended in failure after cost overruns and mismanagement, exasperating

Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The Obama administration’s recovery efforts have won support in principle on both sides of the aisle, but winning money has been far harder in a year when few programs are being spared from cutbacks. It’s not just essential weather information that is at risk, Dr. Lubchenco said in testimony on Wednesday. The weather satellites pick up emergency beacons used by wilderness hikers, boaters and others who venture into remote areas: nearly 300 people were rescued this way in 2010 alone. A gap in satellite coverage could mean that it would take hours longer for rescuers to

find people who get into trouble. In some cases, that time interval could be the difference between life and death. “That data gap will have very serious consequences to our ability to do severe-storm warnings, long-term forecasts and search and rescue,” Dr. Lubchenco said.

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Politics: Controversy Inevitable

Massive partisan battles over climate change are inevitableAndrew Restuccia 2-3 [2011, The Hill, “Obama to unveil energy agenda amid mounting GOP challenges”, http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/141879-obama-to-unveil-energy-agenda-amid-uncertainty-in-congress]

President Obama will outline his latest broad energy-policy goal Thursday amid uncertainty in Congress about energy legislation and mounting Republican challenges to the administration’s climate change agenda. In remarks at Penn

State University on Thursday, Obama will detail a plan to make commercial buildings more energy-efficient. The central goal of the

proposal will be reducing the overall energy intensity of commercial buildings by 20 percent by 2020. The proposal comes as the Obama administration grapples with how to effectively achieve its energy policy goals now that hopes for a climate change bill have been dashed, prospects for significant energy legislation are murky and the new House Republican majority is angling to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) agenda. The fate of the energy-efficiency proposal, much of which is subject to congressional approval, is unclear, given the new House Republican majority. The White House has proposed paying for the plan with money saved from eliminating

oil tax breaks, but such a proposal faces opposition from Republicans in both chambers. Obama will outline a multi-part plan for making commercial buildings more efficient, which, if completed, would save business owners more than $40 billion per year, according to the White House. As part of the

plan, the Small Business Administration will work to encourage lenders to give more financing for commercial retrofits. In addition, the administration will call on Congress to provide grants for local and state governments that streamline building codes and regulations as well as provide new tax credits for energy-efficient buildings. The president will call on corporate executives and heads of major universities to retrofit their buildings to save energy. He will also announce that he is using existing authorities to establish a program to train workers to retrofit buildings.

Obama will detail the cost of his proposal in his upcoming budget request. A senior administration official and a spokesman for the White House Office of Management and Budget both refused to give a cost estimate of the proposal. “There is a lot of information in the budget and it will be out in

due course,” the senior administration official said. A White House plan to eliminate tax breaks for the oil industry will pay for the energy-efficiency proposal, the administration official said. The oil industry tax breaks proposal will also be outlined in Obama’s budget request. But some

lawmakers, even a key Senate Democrat, have said that the proposal to eliminate oil industry tax breaks has little chance of passing, complicating the White House’s plans to pay for its energy-efficiency proposal. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said Monday, “I would be surprised if [the proposal to eliminate oil tax breaks] got a great deal of traction in the 112th Congress.” In another

indication that Obama’s energy agenda will face significant roadblocks in Congress, House Republicans are also raising concerns about a broad proposal to generate the country’s electricity from low-carbon sources. Obama announced the proposal to get 80 percent of the country’s electricity from wind, solar, nuclear, natural gas and coal with carbon capture technology at his State of the Union address. House Republicans have raised concerns that Obama’s “clean energy standard” will give too many advantages to renewable energy.

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Politics: Controversy inevitable

Massive controversy inevitable: Debt fightsNew York Times June 30, 2011, (Obama Shows Emotion, With Political Consequences By MICHAEL D. SHEAR)

The rap on President Obama is that he’s too professorial, too cool, too prone to dissecting a problem logically and then attempting to explain it to the public. If that’s the

case, then it wasn’t Mr. Obama who stood in front of the news media on Wednesday. From the moment he started his prepared remarks in the East Room, it was clear that the president was frustrated with his Republican adversaries, who have spent the last several weeks accusing him of failing to lead. House Speaker John A. Boehner did it again moments after the news conference, saying the president “has been AWOL.”

White House officials say that such accusations have not gotten under the president’s skin. But in the more than hour-long news conference, Mr. Obama made clear that he views the upcoming high-stakes negotiations over the nation’s debt as a test for the Republicans of the very leadership skills they say he lacks. Mr. Obama did not lay down a “red line” beyond which he would refuse to negotiate. But he repeatedly dared Congressional Republicans to side with oil companies, hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners against the interests of the elderly, schoolchildren and the middle class. His tone throughout was defiant. The question is whether Mr. Obama’s pointed remarks about his Congressional adversaries will help jump-start the stalled debt negotiations, or will have the effect of backing each side further into a corner even as the Aug. 2 deadline for raising the nation’s borrowing capacity nears.

And it remains to be seen whether Mr. Obama, who faces a re-election battle next year, is beginning a concerted effort to push back against the Republican charges that he has failed to lead the country out of its economic mess. That charge, more than anything else, has animated the campaigns of his potential 2012 adversaries. “He conveyed an appropriate sense of urgency,” David Axelrod, one of the president’s top political advisers, said in an interview. “It’s time to bear down and get this done.” Mr. Axelrod said the purpose of the news conference was not to make personal accusations about Mr. Boehner or other legislative leaders. He said the president was hoping to “put the debate into perspective” for lawmakers and the public. But, Mr. Axelrod conceded, “his language was very direct.” Indeed it was. Showing a rarely seen passion, the president called out his rivals for their comments about him, saying they are “just not on the level” and essentially accusing them of being crybabies who walk away from the discussions when the debate gets tough. “We’re working through process, and when they decide they’re not happy with the fact that at some point you’ve got to make a choice, they just all step back and say, well, you know, the president needs to get this done,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “They need to do their job.” Mr. Obama said he was “amused” by Republican comments that he needs to show more leadership. But his remarks suggested that he was not amused at all. “Let me tell you something,” he said, describing meetings with lawmakers and his decision to put Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in charge of negotiations. “I’ve met with the leaders multiple times. At a certain point, they need to do their job.” Mr. Obama’s more aggressive, confrontational tone will probably be welcomed by many in the president’s party who have been eager for him to fight for the causes they believe in. Mr. Obama did not go far enough for some liberals, who said after the news conference that they had wanted him to make an absolute statement on the need for tax increases in any

debt deal. But the populist message from Mr. Obama during the news conference suggests that the president is preparing for battle over that issue.

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Politics: Winners Win

Winners winHalloran 10 [Liz Halloran is a Washington correspondent for NPR “For Obama, What A Difference A Week Made,” NPR April 6, https://mail.google.com/mail/?hl=en&shva=1#inbox/130ddd95992fa56a]

Amazing what a win in a major legislative battle will do for a president's spirit. (Turmoil over spending and leadership at the Republican National Committee over the past week, and the release Tuesday of a major new and largely sympathetic book about the president by New Yorker editor

David Remnick, also haven't hurt White House efforts to drive its own, new narrative.) Though the president's national job approval ratings failed to get a boost by the passage of the health care overhaul — his numbers have remained steady this year at just under 50 percent — he has earned grudging respect even from those who don't agree with his policies. "He's achieved something that virtually everyone in Washington thought he couldn't," says Henry Olsen, vice president and director of the business-

oriented American Enterprise Institute's National Research Initiative. "And that's given him confidence." The protracted health care battle looks to have taught the White House something about power, says presidential historian Gil Troy — a lesson that will inform Obama's pursuit of his

initiatives going forward. "I think that Obama realizes that presidential power is a muscle, and the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets," Troy says. "He exercised that power and had a success with health care passage, and now he wants to make sure people realize it's not just a blip on the map." The White House now has an opportunity, he says, to change the narrative that had been looming — that the Democrats would lose big in the fall midterm elections, and that Obama was looking more like one-term President Jimmy Carter than two-termer Ronald Reagan, who also managed a difficult first-term legislative win and survived his party's bad showing in the midterms. Those watching the re-emergent president in recent days say it's difficult to imagine that it was only weeks ago that Obama's domestic agenda had been given last rites, and pundits were preparing their pieces on a failed presidency. Obama himself had framed the health care debate as a referendum on his presidency. A loss would have "ruined the rest of his presidential term," says Darrell West, director of governance studies at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution. "It would have made it difficult to address other issues and emboldened his critics to claim he was a failed president." The conventional wisdom in Washington after the Democrats lost their supermajority in the U.S. Senate when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts seat long held by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy was that Obama would scale back his health care ambitions to get something passed. "I thought he was going to do what most presidents would have done — take two-thirds of a loaf and declare victory," says the AEI's Olsen. "But he doubled down and made it a vote of confidence on his presidency, parliamentary-style." "You've got to be impressed with an achievement like that," Olsen says. But Olsen is among those who argue that, long-term, Obama and his party would have been better served politically by an incremental approach to reworking the nation's health care system, something that may have been more palatable to independent voters Democrats will need in the fall. "He would have been able to show he was listening more,

that he heard their concerns about the size and scope of this," Olsen says. Muscling out a win on a sweeping health care package may have invigorated the president and provided evidence of leadership, but, his critics say, it remains to be seen whether Obama and his party can reverse what the polls now suggest is a losing issue for them. Golden Boy Tested One of the questions that has trailed Obama is how he would deal with criticism and the prospect of failure, says Troy, a McGill University history professor and visiting scholar affiliated with the bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. "He is one of those golden boys who never failed in his life, and people like that are often not used to criticism and failure," Troy says. Obama and his campaign were temporarily knocked for a loop early in the 2008 presidential campaign by then-GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's "zingers," Troy says, "and Obama was thrown off

balance again by the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat." The arc of the health care debate reminded observers that Obama is not just a product of Harvard, but also of tough Chicago politics, Troy says. "You don't travel as far and as fast as Barack Obama without having a spine of steel," he says. "He has an ability to regenerate, to come back, and knows that there is no such thing as a dirty win: a win is a win" — even if it infuriates the progressive wing of the president's party, which wanted far more sweeping

changes to the nation's health care system. GOP Stumbles Obama's new mojo has been abetted, in a way, by high-profile troubles at the Republican National Committee. RNC Chairman Michael Steele has been under fire over the past week for his spending on private jets and limousines, and a staffer resigned after submitting to the committee a nearly $2,000 tab for a visit by young party members to a risque

Los Angeles nightclub. The disarray intensified Monday with the resignation of the committee's chief of staff, and growing anger among top GOP strategists and fundraisers. "Steele has kept Republicans off-message," says West, of Brookings. "Every story about RNC spending is one less story about their views on health care at a time when news coverage has shifted in a more favorable direction." The distraction continued Monday when detractors accused Steele of playing the race card after he told ABC News that as an African American, he, like Obama, is being held to a higher standard. White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs, when asked about Steele's assertion, said the RNC chairman's problem "isn't the race card, it's the credit card." The controversy, Olsen says, hasn't been good for the Republicans' preparations for elections in terms of money and organization. But he doesn't view it as "a voter issue." How Win Translates When Reagan won his tough legislative battle in the early 1980s, it was over tax cuts, something voters saw as directly related to the then-dismal economy. Obama has long made a case for health care reform as a big piece of economic reform, but it's a difficult argument to make to voters, Olsen says, particularly when many of the

health care law's major provisions don't go into effect for another four years. But observers like Troy say they believe that though initially unrelated, a boost in employment among Americans would encourage voters to look more favorably on the health care overhauls. "The perceived success of health care legislation rides on job creation," Troy says. Economists have recently declared the nation's recession, which began in 2007, over. But the unemployment rate has remained stubbornly at just under 10 percent. "I think he understands he's in a crucial period of his presidency," Olsen says. "He's taken a lot of risks, and there's not immediate rewards." Obama faces continuing tests on other big domestic issues, including Wall Street reform, the economy and climate change, as well as myriad foreign policy challenges ranging from testy relations with Israel and uncertainties about Iran's nuclear capabilities, to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Late last month, the administration and Russia agreed to a new nuclear arms treaty that is expected to be signed Thursday in advance of an international summit in

Washington. The world is waiting, Troy says, to see how the president's renewed confidence plays out on the international stage. But the newly invigorated president continues to encourage voters to wait and see what his efforts produce.

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Politics: Climate Change key to base

Confronting the GOP on climate change is key – his base is more essential to his success than RepublicansKara Rowland 11, [Washington Times, “Obama’s base eager to do battle”, 1-4, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/4/obamas-base-eager-to-do-battle/]

Before he left town for the holidays, President Obama hinted at opportunities for both showdowns and collaboration with the GOP in the new Congress — but as he prepares to seek re-election, his own base is telling him they need to see him rumble rather than dance with Republicans.

Fight-starved activists, who say they have little faith in talk alone, are vowing to hold Mr. Obama’s feet to the fire on priorities like protecting entitlements, drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and making another run at immigration reform. “He got elected on the wave of a very mobilized and excited grass-roots base, and the anti-war movement was part of that base, as was the environmental

movement and many people in the immigration movement,” said Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink. “All of us are feeling either deeply disappointed or simply demoralized; and if he isn’t able to excite the base, he’s going to have a problem in the re-election.” The president returned Tuesday from nearly two weeks in Hawaii, and he’ll quickly exchange his low-key vacation for what’s likely to be a

rough-and-tumble year taking on the GOP, which has expanded its numbers in the Senate and is taking control of the House. Mr. Obama expects to spend much of the next two years defending his first two years’ achievements from Republicans repeal efforts, but has also said he wants to try to find common ground on education and jobs, as well as see through his troop surge in Afghanistan and his troop drawdown in Iraq. But with his own

re-election approaching at the end of next year, he’ll also have to worry about appeasing members of his Democratic base, many of whom felt betrayed by his year-end deal with Republicans on tax cuts. The compromise, which critics on the left saw as a premature capitulation, sparked some rumblings of recruiting someone to challenge Mr. Obama in the Democratic primary but no one has come forward. Indeed, even as

Republicans say last year’s election has shown voters want him to take a new direction, Mr. Obama’s own left flank is calling for him to be the candidate they powered to a sizable victory in 2008. In the run-up to last month’s tax fight, more than 170,000 people signed an online petition

drafted by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee urging the president to “FIGHT, don’t cave” on his vow to let rates rise for the wealthy. Mr. Obama ended up agreeing to temporarily extend all tax-rate cuts in exchange for concessions from Republicans on unemployment

benefits and other middle-class tax breaks. The PCCC and other supporters called Mr. Obama’s move a betrayal. And Code Pink activists remain a regular fixture at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — just as they were during the Bush administration, whom they protested over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Mr. Obama vowed on the campaign trail to refocus American attention to Afghanistan, he arguably won the Democratic presidential nod in part for his opposition to the Iraq War; and his escalation of the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan took some progressives by surprise. Asked what kind of “big stick” she and fellow opponents of the wars can use as leverage if Mr. Obama fails to withdraw the remaining 50,000 troops in Iraq and draw down forces in Afghanistan, Ms.

Benjamin puts it succinctly: “Our ‘stick’ is just sitting on our hands.” The biggest threat from the left would be a primary challenge to the sitting president. A similar challenge by Patrick J. Buchanan in 1992 hurt President George H.W. Bush’s re-election chances. But speaking on CNN over the weekend, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine pegged the chances of any “serious primary challenge” at “virtually nil.” And the numbers back him up. A recent CNN/Opinion Research Poll revealed that Mr. Obama’s support among the party remains strong, with 78 percent of Democrats surveyed saying they

would like to see him re-elected — a five-percent jump from days before the November elections. Nevertheless, Mr. Obama is facing pressure on a range of issues important to his liberal base. Hopes of climate-change legislation were dashed when a bill that would have set up a cap-and-trade

system passed the House but failed in the Senate. Mr. Obama all but admitted defeat on the proposal after his party’s “shellacking” at the polls in November, but his administration is moving forward with a plan to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions through executive branch regulations. Meanwhile, environmental groups panned the administration’s decision to lift the deep-water drilling moratorium it instituted in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, although the process of issuing new permits has remained stalled, according to media reports. Immigration activists, recently disheartened by the lame-duck Congress‘ defeat of a bill that would have laid out a path to citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, want to see Mr. Obama make good on his campaign pledge to sign a comprehensive immigration bill. And union supporters are still waiting for action on several of their priorities, even though Mr. Obama wasn’t able to get their agenda through with Democrats in control of both chambers

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Politics: Plan not perceived

Not perceived: Continuing Resolution ProvesVieru 10 (Tudor Science News Editor at Softpedia, http://news.softpedia.com/news/Weather-Satellites-Could-Get-Funding-Boost-171767.shtml)

Congress has recently been asked to increase fundings for the planned Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) mission to Earth's orbit. NASA and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) want to build the new civilian weather satellite for studying global warming and related issues. At this point, lawmakers are working on a budget measure that would see spendings associated with all federal programs being kept to 2010 levels in 2010. But the White House is asking Congress for a significant boost in JPSS funding for next year. Government and industry sources say that the mission is a replacement of sorts for the joint civil-military National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) initiative, which was stopped dead in its track this February. The White House was the architect of NPOESS' downfall, but even President Barack Obama most likely acknowledged the need for such a mission. As such, the American space agency was instructed to develop the JPSS for NOAA, as a civilian application, while scientists at the US Air Force (USAF) are designing and building their own weather satellite. Since the new fiscal year began on October 1, the US federal government has been operating with continuing resolutions, which are stopgap measures designed to maintain funding levels at at least 2010 level. This happens because Congress proved

incapable of passing any spending bills for next year. According to space, a continuing resolution proposal that the House of Representatives could get will call for $528 million in additional funds to be alloted for the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) mission. Even though the new satellite will be using technologies developed under the NPOESS satellite program, NOAA still requested some $1.06 billion in funding for this mission alone for 2011.

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Politics: Plan = Bipart

Plan bipartisan and not perceived. Brinton 6/20 (Turner, http://www.spacenews.com/policy/110620-fourteen-senators-call-jpss-funding.html) WASHINGTON — A group of 14 U.S. senators — many from states hard hit by a rash of tornadoes and ongoing flooding — are warning of potentially grave consequences if Congress continues to short change an overdue effort to replace the nation’s polar-orbiting weather satellites. In a June 17 letter to Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), the chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the Senate Appropriations Committee,

13 Democrats and one Republican — Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.) — warn that a projected looming gap in weather satellite coverage will worsen without more support for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). “As you know, a harmful loss of satellite coverage is already slated to

occur in coming years, and we are deeply concerned that without adequate funding to swiftly implement JPSS, American lives, property, and prosperity will be needlessly endangered,” the senators wrote. They did not call for a specific amount of funding. The JPSS program is an offshoot of the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, a joint military-civilian program that the White House dismantled in February 2010. As a result, NOAA was directed to fund a constellation of polar-orbiting weather satellites for civil weather and climate forecasting, the development of which would be managed by NASA. The Air Force was directed to build its own military weather spacecraft. NOAA sought just over $1 billion for

JPSS for 2011 but a long-delayed government spending package that finally passed in April provided only $382 million for the program. NOAA’s 2012 budget request, submitted to Congress in February, included $1.06 billion for JPSS. Agency officials, however, have said even if the full amount is provided, the nation still risks a minimum one-year gap in weather satellite coverage

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Politics: Plan uncontroversial

Plan uncontroversial: Disaster reliefJansen 6/15 (Bart from the Montgomery advertiser, http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20110615/NEWS02/106150347/US-lawmakers-Disaster-relief-may-run-dry)

WASHINGTON -- With Gulf Coast states still reeling from recent disasters and bracing for the 2011 hurricane season, congressional

lawmakers from Alabama and other states are worried disaster relief funding may run short by early next year. Congress may have to approve extra funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Saks, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee with jurisdiction

over the agency. "The House recently took the prudent step of nearly doubling the president's re quest for disaster relief fund ing, " Rogers said. "Still, more might be needed." Rogers said he expects Congress to approve a sup plemental disaster request from the administration "with equal offsets to ensure we provide what is needed to help rebuild in a sound manner." The administration, however, has not yet requested emergency funding. "Based upon what we have right now, I think we will make it to the end of the fiscal year," FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate told law-makers at a Senate hearing Thursday. "But we have some costs that have come in on the most recent flooding and the recent tornadoes that we're having to evaluate." FEMA has had to respond to severe storms and tornadoes in Alabama, Missouri and Mississippi, and flooding in Louisiana. Agency officials haven't yet tallied those costs, which brought the number of states hit with major disasters to 40. But Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said FEMA estimates it will be short $2 billion to $4.2 billion in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

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Politics Plan Popular: CBO

Long term savings provides political cover: Healthcare CBO provesWhitesides and Smith 10’ (John Whitesides has covered U.S. politics, elections and Congress for 13 years, Dona Smith is as Washington congressional correspondent specializing in economics, taxes and budget issues. http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/18/us-usa-healthcare-idUSTRE61O4NV20100318)

(Reuters) - Congressional budget analysts said on Thursday a broad healthcare overhaul would cut the U.S. deficit over 10 years and sharply expand insurance coverage, boosting the momentum for final passage in the House of Representatives. President Barack Obama postponed a scheduled visit to Indonesia and Australia to help round up support on what is expected to be a close

vote on Sunday on his top legislative priority. House Democratic leaders unveiled the final changes to the overhaul, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated would expand coverage at a cost of $940 billion over 10 years and cut the deficit by $138 billion in the same period through new fees, taxes and cost-saving measures. Obama said the healthcare bill, which has faced solid Republican opposition, represented "the most significant effort to reduce deficits since the Balanced Budget Act" of 1993. "This is history, and this is progress," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of the overhaul. The bill would represent the biggest changes to the $2.5 trillion healthcare system in the past four decades. After weeks of wrangling over the package to ensure the numbers came out favorably, House leaders presented the final revisions to Democrats at a morning caucus and posted them on the Rules Committee website later on Thursday. "It took some time, but we are very pleased," Pelosi said after the meeting. The overhaul would extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans, the CBO estimated, and ban insurance practices like refusing coverage to those with pre-existing medical conditions. It requires all Americans to have health insurance, but gives subsidies to help low- and middle-income workers pay for it. The bill also expands Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor. The final package of changes also included Obama's proposed revamp of the federal student loan program, which would boost aid for needy students. The AFL-CIO, the largest labor union federation, endorsed the final version, which includes a weakened version of a tax on high-cost "Cadillac" insurance plans the union had feared would hit union members. "It is not a perfect bill. But we are realistic enough to

know it's time for the deliberations to stop and for progress to begin," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said. 'UNSALVAGEABLE' Democrats hoped the favorable CBO preliminary estimate would help them round up the 216 votes they need to pass the overhaul, the focus of an intense political brawl in Congress for months. Two more House Democrats who voted against the overhaul in November, Bart

Gordon and Betsy Markey, said they would vote for the final bill, bringing the total of those who have switched to "yes" to three. Dennis Kucinich announced his switch to "yes" on Wednesday.

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http://blogs.reuters.com/search/journalist.php?edition=us&n=john.whitesides&


AT: Militarization DA: Non-Unique

The militarization of space through satellites has existed for years and is on the increase today, resulting in unnecessary dependencies on technology.

Johnson-Freese, 07, United States Naval War College (Joan, Space as a Strategic Asset)Force enhancement capabilities are those that, when added to and employed by a combat force, significantly increase the combat potential of that force, thus enhance the probability of a successful mission. The process described earlier of attaching GPS packages to bombs to

create joint direct attack munitions is an example of force enhancement. Force enhancement also includes a wide range of capabilities that help decision makers and troops assess a situation and communicate with one another. Other examples include the use remotely sensed imagery , weather satellites, communication satellites , and the various components of signals intelligence (SIGINT). All these help the military break through the fog of war and have been increasingly incorporated into U.S. military operations since the 1991 Gulf War. The militarization of space is not a new phenomenon; developing space capabilities dates back to World War II and, in the United States, predates NASA. Military space activities are,

however, less visible than civilian space activities. The increased incorporation of space-related technologies and capabilities into military operations until recently has occurred, to a large extent, as part of incremental modernization efforts.

Moving from land-line-based communications to satellite-based mobile communications has involved in the military much as it has in the

population at large. That evolution required initially developing and continually improving unique capabilities, such as space launch (hereinafter, "lift"). The U.S. military's increased use of space, especially compared to other countries, created technological dependencies, resulting in the perceived necessity to assume the zero-sum perspective about space discussed in chapter 1.

Russia is planning to make huge efforts to militarize space, including developing weapons to send into orbit that are potentially dangerous to the United States if we do not match their advances into space.Mowthorpe, 04, Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom (The Militarization and Weaponization of Space) The Russian military views outer space as a potential theater of military actions. The forms of operations that will be conducted in near-earth space will incorporate the following: operations to destroy strategic weapons in flight; operations to destroy or prevent deployment of enemy satellites; operations to defeat orbital and ground space groupings and to seize and hold strategically important spheres of the near-earth space; and strikes delivered from space.

AT: Militarization DA No Brink

US has been launching earth observing satellites since the 1960s.Smith, 2006 (Marcia S., Congressional Research Reports Researcher, University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska – Lincoln Congressional Research Service Reports Congressional Research Service 1-1-2006 U.S. Space Programs: Civilian, Military, and Commercial digitalcommons.unl.edu)Science Programs. NASA has launched many spacecraft for space science and earth science research. Robotic probes served as pathfinders to the Moon for astronauts, and have visited all the planets in the solar system except Pluto. A probe (New Horizons) was launched to Pluto in January 2006 and is expected to fly past that planet in 2015. Many of the probes have been quite successful, but there were failures, too. In 1999, for example, two NASA Mars missions (Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander) failed, at a combined cost of $328.5 million. They reflected NASA’s “faster, better, cheaper” (FBC) approach to scientific spacecraft, replacing large, complex spacecraft that can acquire more information, but take longer and cost more to build. The FBC approach was subsequently scrutinized and NASA restructured its Mars exploration program significantly. Two other NASA probes, Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor, are currently orbiting Mars, and twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are investigating the planet’s surface (a European probe, Mars Express, also is orbiting Mars). NASA also has sent, or plans to send, spacecraft to other planets, comets, and asteroids. These include Cassini, which arrived at Saturn on July 1, 2004 (GMT), after a seven-year journey and is studying that planet and its moons; and the Stardust probe that returned to Earth on January 15, 2006, after collecting samples of a

comet. Space-based observatories in Earth orbit have studied the universe since the 1960s, creating new fields of

astronomy since space-borne telescopes can intercept wavelengths (such as x-rays and gamma rays) that cannot penetrate Earth’s atmosphere. In the 1980s, NASA embarked upon building four “Great Observatories” for studies in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum: Hubble Space Telescope, launched April 1990 (primarily for the visible wavelengths); Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, launched April 1991, deorbited June 2000; Chandra X-Ray Observatory, launched July 1999; and the Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility), launched August 2003. NASA is planning the James Webb Space Telescope for further infrared observations. Hubble was designed to be serviced and eventually returned to Earth by the space shuttle, but NASA announced in January 2004 it would not send any more shuttles to Hubble because of safety concerns. NASA’s current administrator, Dr. Griffin, agreed to reassess that decision once the shuttle completes its two Return to Flight missions (see CRS Report RS21767, Hubble Space Telescope: Should NASA Proceed with a Servicing Mission?, by Daniel Morgan).

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AT: Militarization DA: It’s Good

China has been providing the funding for developing antisatellite weapons possibly to target the U.S.’s satellites, which, without military involvement, cannot retaliate and defend themselves.

Mowthorpe, 04, Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom (The Militarization and Weaponization of Space)In 1998 there was a report that China's Central Committee was giving its highest priority to the development of an antisurveillance satellite system. This system is a ground-based laser generator with a capability to damage sensors of low-earth orbit imaging satellites. It is believed that the laser has been developed in cooperation with Russia, however this is not confirmed and it would be underestimating the capabilities of Chinese specialists to merely attribute its development to Russia. According to press reports from the Hong Kong-based

Chinese newspaper Sing Tao of 5 January 2000 China has developed and ground tested an advanced antisatellite weapon, called a parasitic satellite. A “parasitic satellite" is a microsatellite that is designed to attach itself to a target satellite and can be activated when required, to either jam of destroy the intended satellite. It is claimed that the parasite satellite is to attack satellites in low, medium, or high orbit, and is so small as to affect the target satellite's normal functions and hence go undetected. The cost of this "parasitic satellite" is one-hundredth or one-thousandth of that of an ordinary satellite.

The militarization of space should be encouraged. Satellites are of very great use to the United States during wars, shown in its contribution during the Gulf War for the United States.

Mowthorpe, 04, Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom (The Militarization and Weaponization of Space)

The use of space systems during the conflict in the Gulf to expel Iraq from Kuwait was one of the first occasions that demonstrated the importance that space systems contributed to the air and ground campaign. This section reviews the literature on space systems and the Gulf campaign, and highlights the roles satellites played in adding to the effectiveness of the overall campaign. It is also important to comprehend political impact the Gulf War had in terms of fueling the debate on Revolution in Military Affairs, which although a broader concept than the military use of space, benefited significantly from the effectiveness of space systems during the campaign. It is for this reason that the military space literature of the Gulf campaign

is assessed. The war in the Persian Gulf was the first circumstance in which a wide range of military space systems were used in a conflict. It was the first real test under war conditions of the sixty or so Western military satellites that were involved. Space added a fourth dimension to the war. It allowed a communications network to support a 400,000-strong army to be established in theater in a few weeks. It provided images of Iraqi forces and the reconnaissance photographs for the Allied air attacks. Satellites provided a navigation system which provided accurate information for combat soldiers, on missiles, tanks, aircraft, and ships. It is for these principal reasons that the Gulf War is being described as the first space war.

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AT: Militarization DA: No link

There is the technology to construct sturdy satellites capable of using passive methods in order to resist natural and manmade dangers in space.

Johnson-Freese, 07, United States Naval War College (Space as a Strategic Asset)

Generally speaking, a variety of technical and nontechnical means can protect the space and electromagnetic link segments of a space system. A number of passive systems are already being utilized to various degrees. Hardening, for example, involves protecting satellite components from harm, including from directed energy, laser, or microwave weapons, by using hardware such as filters and shutters that cover optics. These techniques are also useful to protect satellite components from damage during naturally occurring events, such as meteor showers. Shielding, another protective technique, includes using metal shields and resistant paints to protect satellites from electromagnetic pulses (EMPs), generated either naturally by solar storms by nuclear blasts or other weapons. Circuit-breaker-like devices in satellites can switch off nonessential components to prevent or minimize possible damage from an EMP.

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AT: Space Debris

NASA Orbital Debris safety guidelines checkFutron Corporation 2006 [“Orbital Debris Mitigation: Regulatory Challenges and Market Opportunities”

http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Orbital_Debris_Mitigation_0306.pdf]

NASA has been at the forefront of orbital debris mitigation efforts in the U.S. government. With authority over all U.S. civil government space missions, the

agency has developed a policy and specific procedural requirements for orbital debris mitigation. The NASA guidelines were used, with DoD consultation and input, as the basis for the U.S. Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices finalized in 2000, and form the basis for most

other U.S. government orbital debris regulations, such as those of the FCC. Today there is a stringent safety review process within NASA that every mission must pass through in order to ensure that there is no unnecessary orbital debris creation. This process allows for exceptions to the guidelines on a case-by-case basis, so NASA programs are not always fully compliant with all orbital debris mitigation guidelines. If an individual mission does not meet NASA requirements, it is subject to review at the Associate Administrator level to determine if changes

are needed or if launching may proceed. Though this review could be considered an unofficial waiver process, this risk acceptance procedure rigorously applies NASA’s policy and far-reaching requirements for mitigating orbital debris.

The NOAA has specific requirements for remote sensing technology to track and stop the spread of space debrisFutron Corporation 2006 [“Orbital Debris Mitigation: Regulatory Challenges and Market Opportunities”

http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Orbital_Debris_Mitigation_0306.pdf]

NOAA has licensing and regulatory authority over remote sensing spacecraft. In 2000, NOAA issued regulations that revised the agency’s minimum requirements for licensing, monitoring, 3and compliance of private Earth remote sensing space systems under Title II of the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992. Among other revisions, it added an additional licensing requirement for spacecraft disposal to ensure that applicants would comply with U.S. government orbital debris mitigation practices. Applicants must submit a plan for post-mission disposal of any remote sensing satellites. If the satellite disposal involves atmospheric reentry, the applicant must provide an estimate of the total debris casualty area of the system components and structure likely to survive reentry

India doubling space program now.RIA Novosti 2007 (India Plans To Double Satellite Launches Within Five Years, http://www.space-travel.com/reports/India_Plans_To_Double_Satellite_Launches_Within_Five_Years_999.html)

India intends to double the number of satellites it orbits within five years, the head of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said Thursday. India has been successfully developing its space program in recent years, regularly launching satellites using its own booster rockets. "On the average, four-five launches annually against a maximum of two a year, which we make now," Press Trust of India quoted Madhavan Nair as

telling journalists in Bangalore. Nair said India will have launched 15 telecommunications satellites and 8-10 earth remote sensing satellites by March 2012, when the 11th five-year plan has been completed.

Current regulations solve the threat of space debrisFutron Corporation 2006 [“Orbital Debris Mitigation: Regulatory Challenges and Market Opportunities” http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Orbital_Debris_Mitigation_0306.pdf]

United States government agencies generally anticipate that current orbital debris mitigation guidelines and regulations will face more rigorous enforcement in the next five years. Within the DoD, some observers expect that there will likely be greater efforts to encourage compliance with existing guidelines, but not in the form of strictly enforced rules. Like the DoD guidelines, the current NASA standards for mitigation are not expected to change significantly in the near future, but they are expected to be enforced more comprehensively. NASA plans to release new Procedural Requirements for orbital debris mitigation in 2006, which will emphasize taking direct action to minimize debris risk and more seriously applying NASA requirements to every mission. NASA is working to coordinate its increased mitigation efforts at both the national and international level with other U.S. government agencies and intergovernmental groups. At present there is no pending legislation that would establish any new orbital debris regulations affecting DoD or NASA missions, policies, or procedures. As described above, the FCC recently revised its regulatory requirements for debris mitigation and expects to maintain this new level of oversight and enforcement at least for the near term. NOAA and FAA expect to continue their current

level of oversight and enforcement of orbital debris mitigation at least for the near term. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR INDUSTRY The trend towards increased government enforcement in the orbital debris mitigation area is motivating satellite system operators and spacecraft manufacturers to consider long-term approaches to regulatory compliance. Operators need to closely monitor orbital

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http://www.futron.com/upload/wysiwyg/Resources/Whitepapers/Orbital_Debris_Mitigation_0306.pdf




UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFFdebris regulatory and policy developments around the globe because changing requirements will directly affect how operators approach satellite procurements. Spacecraft RFP documents should include clear post-life disposal requirements that manufacturers can respond to, and satellite system planning efforts need to take into account the evolving international orbital debris mitigation policy regime.

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AT: Privatization CP/Coercion K

The assertion of federal government incompetence is code for indifference to human suffering: we must assert federal responsibility in managing natural disasters. Giroux 2006 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196)

Soon after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the consequences of the long legacy of attacking big government and bleeding the social and public service sectors of the state became glaringly evident as did a government that displayed a "staggering indifference to human suffering" (Herbert 2005). Hurricane Katrina made it abundantly clear that only the government had the power, resources, and authority to address complex undertakings such as dealing with the totality of the economic, environmental, cultural, [End Page 174] and social destruction that impacted the Gulf Coast. Given the Bush administration's disdain for the legacy of the New Deal, important government agencies were viewed scornfully as oversized entitlement programs, stripped of their power, and served up as a dumping ground to provide lucrative administrative jobs for political hacks who were often unqualified to lead such agencies. Not only was FEMA downsized and placed under the Department of Homeland Security but its role in disaster planning and preparation was subordinated to the all-inclusive goal of fighting terrorists. While it was virtually impossible to miss the total failure of

the government response in the aftermath of Katrina, what many people saw as incompetence or failed national leadership was more than that. Something more systemic and deep-rooted was revealed in the wake of Katrina—namely, that the state no longer provided a safety net for the poor, sick, elderly, and homeless. Instead, it had been transformed into a punishing institution intent on dismantling the welfare state and treating the homeless, unemployed, illiterate, and disabled as dispensable populations to be managed, criminalized, and made to disappear into prisons, ghettos, and the black hole of despair. The Bush administration was not simply unprepared for Hurricane Katrina as it denied that the federal government alone had the resources to address catastrophic events; it actually felt no responsibility for the lives of poor blacks and others marginalized by poverty and relegated to the outskirts of society. Increasingly, the role of the state seems to be about engendering the financial rewards and privileges of only some members of society, while the welfare of those marginalized by race and class is now viewed with criminal contempt. The coupling of the market state with the racial state under George W. Bush means that policies are aggressively pursued to dismantle the welfare state, eliminate affirmative action, model urban public schools after

prisons, aggressively pursue anti-immigrant policies, and incarcerate with impunity Arabs, Muslims, and poor youth of color. The central commitment of the new hyper-neoliberalism is now organized around the best way to remove or make invisible those individuals and groups who are either seen as a drain or stand in the way of market freedoms, free trade, consumerism, and the neoconservative dream of an American empire. This is what I call the new biopolitics of disposability: the poor, especially people of color, not only have to fend for themselves in the face of life's tragedies but are also supposed to do it without being seen by the dominant society. Excommunicated from the sphere of human concern, they have been rendered invisible, utterly disposable, and heir to that army of socially homeless that allegedly no longer existed in color-blind America.

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AT: Privatization CP/Coercion K

Don’t believe their impact claims: they are ideologically driven and reinforce a politics of mass death.Giroux 2006 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department, Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability, College Literature 33.3 (2006) 171-196)

In a May 25, 2001 interview, Grover Norquist, head of the right-wing group Americans for Tax Reform, told National Public Radio's Mara Liasson:

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub" (Qtd. in Hertmann 2005). As a radical right-wing activist and practical strategist, Norquist has been enormously instrumental and successful in shaping tax policies designed to "starve the beast," a metaphor for policies designed to drive up deficits by cutting taxes, especially for the rich, in order to paralyze government and dry up funds for many federal programs that offer protection [End Page 182] for children, the elderly, and the poor. Norquist saw his efforts pay off when thousands of people, most of them poor and black, drowned in the basin of New Orleans and upwards of one million were displaced. Under such circumstances, a decades-long official policy of benign neglect became malign neglect, largely rationalized through a market fundamentalism in which the self-interested striving of individuals becomes the cornerstone of both freedom and democracy. This is a politics that wages war against any viable notion of the democratic social. And as Lawrence

Grossberg points out, "The free market in neoliberalism is fundamentally an argument against politics, or at least against a politics that attempts to govern society in social rather than economic terms" (117). The neoliberal efforts to shrink big government and public services must be understood both in terms of those who bore the brunt of such efforts in New Orleans and in terms of the subsequent inability of the government to deal adequately with Hurricane Katrina.

Reducing the federal government's ability to respond to social problems is a decisive element of neoliberal policymaking, as was echoed in a Wall Street Journal editorial that argued without irony that taxes should be raised for low-income individuals and families, not to make more money available to the federal government for addressing their needs but to rectify the possibility that they "might not be feeling a proper hatred for the government" (Qtd. in Krugman 2002, 31). If the poor can be used as pawns in this logic to further the political attack on big government, it seems reasonable to assume

that those in the Bush administration who hold such a position would refrain from using big government as quickly as possible to save the very lives of such groups, as was evident in the aftermath of Katrina. The vilification of the social state and big government—really an attack on non-military aspects of government—has translated into a steep decline of tax revenues, a massive increase in military spending, and the growing immiseration of poor Americans and people of color. Under the Bush administration, Census Bureau figures reveal that "since 1999, the income of the poorest fifth of Americans has dropped 8.7 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars . . . [and in 2005] 1.1 million were added to the 36 million already on the poverty rolls" (Scheer 2005). While the number of Americans living below the poverty line is comparable to the combined populations of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Arkansas, the Bush administration chose to make in the 2006 budget $70 billion in new tax cuts for the rich while slashing programs that benefit the least fortunate (Legum et al 2005). Similarly, the projected $2.7 trillion budget for 2007 includes a $4.9 billion reduction in health funds for senior citizens (Medicare) and the State Children's Health Insurance Program; a $17 million cut in aid for child-support enforcement; cutbacks in funds for low-income people with disabilities; [End Page 183] major reductions in child-care and development block grants; major defunding for housing for low-income elderly; and an unprecedented rollback in student aid. In addition, the 2007 budget calls for another $70 billion dollars in tax cuts most beneficial to the rich and provides for a huge increase in military spending for the war in Iraq (Weisman 2006, A10). While President Bush endlessly argues for the economic benefits of his tax cuts, he callously omits the fact that 13 million children are living in poverty in the United States, "4.5 million more than when Bush was first inaugurated" (Scheer 2005). And New Orleans had the third highest rate of children living in poverty in the United States (Legum et al 2005). The illiteracy rate in New Orleans before the flood struck was 40 percent; the embarrassingly ill-equipped public school system was one of the most underfunded in the nation. Nearly 19 percent of Louisiana residents lacked health insurance, putting the state near the bottom for the percentage of people without health insurance. Robert Scheer, a journalist and social critic, estimated that one-third of the 150,000 people living in dire poverty in Louisiana were elderly, left exposed to the flooding in areas most damaged by Katrina (2005). It gets worse. In an ironic twist of fate, one day after Katrina hit New Orleans, the U.S. Census Bureau released two important reports on poverty, indicating that "Mississippi (with a 21.6 percent poverty rate) and Louisiana (19.4 percent) are the nation's poorest states, and that New Orleans (with a 23.2 percent poverty rate) is the 12th poorest city in the nation. [Moreover,] New Orleans is not only one of the nation's poorest cities, but its poor people are among the most concentrated in poverty ghettos. Housing discrimination and the location of government-subsidized housing have contributed to the city's economic and racial segregation" (Dreier 2005). Under neoliberal capitalism, the attack on politically responsible government has only been matched by an equally harsh attack on social provisions and safety nets for the poor. And in spite of the massive failures of market-driven neoliberal policies—extending from a soaring $420 billion budget deficit to the underfunding of schools, public health, community policing, and environmental protection programs—the reigning right-wing orthodoxy of the Bush administration

continues to "give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values" (Greider 2005). The Bush administration's ideological hostility towards the essential role that government should play in providing social services and crucial infrastructure was particularly devastating for New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Prior to 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America. The Houston Chronicle wrote in [End Page 184] December 2001 that "[t]he New Orleans hurricane scenario may be the deadliest of all" (Krugman 2005). And yet the Bush administration consistently denied repeated requests for funds by the New Orleans Army Corps of Engineers. Ignoring such requests, the Bush administration cut the Army Corps' funding by more than a half-billion dollars in its 2002 budget, leaving unfinished the construction for the levees that eventually burst. And in spite of repeated warnings far in advance by experts that the existing levees could not withstand a Category 4 hurricane, the Bush administration in 2004 rejected the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project's request for $100 million, offering instead a measly $16.5 million. Huge tax cuts for the rich and massive cuts in much-needed programs continued unabated in the Bush administration,

all the while putting the lives of thousands of poor people in the Gulf Basin in jeopardy. As David Sirota has reported, this disastrous underfunding of efforts to build the levee infrastructure, coupled with even more tax cuts for the rich and less revenue for the states, continued right up to the time that Hurricane Katrina struck, making it almost impossible for governments in the Gulf region either to protect their citizens from the impact of a major hurricane or to develop the resources necessary for an adequate emergency response plan in the event of a flood.

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AT: Privatization CP

Commercial satellites fail to provide data in urgent situations.Joyce et al. 2009, [Karen, Holds a ph. D in geographical sciences, A review of the status of satellite remote sensing and image processing techniques for

mapping natural hazards and disasters, Progress in Physical Geography, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=42ff2398-b74e-471c-b710-eba884fe9018%40sessionmgr111&vid=1&hid=113&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d]

There are still many countries that do not have access to direct reception stations within their territory for medium to

high spatial resolution imagery. ln an emergency, commercial satellite services can be tasked to collect data. Depending upon the position of the particular satellite within its orbit, the time interval between an urgent data programming request and the first acquisition attempt could be as short as 24 hours or as long as several days. As a general rule, satellite services more commonly used for emergencies are better at rapid response. A prime example of such a satellite service is Radarsat, which can typically schedule a data acquisition at very short notice and then supply the data to the data requester within hours of a successful acquisition. Other optical commercial satellite services could accept a programming request at similar short notice. Successful data acquisition would then rely predominantly upon orbital constraints plus, for optical satellites, cloud Free conditions over the area of need.

No solvency: Remote Sensor technology is a public good, which means state involvement is inevitable. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999 ERS = Earth Remote Sensors)

The three principle dynamics driving the technology's diffusion are:(1) increased opportunities for commodification; (2) the tremendous expansion in satellite-based science; and (3) the growing availability of satellite imagery (along with complementary GIS and GPS technologies) among popular citizens' groups.

Thus, the diffusion of ERS technology has moved in three directions, involving three sets of non-state actors: the commercial sector, scientists, and NGOs. Because information has inherent public-goods attributes, particularly when its production requires such capital-intensive means as satellite imagery, states are likely to continue to play a central role in ERS funding and applications.54 But the staggering proliferation of ERS users is already kindling conflicts over control and access to ERS data, even as it alters conventional practices and understandings of epistemic sovereignty. The question, then, is whether ERS, along with its companion technologies, is most likely to promote the centralisation of informational power in the scientific state (or the new information hegemons), a corporate monopoly of information, or an "electronic global village".55 Although a case can be made for any

of these, the preponderance of the evidence points to a modified knowledge structure in which non-state actors gradually displace the scientific state as the locus of informational control and authority.

Privatization fails: earth images become unavailable to researches and less prosperous countries, destroying democracy. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999 ERS = Earth Remote Sensors)

Conflicts over the control of ERS data abound, many of them precipitated by the increasing commercialisation of ERS technology and data. Developing countries' lack of confidence in an uninterrupted supply of ERS data from the US, particularly after the privatisation of Landsat, has prompted the largest of them to build their own remote-sensing satellites.56 Researchers have harboured similar sentiments, but they lack the option of building their own satellites. According to one scientist, the tremendous increase in the cost of Landsat data after privatisation effectively impeded a good deal of scientific research.57 Privatisation of Landsat, it may be argued, had a profoundly anti-democratic effect on the accessibility of its images. In 1980, over 128,000 Landsat film products were sold at an average price of $15,

compared with just over 4,000 sold at an average price of $150 in 1989.58 As a result, Landsat data were far less available to researchers, educators, and less prosperous governments. Both government agencies and scientific researchers feel that commercialisation threatens their access to data. SPOT, for instance, implemented a policy in 1989 of giving preferential service to its largest customers, the oil and mining industries, potentially placing certain government agencies at a disadvantage in obtaining urgently needed data.59 More recently, European governments threatened to launch a "data war" by attempting to restrict commercial access to ERS data from weather satellites. Their moves inflamed researchers, who claimed that scientific and commercial data would

not be easily distinguishable.no In a similar vein, ensuring data consistency is a central concern for researchers, whereas commercial competitiveness entails exactly the opposite: capabilities, image size and hardware are differentiated as

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UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFFmuch as possible to prevent commercial users from switching systems.61

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AT: Privatization CP

Private companies fail: empirically proven their tech doesn’t work.Christian Science Monitor March 5 (2011, Pete Spotts, Staff Writer, “An inglorious end for NASA's Glory satellite”)

The inglorious end on Friday to NASA's Glory, a satellite designed to provide critical information about Earth's climate, is widely seen as a temporary blow to US climate research. However, it also could stiffen resistance in Congress to the Obama administration's new direction for the country's human-spaceflight program. With the end of NASA's space-shuttle program only a few months away, the space agency will rely on rockets built and operated by private companies to carry cargo – and eventually

crews – to and from the International Space Station. Space shuttle program 101: Was it worth it? Orbital Sciences Corporation, which built the rocket that failed to deliver the satellite to orbit, is one of two companies NASA has tapped to deliver goods to the station via a contract worth $1.9 billion. And it's one of eight firms hoping to launch astronauts to the station as well. Some lawmakers in key committees overseeing NASA, and from both sides of the aisle, have challenged the wisdom of such a move, arguing that NASA is putting the future of human spaceflight to low-Earth orbit in the hands of the untested. For Orbital Sciences Corporation, the mishap Friday following an apparently successful launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California marks the second consecutive time in two years the company's Taurus XL rocket has failed to deliver a climate-research satellite to orbit. In both cases, the failure has involved the same piece of hardware – a bullet-shaped, clamshell-like cover, or fairing, that protects the satellite during launch. Both Glory and its hapless predecessor, NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory, ended up in the ocean. Over that two-year period, the company has successfully launched 20 of its rockets, many of which share the same traits at the Taurus XL, company spokesman Barron Benski told Space.com. "From time to time, a seemingly small thing can come up," he continued. "You think you've done everything humanly possible, and I know our team including the Orbital Taurus team, they scrubbed

that rocket from stem to stern." Some analysts suggest the company hasn't launched the vehicle often enough to squash all the bugs the system may have. Losing two satellites in two Taurus XL launches is "not a great record," Marco Caceres, senior space analyst for the research

firm Teal Group Corp told the Los Angeles Times. "Part of the problem is that the Taurus just doesn't launch enough. It's hard to develop a launch rhythm if the rocket is only going up once every few years."

Privatization doesn’t solve: Empirically, they price satellite information out of range for developing countries and scientists. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999)

None the less, developing countries exercise little control over the deployment of satellite technology and dissemination of satellite data, and thus have not always been satisfied with their role in the emerging ERS regime. By the early 1980s, developing countries were concerned with preserving open and non-discriminatory distribution of Landsat data, which they felt was threatened by the Reagan administration's proposal to privatise Landsat.31 Many observers believed that Landsat data should remain a public service, analogous to census, cartographic, and meteorological data, and several studies concluded that Land sat could not successfully be commercialised. Despite these objections, the Land Remote Sensing Commercialization Act of 1984 transferred control over Landsat's data to EOSAT,

a joint venture of Hughes Aircraft and General Electric, which was later acquired by Lockheed and recently transferred to Space Imaging Corporation':12 One of EOSAT's first acts, which was greatly resented by scientists as well as developing countries, was to quadruple the price of each Landsat image.33

Privatization destroys the US space industry: ITARLandry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

Related to supplier drawdown, 17% of respondents commented on the industry’s high dependence on government support. Some may argue that the U.S. space industry is only lingering because of defense and government support. Since the DoD and other government agencies are the principal customers of the space industry, ITAR comes into play for many business opportunities outside the U.S., resulting in less export opportunities. With a limited domestic commercial market base and limited opportunities to export, the U.S. government will have to fund and manage the U.S. space industrial base to keep it alive.

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AT: International Actor Counterplans

Perm: Do Both: all international efforts require NASA assets, funding, and direction. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999)

Besides efficiency, a second factor contributing to this diffusion of epistemicsovereignty through international ERS programmes is the broad-based requirements of global environmental change research. A patchwork of transnational scientific research programmes has sprung up in the last decade, including: the Man and the Biosphere Programme, the

International Biosphere-Geosphere Programme, and the World Climate Research Programme. To a great extent, these programmes, spearheaded by international organisations and non-governmental scientific organisations, rely upon satellite data provided through national space agencies. These alliances, seeking to achieve a "worldwide synergy of local research", bring together the financial and organisational capabilities of governments with the intellectual capacity of the world's scientific community.-l8 Though NASA is undoubtedly the major player in these programmes, virtually every ERS project has an international component. Most of the satellites launched under NASA's Mission to Planet Earth programme have carried instruments from other countries and have transmitted data abroad. Likewise, • Japan's recently launched Advanced Earth Observing Satellite (ADEOS) carries two US and one French instruments.49 The principle international coordinating body for earth observations is the Committee on Earth Observations Satellites (CEOS), which was created in 1984 in connection with the annual G-7 Economic Summit, and whose membership includes all national and supranational space agencies. A smaller body, the Earth Observations International Coordination Working Group (EO-ICWG) provides a more restricted forum for Canada, Europe, Japan, and the US to plan the International Earth

Observing System (lEOS) for the 1990s and beyond.50 The voluntary co-operative arrangements represented by CEOS and EO-ICWG are emblematic of a particular kind of sovereignty bargain whereby states sacrifice some degree of autonomy and control over technological and informa tional resources in exchange for the benefits of collaboration, which include cost savings and an intellectual synergy. But this diffusion of epistemic sovereignty comes with a price. Once states become dependent on a continued supply of Earth observation data which they do not themselves control, their access to that data is perpetually at the mercy of other states' budget processes.

For instance, while the ESA, having been once burned by NASA in the Spacelab project, insisted upon effective sovereignty over the elements it contributed to the Space Station, it none the less remains hostage to NASA's budgetary roller coaster. According to the 1988 ESA-NASA agreement, which typifies the language of international space agreements, states' obligations are

"subject to availability of funds".51 Given that NASA's Earth Observation System (EOS) programme has already been scaled back twice, there is a strong likelihood that budgetary politics could interfere with other co-operative ERS endeavours.

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AT: SCIER CP

Ground sensors insufficient; need mobile technologyTuysuz-Erman et. Al. 2007 (Aysegul Tuysuz Erman, Lodewijk van Hoesel, and Paul Havinga Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science University of Twente Enschede, Netherlands “AWARE: Platform for Autonomous Self-Deploying and Operation of Wireless Sensor- Actuator Networks Cooperating with AeRial ObjEcts” grvc.us.es/aware/papers/aware_paper_12.pdf)

Wireless sensor networks are used to increase the efficiency of many applications, such as target detection and disaster management. Wireless sensor networks with static nodes have been developed and also experimentally applied for detection and monitoring activities [1]. However, static wireless sensor networks have important limitations as far as the required coverage and the short communication range in the nodes are concerned. The use of mobile nodes could provide significant improvements. Thus, they can provide the ability to dynamically adapt the network to environmental events and to improve the network connectivity in case of static nodes failure. On the other hand, the aerial and remotely piloted vehicles are now able to be coordinated for missions such as the detection and monitoring of

events. The A W ARE project (EU IST -2006-33579) is committed to the development of a platform that will enable the cooperation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with ground wireless sensor-actuator networks comprising static and mobile nodes. The platform offers self-deployment, self- configuration and self-repairing features by means of cooperating autonomous helicopters. These features are highly relevant in natural and urban environments without pre-existing infrastructure or in situations where the infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed. The cooperation of these aerial vehicles with the ground wireless sensor network offers many potentialities such as disaster management applications. The aim of this paper is to discuss the requirements and challenges of A W ARE platform with focus on fire detection scenarios. Also, some possible research topics related with those challenges will be mentioned in this paper.

Ground wireless sensors fail: PowerRamesh 2009 (Dr. Maneesha Vinodini Ramesh, Amrita Center for Wireless Networks and Applications, (Amrita University) India “Wireless Sensor Network for Disaster Monitoring” www.intechopen.com/download/pdf/pdfs_id/12467 wsn = wireless sensor network)

For any Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), power constraints are one of the major problems faced by wide area deployments, for real-time monitoring and detection. In the current deployment, maximum power is consumed for excitation of geophysical sensors than that of transmission, processing, or reception by a wireless sensor node. Indigenous power circuits are developed to provide constant power for the excitation of the geophysical sensors, wireless sensor nodes, and interfacing circuits, since each of them requires different levels of power. This power circuit board is designed with high efficiency regulator chips to provide multiple outputs from a single power battery input, a non-regulated 6 Volts DC supplied from rechargeable lead acid batteries. To increase the lifetime of the lead acid batteries, they are automatically recharged by the solar recharging unit using the charge controller.

No Solvency The technology is not yet developed. Ramesh 2009 (Dr. Maneesha Vinodini Ramesh, Amrita Center for Wireless Networks and Applications, (Amrita University) India “Wireless Sensor Network for Disaster Monitoring” www.intechopen.com/download/pdf/pdfs_id/12467 wsn = wireless sensor network)

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are still an emerging technology and much literature available is still theoretical, therefore practical deployment guides using actual experience are few if any. Using real practical experience, this overview of operations is one such guide providing the methodical steps and outlining the basic requirements when designing and deploying a WSN into any given application.

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AT: Carbon Capture CP

The CP alternative solutions for warming will cause complacency amongst people pollute freely, thus causing more warming at a faster rate and reversing the effects of the CP. This is the situation for the new warming solution, “Budyko’s Blanket.”

Levitt and Dubner, 9 (Steven, prof of economics, University of Chicago, Stephen, American journalist Super Freakonomics)

Wood and Myhrvold do worry that Budyko’s Blanket might create an “excuse to pollute.” That is, rather than buying time for us to create new energy solutions, it would lure people into complacency.

Carbon capture solves and is cost effective. Carbon Capture Journal Feb 14 (2011, “Capturing the profitability of carbon“By Joe Jones, CEO and founder of Skyonic http://www.carboncapturejournal.com/displaynews.php?NewsID=737)

Five years ago Skyonic, invented a radical new approach to solving the problem of excess industrial CO2 emissions.

Instead of injecting CO2 underground, he found a way to capture the CO2 before it is emitted into the air and transform it into marketable byproducts. Today, Skyonic is the first company to secure a U.S. patent for a carbon capture mineralization process that provides tremendous opportunity to commercial organizations worldwide. Based on pending environmental mandates created to off-set global warming, industrial organizations are struggling with the exuberant costs associated with stripping their emissions of toxic pollutants and CO2.

Skyonic has created a technology process, called SkyMine® that enables industrial manufacturers to reduce emissions while at the same time providing them with an additional revenue stream. Mineralization Process Skyonic’s SkyMine® process captures and mineralizes CO2 emitted from industrial flue gas stacks into sodium bicarbonate and other marketable chemicals, such as hydrochloric acid, hydrogen chloride, chlorine and hydrogen. It also scrubs 99 percent of SOx, NO2, mercury, and other heavy metals from exhaust emitted from the industrial plants. Because SkyMine® captures CO2 as carbonate compounds, the environmental concerns associated with CO2 pipelines and groundwater contamination are completely

avoided. The process removes CO2, acid gases, such as SOx and NO2, and heavy metals from coal combustion or other flue gas streams in a safe, efficient and profitable manner. A major differentiator of the process is that the SkyMine® process captures CO2 as

a stable solid: sodium bicarbonate, often used as common household baking soda. The process inputs low cost materials such as flue gas, salt, and water, and in turn, produces high-value outputs. Hydrogen and chlorine are valuable commodity chemicals used in a number of ways, such as in the fuel industry and the manufacturing of other compounds. The SkyMine® process is divided into three major operations: gas handling, absorption, and electrochemical production. In the gas handling phase, the hot flue gas is cooled to room temperature. Also during this process, heat and water are harvested and heavy metals like mercury are removed. The harvested heat is used to undertake the cost of chemical production. The harvested water is then reused. After passing through activated carbon filters to remove heavy metals, it becomes a process feed. In absorption, the cooled flue gas containing carbon dioxide and acid gases is scrubbed in a spray tower in a reaction with sodium hydroxide. The CO2 reacts to form baking soda and the acid gases react to form sulfate and nitrate salts. Because of the low concentration of acid gases, the bicarbonate has been shown to be of unusually high purity, guaranteeing simplistic disposal. The cleaned flue gas is returned to the exhaust stack. In electrochemical production, the sodium hydroxide that will be used in the absorption process, the

hydrogen and the chlorine, are produced using a feed of salt, water, and electricity. Economic Value The costs associated with a SkyMine® plant include salt, water, electricity and freight, which are all affordable elements. Salt is abundant in nature and, as such, is relatively inexpensive when compared to the outputs produced. In addition, much, if not all of the SkyMine® water requirements can be harvested from the flue gas. Other operating expenses from SkyMine®, such as headcount costs, are relatively minimal as compared to the revenue streams which can be generated. The process also operates at energy-efficient conditions, further adding to its profitability and

environmentally-friendly stance. There are several advantages to using the SkyMine® process for an industrial plant. First, heat from the gas handling steps is used to warm the process chemicals to defray costs. Second, chemical production can occur during off-peak periods when electricity is readily available and at a lower cost. Finally, the caustic produced is low concentration and used immediately. This eliminates the need for an energy intensive evaporation step, thus also saving on costs.

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The counterplan links to spending, politics, and cannot solve emissions.New York Times 2009 (Sept14, Big Utility Puts Carbon Capture Technology to the Test By JESSICA LEBER of ClimateWire)

Some are casting a wary eye on even those few. Bruce Nilles, who opposes all new coal-fired plants as head of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, is skeptical that carbon capture will be technically or economically feasible. He argued that rather than pursue expensive CCS plant-prolonging projects, utilities should be turning to cheaper and cleaner wind and natural gas generation. Meanwhile, the company and its partners, including the technology's developer, Alstom Power, are optimistic about the prospects for post-combustion CCS, which describes the idea of capturing CO2 after the coal is burned -- the only option for most existing plants.

Both companies say they will be able to replicate the technology commercially by 2015. This will be after AEP has built a second, 235 MW commercial-scale capture plant on the Mountaineer site and after Alstom has tested the technology at a similar scale in partnership with Norwegian gas and oil company Statoil. Meanwhile, other major coal utilities, like Southern Co. and Duke Energy, will be trying out different technologies in parallel. In many ways, the Mountaineer plant itself -- where the Statue of Liberty could fit inside the boiler unit -- was chosen because it provides a best-case scenario for how a CCS power plant retrofit might work. The great mysteries of carbon storage This whole lineup requires a few key resources that Mountaineer happens to have: scrubbers, space, steam and a stroke of geological luck. Its benefits also demonstrate the challenges in store for removing and sequestering carbon at all plants. For the current Mountaineer setup, the process works like this: First, the gas is treated by chemical plants -- at Mountaineer they are as big as the electric generating unit itself -- to remove air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and particulates from the flue gas, which also happen to poison the carbon capture reaction. This will rule out replicating carbon capture at some of AEP's oldest and most inefficient units, which will never get scrubbers. These will likely be retired. Next, a small stream of the scrubbed gas is siphoned towards the newly built carbon plant. It sits between the sulfur dioxide scrubbers and the cooling tower, and itself has an enormous footprint that's bigger than a football field. In fact, company engineers say that a lack of space available at some plants already brimming with add-ons and without room to expand will in some places prohibit carbon capture. Mountaineer happens to have a large, green field of empty space. At the capture plant, the gas is cooled and run over chilled ammonia, which absorbs 90 percent of the CO2, before the now low-carbon stream is sent back out the smokestack. Now left with a carbon-soaked ammonia sponge, the slurry is reheated to release the CO2, and the ammonia gets recycled for another round. This process uses steam siphoned from the power cycle. If too much steam is required, however, the plant operations could become unstable, another potential limitation of the technology. Next, the isolated CO2 gas is cleaned and compressed to very high pressures as it moves through 1,200 feet of pipeline. Because long CO2 transport pipelines don't exist in many areas and are expensive to build, CCS is today much more viable where the right underground storage sites exist at or near the plant property. At Mountaineer, AEP had already installed an injection well to test the geology. The last step is to pump the CO2 into two deep aquifers, 1 1/2 miles below the property, where it is trapped under overlying rock. This part -- to the company, to nearby property owners, and to state and federal regulators -- is the biggest unknown in the entire process. Right now, there are no clear rules to govern who is responsible for making sure the carbon dioxide stays underground and for how long, who will pay if something goes wrong, and what happens when the CO2

migrates beneath nearby properties. The burden of costs "Permitting is the biggest headache. You've got to establish something that doesn't create death by 1,000 cuts of regulation," said Bruce Braine, AEP's vice president of strategic policy analysis. There also may be public opinion problems. Recently, nearby residents opposed and stopped a carbon sequestration test project in Ohio. But in the end, the biggest hurdles are not technical or even regulatory. They are the huge costs of CCS, measured both in energy and dollar units. At full commercial scale, Alstom says its chilled ammonia technology will need 15 percent of a power plant's total electricity production to run. This, the company says, will be a big improvement over the 30 percent energy needed by amine scrubbers, a carbon capture technology that is used for natural gas production today. Still, for the entire Mountaineer plant, 15 percent of its power would still be 195 MW that no longer makes it to the grid. AEP would bear the cost of replacing this by building new generation capacity elsewhere. There is still more progress that can be made. Further advances to cut the massive amount of energy to compress CO2 or ring out better efficiencies from the process might save even more energy, said Sean Black, post-

combustion CCS product manager at Alstom. An even bigger issue is the looming cost of capturing carbon. And there is a long way to go before it drops. In regulated electricity markets, this cost will mostly be passed down to consumers in the form of higher rates. DOE's goal is that commercial post-combustion CCS should not raise the cost of producing electricity more than 35 percent. Yet existing off-the-shelf technologies right now translate into nearly a 100 percent increase, said Jared Ciferno, existing plant technology manager at DOE's National Energy

Technology Laboratory. Linking CCS to the carbon markets The price tag of building CCS retrofit projects is also substantial. In August, AEP applied to DOE for a $334 million grant to fund just half the costs of the 235 MW Mountaineer project. Right now, at the demonstration level, CCS costs more than $100 per ton of carbon, far more than projected carbon prices will reach anytime soon under cap-and-trade legislation. While technology experts expect the costs to drop by as much as half or more as it becomes widely deployed, how quickly that will happen is less certain. To sweeten incentives for CCS beyond a straight carbon price, the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill provides $1.1 billion a year for research and hands out billions of dollars in free allowances to early adopters. Morris said that as soon as legislation is passed -- with a carbon price and the incentives -- the company will

have all the push it needs to move ahead on its deployment plans, subject to approval by state utility regulators. Ultimately, though, the decisions on how many and how quickly plants will be retrofitted depend on where the price for CCS meets the emissions reduction time frames and targets that get packed into climate legislation. As the bill moves in the Senate, these numbers are still a moving target, and many utilities, AEP included, are lobbying for more time in early years of the program. "The economics of CCS and the economics of the [carbon] market are going to have to be linked," said AEP Vice President Braine. Meanwhile, back at Mountaineer, inside the plant's central control room, walls filled with gauges monitor everything that happens inside. One small arrow amid them all reads "10.95%." That is how much CO2 is in the gas leaving the smokestack. All of that money and all of the new equipment outside are for reaching one goal: to get that down to nearly zero.

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Carbon sequestration fails and links more to spending.BC Upham 2010 (freelance writer based in Los Angeles. He has written for the New York Times, and was a writer and editor for News Communications, Inc., a local paper consortium serving Manhattan. http://www.triplepundit.com/2010/05/carbon-capture-technology-not-practical-study/ “Carbon Capture Technology Not Practical, Claims Study” May 3) As if the fossil fuel industry hadn’t had enough bad news recently, a new study out of the University of Houston concludes that carbon capture and storage technology, which sequesters carbon dioxide emitted from power plants into the ground, cannot work on the scale needed. The study, by Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, of Texas A&M, says the amount of space needed to store the CO2 emitted from an average coal plant underground has been massively underestimated, and that a single plant might need a reservoir the size of a small US state. “When you try to inject something into an existing formation which is already at pressure, it (pressure) has to go up,” Ms. Ehlig-Economides told Reuters on last week. “The models that people are using more often than not do not accommodate this.” The report was quickly attacked by a variety of geologists, who pointed to numerous pilot projects now in use around the globe, such as the Sleipner plant in Norway. Critics include Lawrence Berkeley National

Laboratory, the Pacific Northwest National laboratory and the American Petroleum Institute. Critics specifically attacked the premise that the underground areas where the gas would be pumped are “sealed boxes,” when in fact CO2 pumped into these formations can seep through porous rock to other underground reservoirs. CCS technology has attracted a lot of attention (and money) from Congress as a potential “compromise” solution to dealing with global warming emissions. If the technology can be rolled out on a large scale, it could greatly reduce the fraction of America’s GHG coming from fossil fuel power plants. But it is expensive and, as yet, unproven. It also, if I may inject my own hot air into the conversation, looks a lot like your typical big, expensive go-nowhere federal boondoggle, akin to SDI missile defense and the like.

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AT: ITAR CP

Counterplan links to politics and will be rolled back.Taylor Dinerman 2008 (Taylor, s a well-known and respected space writer regarding military and civilian space activities since 1983. From 1999 until 2003, Mr. Dinerman ran Space Equity.com. Taylor Dinerman has now been writing for a variety of publications including Ad Astra, The Wall Street Journal and the American Spectator. He was a regular contributor with a weekly piece for Jeff Foust's Space Review and now writes for the Hudson Institute New York, March 17, ITAR’s failure

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1086/1)

In the long run only Congress, with strong support from the White House, can resolve this problem. The Bush Administration has run out of time, so it will be up to the next administration to attempt to resolve this problem. The question involves more than just helping US companies to sell their products in the global marketplace. It involves a deeper question: how does a superpower balance the needs of its national security system and its need to trade? During the Cold War this question arose over and over again as the US attempted to wage economic warfare against the USSR and its empire. While it was often frustrated by the Europeans and Japanese and their mercantile philosophies, the US did raise the “hassle factor” for companies trying to sell high technology goods and services to Moscow. A similar campaign is now underway against Iran, but it will be many years before its full effects are felt by Tehran. A rebalancing of

the US government’s approach must take place. ITAR as it now exists was an overreaction to the Clinton Administration’s all-out embrace of a mercantilistic philosophy. If the new President and Congress simply free up the flow of technology in the name of export promotion, he or she will simply insure that at some future date Congress will re-impose ITAR-like restrictions, perhaps in an even more draconian form. While a new CoCom would be useful, the most important thing is for the US to find a way to trade with its close allies that treats them as trusted friends.

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AT: K Individual action cedes power to the extreme right—turns their argumentBoggs 97 [Carl, National University, Los Angeles, Theory and Society, “The great retreat: Decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America”, December, Volume 26, Number 6, http://www.springerlink.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/content/m7254768m63h16r0/fulltext.pdf]

The decline of the public sphere in late twentieth-century America poses a series of great dilemmas and challenges. Many ideological currents scrutinized here – localism, metaphysics, spontaneism, post-modernism, Deep Ecology – intersect with and reinforce each other. While these currents have deep origins in popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, they remain very much alive in the 1990s. Despite their different outlooks and

trajectories, they all share one thing in common: a depoliticized expression of struggles to combat and overcome alienation. The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved – perhaps even unrecognized – only to fester more ominously in the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious diseases, technological displacement of workers)

cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context of internationalized markets , finance, and

communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or sidestep these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions. 74 In the

meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people’s lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites – an already familiar dynamic in many lesser-developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of

the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise – or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society. 75

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Earth observational data breaks up sovereign control and scientific hegemony. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999)To expand upon Strange's work, the epistemic dimension of sovereignty is crucial to the way in which the scientific state constitutes itself and configures the global flow of information and knowledge. Epistemic sovereignty is distinctive, at least in part, because knowledge is inherently unlike other sources of control, autonomy, and authority. It is communicable and storable, particularly given recent technological innovations, in ways that military force and economic wealth are not. It ha~ certain public goods properties, since the cost of its production does not increase when it is made widely available. Yet it does not always function as a public good since proprietary access to knowledge sometimes enhances its value. And, finally, while knowledge, like other kinds of power, is increasingly dependent upon

technology, the structures of technology themselves reflect and, in fact, are part and parcel with-the global knowledge structure. Satellite technology,

representing both a primary mechanism for surveillance and a central factor in the information revolution, offers an excellent arena for exploring the

global knowledge structure and the epistemic dimension of sovereignty. While other information technologies, especially personal comput ing and telecommunications technologies, are widely believed to challenge states' control and authority, these are in some sense easy cases because of their widespread diffusion among non-state actors. Satellite technologies, particularly those relating to earth observation, offer, if not a least likely case, then a not-so-obvious case for testing the thesis that information technologies are modifying the global knowledge structure. To a greater extent than other information technologies, the roots of earth remote sensing (ERS) satellites are solidly in the domain of national security and Big Science. Looking only at the technology'S early roots in the superpowers' military reconnaissance programmes, one might hypothesize that satellites place science at the service of traditional national security objectives, thereby reinforcing the scientific state. A superficial look at state-based ERS programmes, particularly the US Landsat in its early years, would reinforce that hypothesis. Indeed, no project involving the large-scale collection of statistics approaches in magnitude or scope today's state-based ERS

programmes. Yet other remote sensing developments suggest that, although the technology originally emerged from and bolstered the scientific state, it is now facilitating the diffusion of epistemic sovereignty beyond the scientific state. Users of ERS data are increasingly non-state actors, including a wide variety of industries, scientists, the media, and citizens' groups. High-resolution satellite imagery, until recently monopolised by the national security agencies of the superpowers, is now freely available on the market-to every state's military as well as to groups like Greenpeace. The multi-billion dollar industries of satellite communications and geographical information

services (GIS) have dwarfed the military uses of satellites. The loosely co-ordinated international global change research programme, which relies primarily on satellite observations for its data, is likely to become the largest research project in human history, even with the current budget-cutting mood of many governments. Thus, the global transparency afforded by ERS technologies presents a tremendous challenge to states interested in controlling access to information about resources and events within their territorial jurisdiction.

Satellite images of the Earth problematize sovereigntyLitfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999)

Even in the technology's original association with the superpowers' security apparatus, it displayed an intrinsic tendency to complicate the norm of territorial exclusivity. The early space age, which gave birth to ERS technologies, was characterised by fierce competition. For the superpowers, and to a lesser extent for the latecomers to space technology, large-scale space 'programmes were symbols of national prestige that must necessarily come under autonomous state control. Particularly for the US, military reconnaissance was intended to function as a staple in the exercise of

territorial sovereignty; knowing the adversary's military and industrial capabilities was seen as essential to preventing foreign intervention. Paradoxically, just as the mutual acquisition of nuclear weapons by the superpowers rendered those weapons effectively unusable, the mutual acquisition of satellite reconnaissance technology rendered their territorial space utterly transparent. While

satellites may have offered some protection against military intervention, they simultaneously opened the door to visual intervention. The mutual pursuit of territorial sovereignty through surveillance technologies necessarily undercut both sides' epistemic sovereignty; their ability to control access to information about themselves was compromised by the global gaze of the adversary's satellite systems.The principle of territorial exclusivity is problematised in a world rendered transparent by satellite technology, in large part because the non-territorial nature of outer space is incongruous with a world of sovereign states. While the air space above a state's territory lies within that state's jurisdiction, the space above the earth's atmosphere (outer space) was declared in the 1966 Outer Space Treaty to be a res communis, or the common province of humanity.24

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Better earth observation will render the entire world transparent, undermining state sovereignty.Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999)

It might be an overstatement to declare, as some have, that satellites have "abolished the concept of distance"/1 but it is certainly the case that the transparency afforded by ERS has undercut traditional practices of territorial sovereignty. Certainly the technology still bears the imprint of its

origins in military reconnaissance, the ultimate purpose of which was to protect the superpowers' territorial integrity, but soon the equivalent of spy data will be available to anyone--state and non-state actors alike--who has access to a credit card. The emergence of ERS data on the world market has eroded dramatically the ability of states to maintain control over information about processes and resources within their borders. The almost universal availability of ERS data has rendered much of the world transparent, and the higher the resolution, the greater the transparency. By virtue of its globality and its transparency, ERS challenges the spatial order of the modern world system; territorial exclusivity is undercut by the diffusion of epistemic sovereignty.

Earth monitoring technology breaks up technoscience monopoly on information. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999 ERS = Earth Remote Sensors)

Global Science

The privatisation of Landsat and the entry of SPOT images and high-resolution data on the commercial market may constitute only one chapter in the ERS saga. The new satellite-based global environmental research programmes promise to grant access to vast quantities of information to a wide variety of scientists. When combined with computer technology, these images could be made avail able world-wide on a nearly instantaneous basis .1i2 Already, a marine biologist can sit at his computer and "get information from a free-ranging whale any where on Earth".1i3 NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS), which will soon begin returning unprecedented amounts of environmental data on a continual basis, will be complemented by a host of information storage and interpretive technologies that will make the data accessible to scientists around the world. Yet, as one user of satellite data in Africa remarks: "It's great that there is more information available, but if you still need a Ph.D. to run the GIS software and $50,000 of high-tech equipment, then it will still favour government agencies and work against community, neighbourhood, and nonprofit groups./M Rather than a monolithic

scientific state or a corporate monopoly of information, might the new ERS technologies generate or reinforce a global technocracy? At first glance, the logic underlying ERS appears to be profoundly technocratic. The skills required to operate satellites and sensors, and to decipher ERS data and imagery, are concentrated in an elite group of technicians and scientists in the industrialised countries.lis At times, ERS experts exhibit an almost missionary zeal reminiscent of the Baconian technocratic ideal. One champion of ERS technology even declares that human survival depends upon it: "The great opportunity for progress in the world in the 20th century was physics, which built the world we live in. The great opportunity for creative progress in the next century will be Earth Science. It will determine if humankind is in the universe to stay."(>6 As the technical capabilities of ERS technology expand, such senti ments may become even more

prevalent. However, despite the technocratic potential of ERS, other forces could compel the architects of ERS technology to become more accountable to its users. Even if many users appear to be "high priests", the,very multiplicity of their voices suggests the potential for a diffusion of informational control along multiple channels.

The state may be an important channel, but it is neither the only one nor is it a univocal one. As "Big Science" projects lose their appeal in a time of budgetary conservatism, and as their prestige value is diminished with the end of the Cold War, space agencies must increasingly justify ERS programmes in terms of their users' requirements. Not only does this result in sovereignty bargains in the form of international co-operative endeavours which modify the scientific state, but it also compels state programmes to be more accountable to the needs of non-state actors. One space scientist calls this a "thoroughly post-modern approach", stating that, "No longer will the development of new technology be driven by an elite of scientists and engineers, but a broader base of consultation will be required with the many user constituencies."o7 ERS is a multifaceted technology incorporating sometimes contradictory ten dencies. On the one hand, the global view afforded from the vantage point of space seems especially conducive to notions of "planetary management" and the centralisation of power. Indeed, in the discourse

surrounding ERS, references to "managing the planet" and "global management" abound.o8 Yet global science is inherently decentralised, depending upon "countless loosely knit and continu ally shifting networks of individual researchers-most of whom resist outside intervention-in communication that crisscrosses the borders of well over a hundred sovereign nations".o9 The decentralised nature of global science is likely to have important social and political implications for efforts to cope with global ecological interdependence, the implications which are beyond the scope of this article.

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GIS satellites pushed to their limit, reverses into the opposite of original intention, inevitably becoming a medium which ordinary and disadvantaged citizens are monitored. Additionally GIS satellites give the viewer a sense of artificial reality, which you cannot differentiate between artificial and real worlds, trapping us into particular modes of knowing and separate us from the real world and its problems.Sui and Goodchild 03’ (DANIEL Z. SUI Department of Geography, Texas A&M University, College Station MICHAEL F. GOODCHILD National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, Department of Geography, University of California, “A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using McLuhan’s law of the media”)

The last proposition of McLuhan's law of media is that when a medium is pushed to its limit, it will be reversed into the opposite of what it was originally designed for. In McLuhan's (1964, 23) words, ‘[W]e become what we behold; we first make the tools, then the tools will make us’. Using numerous examples of human artefacts and technologies, McLuhan tries to show that in the beginning, media are extensions of people, but in time

people become extensions of media. When a medium is pushed to its limit, it becomes the message itself. Critical scholars of technology give this process a variety of different names, such as ‘Marx's alienation’(Ollman 1977), ‘reversed adoption’(Veregin 1995),

‘technopoly’(Postman 1992) and ‘colonization of lifeworld’(Habermas 1987). Echoing what Wittgenstein demonstrated for language, McLuhan proposes that

when a medium is pushed to its limit, it is no longer just the vehicle, but also the driver. Indeed, when we surrender our goals and social practices to the technical requirements of a machine, the technology itself becomes what Max Weber called an ‘iron cage’(Scaff 1989). When this occurs, the cage locks up our imagination and creativity. To McLuhan and many of his followers, media are not simply ‘making-aware’ agents but also—and perhaps more importantly—‘making-happen’ agents. Taken in isolation, this reversal concept may easily be construed as a technology-deterministic argument. In fact, McLuhan's law of media

only makes sense when its four elements are taken into consideration as a whole in his tetradic framework. In the context of GIS, what worries most social theorists is that computerization of the natural and cultural may inevitably lead to the naturalization and culturalization of the computerized. This trend, if not deconstructed critically, will have serious social and philosophical consequences. In more and more real-world situations, we have witnessed incidents where organizational mandates or problems themselves are modified to meet requirements of GIS technology. Data models force representations on the world by requiring them to follow certain rules, such as separation of complex systems into geographical layers or imposition of crisp, Boolean categories on systems which are inherently fuzzy. If the only available means of solving a problem is a GIS with no way of representing uncertainty, it seems much simpler to ignore uncertainty

than to insist on better tools. When GIS are reversed into their opposites, they cease to promote democratic practices in society. Instead, GIS developments and applications are driven by corporate greed or the state's insatiable desire to survey and collect intrusive information from ordinary citizens (Goss 1995). Consequently, we become slaves of our media, instead of using media to serve our higher goals and aspirations. Some critics warn that GIS, coupled with other information technologies, will become a super Panopticon to monitor and survey, rather than to help, ordinary citizens, especially the truly disadvantaged (Sui 1998). Perhaps even more problematic are the

philosophical consequences that result when GIS reverse into their opposites. Given their increasingly numerous and versatile visualization capabilities, GIS may give users a false sense of what is real and thus a very shaky ontology (Gregory 1994; Raper 1997). Even more troubling is that these pictures make people feel more real—hyperreal, which is, in fact, unreal. Based upon their studies of the TV advertising industry, Mitroff and Bennis (1993) find that deliberate manufacturing of falsehood and fantasy is not only profitable but has become part of our

culture, as electronic media become the dominant mode of representation. They further point out t hat two kinds of unreality are produced: (1) artificial reality, in which it is often difficult to differentiate between actual and virtual worlds, and (2) pseudoreality, in which attractive presentation overwhelms the desire to differentiate the real from the unreal. Turkle (1995, 169) terms the first form of unreality the ‘Disneyland Effect(the artificial seems real)’ and the second the ‘Artificial Crocodile Effect(the fake seems more compelling than the real)’.These ontological effects have tended to suppress alternative ways of knowing, suggesting that GIS may become a prison which traps us into particular modes of knowing and separates us from the real world and its problems (Curry 1998). To Heidegger (1977), the real danger of the inherent enframing nature of technology comes not from potentially lethal machines or the apparatus of technology itself. Rather, the danger lies in our becoming increasingly blind to alternative ways of looking at things as we turn to technology for solutions to social problems. In this sense, GIS as media represent more than mere exterior aids; they represent interior transformations of consciousness as well. When and if this indeed happens, it would be more apt to say that GIS stands for geographic illusion systems (Couclelis 1996). Indeed, when pushed to their limits, GIS are just the electronic version of Plato's cave: what we see on the screen are only illusions of reality.

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Increased access to Remote Sensing data is key to holding governments and corporations responsible.Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999 ERS = Earth Remote Sensors)

Similarly, environmental advocacy groups have put ERS data and imagery to work for their own purposes. The Nature Conservancy and the Natural Heritage Network,

for instance, have used satellite images to evaluate biodiversity and assess the health of plant and animal communities in their efforts to monitor enforcement of the US Endangered Species Act. Environmental and development groups in post-apartheid South Africa are applying GIS in a way that incorporates local knowledge, community needs, and specific histories into plans for sustainable development.so Thus, ERS technologies may reconfigure epistemic sovereignty from below, a promising development for groups trying to assert local control.The logic of ERS with respect to the scientific state operates in multiple directions. For public-goods reasons, most information production continues to emanate from the state, even in the face of trends towards commercialisation. Yet those trends have undercut the ability of states with ERS capabilities to control information flows in any coherent way. If the combination of new companies and global environmental science succeeds in making high-quality data available at low cost, the ability of citizen groups to monitor the activities of both governments and corporations, and consequently to hold them account able, will increase exponentially .

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Remote Sensing data decentralizes state monopoly on information, allowing citizen groups to be meaningfully engaged in state politics. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999)

The ability to control the flow of information, or what I have called epistemic sovereignty, is central to the exercise of control and authority within a territorial jurisdiction. The transparency and the global perspective of ERS technologies entail multiple, and sometimes contradictory, implications for epistemic sovereignty_ The

primary challenges are from the private sector, global science, and popular movements. On the one hand, ERS contributes to the unbundling, but not the abolition, of territoriality, often deterritorialising state practices. The principle of non-intervention, upon which traditional norms of sovereignty have relied, is at least called into question by the global gaze and the ubiquity of ERS images. On the other hand, ERS has also strengthened the territorial sovereignty of a few developing countries in their remote regions. Yet the greatest contribution of ERS to the reconfiguration of epistemic sovereignty might very well be in its applications to the proliferation of information and political practices beyond the state-most importantly, in the decentralised networks which constitute global science and the local efforts of community, environmental and peace groups.81

While state-funded ERS programmes have their roots in the balance-of-power politics characteristic of the national security state, today they tend to exemplify the sorts of sovereignty bargains required by scientific and environmental co-operation. The availability of high-resolution data on the commercial market has forced states to make a trade-off between traditional security objectives and industrial competitiveness. While none of these developments entails an outright "erosion" of sovereignty, they do highlight the importance of

the epistemic dimension of sovereignty. The control over the flow of information, which is essential to the modern scientific state, appears to be shifting beyond the scientific state. If modernity is interpreted as the enclosure of the globe via the twin institu tions of state sovereignty and private property, then ERS technologies at once epitomise and challenge that trend. On the one hand, by making visible the invisible, satellite imagery

renders nature subject to claims of ownership and control--whether by states or by oil and mining companies. On the other hand, in light of the globality and transparency inherent in ERS technologies and the emphasis on environmental co-operation, ERS has the potential to become a tool in the revisioning of nature as a global commons. Indeed, this is the thrust of much of the discourse surrounding

environmental ERS. Likewise, the commercial availability of high-resolution satellite images opens the door for a host of non-state actors, especially citizens' groups and the news media, to involve themselves in the high-stakes national security issues which were once the sole purview of states' military establishments. There is also an interesting tension between the universal, totalising perspective of the planetary gaze, and the application of ERS technologies to popular sovereignty through the decentralis ation of scientific and political control.

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AT: K PermThe perm solves: Social movements already address disaster in a plethora of ways. Politics are not mutually exclusive. Luft 2009 (Rachel E., assistant professor of sociology and women and gender studies at the University of New Orleans, American Quarterly Volume 61, Number 3, September 2009 Beyond Disaster Exceptionalism: Social Movement Developments in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina)

This article examines leading New Orleans–based, grassroots movement orientations in what I describe as the second generation of Katrina social movements. I characterize the development of these orientations and provide some examples of their articulation and utilization during and after Hurricane Gustav. As the first meaningful disaster threat to the region since Katrina, Hurricane Gustav provides an opportunity to examine strategic and tactical movement lessons as they cycle back to inform disaster preparedness and response. The orientations are still unfolding and are neither unitary nor shared across all movement groups. Nevertheless, it is still

possible to characterize their primary features. The first post-Katrina emergent movement orientation rejects disaster exceptionalism and seeks to recontextualize threat, hazard, and trauma in the daily conditions faced by disenfranchised groups. It understands “disaster” to be different in degree, not in kind, from the ongoing experience of social inequality for many in the United States. The second orientation is a strategic, integrated model of service provision and grassroots organizing. Whereas most first-generation post-Katrina groups privileged either service provision or resistance activity, second-generation groups lean toward a strategic synthesis of the two, offering specific services as a base-building tactic. The third orientation is a human rights approach to disaster response. It draws from three disparate human rights traditions—the Black Liberation Movement (BLM), the United Nations (UN), and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—that have converged in post-Katrina New Orleans. The human rights framework rejects the Robert T. Stafford Act as master disaster policy in the United States, and looks to international covenants and guiding principles to govern disaster response.

Perm solves: the kritik’s approach is additive, not replacements.Brunsma and Picou 2008 (David, University of Missouri, and J. Steven, University of South Alabama, Disasters in the Twenty-First Century: Modern Destruction and Future Instruction Social Forces Volume 87, Number 2, December 2008)

This structural vulnerability paradigm was vividly portrayed to the public by the global media attention accorded to Hurricane Katrina (Beck 2006; Jones-Deweever and Hartmann 2006; Barnshaw and Trainor 2007). Nonetheless, this paradigm has not been without critics, as well as proponents, of alternative areas and topics of inquiry (Tierney 2007). Embedded within the structural vulnerability paradigm is the issue of disaster etiology and subsequent differential patterns of community recovery that characterizes different agents of disaster. As noted over the years by Erikson (1976), Horlick-Jones (1995), Freudenburg (1997), Hewitt (1995) and Kroll-Smith and

Gunter (1998), among others, alternative analytical approaches must be creatively utilized to address 21st century disasters. These concerns are not "replacement areas" for the current theoretical emphasis, but rather creative research expansions that address new disaster risks, the viability of institutions of public safety, [End Page 984] "missing voices," interpretive accounts, corrosive communities and applied responses to the lack of timely community recovery for survivors of modern disasters. In short, the aftermath of major catastrophes over the past decade mandates "a reorientation and redirection of important themes throughout the discipline of sociology" for future disaster inquiry (Picou and Marshall 2007:1). We suggest that the primary reason for the necessity of this post-normative paradigm shift is the anthropogenic recontextualization of disasters in the modern world. Initially identified and addressed in the early "technological" disaster literature from revelations regarding contested discourses – which included public blame directed toward government and corporate organizations and the documentation of chronic corrosive processes of collective trauma – these institutional failures revictimized survivors and became sources for chronic disaster effects (Freudenburg 1997; Marshall et al. 2004). Most notably, protracted litigation has been documented as being one dominant, driving stressor which has perpetuated long-term community disruption and psychological stress for survivors of the worst ecological disaster in North American history, i.e., the Exxon Valdez oil spill (Picou et al. 2004). Indeed, such an anthropogenic scenario characterized the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina when perpetrators, responsible agencies and the failure of institutional response systems were all blamed as "causes" for the observed death and destruction by both survivors and the media. Litigation and toxic exposure has characterized both of these modern catastrophes and chronic physical and mental health ailments persist for survivors (Brunsma et al. 2007).

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Perm solves: multiple grassroots strategies can coexist.Luft 2009 (Rachel E., assistant professor of sociology and women and gender studies at the University of New Orleans, American Quarterly Volume 61, Number 3, September 2009 Beyond Disaster Exceptionalism: Social Movement Developments in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina)

If the State found in Hurricane Katrina an opportunity to remake social policy, then grassroots organizers recognized in the ensuing social disasters the need to hone new strategies of grassroots resistance. The three orientations I have outlined here reflect some of these new strategies. Created in dynamic tension with the first generation of Katrina resistance orientations, the frameworks are still evolving. Organizers seek to turn them into both daily organizational agendas and long-term movement-building tactics. At the same time, the orientations function more broadly as disaster action repertoires among a population that understands the connection between daily hardships and ‘natural’ catastrophe. The social movement organizations I have chosen to highlight are deeply committed to structural transformation, which they believe consists of

radical, substantive changes in the distribution of resources and freedoms. In many ways, they share a movement vision, rooted in an intersectional understanding of justice and the belief that only broad-based grassroots organizing can achieve it. At the same time, despite many similarities, their visions also differ, as do the strategies and tactics they deploy in the larger service of these visions.

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The permutation solves- aid-driven ideas allow for the rethinking of the system by allowing the objects of aid to become subjects and active agents where their ideas will have voice. Even if you win the plan is bad, it will cause a backlash beneficial to your movement. Only the aff working with the alternative can solve capitalismDavid Sogge - Harvard graduate and former international aid worker-2002 Sogge- works as a self-employed analyst in the aid industry. He holds degrees from Harvard, Princeton and the Institute of Social Studies. Since 1970 he has held staff positions in American, Canadian and Dutch private aid agencies and has carried out many dozens of evaluation and policy development assignments for multilateral, bilateral and private aid agencies and for policy activist organizations.- Give and Take: What’s the Matter with Foreign Aid?- p. 151-2

Put into practice, many aid-driven ideas proved impotent. Resistance and re-negotiation lower down aid chains deflected some harmful effects. Failure sometimes led to better understandings of social contexts, and to progressive initiatives. For example, attention to the informal sector allowed a closer look at precarious livelihoods; those insights have since informed thinking and experimentation in sustainable livelihoods and such things as trade unions of market women. Ideas emerging from population science catalysed action in women's reproductive rights - largely thanks to a women's movement promoting its ideas both inside and outside the aid system. Ideas trigger critique and counter-ideas. Against the pessimism about local know-how, for example, activists and academics concerned about the rights of indigenous people (including their rights over seeds and useful plants) joined with sympathetic aid system staff to promote understanding of indigenous knowledge. Similar cycles of debate and renewal have taken place where outsiders' criticisms have triggered rethinking about gender, the role of the state, complex political emergencies, and social service delivery, to name only a few topics. In these ways, concepts and practice in the aid system have seen real improvement. Appearing in these debates is a striking pattern, sometimes hidden under a fog of aid-speak about management, monitoring, partnership and best practice. Aid-driven ideas, whether technocratic ones such as the Green Revolution or political ones such as anti-communism, tend to produce negative knock-on effects. In 2001, the 'blowback' of conflict, displacement and hostility towards US global dominance - of which foreign aid was an important part - began to reach terrifying proportions .21A rethinking of the aid system nested in contexts of power is long overdue. If the objects of aid are to become subjects and active agents in its use, their interests and ideas will have to form points of departure. But that is unlikely to happen where intended beneficiaries or their representatives lack parity with those wishing to develop, rescue or empower them. In the balance is whether aid system backers of new ideas, once they start investing in them, can anticipate and tackle these disparities of power.

Additionally, Aid can be used as a tool for local empowermentDavid Sogge - - Harvard graduate and former international aid worker-2002 Sogge- works as a self-employed analyst in the aid industry. He holds degrees from Harvard, Princeton and the Institute of Social Studies. Since 1970 he has held staff positions in American, Canadian and Dutch private aid agencies and has carried out many dozens of evaluation and policy development assignments for multilateral, bilateral and private aid agencies and for policy activist organizations.- Give and Take: What’s the Matter with Foreign Aid?- p. 151-2But where aid intensity and pressures to spend are high, the authenticity of local initiatives will tend to be low. Non-profits are either organized by donor agencies themselves, or spring up as entrepreneurial ventures to meet donor specifications. Organ- izations that were once member-driven have been converted into contracting social enterprises driven by competition for the donor dollar. USAID and the World Bank pioneered public service contracting of non-profits in Latin America, and the practice has spread elsewhere.Yet despite these seductive pressures, downward accountability and transparency in aid-supported popular organizations still function." There are, in short, hopeful signs that aid chains do not inevitably put end users in shackles.

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Capitalism is the only way to generate resources necessary to save the environment.Martin Lewis professor in the School of the Environment and the Center for International Studies at Duke University. Green Delusions, 1992 p 19-20.As noted above, I believe that only a capitalist economy can generate the resources necessary for the development of a technologically sophisticated, ecologically sustainable global economy. In embracing capitalism I do not thereby advocate the laissez-faire approach of the Republican

right. To say that the market plays an essential role is not to say that it should be given full sway. As Robert Kuttner (1991) persuasively argues, the laissez-faire ideology has actually placed shackles on the American economy; it has rather been the “social market” economies, like that of Germany, that have shown the greatest dynamism in the postwar period. Moreover, if the example of Japan teaches us anything, it should be that economic success stems rather from “combining free markets and individual initiative with social organization” (Thurow 1985 :6o; emphasis added). At the same time, hard heads must always be matched with soft hearts (see Blinder 1987); we must never lose sight of social goals when working for economic efficiency or ecological stability But both social equity and environmental protection are, I will argue, more easily realized by working through rather than fighting against the market system and the corporate structure of late twentieth-century capitalism. Economic growth, environmental protection, and social welfare should be seen as positively rather than negatively linked; a society that demands strict pollution controls, for example,

will be advantaged in industrial competition at the highest levels of technological sophistication, as will a society that continually upgrades its human resources by providing workers with skilled, well-paying jobs (Porter 1990).

Only capitalism can generate enough wealth to afford investments necessary to ensure environmental protectionTaylor 2003 senior fellow CATO institute. (Jenny Taylor, Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism, http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3073)Property rights -- a necessary prerequisite for free market economies -- also provide strong incentives to invest in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can be sure they'll be around to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for resource conservation and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on such decisions, minority preferences in developing societies are

overruled (see the old Soviet block for details). Furthermore, only wealthy societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification. Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for heating and cooking needs) are directly responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today. Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the environmental organizations combined. Finally, the technological advances that are part and parcel of growing economies create more natural resources than they consume. That's because what is or is not a "natural resource" is dependent upon our ability to harness the resource in question for human benefit. Resources are therefore a function of human knowledge. Because the stock of human knowledge increases faster in free economies than it does in socialist economies, it should be no surprise that most natural resources in the western world are more abundant today than ever before no matter which measure one uses. This is not to say that government regulations haven't had an impact or aren't occasionally worthwhile. It is to say, however, that free markets are an ally -- not an enemy -- of Mother

Earth. The Left, accordingly, has no special claim on Earth Day.

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Only a market based system can generate capital fast enough and efficiently enough to generate enough innovation to address the green problemSteinberg 10 (Ted, Ted Steinberg is Professor of History and Law at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. His work in the field of environmental history has attracted attention to his name as a leader in the new generation of environmental historians, Can Capitalism Save the Planet? Radical History Review 2010 2010(107):7-24; DOI:10.1215/01636545-2009-032 , http://rhr.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/2010/107/7)

The global crisis in environmental relations with its effects on everything from biodiversity to forest cover —

substantial as it is — is nothing that the capitalist system cannot handle. The new project in the United States — “Code Green,” as Friedman calls it — is about creating the right market incentives for green innovation to take place. At almost

every turn Friedman seeks to naturalize the free market. As he explains, only the “free market” can lead us down the path to clean energy. “Only the market can generate and allocate enough capital fast enough and efficiently enough to get 10,000 inventors working in 10,000 companies and 10,000 garages and 10,000 laboratories to drive transformational breakthroughs; only the market can then commercialize the best of them and improve on the existing ones at the scope, speed, and scale we need.”55 At points in the book Friedman seems to be renouncing the emphasis on individual initiative that also characterizes green liberalism. He makes fun of tracts such as “205 Easy Ways to Save the Earth” and “40 Easy Ways to Save the Planet.” If only environmental reform were so easy, explains

Friedman. While urging readers to “personally lead as environmentally sustainable a life as you can,” he also advocates for a more “systemic approach” to environmental reform — reforms such as properly factoring price into the cost of goods and seeing that externalities are absorbed within the financial equation. But since Friedman is not advocating any structural transformation it is impossible to see how, for example, corporations — which are legally obligated to operate in the financial best interests of their shareholders — would relinquish the idea that plants, soil, water, forests, and other natural resources are anything but a form of capital. Nor is it clear how Friedman’s prescription for the world’s

ecological ills can come about without renouncing the pro-growth ideology that has governed capitalism since at least the nineteenth century. What Friedman means by fundamental change is, at most, “changes in our lifestyle,” not in the prevailing mode of production.56

In Friedman’s “Code Green” world, more companies would presumably behave like Wal-Mart, which has been greening its trucking fleet and pushing consumers in the direction of compact-florescent bulbs. On the surface it seems hard to disagree with Friedman’s conclusion that the superstore’s “growth be as green as possible.”57 And yet Wal-Mart’s entire business plan centers around a particular strategy of labor and environmental management. Just as anti-unionism has enabled the company to externalize the cost of labor, the company’s push for new roads and drainage systems on the urban fringe for its big-box stores allows it to profit — at public expense — from the high traffic that is the signal feature of the retailer’s success. How likely is it that a company like Wal-Mart will internalize the true environmental and labor costs of its

operations when its entire business plan is predicated on externalizing those costs? Will a planet filled with green-thumbed CEOs, bowing down to Smith and his faith in free markets, really be able to address ecological problems such as global warming, species extinction, and the alteration of the global nitrogen cycle?58 Friedman’s best-selling prescription for the world is of course a long way from the ideas of people like Schumacher who wrote Small Is Beautiful thirty-five years earlier. The popularity of the two books at their various points in time represents the distance environmental politics has traveled over the past several decades. Unlike Friedman, Schumacher, an economist though he was, believed the question of how to reform capitalism in the name of social justice and ecology remained at its core a question of politics. Schumacher put his trust in small-scale economic entities, but he did not believe in small government or small ideas. It might surprise today’s devotees of the neoliberal, neo-appropriate-technology worldview that their pioneering intellectual figure reckoned that corporations “live parasitically on the labour of others” and argued for an end to private ownership, at least among largescale enterprises.59 If in these Friedmanesque times such ideas sound like so much Joe Hill pie in the sky, it is worth taking a moment to remember that Schumacher, too, in his day, was a best-selling author — even if his road was not taken.

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AT: Capitalism K:– inequalities

The aff controls unregulated capitalism to reduce social inequalities.Dew 2007 (Kevin, Public Health, University of Otago Public health and the cult of humanity: a neglected Durkheimian concept. Sociology of Health & Illness)The science of social epidemiology underpinning public health policy can be seen in terms of a new religion based on reason and objective knowledge. Social epidemiology points to the social causes of illness and death, and, as such, policy goals are directed at ameliorating negative social impacts. Classically, these influences include unequal distributions in income, education, housing and other social factors that lead to unequal outcomes in terms of morbidity and mortality (Howden-Chapman 2005). As such, the science of social epidemiology leads to calls for social and economic justice in the policy arena. To reduce health inequalities, social inequalities must also be reduced. A seminal publication in this regard was the Black Report in the United Kingdom, which, like more recent UK reports highlighting the link between social and health inequalities, was a source of political embarrassment for the government of the day (Shaw et al. 2005). Similarly, a recent social epidemiology report published by the New Zealand Ministry of Health, titled Decades of Disparity, pointed at neo-liberal restructuring as a cause of widening health gaps between different groups (Ajwani et al. 2003). Public health in this context offers a critique of the excesses of unregulated capitalism, performing an important function in a society based on social differentiation and individualism.

Public health acts as a buffer against the ill effects of capitalismKevin Dew, Public Health, University of Otago Public health and the cult of humanity: a neglected Durkheimian concept. Sociology of Health & Illness 1/2007Public health can be positioned as a buffer against both individualism and capitalism. With this understanding, public health researchers and advocates have a clearer view of their objectives, and the potential confusion between politics and science can be explained. The role of public health in moral regulation can be seen as a contemporary response to the limits of traditional religions, but, as such, public health will always be in tension with the individualistic tendencies at the foundation of the human condition, represented in Durkheim's use of the concept homo duplex.

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Earth remote sensors allow for counter-territorializing by marginalized groups. Litfin 1999 (Karen T., Professor of Political Science, University of Washington, The Status of the Statistical State: Satellites and the Diffusion of Epistemic Sovereignty, Global Society, Vol. 13, No.1, 1999 ERS = Earth Remote Sensors)

ERS data can also facilitate the localisation of control in some surprising ways. Perhaps most interesting is the use of satellite data by indigenous peoples for mapping their customary land rights and documenting the role of the state and multinational corporations in environmental destruction. Environmental advo cacy groups and indigenous rights groups in Indonesia, Nepal, Thailand, and the Pacific Northwest are using satellite-generated data to reterritorialise their political practices to an extent previously inconceivable.77 Indigenous communi ties around the world, in Canada, the Caribbean, the Amazon, and the Hi malayas, are attempting to integrate their traditional knowledge into conventional scientific methodologies through the use of satellite data and GIS

software packages to legitimate territorial claims?8 While ERS data may deterri torialise political practice at the level of the nation- state, when used for "counter mapping" by indigenous peoples at the local level, it seems to have exactly the opposite effect?9

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Turn: Environmental security is key to stop violent conflict over material conditions of scarcity. Karen T Lifton, assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, 1999 ( Constructing Environmental Security and Ecological Interdependence., Global Governance, 10752846, Jul-Sep99, Vol. 5, Issue 3)The project's conclusions seek to address this objection by concluding that "environmental scarcity," which leads to violent conflict, is itself a combination of environmental change, population growth, and unequal resource distribution.[sup18] Yet the empirical findings only support a more nuanced conclusion, since virtually every example--from the Senegal and Jordan River valleys to the Ganges-Bramaputra flood plain--highlights the pernicious impact of inequalities in wealth and access to natural resources. Environmental insecurity turns out to be a consequence of social structures rather than ecological degradation per se. Nor do the findings consider the relevant international institutions--for example, the various agreements India has made with Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh to share river waters. The findings, however, do support two important conclusions: that diffuse and persistent subnational violence is a more likely outcome than acute international violence and that environmental degradation can contribute to the delegitimation of the state. They also confirm a key insight of an ecological approach to international relations: strengthening the environmental component of conflict resolution can promote international stability . Although Homer-Dixon's work is problematic for its lack of insight into the root causes of both violent conflict and environmental degradation. it usefully decenters the state and fosters a conception of environmental security that is decoupled from traditional national security discourse.

Perm solves and has 3 net benefits: Improves security, solves environmental problems, and rehabilitating security discourse. Karen T Lifton, assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, 1999 (Constructing Environmental Security and Ecological Interdependence., Global Governance, 10752846, Jul-Sep99, Vol. 5, Issue 3)

It may be tempting to jettison environmental security, but there are strong practical and epistemological reasons for not doing so. First, the two principal trends that have thrown the field of security studies into tumult--the declining utility of force and the growing salience of nonstate actors--are likely to persist. Alternative formulations of security will therefore continue to demand a hearing. Second, climate change, land degradation and desertification, the largest wave of species extinctions since the dinosaurs, and multifarious pollutants are real and growing sources of insecurity . Third, limiting security language to military threats cedes too much ground to the security traditionalists . If security is a discursive practice, then it can be constructed by a mulitiplicity of social actors. Security discourse can be rehabilitated to encompass environmental dangers, however, only if certain caveats are prudently observed. These have mostly to do with the twin dangers of bolstering a traditional state-centric threat-defense conception of security, and falling into an objectivism that ignores the socially constructed element

of all security concerns. To claim that environmental problems are social constructions is not to deny their physical character ; to believe otherwise would be ecologically and politically irresponsible . One of the pitfalls of security language is the presumption that security signifies some reality with a concrete external referent. As Ole Waiver argues, rather than being a sign for an objective referent, security is most aptly understood as a speech act: "The utterance itself is the act."[sup19] Although his critique could provide the basis for a more reflective conception of security as a

socially constructed set of concerns, Waiver opposes an expanded notion of security, including the "securitization of the environment," on the grounds that "security is articulated only from a specific place, in an institutional voice, by elites."[sup20] In other words, only those

concerned with classic state-centric threat-defense dynamics are entitled to perform security speech acts. This reading not only ignores the fact that security speech acts are performed on a daily basis by an increasingly diffuse group of scholars and practitioners, but it also abdicates too much terrain to the security traditionalists. The state is not the sole subject of security, nor is coercive power the sole means of seeking it. If Cold War hawks could seize on the ambiguous symbol of national security, then contemporary analysts may also deploy the ambiguous symbol of environmental security. But to do so reflectively, without falling prey to the sorts of ideological excess that characterized Cold War security discourse, they must be conscious of how they construct their speech acts.

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Environmental problems will get worse, and there is no reason to abandon all security. The alternative doesn’t eliminate security, security will just migrate.Karen T Lifton, assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, 1999 ( Constructing Environmental Security and Ecological Interdependence., Global Governance, 10752846, Jul-Sep99, Vol. 5, Issue 3)

These cautionary words, however, need not preclude development of a useful conception of environmental security. First, the environmental problems that are likely to deepen in the coming century present material dangers, not just discourses of danger, even if their meaning is socially constructed. To the extent that a widespread sense of danger persists, security language will find a voice, so every effort should be made to refine that language. Second, there is no prima facie reason for ceding the security terrain to those whose focus is the state's ability to wield coercive force. If current trends continue, then security discourses will migrate to other perceived dangers.

Turn: Environmental security fosters international cooperation and solve violent conflict. Karen T Lifton, assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, 1999 ( Constructing Environmental Security and Ecological Interdependence., Global Governance, 10752846, Jul-Sep99, Vol. 5, Issue 3)

The proliferation of environmental treaties since 1972 affirms that international cooperation has been essential in the pursuit of environmental security. Indeed, the clearest evidence for the ecological turn in world politics is the astonishing array of recent treaties on a host of environmental problems, including marine pollution, acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity, and the export of toxic waste to developing countries. Although the pace of treaty making has slowed somewhat since the peak in 1992, the ecological trend in international relations will inevitably continue as the twin engines of environmental destruction--population and consumption--move into high gear in the coming century. If recent history serves as a guide, this trend will engender greater cooperation rather than a heightened risk of violent conflict . But in order for that cooperation to move beyond Band-Aid measures, the tension between economic and ecological interdependence must be confronted more directly.

Turn: Green Capitalism

A) Current economic practices ensure environmental degradation. Karen T Lifton, assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, 1999 ( Constructing Environmental Security and Ecological Interdependence., Global Governance, 10752846, Jul-Sep99, Vol. 5, Issue 3)

Ecological and economic interdependence stand in an uneasy relationship to one another. On the one hand, both concepts stress interconnections and mutual vulnerabilities. Like ecosystems, the global economy is characterized by far-flung causal chains,

such that, in John Muir's classic turn of phrase, "everything is hitched to everything else." On the other hand, the global economy confronts earth's species and life-support systems in a generally predatory mode. Ecological degradation , from tropical deforestation to ozone depletion to toxic waste trade, is a corollary of existing economic practices . An authentic environmental security agenda for the twenty-first century, therefore, must somehow harmonize economic and ecological interdependence. If taken seriously, this mandate, which is implicit in the term sustainable development, would entail radical consequences in all spheres of life.

Perhaps because economic practice is at the core of the problem, the greening of international political practice appears to be proceeding at a more rapid pace than the greening of the global economy.[sup38] Nature was discounted in modernity's economic calculations because it was assumed to be resilient and abundant as both source and sink. The annual expansion of gross national product is still widely viewed as the best indicator of economic progress--and perhaps progress in general, despite the availability of more ecologically inclusive indicators.[sup39] Growth is the core value informing all of the major international economic institutions: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. To the extent that environmental considerations are incorporated into international economic institutions at all, as in the environmental side agreement of the North American Free Trade Agreement or the World Bank's Global Environmental Facility, their impact is minor. Thus, the road to a truly sustainable global economy is likely to be a long and difficult one. Rather than being acknowledged as the fundamental challenge it represents, the language of sustainability has been grafted onto the liberal international economic order, without any real transformation of economic practices. Even worse, affluence is sometimes recommended as the recipe for sustainability.[sup40] According to this reasoning, only the prosperous can afford the luxury of environmental integrity.

B) Aff solves: green cap <Insert Green Cap Ev>

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Turn: Alternative requires tech transfers from the US to the global south. Karen T Lifton, assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, 1999 (Constructing Environmental Security and Ecological Interdependence., Global Governance, 10752846, Jul-Sep99, Vol. 5, Issue 3)

Although interconnectedness is a physical feature of the planet's geosphere and biosphere, international ecological interdependence is socially constructed. The perception of ecological interdependence, for instance, can generate important opportunities for developing countries. As Marian Miller argues, developing countries seem to fare best in regime negotiations when the perception of interdependence is greatest, as it is

for common property resources.[sup46] Because industrialized countries perceived interdependence to be high with respect to ozone depletion, developing countries were able to exact significant concessions--most important, the technology transfer fund--in exchange for their willingness to cooperate. A generalized increase in the perception of interdependence could have important implications for the creation of innovative North-South partnerships in the coming century. Global climate change offers a potential arena for such a partnership, yet key states have so far failed to seize the opportunity. Although industrialized countries, with less than 20 percent of the world's population, emit 70 percent of all energy-related

greenhouse gases, developing countries are expected to surpass them within a generation.[sup47] Rather than fostering partnership, key industrialized countries (most notably the United States) refuse to move beyond minuscule reductions until developing countries limit their emissions. Largely because of European pressure, the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol, requiring industrialized countries to reduce overall emissions by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels sometime between 2008 and 2012.[sup48] Even with U.S. ratification, which

is in doubt, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol will do little to achieve the 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists believe is required to stabilize the world's climate.[sup49] Such an accomplishment will require not only major economic and technological changes but also a strong NorthSouth partnership premised on a mutual perception of ecological interdependence. Failure to forge that partnership will only increase the longterm economic, political, and environmental costs.

Environmental harm is real: the only question is whether environmental politics will solve or not. Karen T Lifton, assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington in Seattle, 1999 ( Constructing Environmental Security and Ecological Interdependence., Global Governance, 10752846, Jul-Sep99, Vol. 5, Issue 3)

This section explores two broad scenarios for global environmental governance. In the first, environmental change continues at a gradual pace, whereas in the second it occurs rapidly, precipitating a sense of crisis. In general, the prospects are much brighter under the first scenario; a wider range of creative policy options will present themselves, existing institutions can continue to evolve, and violent conflict will be less likely. In either case, the ecological turn m world politics that began in the latter part of this century will continue into the next. The primary question is whether that turn will be socially and politically benign or harsh . Preventive policies that address the causes of environmental problems are therefore preferred on the basis that they will tend to avert the more catastrophic scenarios. Because human activities

have taken on geophysical proportions, we have produced a kind of ecological hermeneutical circle. Whether environmental change occurs at a gradual or precipitous pace depends on crucial human choices and will in turn affect how problems are socially constructed. In other words , our activities help to produce the physical conditions that will shape how environmental problems are constructed in the future.

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And, our environmental security rhetoric internal link turns their impacts—it prompts a re-conceptualization and shift in value structures that is a prerequisite to the altDyer 8 [Dr. H.C. Dyer, School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) @ University of Leeds, “The Moral Significance of 'Energy Security' and 'Climate Security” Paper presented at WISC 2nd Global International Studies Conference, ‘What keeps us apart, what keeps us together? International Order, Justice, Values’

http://www.wiscnetwork.org/ljubljana2008/getpaper.php?id=60]

There is already considerable concern and cooperative activity, but it must also cope with predominately structural obstacles. Beyond the practical problem of coping with existing structures, or changing them, is the deeper problem of assuming foundational points of reference for any given

structural reality such that challenging or changing it is difficult or impossible. So there is an intellectual, or attitudinal, hurdle to leap at the outset – we’d have to accept that some deeply held assumptions are simply not viable (sustainable), and learn to let them go. I have suggested elsewhere that while ‘perspectives on politics in the absence of

immutable external foundations may be quite widely accepted… there is a great temptation in public discourses to deal with uncertainty by positing certainties, and to play fundamentalist trump cards of different kinds’ (Dyer, 2008). Switching from one foundational

reference to another is not likely to work, and the anti-foundational perspective taken here suggests a pragmatic approach to developing the most effective social practices as we learn them, and adjusting structures to support them. An institutional context illustrates the discourse, in so far as ‘some controversial principles, such as whether to approach from an anthropocentric perspective or from a biocentric approach, or whether the viewpoint was from the individual or community, were the focus of considerable debate’. Not surprisingly, there is an air of realism about the application of ethical principles on renewable energy: ‘although a normative declaration would be nice, it was not feasible in the current political environment’ (UNESCO 2007; 7). The pragmatism is, nevertheless, appropriate since there is no progress to be made by assuming that an appreciation of the moral significance of energy and climate security only bears on abstractions – the point is that the underlying values reflected in political agendas should be flushed out, and the most appropriate values promoted and acted upon in a pragmatic fashion as interests. For example, it was noted that ‘barriers to renewable energy systems were institutional, political, technical and financial’ and also that there is ‘potential conflict between bioregional, potentially unstable energy systems and countries’ desires for energy independence and self-reliance’; this suggests the need for a ‘global eco-ethics’ (UNESCO 2007; 8). Pragmatism is inherent in thinking through the moral significance of such challenges: ‘From the ethical point of view, nuclear power presented many problems at each point of the complex supply chain, including uranium mining, enrichment, and risk management in a functioning plant. It was a highly centralized and state-controlled source of energy that did not promote participatory democracy’. It can also be seen that ‘nuclear and fossil-fuel based power also triggered international conflicts’. By contrast, ‘renewable energies such as solar, wind, small hydro,

biomass, geothermal and tidal energy are often decentralized and can be used in remote areas without a solid energy supply system’ (UNESCO 2007; 8-9). The moral significance of energy security and climate security dilemmas is that they cause us to see change as a challenge, rather than impossible ; a challenge to be met by reconsidering our value-orientations – which changes everything. Elsewhere I’ve noted that goals which the state purports to serve (health, wealth, security) are seen differently in an environmental light,

and this could lead to substantial change in political practices (Dyer, 2007). Another pragmatist, John Dewey, ‘argued that the public interest was to be continuously constructed through the process of free, cooperative inquiry into the shared good of the democratic community’ and Minteer suggests that this is a necessary approach ‘in making connections between normative arguments and environmental policy discourse’ (Minteer, 2005). This reflects Hayward’s argument that environmental values are supported by enlightened human interests, and furthermore this link must exist to promote ecological goods, and that consequently there are serious implications in fully integrating environmental issues into our disciplinary concerns (Hayward, 1998). I’ve argued before that environmental politics dislodges conventional understandings of moral and political agency, and in ‘this wider socio-political-economic context, ecological significance may be the determining factor in the end’ (Dyer, 2007). Hargrove (1989) makes an argument for anthropocentric, aesthetic sources of modern environmental concern by identifying attitudes that constrained (‘idealism’, ‘property rights’) and supported (scientific and aesthetic ideals) our environmental perspectives. If this argument doesn’t stretch us much beyond ourselves, there is no reason these anthropocentric orientations couldn’t be built upon as a foundation for more specifically ecocentric perspectives. The key here is to identify the underlying ‘security’ assumptions which thwart efforts to cope with energy and climate issues coherently and effectively, and to advocate those assumptions that serve genuine long-term human security interests (inevitably, in an ecological context). In this way can we take stock of the existing structures that constrain and diminish human agency – while conceiving of those that would liberate and secure it in sustainable ways. As the reality of the situation slowly dawns on us, various moral, political, economic and social actors are beginning to consider and test new strategies for coping – the real question is whether they are just playing to beat the clock, or if they’ve stopped long enough to reconsider the rules and purposes of the strategic context in which they act. 'Security' as cause and effect of a moral turn Security is central to understandings of the responsibilities of states, even definitional in their self-conception as defenders of the nation, with moral obligations to their own population which include defending them from external threats of all kinds (even if threats to nationals commonly emanate from their own state, per Booth’s ‘protection racket’, 1995). Security is usually the first concern of individuals as well, even extending to protective self-sacrifice (if sometimes greed or pleasure usurps this priority). The boundaries of concern and felt responsibility for security are nevertheless potentially flexible, and moral obligations may vary over time and space (who’s included, who’s not; when, where). The rationale for those obligations may now be extending over wider ranges of time and space, especially within an ecological perspective on how ‘security’ might be obtained. In this way, alertness to the security implications of climate and energy drives moral development, while at the same time a developed sense of moral obligation prompts a recasting of these issues in more urgent security terms. The insecurity of the status quo with respect to both energy and climate is enough to warrant serious consideration of how relative security might be obtained, and yet the most obvious dimension of insecurity is the collective failure to plan and act for the inevitable change that will be forced upon us, sooner or later. At every periodic assessment it seems sooner, rather than later, as IPCC and other government reports confirm our worst fears and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sets the doomsday clock ever nearer to midnight. On the assumption that justice and equity will underwrite the feasibility of any international climate strategies, Grasso (2007) attempts to ‘identify a pluralistic normative ethical framework for climate mitigation and adaptation’ which includes ‘the criterion of lack of human security’

as regards the allocation of adaptation resources. The pursuit of any meaningful energy and climate security policy will require anticipation of future post-carbon scenarios. In offering a convincing perspective on ‘the age of petroleum’ as merely a recent blip in the long run of human energy supply (until the late 19th century provided by biomass and animate

labour, and from the 21st century by renewables) the Nuclear Energy Agency argues that the ‘critical path structure’ should include ‘concurrent risk, economic, and environmental impact analyses… for all technologies and proposed actions for the transition to a post-petroleum economy’ (Nuclear Energy Agency, 2004; 37). While nuclear power remains under consideration, and hydrogen technology emerges as a potential portable fuel (though electricity intensive in production), there are many more positive solutions to the challenge. The

alternatives to fossil fuels clearly exist, though it ‘will take a new industrial revolution’ (Scheer, 2002) or an ‘energy revolution’ (Geller, 2002). A wide range of innovations include ‘a fuel cell battery that runs on virtually any sugar source’ (African Technology Development Forum 27 March 2007). The Renewables 2007 Global Status Report (REN21) offers evidence of ‘the undeterred growth of electricity, heat, and fuel production capacities from renewable energy sources, including solar PV, wind power, solar hot water/heating, biofuels, hydropower, and geothermal’. Heinberg notes that the 21st century ushered in an era of declines, in a number of crucial parameters: Global oil, natural gas and coal extraction; Yearly grain harvests; Climate stability; Population; Economic growth;

Fresh water; Minerals and ores, such as copper and platinum. ‘To adapt to this profoundly different world, we must begin now to make radical changes to our attitudes, behaviors and expectations’ – he seeks to address ‘the cultural, psychological and practical changes we will have to

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UTNIF 2011 GEOSS AFFmake as nature rapidly dictates our new limits’ (Heinberg, 2007). Thus moral issues arise as the idea of a post-petroleum economy gains new currency as a security issue. Decades ago, conventional intergovernmental bureaucracies (e.g. FAO, 1982, ‘Planning for the post-petroleum economy’) were addressing what now seems a novel and urgent issue, perhaps because the sense of urgency or emergency has re-emerged in the confluence of energy and climate concerns. Both producers and consumers of energy have already taken some steps to reflect concern with energy and climate insecurity, by experimenting with different practices (recycling, improving efficiency, slowly introducing new technologies, attempting to manage the energy situation collectively, etc), and yet a

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AT: Environmental Security K remaining element of denial is reflected in a slow pace of change limited to the margins rather than the centre of planning. It seems fairly clear that maintaining current assumptions about economic growth

while addressing climate change will at the very least require prompt application of new technologies and a regulatory

and fiscal environment to support them (Sachs, J., 2008). This implies a radical shift of practices, and it remains to be seen whether currently familiar assumptions about economic growth will survive. Dabelko notes the considerable history of environmental security thinking, which figured in the landmark Brundtland Report (‘Our Common Future’, 1987) twenty years ago, including extensive discussions of energy, food security, and sustainable development in general (Dabelko, 2008). However, the Brundtland account of environmental security (and sustainable development) may be too conventional and insufficiently radical for current purposes, as

the contemporaneous critiques and events of the intervening decades suggest. The present challenges require a more holistic 'ecological security' perspective for achieving climate security and energy security in a coordinated manner, reflecting an evolving morality-security relationship. Pirages and De Geest offer an ‘eco-evolutionary’ approach to environmental security, ‘to anticipate and analyze emerging demographic, ecological and technological discontinuities and dilemmas associated with rapid globalization’

(Pirages and De Geest, 2003), while Kütting highlights the distinctions between environmental security and ecological security, suggesting that ecological security addresses local environment/society relations rather than state-centric concerns with environmental threats – though she does argue that ecological security is still focussed on the issue of violence and conflict as security references, rather than inequality per se; an issue that development of the concept is addressing. She also notes Peluso and Watt’s (2001) political ecology critique of the concept of environmental security: ‘[their] ecological security approach combines structural political economy approaches with cultural and ecological studies’

(Kütting, 2007; 52-53). Among the conclusions Kütting arrives at is that the breadth and inclusiveness of ‘ecological security’ which gives it great qualitative and

normative analytical power can also diffuse the meaning and reference of the concept. A broad concept, to be sure, and yet the

breadth of ‘ecological security’ may provide the framework for research into narrower policy topics which is otherwise thrown into a competitive relationship. For each society, economy, or country, or collective actor (such as the EU),

competing political and economic demands may undermine the attempt to address climate and energy security priorities in a coordinated, consistent, and complementary manner. It is already clear that energy and climate create a nexus that invokes long-term security concerns for major actors (Hart, 2007), but not so clear that they have been understood as interconnected

strategic goals in a moral context. Achieving such strategic goals rests heavily on global cooperation and the success of any such endeavours would seem to rest in having a commonly accepted framework – such as ecological security – to underwrite agreement in principle and policy. Sayre identifies as the critical factor our choice of values: ‘we have a clear and urgent need to set aside the values of consumerism and to replace them with other values …’ (Sayre, 2007; Chapter 18). It is this underlying set of values that has not yet been seriously addressed in energy and climate security discussions, not least

because it presents profound challenges to almost everything we currently do, and the way we do it. To meet such challenges it will be necessary to internalize an ecological understanding of human security in our moral, political, economic, and social systems and structures. Such an ecological understanding would encompass the widest scope of moral community. The emergence of ‘energy security’ and

‘climate security’ reflects an increased sense of urgency around these issues at the heart of state interests and the global

political economy, and may yet represent the tipping point at which the remnants of denial and resistance are abandoned in favour of structural adjustments of the ecological kind. While practical issues (such as developing alternative

portable fuels) may carry moral implications, the real normative weight of pursuing energy and climate security arises from the wider structural implications of securing a sustainable future. Viewing such developments as a moral turn allows us to

appreciate that a sense of insecurity can cause us to question our assumptions and adjust our values, and that schanging values can underwrite our efforts to change everything else – including the socio-political- economic structures that influence our practices. Conclusions: more than instrumental adjustment These recent climate and

energy security terms reflect more than mere instrumental adjustment to practical challenges, within the framework of

existing moral conceptions and commitments; that is, within the framework of the existing international system. Our attention should be turned to the systemic and structural implications of this shifting discourse, as it may reflect substantial

underlying change. Furthermore, any opportunity to build on momentum or dynamics that would address the fundamental issues of energy and climate should be identified and capitalised on – while mere instrumental short-term

adjustments may advantage some actors, it is of course necessary to go far beyond such superficial instrumentality and to appreciate the deeper significance of the energy-climate scenario. In viewing shifts in the security discourse as morally significant, we are better able to appreciate the structural consequences. In light of these evolving security concepts we should attempt the further development of an 'ecological security' concept as a holistic perspective of some practical and normative significance. This should be informed by an anti-foundational interpretation of the discourses in which these security terms are deployed, with no fixed assumptions about moral, political, economic or

social points of reference – this is new territory, which demands open-mindedness. As Cerny (1990) concluded in respect of structure and

agency, our inherited ideas are imperfect guides to the future, and a critical report on biofuels (Santa Barbara, 2007) concludes that energy security and climate change demand a new paradigm and cites Einstein: ‘We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them’. Oversimplification of the issues under convenient

‘security’ labels is risky – in doing this states signal high priority ‘national interests’ and the threat of extraordinary measures. However, a moral perspective on security could lead to even more extraordinary measures: global cooperation in the long-term pursuit of human interest, bringing urgency to what is obviously important. Thus some conformity around ecological values may yet help us cope with the challenges of energy and climate security.

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Alt causes widespread suffering—creates apathy to structural problemsDyer 8 [Dr. H.C. Dyer, School of Politics & International Studies (POLIS) @ University of Leeds, “The Moral Significance of 'Energy Security' and 'Climate Security” Paper presented at WISC 2nd Global International Studies Conference, ‘What keeps us apart, what keeps us together? International Order, Justice, Values’

http://www.wiscnetwork.org/ljubljana2008/getpaper.php?id=60]

The discourse around the key terms will allow insight into the nature of the ‘moral community’ of energy and climate.

These new terms invoke consideration of a global moral community in which individual responsibility is an important consideration, but more radically, they potentially extend the scope of moral community beyond the current generation (in respect of intergenerational equity and futurity) and beyond the human agent (in respect of ecological concern). While the two issue areas of energy and climate have received individual attention, the notion of

'security' attached to either of them is relatively novel and introduces a different intellectual and policy orientation which has not yet been thoroughly explored. Beyond this novelty is the connection between the two issues, which has also been raised recently (e.g. by WWF, the UK government, an Oxford High-Level Taskforce, Chatham House, think-tank E3G, and academic journals such as 'China and World Economy'). For example, in pointing to these interconnected issues it is noted that 'in the future energy security will be almost as important as defence to our national security', while at the same time there are also ‘ambitious goals for climate security and international development’ such that ‘an aggressively single-minded pursuit of energy security will compromise these other goals’ (Oxford High-Level Taskforce, 2007). The introduction to their report claims that ‘present UK policy is a hotchpotch of measures unlikely to deliver’. This seems to be a very clear indication of policy incoherence in at least one significant actor in these issue areas. Even as these two issues are identified with one another, it is typically with a focus on either energy security, or climate security, and mention of associated climate change issues or energy issues, without considering the implications of the terminology, the hidden tension behind policy, or the altogether absent discussion of inevitable reductions in consumptive lifestyle expectations and declining or altered economic growth. This calls attention to contradictory and complementary aspects of energy 'security' and climate 'security' as strategic goals, and the coherence of policy in these areas. It raises a challenge to address the unspoken requirements to make sacrifices in terms of consumption and/or to

absorb costs in terms of mitigation, if both objectives are to be pursued in a coordinated manner and within a relevant timescale. The ‘security’ content of the debates can, of course, be accessed from the traditional field of military-political security such that the underlying characteristics of energy and climate issues are stripped down to potential consequences in terms of conflict. For example, a NATO view on energy security represents the conventional political-military strategic orientation which continues to dominate debates about security, and so illustrates commonly held conceptions of the nature of the issue and implied responses to it:

All modern developed economies are dependent upon an abundant supply of energy both in terms of guaranteed supplies and stable prices…Today, the tightness in the global oil market and recent price increases, not to mention the threat of terrorist attacks against critical infrastructure, have once again made energy security an issue of strategic importance (Shea, 2006). The vulnerabilities identified in this perspective include lines of communication and transportation, internal developments of importance to the global economy, difficulty of increasing supplies or finding new energy resources to ‘cope with rising demand, particularly from China and India’, loss of overall production due to under-investment, state-controlled oil production (80% of all oil assets state owned), and a lack of spare capacity making even small decreases in supply significant as North America and Europe are dependent on imported energy. Thus energy and climate issues may be conveniently linked to traditional notions of security where that suits political purposes, in ignorance of Deudney’s argument that organised violence as a traditional threat and source of insecurity is not analytically comparable to environmental threats (Deudney, 1990, pp. 461ff; Deudney, 1991, pp. 22-28). At the same time, the economic threats (so now ‘economic security’) are increasingly obvious and as these are a central focus of national interests, what could previously be described as ‘low politics’ issues of economy and social welfare increasingly move into the ‘high politics’ category previously occupied by military-political concerns. Pirages and De Geest indicate that environmental politics ‘emerged from its initial incarnation in the arena of "low politics" and is rapidly becoming a "high politics" concern’ (Pirages and De Geest, 2003). So it has now become commonplace to identify energy and its climate corollary as significant issues: ‘Energy policy is one of the most important strategic issues facing the Government over the next ten years, for both security and environmental reasons’. It is equally commonplace to note the poor state of coordinated planning in respect of these challenges: ‘There’s scant evidence so far of ministers getting it right’ (Outlook, The Independent, 13 May 2008, p37).

Security concepts, and the issues to which they refer, tend to hinge on estimates of relative importance giving rise to ‘urgency’ or ‘emergency’. Of course, we might note that one person’s sense of emergency is not always shared by others (consider the sign often found on administrative desks: ‘Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my

part’). Yet, it is commonplace in organisational contexts that the urgent displaces the important. To some extent this explains the political force of security concepts, as they underwrite claims for priority. In this way, daily struggles for survival, or dignity, are not captured by an understanding of security which focuses on a single iteration of threat or cataclysm – though the prospect of a sudden fall from a position of relative privilege to a position of daily struggle might well be seen as a security issue by the privileged. What determines ‘security’ is how, and by whom, issues are classified as

either important or urgent, or both. It may well be that some common morality determines what is agreed to be fundamentally important, in general principle (say, human rights, whether political or economic), and yet this may be displaced by claims for urgency in respect of less fundamental, less important, more specific and less principled concerns (say, security of

particular governments or of economic privilege, etc). This is the significance of a shift to the ‘high politics’ of security. As long as limited and specific issues are

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AT: Environmental Security K classified as urgent (i.e. as security issues) long-term planning for important issues will be overshadowed and unattended. Even when important issues occasionally surface in the urgent category in the form of natural, economic, or political disasters (a tsunami, typhoon or earthquake; famine, hyperinflation, general loss of liquidity in a ‘credit crunch’, or even a defaulting sovereign

debtor; a Kosovo, Rwanda or Darfur), these may be set aside as humanitarian or ‘private’ issues which are exempt from normal national or international security considerations. Only recently, and tentatively, has the importance of humanitarian issues been raised in the security context of ‘Responsibility to Protect’, but still with little sense of urgency evident. It is quite possible that priority and urgency is assigned on a completely ad hoc basis by the specific interests implicated in particular events, though this is still rare or diffuse enough to have little impact on general concepts of security (if somewhat more on national security doctrines) – or more to the point, states are still able to define any threat to their interests in national security terms. The conventional connection between national interest and power politics permits the characterisation of some important long-term issues such as nuclear proliferation as being security issues, but only to the extent that these are presented as being potentially urgent, immediate threats. The presentation is of the essence here – the ‘war on terror’ being an instructive, and deeply flawed, case in point. Etzioni, for an example of rethinking such issues, has recently made a pragmatic communitarian case for ‘primacy of life’ as the focus and priority of security (Etzioni, 2007), and the priority of such security over democracy (in US foreign policy), which is indeed hard to argue against in these simple terms, though this doesn’t seem to address the conditions of life beyond individual corporal security (sensible starting point that it is) – it is ‘short on explicit

discussion of sociological and political theory’ (Kleykamp, 2008). Certainly longer-term issues which few deny are important (environmental degradation, poverty and underdevelopment, lack of human rights), and yet don’t attract a sense of urgency, will be driven to the margins of the agenda. How then, do the novel concepts of ‘energy security’ and ‘climate security’ find themselves in the mix of security concepts? Indeed, are they to be taken seriously as security concepts? They are less likely to be taken seriously in a conventional perspective, but more likely to be in a critical perspective, and perhaps most likely from a radical perspective – but this leaves us to ponder their appearance in mainstream discourse. Perhaps it is only the contribution to military and economic security concerns that attracts attention, though more radical insights are possible. Consider the notion of ‘biopolitical security’. Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics can be mapped onto a critical, radical, notion of security as surveillance, control and thus management of the human species. Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, for example, note that the referent object of the biopolitics of security is ‘life’, which in turn is subject to modern developments in respect of population demographics, molecular biology, and digital virtual life (2008; 269). The modern freedom-security relationship thus described raises Foucault’s spectre that it may threaten itself, and ‘wager the life of the species on its own (bio) political strategies’ (Dillon and Lobo-

Guerrero, 2008; 292) Without necessarily adopting a radical critique, we can still test these new terms in familiar waters. How can concepts of ‘energy security’ and ‘climate security’ help us to appreciate longer-term issues of importance but as yet little apparent urgency? The ideological debates about ‘peak oil’, for example, seem to pit left and right in a struggle to define the level of urgency in the human (economic, social, political) relationship to petroleum, with the only common ground being acceptance that we currently inhabit a global petroleum-based economy. Those on the right appear to defend privileged interests in neo-liberal economic policies based on assumptions of plentiful petroleum, while those on the left purport to defend the interests of those who benefit less from the petroleum economy and have even more to lose if no preparation is made for a ‘low carbon economy’ (in the current jargon), let alone a ‘post-petroleum economy’. Because of our petroleum-based economy there are, of course, direct connections between petroleum and other resource issues (including food) as well as the connection with climate change, and its implications in turn for other resources (including food). This is most apparent when high oil prices trigger a broader sense of insecurity around the prospect of another global recession. Here, an attempt is made to situate the morality of these issues in a 'security' context, and vice versa – situating the security terms in a moral, political or social context. While there is likely to be some tension between the intended meanings of the

terms ‘energy security’ and ‘climate security’, and even some incoherence, the normative weight of setting these issues in a 'security' context may amount to both cause and effect of an underlying moral turn. The moral obligation to provide security – an obligation of political authority, typically the state – is extended by ‘energy’ and ‘climate’ beyond traditional response-to-threat categories and practices of states; consequently the capacity of states to deliver such security is reduced, making room for other economic and social actors to exert influence.

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The permutation puts the insights of their criticism to work with science in order to modestly improve the world. Donna Haraway, Professor in the History of Consciousness Board at the University of California at Santa Cruz, 1994. [“A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies,” Configurations 2.1]

Optical metaphors are unavoidable in figuring technoscience. 3 Critical vision has been central to critical theory, which aims to unmask the lies of the established

disorder that appears as transparently normal. 4 Critical theory is about a certain kind of "negativity"--i.e., the relentless commitment to

show that the established disorder is not necessary, nor perhaps even "real." The world can be; that is what technoscience studies can be about. Technoscience studies can inherit the bracing negativity of critical theory without resurrecting its Marxist humanist ontologies and teleologies. If the poison of metaphor-free facticity can be neutralized by the tropic materiality of worldly engagement--and again, engagement without narrative or scientific guarantees--then

technoscience studies will have done its job. Perhaps cracking open possibilities for belief in more livable worlds would be the most incisive kind of theory, indeed, even the most scientific kind of undertaking. Perhaps this is part of what Sandra Harding means by

"strong objectivity"! 5 "High" theory might be about pushing critical negativity to its extreme--i.e., toward hope in the

midst of permanently dangerous times. So, for me, the most interesting optical metaphor is not reflection and its variants in doctrines of representation.

Critical theory is not finally about reflexivity, except as a means to defuse the bombs of the established disorder and its self-invisible subjects and

categories. My favorite optical metaphor is diffraction--the noninnocent, complexly erotic practice of making a difference in the world, rather than displacing the same elsewhere.

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A2 Science K - Perm

Prefer the permutation – the K and the Aff aren’t mutually exclusive – creating symbiosis and negotiation between them is key to effective criticism. Donna Haraway, Professor in the History of Consciousness Board at the University of California at Santa Cruz, 1994. [“A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies,” Configurations 2.1]All that is needed for a game of cat's cradle is now in play. Drawn into patterns taught me by a myriad of other practitioners in technoscience worlds, I would like to make an elementary string figure in the form of a cartoon

outline of the interknitted discourses named (1) cultural studies; (2) feminist, multicultural, antiracist science projects; and (3)

science studies. Like other worldly entities, these discourses do not exist entirely outside each other. They are not preconstituted, nicely bounded scholarly practices or doctrines that confront each other in debate or exchange, pursuing wars of words or cashing in

on academic markets, and at best hoping to form uneasy scholarly or political alliances and deals. Rather, the three names are place markers, emphases, or tool kits--knots, if you will--in a constitutively interactive, collaborative process of trying to make sense of the natural worlds we inhabit and that inhabit us; i.e., the worlds of technoscience. I will barely sketch what

draws me into the three interlocked webs. My intention is that readers will pick up the patterns, remember what others have learned how to do, invent promising knots, and suggest other figures that will make us swerve from the established disorder of finished, deadly worlds. Cultural Studies: A set of discourses about the apparatus of bodily/cultural production; emphasis on the irreducible specificity of that apparatus for each entity. Not culture only as symbols

and meanings, not comparative culture studies, but culture as an account of the agencies, hegemonies, counter-hegemonies, [End Page 66] and unexpected possibilities of bodily construction. Deep debts to Marxism, psychoanalysis, theories of hegemony, communications studies, critical theory of the Frankfurt variety, the political and scholarly cauldron of the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Relentless attention to the ties of power and embodiment, metaphoricity and facticity, location and knowledge. Unconvinced by claims about insuperable natural divides between high and low culture, science and everything else, words and things, theory and practice. 8 Feminist, Multicultural, and Antiracist Theory/Projects: The view from the marked bodies in the stories, discourses, and practices; marked positions; situated knowledges, where the description of the situation is never self-evident, never simply "concrete," always critical; the kind of standpoint with stakes in showing how "gender," "race," or any structured inequality in each interlocking specific instance gets built into the world--i.e., not "gender" or "race" as attributes or as properties, but "racialized gender" as a practice that builds worlds and objects in some ways rather than others, that gets built into objects and practices and exists in no other way. Bodies in the making, not bodies made. Neither gender nor race is something with an "origin," for example in the family, that then travels out into the rest of the social world, or from nature into culture, from family into society, from slavery or conquest into the present. Rather, gender and race are built into practice, which is the social, and have no other reality, no origin, no status as properties. Feminist, antiracist, and multicultural locations shape the standpoint from which the need for an elsewhere, for "difference" is undeniable. This is the unreconciled position for critical inquiry about apparatuses of bodily production. Denaturalization without dematerialization; questioning representation with a vengeance. 9 [End Page 67] Science Studies: reflexivity, constructionism, technoscience instead of science and technology, science in action, science in the making (not science made), actors and networks, literary/social/material technologies for establishing matters of fact, science as practice and culture, boundary objects, the right tools for the job, artifacts with politics, delegated labor, dead labor, confronting nature, the culture of no culture, the nature of no nature, nature fully operationalized, escape velocities, obligatory compared to distributed passage points, representing and intervening, how experiments end, social epistemology. All the disciplines of science studies: history, philosophy, sociology, semiology, and anthropology; but also the formation of science studies out of the histories of radical science

movements, community organizing, and policy-directed work. These histories are regularly erased in the hegemonic accounts of disciplinary and interdisciplinary development in the academy and the professions. 10 [End Page 68] I seek a knotted analytical practice, one that gets tangled up among these three internally nonhomogeneous, nonexclusive, often mutually constitutive, but also nonisomorphic and sometimes mutually repellent webs of discourse. The tangles are necessary to effective critical practice. Let me name this knot tendentiously and without commas: antiracist multicultural feminist studies of technoscience--i.e., a practice of critical

theory as cat's cradle games. 11

This is a game for inquiring into all the oddly configured categories clumsily called things like science, gender, race, class, nation, or discipline. It is a game that requires heterogeneous players, who cannot all be members of any one category, no matter how mobile and inclusive the category seems to be to those inside it. I want to call the problematic but inescapable world of antiracist feminist multicultural studies of technoscience simply "cat's cradle." Cat's cradle is a game for nominalists like me who cannot not desire what we cannot possibly have. As soon as possession enters the game, the string figures freeze into a lying pattern. Cat's cradle is about patterns and knots; the game takes great skill and can result in some serious surprises. One person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands; but the cat's cradle figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players, who add new moves in the building of complex [End Page 69] patterns. Cat's cradle invites a sense of collective work, of one person not being able to make all the patterns alone. One does not "win" at cat's cradle; the goal is more interesting and more open-ended than that. It is not always possible to repeat interesting patterns, and figuring out what happened to result in intriguing patterns is an embodied analytical skill. The game is played around the world and can have considerable cultural significance. Cat's cradle is

both local and global, distributed and knotted together. If we do not learn how to play cat's cradle well, we can just make a tangled mess. But if we attend to scholarly, as well as technoscientific, cat's cradle with as much loving attention as has been lavished on high-status war games, we might learn something about how worlds get made and unmade, and for whom. "String theory" and "super string theory" are names for high-status explanatory models in cosmology and physics. These theories of the universe are designated TOE--i.e., a Theory of Everything. TOE is a joke, of course, but a very revealing one about the deep ideological resonances and commitment to

unified totality in the knowledge-power games of the "hard" sciences, with physics and mathematics the "hardest" cases of all. 12 Cat's cradle is not that kind of game; its string theories are not theories of everything. Cat's cradle is, however, a mathematical game about complex, collaborative practices for making and passing on culturally interesting patterns. Cat's cradle belongs to no one, to no "one" culture or self, to no frozen subject or object. Cat's cradle is a wonderful game for demystifying notions like subject positions and fields of discourse. I like the trope embedded in this string

theory. Cat's cradle players are very unlikely to think that war games give the best models of knowledge building and the best tropes for one's own practice. Narrative structures built on miming cat's cradle patterns would not produce another Sacred Image of the Same. Cat's cradle is where I think the action is in science studies, feminist studies, antiracism, and cultural studies--not in the mind-numbing militarized games of endless agonistic encounters and trials of strength passing as critical theory and as technoscience. If, as we must do, we are fruitfully to mistake the world for the trope, [End Page 70] and the trope for our own method, in a spiraling mimesis,

cat's cradle promises to be a less-deadly version for moral discourse, knowledge claims, and critical practice than heroic trials of strength. Tracing networks and configuring agencies/actors/actants in antiracist feminist multicultural studies of technoscience might lead us to places different from those reached by tracing actors and actants through networks in yet another war game. I prefer cat's cradle as an actor-network theory. The issues here are not "mere" metaphors and stories; the issues are about the semiosis of embodiment, or, in Judith Butler's nicely punning phrase, about "bodies that matter.

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Their pessimistic and totalizing criticism of technology ironically ratifies it’s power and undermines attempts at putting it in service of progressive political struggles. Leo Marx, Senior Lecturer, Kenan Professor of American Cultural History, Emeritus, 1994. [The Idea of “Technology” and Postmodern Pessimism]

But the second way of looking at the role of technology in postmodernist thinking is much less encouraging. What many postmodernist theorists often propose in rejecting the old illusion of historical progress is a redescription of social reality that proves to be even more technocratic than the distorted Enlightenment ideology they reject. Much early postmodernist theorizing took off from a host of speculative notions about the appearance of a wholly unprecedented kind of society, variously called "post-Enlightenment," "post-Marxist," "post-industrial," or "post-historic." A common feature of these theories-and of the umbrella concept, postmodernism-is the decisive role accorded to the new electronic communications technologies. The information or knowledge they are able to generate and to disseminate is said to constitute a distinctively postmodern and increasingly dominant form of capital, a "force of production," and, in effect, a new, dematerialized kind of power. This allegedly is the age of knowledge-based economies.

There are strikingly close affinities between the bold new conceptions of power favored by influential postmodern theorists-I am thinking of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault-and the functioning of large technological systems.23 Power, as

defined by these theories, is dynamic and fluid. Always being moved, exchanged, or transferred, it flows endlessly through society and culture the way blood flows through a circulatory system or information through a communications network. In contrast with the old notion of entrenched power that can be attacked, removed, or replaced, postmodernists envisage forms of power that have no central, single, fixed, discernible, controllable locus. This kind of power is everywhere but nowhere. It typically develops from below, at the lower, local levels, rather than by diffusion from centralized places on high. The best way to understand it, then, is by an ascending analysis that initially focuses on its micro, or capillary, manifestations. The most compelling analogy is with the forthcoming mode of fiber-optic communications, an electronic system that is expected to link all telephonic, television, and computer transmission and reception, and all major databanks, in a single

national (and eventually global) network. This outlook ratifies the idea of the domination of life by large technological systems, by default if not by design. The accompanying mood varies from a sense of pleasurably self-abnegating acquiescence in the inevitable to melancholy

resignation or fatalism. In any event, it reflects a further increase in the difficulty, noted earlier, of discerning the boundary between what traditionally had been considered "technology," (the material or artifactual armature, which may be a network of filaments) and the other socio-economic and cultural components of these large complex systems. In many respects postmodernism seems to be a perpetuation of-and an acquiescence in the continuous aggrandizement of "technology" in its modern, institutionalized, systemic guises. In their hostility to ideologies and collective belief systems, moreover, many

postmodernist thinkers relinquish all old-fashioned notions of putting the new systems into the service of a larger political vision of human possibilities.24 In their view, such visions are inherently dangerous, proto-totalitarian, and to be avoided at all costs. The pessimistic tenor of postmodernism follows from this inevitably diminished sense of human agency. If we entertain the vision of a postmodern society dominated by immense, overlapping, quasi-autonomous

technological systems, and if the society must somehow integrate the operation of those systems, becoming in the process a meta-system of systems upon

whose continuing ability to function our lives depend, then the idea of postmodern technological pessimism makes sense. It is a fatalistic pessimism, an ambivalent tribute to the determinative power of technology. But again, the "technology" in question is so deeply embedded in other aspects of society that it is all but impossible to separate it from them. Under

the circumstances, it might be well to acknowledge how consoling it is to attribute our pessimism to the workings of so elusive an agent of change.

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AT: Weather Security KNo link- we focus to protect the people in the 1ac. Your authors only take into account for a utilitarian environmental securitization. Our discourse is a good thing Dalby 09 (Simon, Ph.D and Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, “security and environmental change”, P135)

'Nonetheless there obviously will be times when forms of intervention for emergency assistance are needed. There might also be times and circumstances where intervening to prevent an environmental disaster is necessary. But where and when and who legitimizes which

invocation of security to justify such interventions goes to the heart of the matter of the geopolitical specification of environmental danger. This thinking about the international dimensions of human security, and the obligations on the part of states and the international community to protect citizens of all states from security threats, links up with the discussion of human security in terms of the appropriate response to humanitarian emergencies and what has become known, following the title of the 2001 ICISS

report, as The Responsibility to Protect. This formulation, subsequently adopted by many members of the United Nations, suggests that states have the obligation to provide for the safety of their citizens, and should they very obviously fail in this duty the international community has the responsibility to intervene to provide the necessary assistance. The human security theme is key; people are

the referent object, not states. This isn't national security understood in traditional terms of protecting borders; it's about human survival and the institutions to ensure this. While this leads to all sorts of policy dilemmas in particular situations (Weiss 2007), it is especially fraught when it comes to discussions of interventions in other states, not least the suggestions in May 2008 that the international community ought to use force to ensure that the government of Myanmar distributed aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The "responsibility to protect" principle might be read as an attempt to reinvent the type of social contract between peoples and rulers that was apparently demolished in many places by the expansion of carboniferous capitalism and nineteenth-century imperialism. Where, as discussed in chapter 3, the eighteenth-century Qing dynasty understood its obligations to take measures to ensure the survival of its people, the

twenty-first-century arguments about the responsibility to protect suggest similar obligations. In the face of environmental change and the possibilities of extreme events, aggravated ENSO events, or other disruptions, then, what are the responsibilities of states to protect their peoples? In part this requires a prior question concerning who is most likely to be affected by environmental change. Clearly, impoverished subsistence farmers are at high risk from the combination of matters in political ecology. So too are the slum dwellers in many of the informal settlements of the cities of the South. Rising sea levels and hurricanes render marginal peoples in the South especially vulnerable, but those in the "north of the north" round the Arctic circle too have already had their lives disrupted by climate change (Dalby 2003). Who might intervene where and how to deal with these human insecurities?

International cooperation toward climate change is key to solve – the aff takes a step in the right direction to solve.Dalby 09 (Simon, Ph.D and Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, “security and environmental change”, P148)

'The logic of a fundamental rethink of energy and climate security is made especially clear in a recent analysis published by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. This report directly confronts the importance of thinking ahead to anticipate potential conflict while moving quickly to de-carbonize economies and reduce the acceleration of the accumulation of greenhouse gases

(Mabey 2007). Explicitly invoking the language of prevention, as opposed to the traditional understanding of security to respond to crises, this analysis written by an environmentalist author is significant because it was published as a discussion paper by an institution at the heart of

the British-military establishment. The analysis points squarely at the need to rebuild infrastructure and economies so that carbon content in the atmosphere is curtailed; this while simultaneously working directly with international institutions to cooperate in anticipating crises and preparing to deal with disruptions. This is not a traditional military response of building armies to deal with aggression, but a policy that takes global change seriously and emphasizes the need to adapt military thinking to deal with the new

circumstances. But given the current circumstances of environmental change, of which climate change is only perhaps the most obvious manifestation, the question of environmental obligations across borders has once again become unavoidable. Emergency circumstances are being invoked by a diverse range of thinkers, from James Lovelock (2006) in his pessimistic analysis in The Revenge of Gaia, through discussions of Kunstler's (2006) "long emergency" and peak oil, to the formulation of environmental emergencies by Australian Friends of the Earth

(Spratt and Sutton 2008), who invoke the medical term "Code Red" in their call for immediate action to tackle climate change. But the geopolitics of who should intervene where to stop what kind of environmental threat to whom is a complicated matter when analysis focuses on cases that might justify such actions. Following Lovelock (2006), the Australian Friends of the Earth suggest that the kind of mobilization undertaken in the 1940s during the Second World War is the scale of effort that is now needed to begin reducing greenhouse gases quickly. Now strategists are finally beginning to think similar things.

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International cooperation in climate change key to avoid conflictDalby 09 (Simon, Ph.D and Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, “security and environmental change”, P152)

Much violence and conflict related in numerous ways to economic and political change has an environmental dimension, but in much of the scholarly literature since the Brundtland commission report (WCED 1987) it seems to be clear that the environment is rarely a direct and immediate cause for violence. The fact that this is the case is key to both the literature on peace parks and the broader

discussions of environmental diplomacy and peacemaking (Conca and Dabelko 2002). Precisely because environmental matters are important, but not a direct cause of warfare, there is the possibility of conflict mitigation and peacebuilding. Hence international cooperation on such things as peace parks acts as a confidence-building measure and establishes patterns of cooperation that reduce the likelihood of dis- putes escalating to warfare (Ali 2007). This may be especially important in Africa, where climate change may yet aggravate numerouspolitical difficulties (Brown et al. 2007).

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AT: Structural Violence K

Their preoccupation with structural violence is naïve and diverts attention from address immanent and dangerous international events. Ken Boulding, 78 is professor of economics and director, Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, University of Michigan, “Future Directions in Conflict and Peace Studies,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1978)Galtung is very legitimately interested in problems of world poverty and the failure of development of the really poor. He tried to amalgamate this interest with the peace research interest in the more narrow sense. Unfortunately, he did this by downgrading the study of international peace, labeling it “negative peace” (it should really have been labeled “negative war”) and then developing the concept of “structural violence,” which initially meant all those social structures and histories which produced an expectation of life less than that of the richest and longest-lived societies. He argued by analogy that if people died before the

age, say, of 70 from avoidable causes, that this was a death in “war” which could only be remedied by something called “positive peace.” Unfortunately, the concept of structural violence was broadened, in the word of one slightly unfriendly critic, to include anything that Galtung did not like. Another factor in this situation was the feeling, certainly in the 1960s-and early

1970s, that nuclear deterrence was actually succeeding as deterrence and that the problem of nuclear war had receded into the background. This it seems to me is a most dangerous illusion and diverted conflict and peace research for ten years or more away from problems of disarmament and stable peace toward a grand, vague study of world developments, for which most of the peace researchers are not particularly well qualified. To my mind, a t least, the quality of the research has suffered severely a s a result . ’

Their alt trades off with traditional IR scholarship which is necessary to prevent war, which outweighs their impacts. Ken Boulding, 78 is professor of economics and director, Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, University of Michigan, “Future Directions in Conflict and Peace Studies,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1978)Where, then, do we go from here? Can we see new horizons for peace and conflict research t o get it out of the doldrums in which it has been now for almost ten years? The challenge is surely great enough. It still remains true that war, the breakdown of Galtung’s “negative peace,” remains the greatest clear and present danger t o the human race, a danger t o human survival far greater than poverty, or injustice, or oppression, desirable and necessary as it is t o eliminate these things. Up to the present generation, war has been a cost and a n inconvenience t o the human race, but it has rarely been fatal t o the process of evolutionary development as a whole. It has probably not absorbed more than 5% of human time, effort, and resources.

Even in the twentieth century, with its two world wars and innumerable smaller ones, it has probably not acounted for more than 5% of deaths, though of course a

larger proportion of premature deaths. Now, however, advancing technology is creating a situation where in the first place we are developing a single world system that does not have the redundancy of the many isolated systems of the past and in which therefore if anything goes wrong everything goes wrong. The Mayan civilization could collapse in 900 AD., and collapse almost irretrievably without Europe or China even being

aware of the fact. When we had a number of isolated systems, the catastrophe in one was ultimately recoverable by migration from the surviving

systems. The one-world system, therefore, which science, transportation, and communication are rapidly giving us, is inherently more precarious than the many-world system of the past. It is all the more important, therefore, to make it internally robust and capable only of recoverable catastrophes. The necessity for stable peace, therefore, increases with every improvement in technology, either of war or of peace .

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Structural violence is an obscure metaphor. Its use cannot lead to positive changes because it conflates distinct and generally unrelated problems of violence and poverty.

Boulding ’77 (Kenneth, Faculty – U. Colorado Boulder, Former Pres. American Economic Association, Society for General Systems Research, and American Association for the Advancement of Science, Journal of Peace Research, “Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung”, 14:1, JSTOR)

Finally, we come to the great Galtung metaphors of 'structural violence' 'and 'positive peace'. They are metaphors rather than models, and for that very reason are suspect. Metaphors always imply models and metaphors have much more persuasive power than models do, for models tend to be the preserve of the

specialist. But when a metaphor implies a bad model it can be very dangerous, for it is both persuasive and wrong. The metaphor of structural violence I would argue falls right into this category. The metaphor is that poverty, deprivation, ill health, low expectations of life, a condition in which more than half the human race lives, is 'like' a thug beating up the victim and 'taking his money away from him in the street, or it is 'like' a conqueror

stealing the land of the people and reducing them to slavery. The implication is that poverty and its associated ills are the fault of the thug or the conqueror and the solution is to do away with thugs and conquerors. While there is some truth in the metaphor, in the modern world at least there is not very much. Violence, whether of the streets and the home, or of the guerilla, of the police, or

of the armed forces, is a very different phenomenon from poverty. The processes which create and sustain poverty are not at all like the processes which create and sustain violence, although like everything else in 'the world, everything is somewhat related to everything else.

There is a very real problem of the structures which lead to violence, but unfortunately Galitung's metaphor of structural violence as he has used it has diverted attention from this problem. Violence in the behavioral sense, that is, somebody actually doing damage to somebody else and trying to make them worse off, is a 'threshold' phenomenon, rather like the boiling over of a pot. The temperature under a pot can rise for a long time without its boiling over, but at some 'threshold boiling over will take place. The study of the structures which underlie violence are a very important and much neglected part of peace research and indeed of social science in general. Threshold phenomena like violence are difficult to study because they represent 'breaks' in the system rather than uniformities. Violence, whether between persons or organizations, occurs when the 'strain' on a system is too great for its 'strength'. The metaphor here is that violence is like what happens when we break a piece of chalk. Strength and strain, however, especially in social systems, are so interwoven historically that it is very difficult to separate them.The diminution of violence involves two possible strategies, or a mixture of the two; one is the increase in the strength of the system, 'the other is the diminution of the strain. The strength of systems involves habit, culture, taboos, and sanctions, all these 'things something fundamental is missing. This is which enable a system to stand increasing strain without breaking down into violence. The strains on the system 'are largely dynamic in character, such as arms races, mutually stimulated hostility, changes in relative economic position or political power, which are often hard to identify. Conflicts of interest 'are only part 'of the strain on a system, and not always the most important part. It is very hard for people to know their interests, and misperceptions of 'interest take place mainly through the dynamic processes, not through the structural ones. It is only perceptions of interest which affect people's behavior, not the 'real' interests, whatever these may be, and the gap between perception and reality can be very large and resistant to change.However, what Galitung calls structural violence (which has been defined by one unkind commentator as anything that Galitung doesn't like) was originally defined as any unnecessarily low expectation of life, on that assumption that anybody who dies before the allotted span has been killed, however unintentionally and unknowingly, by somebody else. The concept has been expanded to include all 'the problems of poverty, destitution, deprivation, and misery. These are enormously real and are a very high priority for research and action, but they belong to systems which are only peripherally related to 'the structures which produce violence.This is not to say that the cultures of violence and the cultures of poverty are not sometimes related, though not all poverty cultures are cultures of violence, and certainly not all cultures of violence are poverty cultures. But

the dynamics of poverty and the success or failure to rise out of it are of a complexity far beyond anything which the metaphor of structural violence can offer. While the metaphor of structural violence performed a service in calling attention to a problem, it may have done a disservice in preventing us from finding the answer.

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Violence declining and the neg misidentifies the cause of its remnants- our engagement in the international system is key to obliterate it.

BETHANY LACINA et al 2006 (professor, Stanford University NILS PETTER GLEDITSCH, Centre for the Study of Civil War, International Peace Research Institute and BRUCE RUSSETT Yale University, International studies quarterly, 50:3 pp 673-680, “the declining risk of death in battle,”)

A few key features stand out in this review of battle deaths in the twentieth century. First, the largest peaks in combat deaths are in interstate wars, followed by internationalized civil wars, and for the most part feature at least some conventional, rather than guerilla, warfare. Purely conventional wars have been the most deadly. In the post-World War II period, each peak is lower than the last reflecting, in part, that there has not been an interstate conflict between major powers since the Korean War. Second, civil wars seem to have grown less frequent (Harbom, Ho rgbladh, and Wallensteen 2006), less deadly, and less likely to become internationalized since the end of the Cold War (Lacina

2006). These trends reflect in part the de-escalation of the superpower rivalry and the declining levels of superpower military aid to regional conflicts. For example, declining tension between the United States and the USSR sped the de-escalation of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and decreased rates of mortality there (Sliwinski 1989:40–41). Other countries experiencing the dismantling of superpower proxy wars include El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Namibia, and Cambodia.

Table 1 shows a regression analysis of these data. Time is simply a yearly index running from zero in 1900 up to 1997. An ordinary least-squares regression for time as a predictor of battle deaths from 1900 to 1997 finds a downward linear trend, significant at the 90% confidence level. Adjusting the model to allow for a nonlinear temporal trend reveals this downward tendency even more clearly; the estimated coefficients on a term for time and its square imply that the trend in battle deaths over time has been an upside down parabola with an apex in the early 1940s. There are also negative linear trends in battle deaths in the post-World War period and after the Cold War.7

We have sounded a note of some optimism about the international system. The post-World War II international system witnessed a remarkable decline in the numbers of combat deaths worldwide. This is in large part due to the decreasing incidence of interstate and Great-Power wars, the most deadly type of conflict humans have ever faced, and to decreased casualty levels in civil wars due to less frequent intervention by major powers. Thus, the success of the post-World War II period has been in building a historically unprecedented network of peaceful ties among the most powerful states in the international system. 8 The challenge going into the twenty-first century is to expand these gains into areas still torn by domestic conflict, terrorism, and interstate feuds.

162


AT: Structural Violence K Link Turn

Global warming results in disasters that disproportionately affect marginalized populations. This is a form of structural violence that demands redress. Dennis Soron is an Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, 2007. [“Cruel Weather: Natural Disasters and Structural Violence,” Transformations Vol. 14]The ideological influence of entrenched economic and political interests has helped to distort our understanding of the most urgent threats to human “security” today, creating a stark imbalance between the moral gravity we attribute to direct but limited forms of violence

such as terrorism, and the casual expediency with which we accept the systematic harm inflicted on millions across the globe by climate change. Part of this imbalance, perhaps, derives from our very conceptualization of “violence” itself. Terrorist acts – understood as direct and premeditated inflictions of physical harm by identifiable perpetrators upon identifiable victims – fit neatly within our commonsense notions of “violence” and moral culpability, whereas the manifold forms of destruction and suffering associated with climate change do not. This paper aims to establish a provisional framework for understanding the manifold types of harm and suffering arising from climate-related disturbances, not as arbitrary environmental “accidents", but as

expressions of “structural violence” – that is, the normal, unexceptional, anonymous, and often unscrutinized violence woven into the routine workings of prevailing power structures. In the classic disaster movie scenario, floods, fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, impending asteroid collisions, killer bee invasions, and so on, usually become a kind of projection screen for sublimated social anxieties and perceived political threats, providing the rationale for people of all ranks and stripes to lay aside their petty differences and pull together in opposition to some all-purpose inhuman enemy. Ironically enough, such ostensibly “accidental” occurrences in recent years have increasingly become a flashpoint for dissent rather than unity, providing opportunities for reflecting upon the inadequacies of a socioeconomic system that has proven miserably incapable of ensuring the security and well-being of countless vulnerable and marginalized people, and has continually fed and exacerbated the very “natural” disturbances giving rise to so much suffering, insecurity and dislocation. In short, “natural disasters” now promise to become a kind of privileged window onto the forms of structural violence upon which contemporary capitalism rests, and against which environmentalists and other progressive forces must pitch their political energies.

163


AT: Structural Violence K: No Root Cause

There is no one root cause to violence. There analysis is misleading. Hinde and Pulkkinnen, Cambridge psychology professor and University of Jyväskylä psychology professor, 2000[Robert and Lea, DRAFT Background Paper for Working Group 1: HUMAN AGGRESSIVENESS AND WAR, 50th Pugwash Conference On Science and World Affairs: "Eliminating the Causes of War" Queens' College, Cambridge , UK, 3-8 August http://www.pugwash.org/reports/pac/pac256/WG1draft1.htm]

People are capable of perpetrating the most terrible acts of violence on their fellows. From before recorded history humans have killed humans, and

violence is potentially present in every society. There is no escaping the fact that the capacity to develop a propensity for violence is part of human nature. But that does not mean that aggression is inevitable: temporary anger need not give rise to persistent hostility, and hostility need not give rise to acts of aggression.

And people also have the capacity to care for the needs of others, and are capable of acts of great altruism and self-sacrifice. A subsidiary aim of this workshop is to identify the factors that make aggressive tendencies predominate over the cooperative and compassionate ones. Some degree of conflict of interest is often present in relationships between individuals, in the relations between groups of individuals within states, and in the relations between states: we are concerned with the factors that make such conflicts escalate into violence.

The answer to that question depends critically on the context. While there may be some factors in common, the bases of individual

aggressiveness are very different from those involved in mob violence, and they differ yet again from the factors influencing the bomb-aimer pressing the

button in a large scale international war. In considering whether acts which harm others are a consequence of the aggressive motivation of individuals, it is essential to recognise the diversity of such acts, which include interactions between individuals, violence between groups, and wars of the WW2 type. We shall see that, with increasing social complexity, individual aggressiveness becomes progressively less important, but other aspects of human nature come to contribute to group phenomena. Although research on human violence has focussed too often on the importance of one factor or another, it is essential to remember that violence always has multiple causes, and the interactions between the causal factors remain largely unexplored .

164


AT: Structural Violence K Extinction First

Extinction outweighs Watson 94 – founder of Greenpeace (Paul, The Politics of Extinction, http://www.eco-action.org/dt/beerswil.html)

Extinction is a difficult concept to fully appreciate. What has been is no more and never shall be again. It would take another creation and billions of years to recreate the passenger

pigeon. It is the loss of billions of years of evolutionary programming. It is the destruction of beauty, the obliteration of truth, the removal of uniqueness, the scarring of the sacred web of life. To be responsible for an extinction is to commit blasphemy against the divine. It is the greatest of all possible crimes, more evil than murder, more appalling than genocide, more monstrous than even the apparent unlimited perversities of the human mind. To be responsible for the complete and utter destruction of a unique and sacred life form is arrogance that seethes with evil, for the very opposite of evil is live.

Extinction first Bostrom 7 – Oxford philosophy professor (Nick, April, Humanity's biggest problems aren't what you think they are, transcribed from video 5:22 to 5:52, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/44,)

Then, even a one-percentage-point reduction in the extinction risk could be equivalent to this astronomical number, ten to the power of thirty two. So if

you take into account future generations as much as our own, every other moral imperative or philanthropic cause just becomes irrelevant. The only thing you should focus on would be to reduce existential risk, because even a tiniest decrease in existential risk would just overwhelm any other, um, benefit you could hope to achieve.

Extinction preconditions ethics—only an obligation to future generations can prevent fatalistic nihilism Trisel 4 (Brooke, Human Extinction and the Value of Our Efforts, The Philosophical Forum 35.3, ebsco,)

Discussions about nuclear weapons, the depletion of the ozone layer, and the possibility that a massive asteroid could crash into Earth, prompt us to reflect on our own

individual mortality and on human extinction. And when we think about the end of humanity, it raises questions about whether our efforts have value because, if human extinction does occur, the things that we have created will decay and eventually vanish. Some claim that our efforts are pointless if humanity will cease to exist. This claim will be examined and disputed in

this essay. In recent years, there has been extensive debate regarding the question of whether we have obligations to future generations, such as an obligation to preserve the environment. To a far lesser extent, there has also been discussion about the more basic question of whether it matters how long humanity will persist. The related question of whether our efforts have value if humanity will end has received even less attention. The human species could become extinct abruptly, with all of us dying at once or within a short time of each other. Extinction could also occur gradually. For example, if people would immediately stop having children, then we would live out our lives in a world without future generations. Humanity would become extinct over a period of 110 to 120 years—the maximum life span of someone currently alive. If we knew that humanity would become extinct within the next few months, then we would be justified in feeling distressed about this because it would cut short our expected life span, thereby depriving us of many potential experiences. However, should we feel anguish about the possibility that humankind will become extinct long after we and our loved ones have died? It is understandable why we want those that we love, including our children and friends, to continue living after we have died. Because we love them, relate to them as one existent individual to another, and empathize with their feelings and aspirations, we desire for them to live on so that they can realize their goals and experience fulfilling lives. But why should it matter whether remote future generations— faceless, abstract persons who only potentially exist and whom we

will never know—will be born after we have died and will persist for as long as possible? Ernest Partridge contends that people have a “basic need” to care for the future beyond their own lifetimes, a need that he refers to as “self transcendence.”1 He writes: By claiming that there is a basic human need for “self transcendence,” I am proposing that, as a result of the psychodevelopmental sources of the self and the fundamental dynamics of social experience, well-functioning human beings identify with, and seek to further, the well-being, preservation, and endurance of communities, locations, causes, artifacts, institutions, ideals, and so on, that are outside themselves and that they hope will flourish beyond their own lifetimes.2 In attempting to support his claim, Partridge argues that there is a “desire to extend the term of one’s influence and significance well beyond the term of one’s lifetime—a desire evident in arrangements for posthumous publications, in bequests and wills, in perpetual trusts (such as the Nobel Prize), and so forth.”3 Partridge concludes by asserting: To be sure, posterity does not actually exist now. Even so, in a strangely abstract and metaphorical sense, posterity may extend profound favors for the living. For posterity exists as an idea, a potentiality, and a valid object of transpersonal

devotion, concern, purpose, and commitment. Without this idea and potentiality, our lives would be confined, empty, bleak, pointless, and morally impoverished.4 Allen Tough makes a similar argument to Partridge when he states: “If our future is highly negative [referring to the end of humanity], then most

other values and goals will lose their point.”5

165


NEG Supplement :You’ll need to sort this for your own use

Free Trade Good

Government involvement in the market destroys rights and freedoms. Regulation IS the majority violating the rights of the minority. The alternative is tyranny. Frazier 2004, [Bart received a B.S. in economics from George Mason University, the free market is the high road, future of freedom foundation,

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0408a.pdf]

This is the central idea on which our country was founded — that the purpose of government is to protect, not regulate or destroy, the fundamental and inherent rights of the people. The individual would be left alone so long as he did not violate the rights of others and, for the most part, that was the role of the federal government for the first 100 years after the country’s founding. With the tragic exception of slavery, the United States was a

bastion of freedom in that golden age, with the government overseeing very little of the private lives of citizens. The result was an

explosion of ideas and a creation of wealth that the world had never seen before. It is that philosophy that we have abandoned. Government regulation is the result of the majority violating the rights of the minority. This is nothing more than tyranny. The moral path is to let people live in peace so long as they do not violate the rights of others. This is the essence of a free-market society, it is the path to prosperity, and it is the only honorable way to live with one another.

Economic growth results in a direct INCREASE in income for those in poverty. Dollar and Kraay 2002 [David. Aart, Dollar and Kraay are economists in the World Banks Development Research Group, Growth Is Good for the Poor, Forthcoming: Journal of Economic Growth, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/DEC/Resources/22015_Growth_is_Good_for_Poor.pdf]In a large sample of countries spanning the past four decades, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the income share of the first quintile does not vary systematically

with average incomes. In other words, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that income of the poor rise equiproportionately with average incomes. Figure 1 illustrates this basic point. In the top panel, we plot the logarithm of per capita incomes of the poor (on the vertical axis) against the logarithm of average per capita incomes (on the horizontal axis), pooling 418 country-year observations on these two variables.

The sample consists of 137 countries with at least one observation on the share of income accruing to the bottom quintile, and the median number of observations per country is 3. There is a strong, positive, linear relationship between the two variables, with a

slope of 1.07 which does not differ significantly from one. Since both variables are measured in logarithms, this indicates that on average incomes of the poor rise equiproportionately with average incomes. In the bottom panel we plot average annual growth in incomes of the poor (on the vertical axis) against average annual growth in average incomes (on the horizontal axis), pooling 285 country-year observations where we have at least two observations

per country on incomes of the poor separated by at least five years. The sample consists of 92 countries and the median number of growth episodes per country is 3. Again, there is a strong, positive, linear relationship between these two variables with a slope of 1.19. In the majority of the formal statistical tests that follow, we cannot reject the null hypothesis that the slope of this relationship is

equal to one. These regressions indicate that within countries, incomes of the poor on average rise equiproportionately with average incomes. This is equivalent to the observation that there is no systematic relationship between average incomes

and the share of income accruing to the poorest fifth of the income distribution. Below we examine this basic finding in more detail and find that it holds across regions, time periods, growth rates and income levels, and is robust to controlling for possible reverse causation from incomes of the poor to average incomes

166


Free Trade Good

Economic Growth is key to public health. Meier and Fox 2008 [Benjamin and Ashley, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University; and Public Health Law Program Manager, Development as Health: Employing the Collective Right to Development to Achieve the Goals of the Individual Right to Health Human Rights Quarterly, Project MUSE, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hrq/summary/v030/30.2.meier.html]

Given this link between poverty and damage to underlying determinants of health, health scholars long held that economic development programs would lead inexorably to improved conditions for public health, noting the positive relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) and rising life expectancies at birth.38 Since the earliest days of the

Industrial Revolution, studies have overwhelmingly pointed to the role of economic development as a fundamental mechanism for sustainable improvements in the public’s health.39 However, scholars have recently come to recognize that national economic figures alone (primarily measured in terms of a country’s GDP) do not accurately capture the concept of development as a broad social, political, and cultural change.40 This has led to a shift in thinking away from purely economic development (measured in terms of aggregate GDP) toward the creation of “human development” (measured through a human development index (HDI) that takes into account, inter alia, life expectancy at birth and literacy)41 as a broader measure of humanwell-being.42 Reanalyzing development from this perspective has produced striking discontinuities in how different states convert national income into salutary opportunities for its peoples.43 Scholars working in the social medicine school have argued that health improvement requires that national financial growth be accompanied by appropriate social

reforms.44 In the context of examining underlying determinants of health, it has become clear that the social, cultural, political, and material changes that accompany the development process are the causal agents responsible for the steady reduction in avoidable forms of morbidity and mortality.45 On the basis of this empirical finding,

public health scholars have elucidated the pathways through which economic development results in a decrease in the number of people living in absolute poverty and allows for improvements in underlying determinants of health, including clean water, sanitation, electricity, and food security.46 Conceptualizing public goods through these pathways, changing modes of production are seen to restructure social relations away from traditional sources of family support and toward wage labor, forcing individuals to turn to the state to meet their

demands for systems.47 As the affluence of the nation increases, the state becomes increasingly capable of meeting these demands, with the formalization of the economy increasing the tax base and allowing for an increase in the size of the public economy, including spending on public goods.48 In this sense, the size of a state’s public economy and its capacity to govern may be used as indicators of a state’s political development, or its institutional “reach,” which become vital for the provision of public goods, among them the

establishment of public health systems to regulate underlying determinants of health.

167


EXT: 1NC 4: A2: “Your evidence is based on CHina”

China is the best area to reflect neoliberal/globalization effects. 5 reasons. Jin-Wei 2002 [Shang, Professor of Finance and Economics, Professor of International Affairs, and N.T. Wang Professor of Chinese Business and Economy, Is

Globalization Good for the Poor in China?, Finance and Development, http://relooney.fatcow.com/3040_c189.pdf]

What makes China a good case study? Reason #1. A large country, China represents a lot of observations and a chance to make statistically powerful inferences. It is harder to do a similar analysis for smaller economies, like Bangladesh and Costa Rica,

that have also recently experienced huge increases in their ratios of trade to GDP. Reason #2. China is a developing country that has embraced globalization in the areas of trade and foreign direct investment. Before 1978, when the government formally adopted a policy of opening to the outside world, China's foreign trade was negligible, but, since then, the ratio of trade to GDP has quadrupled— from a mere 8.5 percent in 1978 to 36.5

percent in 1999. China has transformed itself from a hostile investment environment into a major destination for foreign direct investment. Reason #3. Poverty in China accounts for a major share of world poverty. In 1978, based on the World Bank's definition of extreme poverty as living on $1 a day or

less after purchasing-power adjustment, there were 600 million poor people in China, more than one-third of the world's total. Any change in poverty in China would have a significant impact on world poverty. Reason #4. China represents a quasi-natural experiment.

Even though changes in tariffs apply equally to all regions, different parts of the country have experienced vastly different effective changes in openness because of variations in natural barriers to trade, such as distance from major seaports. The variations provide a good opportunity to study the impact of openness on inequality while holding constant the legal system, macroeconomic policies, culture, and other variables. During 1988-93, for example, some cities saw the ratio of exports to local GDP increase by 50 percentage points, whereas others experienced an absolute decline. This regional variation is very useful for researchers studying the relationship

between openness, local growth, and local inequality. Reason #5. China's peculiar geography allows researchers to sort out causality versus correlation between openness and inequality. ? In cross-country comparisons, if there is an association between openness and inequality, it is difficult to say that openness causes growth or inequality. It is possible to attribute it to a fortuitous correlation or even a reverse causality. ? Using geography as a key variable for openness is a methodological innovation in cross-country regressions, proposed by Jeffrey Frankel and David Romer. The idea is that a country's openness is related to its geography but that its geography is not influenced by its growth. ? China's geography lends itself to this approach. There is an ocean to the east and southeast of the country, vast deserts in the far north and west, and the world's highest mountain range in the southwest. Regional variations in trade openness (or changes in trade openness in the past two decades) can be explained largely by regional

variations in the distance from major seaports. A major benefit of exploring this geographical feature is that one can argue that the correlation between regional openness and inequality (or growth) may reflect a causal relationship, with openness leading to growth, poverty reduction, and change in inequality.

168


NEG: ITAR

ITAR regulations bad prevent cooperation with allies and restrict development of commercial satellitesDinerman 2008 [Taylor, is an author and journalist based in New York City, “ITAR’s Failure”, The Space Review, http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1086/1]Some attempts have been made to try and improve this situation. In November 2007, Don Manzullo (R-IL) and Brad Sherman (R-CA) joined with a small bipartisan group of representatives to offer a couple of small but useful steps in the right direction. First, they would require the State Department to double the number of

licensing officers on staff from 42 to 84. More importantly, it would allow space parts for systems that have already been exported to close allies to be shipped without having to go through the ITAR process. These are useful changes, but they fail to address the space industry’s most pressing problem, which is the classification of communications and other commercial satellites as “weapons systems”, something no other nation on this planet does. In late January the White House made a few, minimal changes in the way the ITAR regulations would be administered. Even taking into account the statutory limits involved, few serious changes were offered. The most potentially important part was the promise to require decisions on licensing to be made within sixty days of the application. Other changes include a new dispute mechanism and an upgrade of the electronic licensing system. One change that may be more significant than it seems is the establishment of a new

multiagency working group that would include both the Departments of Commerce and Defense. The DoD in particular is painfully aware of the damage that ITAR has done to US industry and can be expected to put real pressure on the State Department to improve this situation. In the long run only Congress, with strong support from the White House, can resolve this problem. The Bush Administration has run out of time, so it will be up to the next administration to attempt to resolve this problem. The question involves more than just helping US companies to sell their products in the global marketplace. It involves a deeper question: how does a superpower balance the needs of its national security system and its need to trade? During the Cold War this question arose over and over again as the US attempted to wage economic warfare against the USSR and its empire. While it was often frustrated by the Europeans and Japanese and their mercantile philosophies, the US did raise the “hassle factor” for companies trying to sell high technology goods and services to Moscow. A similar campaign is now underway against Iran, but it will be many years before its full effects are felt by Tehran. A rebalancing of the US government’s

approach must take place. ITAR as it now exists was an overreaction to the Clinton Administration’s all-out embrace of a mercantilistic philosophy. If the new President and Congress simply free up the flow of technology in the name of export promotion, he or she will simply

insure that at some future date Congress will re-impose ITAR-like restrictions, perhaps in an even more draconian form. While a new CoCom would be useful, the most important thing is for the US to find a way to trade with its close allies that treats them as trusted friends. Part of a future solution would be to re-establish the CoCom, a tiny and highly effective multilateral Cold War organization that brought together the US and its NATO allies, as well as Japan and Australia, in an informal setting where they could agree on what and what not could be exported. The organization’s extreme discretion and its lack of a formal legal structure insured that no nation could publicly lose face. The fact that it lacked any means to enforce its decisions did not mean that it did not have clout. One example: in the 1980s, when it was found that Japanese and Norwegian firms had sold equipment to the USSR that significantly improved their submarine technology, the US retaliated against those firms without arousing much of a backlash. While a new CoCom would be useful, the most important thing is for the US to find a way to trade with its close allies that treats them as trusted friends. The Validated End User program for a few highly reputable foreign firms is a small step in the

right direction. However, much more is needed, and this can only be accomplished if the legislation is changed. It is doubtful that many foreign governments or firms are ready to spend any time or effort to help the US out of this dilemma. They are profiting—or at least they think they are profiting—from America’s mistake. This time next year the new President should put in place a small task force on ITAR reform that will report directly to him or her. This task force should work closely with Congress to present comprehensive legislation that can be passed

and signed during the first year of the new administration. Otherwise, the problem will just get kicked down the road. The US space industry will continue to suffer and good, high paying jobs will continue to be lost.

169


NEG: ITAR

ITAR destroys US space cooperation, research, and competitiveness. Chakrabarti 2009 (Supriya, professor of astronomy, Boston University, Export Controls Stifle Science. Aviation Week & Space Technology, 00052175, 3/23/2009, Vol. 170, Issue 12)

President Barack Obama has pledged to restore science to its rightful place and transform our schools, colleges and universities to meet the

demands of a new age. He can do both starting with a revitalization of space exploration, which for nearly a decade has been under the dark cloud of ITAR--International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Designed to control the information and materials of military-related

technologies and administered by the State Dept., ITAR has provided export control guidelines for items ranging from armaments to warships. During a four-year period in the 1990s, satellites--which have scientific, commercial and military applications (the so-called dual-

use spacecraft)--were controlled by the Commerce Dept. through the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). In 1999,

however, concerns over China's attempt to circumvent regulations to obtain U.S. high technology prompted a change pushing export control jurisdiction back to the hands of the State Dept. Scientific and research satellites are classified in ITAR as "Significant Military Equipment." Even sounding rockets, which collect 5-7 min. of data and are used to train future space explorers, are ITAR-controlled. Everyone agrees on making sure U.S. space technology that is critical to national security does not end up in the wrong hands. But, there is more than adequate room for continued academic space research that does not breach security. A National Academy of Sciences workshop in 2007 noted, "The capture of space

technology by ITAR has caused serious problems in the teaching of university space science and engineering classes." ITAR's lack of clarity and cumbersome rules have been applied inconsistently, prompting delays and business declines by U.S. space component manufacturers and exporters to the tune of $600 million per year, according to a joint report by the National Security Space

Office and the Commerce Dept. "ITAR-free" satellites and rockets are now sold by non-U.S. manufacturers launching their own space ventures, thus restricting the ability of American companies from competing in foreign markets. To appreciate this unanticipated collision between the well-intentioned export controls and the academic missions of research universities, it is necessary to examine the anatomy of a space science mission and its development. A U.S. science satellite includes a bus--which provides such essential functions as power, pointing and control and communications--which is usually constructed by an American aerospace company. Scientific instruments are typically developed, built and tested by a combination of

university and industry partners and then mounted on the bus. The bus technology can have military use, but most of the science experiments do not. The problem for academic institutions is that current ITAR regulations do not differentiate between the technology in a secret military satellite and the clearly defined science experiments and technology created and assembled at an American university. This is pushing space research out of the universities to industries or research laboratories--even to other countries. Furthermore, ITAR creates two classes of students--those working on space missions and those who cannot--and inhibits collaboration between them. The result is some highly qualified foreign-born students are bypassing U.S. research universities for "ITAR-free" countries to pursue their academic aspirations. Allowing science and research missions to follow the pre-1999 EAR rule would be a good first step to immediately invigorate space research in U.S. universities. It would enable the next generation of space scientists and technologists to cut their teeth in an environment that encourages creativity, innovation and most importantly, collaboration. The thrust of renewed excitement over space exploration would once again announce that America welcomes the world. This citizen diplomacy should not compromise national security. We experienced

similar cooperation during the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project conducted during the coldest winter of the Cold War. Rejuvenating space research would be more than a symbolic gesture. Instead of an isolationist posture to thwart all international scientists from U. S. collaborations, only a handful would have to prove that their intentions are honorable. Such containment would be rare and easy to enforce. Best of all, these collaborations would reinstate the American brand in space research, and that would be one power tool that is rocket-science smart.

ITAR destroys the Us space industryLandry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

As a secondary effect, companies may modify their business approach. Three of the concepts mentioned by respondents indicate this behavior. Because companies are limited to the domestic market, they are more likely to avoid risk in developing new technologies in order to provide mission assurance. When considering opportunities beyond the domestic market, companies must balance the cost of complying with ITAR with the expected return. Companies may question the worth of staying in the space industry. This leads to companies choosing to withdraw either from individual projects or from the industry altogether. The punitive threat of violating ITAR is so great that some companies are unwilling to risk questioning if ITAR applies. They usually assume that ITAR does apply and walk away from the business opportunity. In some cases, companies choose to abandon the space industry and transition their technologies to a different industry. In addition, many times larger companies that do not necessarily have a focus on innovation acquire small companies.

170


NEG: ITAR

ITAR kills US space industry: competiveness and innovation.Landry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

This research did not reveal significant evidence that ITAR has a direct effect on innovation. The space industry has experienced some negative effects as a result of ITAR restrictions, such as increased costs due to compliance requirements and increased timelines due to the lengthy licensing process. These negative effects hinder the ability to compete in the global market, thus making growth for

lower-tier companies difficult to achieve. The industry may expect some secondary negative effects on innovation due to lower-tier companies abandoning the space industry, leaving a void in its primary source of innovation. This is already a risk for key technology areas where there are only one or two domestic suppliers, such as radiation hardened electronics and solar arrays. Companies specializing in these technology areas may not be able to compete in the global market due to ITAR restrictions;

however, foreign companies are allowed to compete with them in the US market, making their survival challenging. If a company remains in the space industry, funds for ITAR compliance activities may be diverted from funds for internal R&D investments, thus reducing the potential for innovation.

ITAR kills US space industryLandry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

From 2007 through 2009, there have been at least eight studies that examined the health of the U.S. industrial base in general and the effects of ITAR specifically on the

SIB. Key findings agree across these studies with regard to the space industry. Large defense contractors in the SIB are healthy, but there is some concern for key lower-tier suppliers (CSIS 2008; AFRL 2009). AFRL’s 2009 Industrial Base Assessment points out that demand for global

commercial and domestic military space systems is strong through at least 2012 (AFRL 2009). Upgrade and replacement efforts for nearly all on-orbit assets currently under-way in the national security space sector contribute to the “good” financial health of top-tier manufacturers in the SIB (CSIS 2008). However, export control requirements present a significant barrier to competing in foreign markets while there is an insufficient domestic demand to keep all suppliers operating at efficient capacity (AFRL 2009). Abbey and Lane (2009) show there is a direct correlation between export policies, cost of compliance, and financial health of smaller suppliers. Furthermore, domestic sources are diminishing or are at-risk for key items such as solar arrays and radiation-hardened electronics (AFRL 2009). U.S. space firms need to expand to the global community in order to survive.

ITAR covers all space technology: no hope for cooperation.Marks 2009 (Paul, senior technology correspondent, Space pioneers in battle with export laws, New Scientist, 5/23/2009, Vol. 202, Issue 2709)

At issue are the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which are supposed to prevent technological secrets ending up in the hands of 21 proscribed nations, including China, Iran and North Korea. If a technology appears on a document called the US Munitions List, companies need a licence to export it or to reveal details to a foreign national. Even if granted, the licence often forces the firm to mount a security guard on the system while it is in another country. The list contains very broad definitions of what should be kept secret, and even includes spacecraft hatches and windows. "That list is written for a cold war world," says Mike Gold of Bigelow Aerospace in Washington DC, which plans to fly crewed inflatable habitats in Earth orbit.

"Any space technology, no matter how benign, such as a solar panel or the table you support a craft on in the workshop, is covered by it."

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NEG: ITAR

ITAR destroys US space competitiveness and encourages loss of leadership.Landry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

In some cases, ITAR has encouraged the rise of foreign space capabilities. Foreign competitors take advantage of U.S. export controls (Taylor 2007; Space Foundation 2008; Abbey and Lane 2009; AFRL 2009). They may intentionally set shorter deadlines they know U.S. companies will not be able to meet due to the lengthy ITAR licensing process (Space Foundation 2008). In response to continued problems with U.S. trade restrictions, there is a growing ITAR-free movement where foreign companies are funding the development of satellite

components typically acquired from the U.S. (CSIS 2008; Abbey and Lane 2009) – “they are choosing to avoid dealing with U.S. export controls by not using American-made parts” (Abbey and Lane 2009). This is evidence that the intent of space export controls – to prevent sensitive

technology from reaching parties hostile to the U.S. – is not being achieved (CSIS 2008). Because of increasing foreign competition in the space industry, the U.S. share of global space markets is steadily declining (Taylor 2007; CSIS 2008; AFRL 2009; Futron Corporation 2009). From 1999 to 2006, the U.S. share of satellite manufacturing for all communication satellites sales decreased 20% and for geosynchronous orbit communication satellites the decrease was 10% (Taylor 2007). A 2009 study sponsored by the Satellite Industry

Association indicates that the U.S. share of manufacturing revenues fell from 41% to 29% of the world total from 2007 to 2008 (Futron Corporation 2009). This steady decline in the U.S. share of global space markets is most likely due to foreign companies choosing not to buy from the U.S. due to export controls and having U.S. components and technology designed out of satellite systems (CSIS 2008). Finally, U.S. space export control policy is not in agreement with the national space policy (CSIS 2008). A study conducted by the Center for Strategic & International Studies shows specific examples where some elements of ITAR are in conflict with the goals of the NSP. Table 1 captures the findings. These findings

further emphasize the idea that the U.S. is not achieving the strategic intent of space export controls and there is a continuing need to balance economic security with national security. Several articles are available that address the issue of ITAR in relation to the space industry. These articles primarily speak of the hardships companies in the U.S. space industry have faced since commercial satellites returned to the USML in 1999.

Opinions are consistent across all the articles. The main concern is that instead of protecting U.S. national security interests, the export policy has closed off a profitable export industry. “The result has been the deliberate development by overseas manufacturers of ...

devices and systems that are the equivalent of American technologies ... not subject to ITAR” (Wheatley 2009). Even in the case of U.S. dual-use technologies, export restrictions do not have any impact on what other nations are able to sell (Dinerman 2005). Dinerman (2008) poses a relevant question: How does a superpower balance the needs of its national security system and its need to trade? The majority of the articles reiterate the fact that ITAR has negatively affected the U.S.’s participation in the global space market. Foust (2005) points out that since oversight of satellite technology exports was transferred to the State Department, “it has become far more difficult for U.S. companies to sell satellites and satellite components to customers outside the [U.S.], even to friendly nations such as Canada and Britain.” Global competition has grown and U.S. companies are finding it difficult to compete with foreign companies

offering ITAR-free satellites. Contractors around the globe have the option of acquiring equivalent technologies from companies outside the U.S. Wheatley (2009) provides two specific examples: (1) Canada has specifically cited ITAR as a reason for selecting European satellite builders and (2) EADS Sodern, a French company, is phasing out its American supplier base.

ITAR destroys US space industry: brain drain and timeframe.Landry 2010 (Kalliroi L., Air Force Major, “EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF INTERNATIONAL TRAFFIC IN ARMS REGULATIONS RESTRICTIONS ON INNOVATION IN THE U.S. SPACE INDUSTRIAL BASE” http://dodreports.com/ada535245)

All the space industry studies agree that ITAR inhibits the ability to compete or participate in the global space community (Taylor 2007; CSIS 2008; NSSO 2008; Space Foundation 2008; AFRL 2009). The uncertainty of ITAR processes and processing times impacts the space industry’s confidence to compete in foreign markets (CSIS 2008). Lengthy processing times for license requests are a major cause for loss of foreign sales (Taylor 2007; Space Foundation 2008). Export control compliance costs are a significant burden for lower-tier firms (Taylor 2007; NSSO 2008; Space Foundation 2008). “As a percent of foreign sales, the cost burden on Tier 3 companies is nearly eight times that of Tier 1 firms” (CSIS 2008). Tier definitions are Tier 1 – prime contractors, Tier 2 – subcontractors, and Tier 3 –

commodity suppliers (Taylor 2007). ITAR makes it difficult to hire the best talent and also inhibits access to foreign technology (NSSO 2008). The U.S. Munitions List (USML), which lists the products and services that ITAR protects, includes technologies that are already commercially available in other countries (NSSO 2008; Space Foundation 2008). Specifically, the USML classifies commercial communications satellites as “munitions.” As a result, satellite manufactures must adhere to ITAR licensing requirements when developing products that include any components also found on the protected communications satellites – these components may already be openly available outside the U.S.

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NEG: ITAR

China wants to cooperate on the plan – ITAR kills cooperationDe Selding 2011 [Peter, the European correspondent for space news, “ Chinese Government Official Urges U.S.-Chinese Space Cooperation”, Space News, April 14, 2011 http://www.spacenews.com/civil/110414-chinese-official-space-cooperation.html]

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — A top Chinese government space official on April 14 appealed to the U.S. government to lift its decade-long ban on most forms of U.S.-Chinese space cooperation, saying both nations would benefit from closer government and commercial space interaction. He specifically called for cooperation on manned spaceflight, in which China has made massive

investment in recent years. Lei Fanpei, vice president of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), which oversees much of China’s launch vehicle

and satellite manufacturing industry, said China purchased more than $1 billion in U.S.-built satellites in the 1990s before the de facto ban went into effect in 1999. Since then, the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) have made it impossible to export most satellite components, or full satellites, to China for launch on China’s now successful line of Long March rockets. The ITAR regulations that tightened the U.S. technology export regime were put into place to punish China for its missile exports, and to slow development of China’s rocket industry by reducing its customer base. Most commercial telecommunications satellites carry at least some U.S. parts, which is why ITAR has all but locked China out of the global commercial launch market. The U.S. government is reviewing the current ITAR regime, which U.S. industry says has had the unintended effect of making it difficult to sell satellites and satellite components just about anywhere in the world. At the same time, China’s domestic demand for launches of its own telecommunications, navigation, Earth observation and science satellites — and its manned space program — has given the Long March vehicle sufficient business to earn it a record of reliability. The global insurance underwriting community now ranks the Long March vehicle alongside Russian and European rockets for reliability when it sets insurance premiums. Addressing the National Space Symposium here, Lei said Chinese vehicles launched more than 20 U.S.-built satellites in the 1990s. While cooperation with the United States has been shut down, he said, China has maintained relations with the 18-nation European Space Agency, Brazil, France, Russia and others. China also has developed a telecommunications satellite product line that has been bundled with a Chinese Long March vehicle to offer in-orbit delivery of telecommunications spacecraft to a half-dozen nations that in many cases can offer China access to their crude oil

reserves. Lei said he sees three areas in which U.S.-Chinese cooperation would be in both nations’ interests. The first, he

said, is an open commercial access of each nation to the other’s capabilities in satellites and launch vehicles. The second, he said, is

manned spaceflight and space science, particularly in deep space exploration. The third is in satellite applications including disaster monitoring and management.

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Weather security K Link Extensions

Their scientific production is neither neutral nor harmless: The assertion of United States primacy in scientific understanding reinforces imperialistic visions of the world. Dalby, carleton University, 2004 (Simon, Global Environmental Politics, 4:2, May, Ecological Politics, Violence, and the Theme of Empire)

Science and academic knowledge are not neutral here; neither are geographical designations of politics. The heuristic point about empire is that it challenges the taken for granted assumptions of territorial sovereignty and inter-governmental cooperation in building environmental regimes. The theme of empire suggests something more important is going on. This is the case whether either the novel claims of Hardt and Negri’s formulation are taken seriously, or whether the historical view of empire sketched above is worked into the analysis. The argument here is that both matter and that they complement each other rather well. The geographic specification of politics is

unavoidable; it is especially important when “global” phenomena are invoked. Finally, it is important to emphasize that the development of “science” and the knowledge that it produces is not divorced from social and economic context . Mike Davis shows this, so eloquently

and so tragically, in his analysis of the rise of meteorology and the extension of European empires in the nineteenth century.35 In providing preliminary evidence of what was only much later understood to be the El Nino Southern Oscillation phenomenon, meteorological science charted a picture of a cruel and unpredictable nature that could easily be blamed for famine in various parts of the world. Nature as precarious and fickle let European imperial grain merchants off the hook for the disruptions to the global patterns of food production that were a major contributing cause to the famines. Environmental science too is tied into the thinking of empire here at the largest of scales; not least when it provides powerful support for neo- Malthusian arguments about overpopulation, nature and all sorts of disasters in “far away” places, whether understood as matters of environmental security, or not.36 Empire directly challenges how the theme of the global is formulated in environmental politics. The abstractions of global and local obscure both the histories of environmental change and the contemporary flows across political boundaries. The immense advantage of studies such as those included in Magnusson and Shaw’s volume on one very particular place, Clayoquot Sound on the West Coast of

Canada, is that the spatial tropes of contemporary administration, and political studies in many disciplines, are revealed as very inadequate starting points for analysis.37 Linking environment and empire explicitly allows for reflection on the taken for granted identities of both protagonists and scholars in the debate about global environmental politics. Understanding our own roles as urban consumers in the metropoles of empire is a useful corrective to assumptions of dispassionate scholarly identities. It also allows appropriate contextualization of the crucial matters of environmental history to be added explicitly into the discussion of environmental politics .

In addition empire constructs matters of violence and the environment in a way that rejects the alarmist neo-Malthusian temptations of environmental security discourse. For all these reasons the theme of empire has very considerable potential to advance scholarship in global environmental politics.

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Weather security K Impact extensions

Turns case: Invocations of environmental danger reifies neoliberal solutions. Dalby 09 (Simon, Ph.D and Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, “security and environmental change”, P53-54)There are a number of further considerations in understanding how the politics of environmental danger works in

contemporary circumstances in the developed world. In particular, these multiple fears and discourses of insecurity are part and parcel of the economic discourses of risk and uncertainty that have infused contemporary policy discussions of everything from bottled drinking water to the fluctuations of the stock market and the 2008 global financial crisis. Not only do the traditional institutions

of states get involved in the provision of security but this has now been marketized in private security firms, whether it's household burglar warning systems or virus scanners on our computers, but also more explicitly in the insurance business, where all manner of risks are commoditized and regulated in complex legal and financial arrangements. These literally, to borrow Mick Dillon's (2008) word play on David

Campbell's (1998) book title, are "Underwriting Security." Governance and security are morphing into complex market strategies, as neo-liberalism both privatizes and commodifies many facets of our lives in complex technical practices that supposedly provide protection in the face of life's vagaries. Contingencies and the emergence of life itself are securitized and commodified in contemporary modes of governance (Cooper 2006). Or at least they are for those who operate in the commoditized economy; those who have property and the wherewithal to purchase insurance. Security is very much about the economics of risk and the ability to spread the costs of danger through the global economy.

Recent commentators on security have been making very clear that security is about maintaining forms of political order, frequently invoking emergency measures to ensure the perpetuation of modern states and their economic systems and the privileges, of the rich and powerful (Neocleous 2008). The invocation of danger to social order is a powerful mobilizing theme in political discourse, but that social order is a larger, more inchoate matter of culture and the identities that apparently need to be protected. Michael C. Williams (2007)

suggests security is about symbolic power and the reproduction of modes of political life, not simply about protecting states from external threats. Thus he argues "the culture wars" in the United States in the last few decades were not simply a matter of partisan struggles or purely domestic politics, but spilled over into the conduct of foreign policy and international security, nowhere more obviously than in the Bush administration's adoption of the neo-conservative agenda of military engagement with Iraq and other putative rivals to American

predominance in international affairs. But this now becomes all the more complicated because it's precisely this modern culture that has caused the

transformation of so much of "nature" that environmental security problems are on the agenda. Insofar as that culture is threatened then security may be invoked to protect humanity from "natural" hazards.

175

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_University


Weather security K Alternative extensions

The material implications of environmental security policies must be examined in order to challenge racialized and nationalistic responses to environmental degradation. Urban, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Multicultural Queer Studies at Humboldt State University, 2008 (Jessica LeAnn, Nation, Immigration, and Environmental Security, p.6-7)

I suggest that instructors include substantive attention to the scholar-activists included in the broad intersectional, postcolonial feminist theo retical framework grounding this project and critically examine with students the material implications of policy positions on environmental security. Neo-Malthusian–based responses to environmental degradation (population stabilization, immigration moratoriums, etc.) rely on racial ized, gendered, nationalistic, and classist stereotypes to support their arguments, as well as the policy positions flowing from them. These stereotypes cannot

simply be left standing, as Hardin's analogies were in several of the textbooks examined in chapter 1. Intersectional, postcolo nial feminism allows for an interrogation of the representations of Oth ers informing the greening of hate and provides a means by which to uncover the relations of power that such representations serve. Doing so would also allow students the opportunity for critical awareness and thinking about systems of power, privilege, and oppression and their ide ological foundations, as well as the consequences experienced by populations constructed as "environmental enemies" within mainstream ES discourse. An intersectional, postcolonial lens would help instructors to

encourage students to shift the center and consciously acknowledge the voices of actors routinely excluded from mainstream debates of environmental security, not the least of which includes the voices and

perspectives of immigrants themselves and environmental justice and immigrants' rights groups like Border Acton Network. In many ways, these recommendations

have broader implications for the field of IR as it is currently mapped. Perhaps most important, IR scholars must do more to acknowledge and come to grips with knowl edge production as a form of power. Ideally, this may lead to a move away from the positioning of nation and state actors as central and "natural," and thus, a more comprehensive redefinition of sovereignty and a redefi nition of security inclusive of a more genuine ecological understanding of the interconnectedness of all life (human and nonhuman). It may also allow scholars to move away from simplistic analyses that only perpetu ate the greening of hate and reinforce white supremacist, capitalist het ero-patriarchy

Deconstruction of academic representations of environmental security is necessary to expose the ways these are used to bolster inequality, militarization, and genocidal policies.Urban, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Multicultural Queer Studies at Humboldt State University, 2008 (Jessica LeAnn, Nation, Immigration, and Environmental Security, p.6-7)The revised sentences still ignore the histories, contemporary experiences, diversity, and complexity of indigenous peoples and cultures in North America, including complex forms of political and social organization and "other trappings of states." As Eisenstein explains, "Ideas like federalism, checks and balances, popular nomination, and women's suffrage are found early on in the Iroquois League. Both Jefferson and Franklin admired

Indian democratic thought and have a debt to it—although the debt is usually forgotten" (Eisenstein 2004, 44 45). This may indeed be the case with regard to the IR textbook quotes above. Deconstructing these types of representation is an absolutely crucial part of bringing about a more just world because constructions and represen tations of Others provide one foundation for systems of inequality, colonialism, militarization, genocide, and neoliberal globalization. Despite such distortions and erasures, world politics and international relations textbooks reflect, reinforce, and set the terms of debate in IR and provide an important foundation for the field by assisting in the determination and framing of relevant topics, including IR's engagement with environmental issues. Some textbook authors seem quiteconscious of their role in both setting and reflecting the terms of debate and providing a foundation for college-level students. Spiegel and Wehling claim that their "Global Issues" chapter "introduces the reader to the most salient issues in the community of nations" (1999, 430; emphasis added). While I am not suggesting that introductory textbooks cover every single issue associated with the field of IR, I am

suggesting that the topical choices made by the authors (including the manner in which those topics are represented) are conscious, political choices with concrete, material consequences. This is especially noteworthy given that for many college students, introductory world politics and political science courses may be their only introduction to the field of IR. Nonmajors often take introductory political science courses to

fulfill elective or other requirements for their program of study. As such, constructions of "legitimate topics" within course textbooks and the manner by which these topics are represented can play an important role in shaping larger, mainstream understandings of international politics, including environmental security. This is also significant for students continuing their study in the field because introductory textbooks play a key role in laying the foundation upon which later study is built. Introductory world politics textbooks therefore play a significant role in the development of mainstream understandings of political science as well, including understandings of the IR-subfield of ES and thus mainstream ES discourse in the United States. In this chapter, I examine twenty-five university introductory-level world politics and IR textbooks, with primary attention to the process by which security threats are identified and interpreted, as well as the relationship between national, civilizational, and environmental security within mainstream ES discourse

in the United States. Analysis of ES scholarship, including especially its articulation within introductory textbooks, provides one opportunity to reveal the (re)production of knowl edge around and within the IR subfield and, moreover, to examine the role of academia and academic textbooks in the production of main stream ES discourse on population growth and movement (including immigration and migration, as well as environmental and economic refugees or "refugee flows," as they are commonly called). Before discussing the results of my interpretive analysis of the textbooks, however, I begin the chapter with an overview of "mainstream IR theory," followed by a discussion of some of the key lines of thought informing debates on population issues within mainstream IR, followed by an outline of the IR subfield of ES.

176


Weather security K Alternative extensions

The material implications of environmental security policies must be examined in order to challenge racialized and nationalistic responses to environmental degradation. Urban, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Multicultural Queer Studies at Humboldt State University, 2008 (Jessica LeAnn, Nation, Immigration, and Environmental Security, p.6-7)

I suggest that instructors include substantive attention to the scholar-activists included in the broad intersectional, postcolonial feminist theo retical framework grounding this project and critically examine with students the material implications of policy positions on environmental security. Neo-Malthusian–based responses to environmental degradation (population stabilization, immigration moratoriums, etc.) rely on racial ized, gendered, nationalistic, and classist stereotypes to support their arguments, as well as the policy positions flowing from them. These stereotypes cannot

simply be left standing, as Hardin's analogies were in several of the textbooks examined in chapter 1. Intersectional, postcolo nial feminism allows for an interrogation of the representations of Oth ers informing the greening of hate and provides a means by which to uncover the relations of power that such representations serve. Doing so would also allow students the opportunity for critical awareness and thinking about systems of power, privilege, and oppression and their ide ological foundations, as well as the consequences experienced by populations constructed as "environmental enemies" within mainstream ES discourse. An intersectional, postcolonial lens would help instructors to

encourage students to shift the center and consciously acknowledge the voices of actors routinely excluded from mainstream debates of environmental security, not the least of which includes the voices and

perspectives of immigrants themselves and environmental justice and immigrants' rights groups like Border Acton Network. In many ways, these recommendations

have broader implications for the field of IR as it is currently mapped. Perhaps most important, IR scholars must do more to acknowledge and come to grips with knowl edge production as a form of power. Ideally, this may lead to a move away from the positioning of nation and state actors as central and "natural," and thus, a more comprehensive redefinition of sovereignty and a redefi nition of security inclusive of a more genuine ecological understanding of the interconnectedness of all life (human and nonhuman). It may also allow scholars to move away from simplistic analyses that only perpetu ate the greening of hate and reinforce white supremacist, capitalist het ero-patriarchy

Deconstruction of academic representations of environmental security is necessary to expose the ways these are used to bolster inequality, militarization, and genocidal policies.Urban, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Multicultural Queer Studies at Humboldt State University, 2008 (Jessica LeAnn, Nation, Immigration, and Environmental Security, p.6-7)The revised sentences still ignore the histories, contemporary experiences, diversity, and complexity of indigenous peoples and cultures in North America, including complex forms of political and social organization and "other trappings of states." As Eisenstein explains, "Ideas like federalism, checks and balances, popular nomination, and women's suffrage are found early on in the Iroquois League. Both Jefferson and Franklin admired

Indian democratic thought and have a debt to it—although the debt is usually forgotten" (Eisenstein 2004, 44 45). This may indeed be the case with regard to the IR textbook quotes above. Deconstructing these types of representation is an absolutely crucial part of bringing about a more just world because constructions and represen tations of Others provide one foundation for systems of inequality, colonialism, militarization, genocide, and neoliberal globalization. Despite such distortions and erasures, world politics and international relations textbooks reflect, reinforce, and set the terms of debate in IR and provide an important foundation for the field by assisting in the determination and framing of relevant topics, including IR's engagement with environmental issues. Some textbook authors seem quiteconscious of their role in both setting and reflecting the terms of debate and providing a foundation for college-level students. Spiegel and Wehling claim that their "Global Issues" chapter "introduces the reader to the most salient issues in the community of nations" (1999, 430; emphasis added). While I am not suggesting that introductory textbooks cover every single issue associated with the field of IR, I am

suggesting that the topical choices made by the authors (including the manner in which those topics are represented) are conscious, political choices with concrete, material consequences. This is especially noteworthy given that for many college students, introductory world politics and political science courses may be their only introduction to the field of IR. Nonmajors often take introductory political science courses to

fulfill elective or other requirements for their program of study. As such, constructions of "legitimate topics" within course textbooks and the manner by which these topics are represented can play an important role in shaping larger, mainstream understandings of international politics, including environmental security. This is also significant for students continuing their study in the field because introductory textbooks play a key role in laying the foundation upon which later study is built. Introductory world politics textbooks therefore play a significant role in the development of mainstream understandings of political science as well, including understandings of the IR-subfield of ES and thus mainstream ES discourse in the United States. In this chapter, I examine twenty-five university introductory-level world politics and IR textbooks, with primary attention to the process by which security threats are identified and interpreted, as well as the relationship between national, civilizational, and environmental security within mainstream ES discourse

in the United States. Analysis of ES scholarship, including especially its articulation within introductory textbooks, provides one opportunity to reveal the (re)production of knowl edge around and within the IR subfield and, moreover, to examine the role of academia and academic textbooks in the production of main stream ES discourse on population growth and movement (including immigration and migration, as well as environmental and economic refugees or "refugee flows," as they are commonly called). Before discussing the results of my interpretive analysis of the textbooks, however, I begin the chapter with an overview of "mainstream IR theory," followed by a discussion of some of the key lines of thought informing debates on population issues within mainstream IR, followed by an outline of the IR subfield of ES.

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Weather security K AT: Cede the PoliticalThe illusion of technological participation reinforces political passivity. Sturken, 2001 (Marita, associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, “Desiring the Weather: El Niño, the Media, and California Identity” Public Culture 13.2 (2001) 161-189)

Personalized El Niño sites focused in particular on the story's hype and on the creation of lists. Typical among these, for instance, was the El Niño Hotline of Doom (www.primenet.com/~rfwatts/elnino.html), run by Los Angeles resident Hugh Stegman. Stegman, who has been interviewed about his site in the media, is a quintessential Web site bricoleur with a libertarian slant. 35 As a kind of ongoing rant about the media, he used the site to create--with the aid of Web participants--a list of El Niño hype. The site included, for instance, a list of verbs the Los Angeles Times used to describe a rainstorm (barrel, blow, chew, explode, flood, gnaw, hit,

plunge, pour, push, ram, rip, roar, screech, shove, slam, soak, split, swamp, swat, sweep, swipe [savagely], and whip). Stegman's site, like [End Page 177] many Web sites, occupies a border between information and personal obsession, demonstrating the ways in which the Web legitimates behavior (keeping excessive lists, ranting about an official, fantasizing out loud) that might be construed as aberrant in another context, media or otherwise. (He eventually ran out of steam in September 1998, when his list of predictions

hit the goal of one thousand.) Yet, Stegman's Web site also demonstrates the ways that the Web can provide an illusion of participation and citizen action while obscuring political analysis. Stegman's site was fueled by anger at the media for its unconscionable focus on the El Niño story long before a drop of rain fell in the region. He and his fellow participants thus understand the Web to be a means of talking back to the media and a means of

alternative production to the mainstream. The participatory illusion of the Web is thus based upon the notion that expressing opinion constitutes action, if not political engagement. But if the individualization that the Web can foster easily fits a myth of resistance through personal opinion, it also shows the ties of new technology to commodification. Indeed, the Web's appeal to the individual is often little different than an appeal to individual consumers through, in this case, the selling of preparedness.

Scientific narratives of disaster are politically disabling: encourages flight response instead of transformative politics. Sturken, 2001 (Marita, associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, “Desiring the Weather: El Niño, the Media, and California Identity” Public Culture 13.2 (2001) 161-189)

Davis's book is an example of how politically disabling the story of disaster as told through science invariably is.

Despite its leftist political claims, Ecology of Fear offers a paranoid narrative that ultimately screens over the story of social disaster with one of natural disaster. Like weather media, Davis's book is enamored with scientific statistics and the story of nature, which then overpowers its argument about how the city planners and developers of Los Angeles, motivated by greed, placed the lives of millions of residents in the path of routine disaster. Indeed, Davis has just released a new book, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, that takes this analysis of weather science one step further. The book argues that El Niño climate changes intersected in deadly ways with imperialist

politics in the devastating late-nineteenth-century famines of China, India, and Brazil, resulting in more than 50 million deaths. As in Ecology of Fear, Davis reads the weather's impact through the framework of politics, arguing that "ecological poverty"--created in these countries through colonialist oppression--worked to create the contemporary Third World and its particular "vulnerability to extreme climate changes." 43 Davis's fascination with natural history and the love of data culminates in Ecology of Fear when he ends the book by analyzing a satellite image of the heat of the Los Angeles riots. Here, one can feel that technology's rendering of this image is ultimately for Davis a kind of thrill. In reiterating that the destruction of Los Angeles has been depicted throughout the century as a "victory for civilization," Davis seems unintentionally to embrace the position that the only "solution" is to leave town. 44 In fact, he himself did leave town after publishing the book; he now lives in Hawaii. The idea that California deserves what it gets because of its conspicuous wealth; its status as the primary source of popular culture production in the world; its relentless sunshine; and its reputation for New Age philosophy, body worshiping, and mindless leisure activity relies, of course, on stereotypes of the actual residents of Southern California. At the same time, the sociogeography of [End Page 184] Southern California means that weather phenomena such as El Niño have a tendency to wreak the most havoc on upscale neighborhoods in the hills and along the beaches. Whereas in much of the developing world disaster appears to be the province of the poor, who live in unstable structures on flood plains or hillsides subject to mud slides, or whose subsistence living is easily disrupted by drought and excessive rains, in Southern California the most perilous living areas--such as Malibu beaches and the Hollywood Hills--are the most coveted. Delight in watching California disaster coverage is thus in part about the pleasure that exists for ordinary citizens in seeing celebrities sifting through the refuse of their destroyed beach houses and the resulting comfort viewers derive from witnessing the problems of those who seem to have it all. Hence, watching disaster footage is often a form of class vengeance. The two narratives that California is the site of the future apocalypse and that it deserves this as punishment for having "invented the concept of life-style" 45 are joined by a third, which is that this propensity for natural disaster is crucial to California identity. Here, California narcissism includes its belief that it is special in the world of natural disasters. Los Angeles-based science fiction writer Steve Erickson states, "Navigating catastrophes is our stock in trade in California. . . . The End of the World is California's middle name; it's in our job description as a place. . . . Where else are they going to end the world, Wisconsin? . . . The very occupation of California--a fractured, partially liquefied terrain of arid deserts, hostile mountains, dense woods and craggy seashores--is an act of recklessness; and like all acts of recklessness, it's motivated by both the hubris of transcendence and the rapture of self-annihilation. . . . Take our apocalypse from us and we are nothing." 46 Erickson defines the status of California as "The Moment of the Held Breath," when the hot and dry Santa Ana winds blow in the fall and "everyone from Malibu to the Palisades to the Hollywood Hills holds his or her breath waiting for the wrong match struck at the wrong moment." If, as Erickson states, Californians, and in particular Los Angeles residents, pride themselves on their

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Weather security K AT: Cede the Politicaldisaster status, so much so that it is essential to the regional character, then the coverage of the 1997-98 El Niño necessitated a narcissistic approach. Although El Niño was portrayed in the media as a global event, which had broad-reaching impact throughout the world, coverage of the event made clear that California was its ultimate

site of meaning. [End Page 185] Again and again, these apocalyptic narratives of natural disaster and the weather function as a means of eliding politics and class. In defining Los Angeles and Southern California through an array of media-generated stereotypes, the gleeful story of Los Angeles's deserved demise erases class differences and ignores the fundamental differences by which people experience disaster because of their economic

status. Yet, at the same time, even as it wants to engage with such political questions, Davis's book offers such a persuasive argument--with its love of data, statistics, and science--for the proposition that Los Angeles should not exist in "natural" terms that it constitutes another form of nontransformative politics. Simply put, if Ecology of Fear makes one want to get in the car and immediately drive east, then it offers little understanding of what a nonescapist intervention into disaster politics would mean. The scientific discourse of disaster prediction, precisely because of its criteria of what constitutes knowledge, produces narratives that do not allow for individual agency or political analysis. These narratives are ultimately about the question of survival--the fear that we will not survive, the desire to survive, and the inability to say what it means to survive in the context of daily life. In the story of the weather and the survival of dramatic natural disasters, the viewers of weather media are asked to reassure themselves that they can survive the everyday difficulties of life as they know it. This is part of the pull of the Weather Channel, its relentless ongoing presence that insures, in some sense, a future. The story of weather disaster is about finding meaning in survival.

Production of scientific knowledge about weather creates illusions of control while erasing political agency.Sturken, 2001 (Marita, associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, “Desiring the Weather: El Niño, the Media, and California Identity” Public Culture 13.2 (2001) 161-189)

It is the very establishment of meaning, some meaning, that matters. In creating an overreaching narrative for the weather, El Niño provided an explanation for that thing which is perceived to be the most uncontrollable, the most arbitrary, and the most chaotic. It established a continuum of events across the world, from the drought and forest fires in Indonesia to ice storms in Canada, from West Coast storms and mud slides to fires in Mexico and the tornadoes and hurricanes in Florida. The message was more than a simple one of global

unity--nature has a coherent story and we are all connected by weather/nature--it was a story that made sense of the irrational aspects of tragic events, the violence of difference, and the arbitrariness of death. Hence, viewing El Niño through the media's lens became a form

of witnessing. This was weather with a purpose, and, as such, an indicator of a larger purpose in life. As witnesses to El Niño, viewers were not only able to exercise their voyeuristic tendencies in seeing tragedy and disaster wreaked on others, they also were allowed to feel like witnesses to history, witnesses to the end of the twentieth century, and, finally, witnesses to some moment of significance. The weather is the site of a production of knowledge that functions as a means to erase political agency and to substitute the activity of witnessing in its place. Watching it becomes the central experience; indeed it subsumes all other experiences. The weather viewer feels connected to the world of weather twenty-four hours a day, with the Weather

Channel as a place where one is safe and protected by technology. The weather citizen is interpellated within a set of narratives that range from the duties of consumerism to the vagaries of fate. The weather, we are told, is uncontrollable, dramatic, and exciting, yet science has given us the capacity to predict it. The government and the media have it under control. Prediction, it is stated, will save us. Prediction, a form of knowledge that is short-lived and of limited capacity, is seen as a shield against the future. If only, we are asked to think, we could be prepared. [End Page 187]

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The argu Weather security K AT: Cede the Political

ment that securitization is necessary to spur action is a dubious rhetorical device meant to legitimize traditional politics and stigmatize detractors. Dalby, Carleton University, 2002 (Simon, “Environmental Security: Ecology or International Relations?” paper presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, March)The arguments about environmental security are extensive and beyond the scope of this paper to recapitulate, but the key point that recent critics have emphasized

concerns the question of what exactly is being secured. Traditional security analyses which lead to discussions that environmental matters might cause warfare have not produced many plausible scenarios of immediate concern. The argument that environmental degradation might lead fairly directly to interstate conflict has by now been rejected by most researchers in the field. Water wars are not very likely although there are a few important exceptions where conflict might yet ensue. What is becoming clear is that in many places in the periphery of the global economy struggles over resources are prevalent. But these are often traditional land wars on the fringes of agricultural settlement or struggles to control the revenue streams earned by the export of resources, whether strictly "environmental" or not. Minerals, timber, diamonds and oil are struggled and fought over in many parts of the world although their connection with environmental change and degradation is frequently not in a manner that makes conflict simply a result of "environmental" change. The assumptions that warfare is likely as a result of environmental change do not exhaust the range of concern. The initial focus of policy concern in the late 1980s where the argument was less that environmental change will cause warfare than that

environmental disruptions threaten people in many ways that might be said to render them insecure. Phrasing matters of environmental concern in terms of security as a strategy to gain political attention has turned out to be a dubious rhetorical device. But the matter of various forms of endangerment as a result of environmental themes and the priorities that might be afforded these continue to raise the possibility of understanding such matters in terms of securing the environment. Several matters of global scope fit within such thinking. Barnett and Dovers itemize three; biodiversity, climate change and nuclear hazards as being of a sufficient spatial and temporal scale, and so difficult to reverse, as to qualify as matters of global security. Given the analyses now appearing from the international science community and especially discussions of the scale of human impacts in terms of "no-analogue states" and the beginning of the "Anthropocene" it is clear that the relatively stable biospheric conditions of the last ten millennia cannot be taken for granted in even the near term future. The rapid collapse of biodiversity is reversing the geological trend to increased variety of species, a matter of long term concern well beyond the alarm on the part of pharmaceutical advocates concerned that medicinal plants are being extirpated. The potential for further Chernobyl style disasters cannot be ruled out, despite technological innovation in the nuclear industry and the global reach of nuclear fallout is now common knowledge. As the IGBP analyses discussed above make clear the most important point about global change is not any one of these themes, be it climate, biodiversity, radiological pollution or even ozone depletion, nitrogen or phosphorus cycle disruptions, but rather the fact that all these matters are occurring simultaneously and cascading through the biosphere in unpredictable interactive manners. Phrased in these terms it is not difficult to

render such matters extraordinary and beyond the normal operation of politics and human activity. But whether such threats to human welfare can be usefully designated as security is doubtful and it is also clear that the poor and the marginal populations in the South are likely to be much less likely to adapt to changes than the rich in the Northern metropoles who can use their wealth to avoid the consequences of local environmental changes. As Dovers and Barnett suggest climate change, biodiversity loss and some nuclear technologies clearly fit the criteria of what ought to be rendered as a global security threat, but the failure of many to respond to such threats suggest that their designation in these terms is not any more effective than the use of other vocabularies. Skeptical realists will at this point no doubt reassert the inevitability of faction, the unavoidability of short term parochial interest and the impossibility of global efforts. But the dangers remain as concerned ecologists never tire of reminding the few people who bother to listen.

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Structural Violence K Impact Outweighs

Structural violence is the biggest impact in the debate. Abu-Jamal 98 (Mumia, award-winning PA journalist, 9/19, http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html)

We live, equally immersed, and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural' violence, of a kind that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness. Former Massachusetts prison official and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes; By "structural violence" I mean the increased rates of death and disability suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them. Those excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion

of them) are a function of the class structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting "structural" with "behavioral violence" by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as

the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide, soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. --(Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic (New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.) This form of violence,

not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, ruling-class protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it--really? Gilligan

notes: [E]very fifteen years, on the average, as many people die because of relative poverty as would be killed in a nuclear war that caused 232 million deaths; and every single year, two to three times as many people die from poverty throughout the world as were killed by the Nazi genocide of the Jews over a six-year

period. This is, in effect, the equivalent of an ongoing, unending, in fact accelerating, thermonuclear war, or genocide on the weak and poor every year of every decade, throughout the world. [Gilligan, p. 196]

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http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html


SCIER CP Solvency

Ground sensors are economically efficient and solve better than visual inspection.Rushing 2008 (Reece, Director of Government Reform at American Progress, Center for American Progress “Catching Crumbling Infrastructure Sensor Technology Provides New Opportunity” www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/01/infrastructure.html)

This heavy reliance on visual inspection is inadequate for three major reasons. First, inspections are susceptible to human error. Indeed, a 2001 study by the Federal Highway Administration found that inspectors regularly missed problems and inconsistently rated bridge conditions. Second, there are long intervals between required inspections, during which time serious problems may emerge. And third, inspections may be superficial and might not produce the detail necessary to spot deficiencies. This is not to say that visual inspection is unimportant—visual inspection

is crucial to assess bridge conditions, in particular cracks and corrosion. But more is needed to assure the safety of the nation’s bridges. That’s where sensor technology comes in. Instead of relying on sporadic and error-prone observations, matchbox-sized wireless sensors can be attached or embedded on bridges to take precise, continuous measurements of virtually anything relevant to a bridge’s condition, including strain, tilt, vibrations, temperature, and seismic activity. This sort of data is particularly important as the nation’s bridge population ages—the mean bridge age is now 40 years old—and traffic and truck loads continue to increase, causing more rapid deterioration. The Minneapolis collapse has created a political opportunity to modernize bridge monitoring. In its aftermath, Secretary of Transportation Mary E. Peters initiated an ongoing review of the agency’s bridge inspection program to, in her words, “make sure that everything is being done to keep this kind of tragedy from occurring again.”

Congress, meanwhile, is also engaged in finding solutions. Rep. James Oberstar (D-MN), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, is developing legislation to significantly improve bridge inspection requirements as part of “a data-driven performance-based approach to systematically address structurally deficient bridges on our nation’s core highway network.” Sensor technology can help meet the goals expressed by Peters and Oberstar. What’s needed now is a plan to move forward. First Steps for Sensor Technology Recently, the Federal Highway Administration awarded funding to the Connecticut Department of Transportation and the University of Connecticut to deploy and study different types of sensor systems for long-term bridge monitoring. “The goal is to generate information between inspections, so that if there’s a major change, we can take action to prevent something catastrophic from happening,” said project leader John DeWolf, a professor of civil engineering, who became involved in bridge monitoring following the 1983 collapse of the Mianus River Bridge on Interstate 95 in Greenwich, Connecticut. Over the last several years, six bridges in Connecticut have been outfitted with unique sensor systems. Five of these are wired systems, in

which cables connect the sensors to a computer. The sixth relies on solar-powered wireless sensors. This wireless system is particularly exciting because it holds great promise to be more widely replicated. It can take a great deal of labor and expense to run cables over a bridge—especially one that is large and difficult to access. For a wireless system, however, cables are not an issue. Sensors merely need to be placed in desired locations on the bridge. Installation typically takes no more than a few hours, at a cost less than half that of a wired system. Because of these advantages, DeWolf decided to go wireless for Connecticut’s longest bridge, the Goldstar Bridge, which crosses the Thames River on Interstate 95 in New London. Like all new technologies, wireless sensors are expected to get much cheaper over time. But even now they are affordable. Installation of 12 sensors at the Goldstar

cost about $30,000. Over the long run, sensors may even pay for themselves by more precisely identifying when and where repairs are needed. Ten wireless sensors were recently used to test stress levels from passenger trains on the Ben Franklin Bridge, which crosses the Delaware River from Philadelphia to Camden, New Jersey. The state believed the bridge was in need of major repairs based on advice it received from an engineering consultant. But data gathered by the sensors showed the bridge was in fact secure, saving tens of thousands of

dollars in unnecessary repairs. Sensors can also reveal problems as they emerge—before there is visual evidence such as cracking. This allows remedial action to be taken in time to head off serious structural damage, which can be very expensive to repair. “If you get to it quickly and fix it, it’s not going to be a major problem,” said Mike Robinson, vice president for sales and marketing at MicroStrain Inc., which developed the sensors for the Ben Franklin Bridge. “You can reduce the overall life-cycle cost of the bridge.” DeWolf approached MicroStrain to develop the solar-powered sensors specifically for the Goldstar. The sensors used on the Ben Franklin were powered by batteries—fine for short-term testing, but not long-term monitoring. Batteries eventually run out of power and then need to be changed or recharged, which is a difficult task on a bridge like the Goldstar, where sensors are in hard-to-reach locations. The solar-powered system relies on photovoltaic panels to harvest energy from the sun. These panels are connected to the sensors to supply power for daytime monitoring and recharge batteries for overnight observation. This system is expected to generate power for years with little or no maintenance. MicroStrain is also developing other solutions for long-term power, including mini wind turbines and super efficient battery-powered sensors, according to Robinson. MicroStrain first installed its solar-powered system on the Corinth Canal Bridge in Greece to monitor seismic activity. There, the sun is strong enough for continuous monitoring, which is crucial given the unpredictability of seismic activity. At the Goldstar, where the sun is not as bright, data are

gathered for 5 to 10 minutes every hour to conserve energy. For what’s being measured, strain and vibrations, this is considered plenty sufficient. The data collected are temporarily stored on the sensors and then downloaded daily to an onsite laptop computer. From there, the data can be remotely accessed through a DSL connection. Of course, it is not possible to manually analyze the voluminous amounts of data generated. Instead, automated systems are programmed to comb through and pick out relevant information for DeWolf and his team to review.

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Disasters Advantage CP: SCIER Solvency

SCIER solves disaster.Bridge 2010 (Bob Bridge is the principal of Hazard Assessment & Safety in Austin, Texas. He is a Certified Environmental Technician through the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX) in the Texas A&M University System and is a Certified Infrastructure Preparedness Specialist and Registered Environmental Property Assessor through the National Registry of Environmental Professionals, “Mitigating Wildfire Disaster: Early Detection and Commitment“ Disaster Reocvery journal http://www.drj.com/2010-articles/online-exclusive/mitigating-wildfire-disaster-early-detection-and-commitment.html)

European Union Sensor and Computing Infrastructure for Environmental Risks System The European Union-funded program, Sensor and Computing Infrastructure for Environmental Risks (SCIER), took on the challenge of developing a state-of-the-art automated system to detect disasters in the making, forecast how an emergency is likely to unfold, alert authorities, and get them the information they need to respond effectively. The first level of the group’s solution is to deploy networks of ground-based sensors such as video cameras, meteorological instruments, and river-level gauges in high-risk areas ,

especially the “urban-rural interface,” where homes and businesses lie close to undeveloped terrain. The ground-based sensors are linked wirelessly into what the researchers call a local area control unit. This level of the system structures and compares the raw data ; for example, checking to

see if a temperature spike at one sensor is matched by similar changes at nearby sensors. The system reportedly filters out what is unrealistic to not trigger a false alarm. When the local area control unit decides a threat is real, it activates the next level of SCIER’s computational armamentarium to forecast how the emergency is likely to develop during the crucial first hours. The researchers have implemented sophisticated mathematical models of how natural disasters unfold. Those models include detailed information about the local geography, plus real-time sensor data concerning wind, rainfall, temperature, and other variables. They found that in order to produce meaningful forecasts, they need

to generate multiple simulations of a disaster. Only then can their models provide authorities with accurate and useful information, such as where a wildfire is most likely to threaten homes. The system uses the most likely simulations to generate detailed maps that authorities can use to manage the emergency. Generating these complex simulations in real time demands enormous amounts of computing power. SCIER relies on the GRID to provide that computational clout. The GRID, sometimes known as the next-generation Internet, is a dedicated network that links thousands of computers via a fiber-optic network that is up to 10,000 times faster than the Internet. It allows researchers to perform calculations that could not be done otherwise. Early Recognition System in Germany, Estonia, Mexico, Portugal, and Czech Republic Tower-based, automatic forest fire early recognition systems are being utilized in Germany, Estonia, Mexico, Portugal, and the Czech Republic. The optical scanning system has automatic recognition of clouds by day and smoke at night. It incorporates local online data processing and utilizes a small band radio or cable transmission of alerts to a central office. It has an optimum coverage range

detection of 15 kilometers. The time to alert is approximately four minutes for a single tower setup and approximately two minutes for a multi-tower system. The system has a detection accuracy for smoke clouds of 10 x 10 meters at a 10 kilometer distance. During a 360° rotation, the camera takes three photos every 10°. For a better presentation of the smoke clouds, 36 photos are combined to form a panorama view in the central office. Reported smoke areas are marked on electronic maps and an operator evaluates all events by means of the data transferred to the central office. The system installation, maintenance, and service require experienced personnel. The operator has to hire staff that is familiar with the local area to decide, in view of their knowledge

of the area, if there really is a fire.

Empirically solves: ground sensors provided an early warning system for monsoonsRamesh 2009 (Dr. Maneesha Vinodini Ramesh, Amrita Center for Wireless Networks and Applications, (Amrita University) India “Wireless Sensor Network for Disaster Monitoring” www.intechopen.com/download/pdf/pdfs_id/12467 wsn = wireless sensor network)

Our researchers, at Amrita University, designed and deployed a Wireless Sensor Network for the purpose of landslide detection. The complete functional system consists of 50 geological sensors and 20 wireless sensor nodes. This network has the capability to provide real-time data through the Internet and also to issue warnings ahead of time using the innovative three level warning system developed as part of this work. The system incorporates energy efficient data collection methods, fault tolerant clustering approaches, and threshold based data aggregation techniques. This wireless sensor network system is in place. For two years it has been gathering vast amounts of data, providing better understanding of landslide scenario and has been poised to warn of any pertinent landslide disaster in future. The system has proved its validity by delivering real warning to the local community during heavy rains in the last monsoon season (July 2009). This system is scalable to other landslide prone areas and also it can be used for flood, avalanche, and water quality monitoring with minor modifications. This development describes a real experience and makes apparent the significant advantages of using Wireless Sensor Networks in Disaster Management. The knowledge gained from this actual experience is useful in the development of other systems for continuous monitoring and detection of critical and emergency applications.

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Spending link: Satellites cost $$

Satellite failures not only cost millions but also waste years of researchArizona Republic 6/26/11 [ John Yantis, the defense /aerospace / technology/personal technology reporter, “ Despite high-profile satellite failure, diverse contracts position Orbital's Valley factories for growth”, http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/2011/06/26/20110626orbital-position-factories-growth-despite-high-profile-failure.html] Orbital Sciences Corp. was riding a wave of success in its Phoenix-area facilities when disaster struck in early March. The company was preparing to celebrate its first year in a state-of-the-art satellite facility in Gilbert. It had landed a contract to assemble and test 81 satellites for Iridium NEXT, a global satellite-communications system. Work on the first of what are expected to be several satellites that monitor the Earth's terrain was progressing nicely, with a

launch date set for late 2012. But when a faulty Orbital Sciences rocket designed and engineered in Chandler failed to deliver a $424 million

satellite into orbit for NASA , disappointment and investigations ensued. The mishap occurred when the rocket's nose-cone fairing encasing

the Glory satellite did not separate as it traveled through the atmosphere about three minutes into the March 4 launch, sending both into the sea. It was

the second unsuccessful launch in two years of a Taurus XL rocket and an Orbital-built NASA Earth-orbiting satellite, projects that cost $700 million and years of space-science work.

The advancement of satellite technology is slower and thus more costly than expected. The plan is not worth its noticeably high costs.O’Hanlon, 04, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings and holder of the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair (Neither Star Wars Nor Sanctuary)One general theme about future technology is that, despite the tendency of military strategists to rave about defense transformation and a coming revolution in military affairs, many satellite development programs are currently advancing more slowly than once hoped. Leaving aside fundamental constraints of the laws of physics, immediate engineering challenges are making it harder than expected to develop systems that are generally believed to be within reach. For example, the nation’s next-generation global positioning system satellites, space-based infrared satellites at higher and lower orbits (SBIRS-high and SBIRS-low), and communications systems (such as the advanced extremely high-frequency satellite system). Cheaper and/or reusable launchers are proving hard to develop as well, as discussed below. Most futuristic technologies remain just that.

Microsatellites don’t really save that much moneyDefense industry daily 2011 (Small Is Beautiful: US Military Explores Use of Microsatellites, http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Small-Is-Beautiful-US-Military-Explores-Use-of-Microsatellites-06720/, 2011)At a time when defense budgets are being cut, the era of the multi-billion dollar military satellite program might be over. Witness the fate of the massive $12 billion

TSAT program, which was shut down in 2009. As a much cheaper alternative, governments are exploring the possibility of using microsatellites to perform many of the functions currently performed by expensive large satellite systems: GPS

navigation, communication, surveillance, and earth imagery. At a 10th of the cost of their larger cousins, microsatellites are much easier sell to budget conscious procurement officers. They are much cheaper and faster to build and launch. For key

military missions, however, their reliability and longevity are an issue. They might be cheaper, but if the military has to use 10 times as many to do the job of traditional satellites, would that be a cost savings.

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Geoengineering CP

There are many CPs that solve the warming issue altogether. Sulfur dioxide, for example, when shot into the stratosphere, blocks out sunlight and cools the earth.

Levitt and Dubner, 9 (Steven, prof of economics, University of Chicago, Stephen, American journalist Super Freakonomics)

But a big volcano shoots sulfur dioxide far higher, into the stratosphere. That’s the layer that begins at about seven miles above the

earth’s surface, or six miles at the poles. Above that threshold altitude, there is a drastic change in a variety or atmospheric phenomena. The sulfur dioxide, rather than quickly returning to the earth’s surface, absorbs stratosphere water vapor and forms an aerosol cloud that circulates rapidly, blanketing most of the globe. In the stratosphere, sulfur dioxide can linger for a year or more, and will thereby affect the global climate. For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things

don’t get much better. Here’s how it works. At a base station, sulfur would be burned into sulfur dioxide and then liquefied. “The technology for doing this is well known,” says Wood, “because early in the twentieth century, sulfur dioxide was the major refrigerant gas.” The hose, stretching from the base station into the stratosphere, would be about eighteen miles long but extremely light. “The diameter is just a couple inches, not some giant-ass pipe,” says Myhrvold. “It’s literally a specialized fire hose.” The hose would be suspended from a series of high-strength, helium-filled balloons fastened to the hose at 100- to 300-yard intervals (a

“string o pearls”, IV calls it), ranging in diameter from 25 feet near the ground to 100 feet near the top. The liquefied sulfur dioxide would be sent skyward by a series of pumps, affixed to the hose at every 100 years. These too would be relatively light, about forty-five pounds each—“smaller than the pumps in my swimming pool,” Myhrvold says. There are several advantages to using many small pumps rather than one monster pump at the base station: a big ground pump would create more pressure, which, in turn, would require a far heavier hose; even if a few of the small pumps failed, the mission itself

wouldn’t; and using small, standardized units would keep costs down. At the end of the hose, a cluster of nozzles would spritz the stratosphere with a fine mist of colorless liquid sulfur dioxide. Thanks to stratospheric winds that typically reach one hundred miles per hour, the spritz would wrap around the earth in roughly ten days’ time. That’s how long it would take to create Budyko’s Blanket. Because stratospheric air naturally spirals toward the poles, and because the arctic region is are more vulnerable to global warming, it make sense to spray the sulfur aerosol at high latitude—with perhaps one hose in the Southern Hemisphere and another in the Northern. If the garden-hose-to-the-sky idea doesn’t fly, IV has another proposal that relies on the same science but is perhaps slightly less repugnant. As

it turns out, the amount of stratospheric sulfur necessary to cool the planet is equal to the amount that just a handful of coal-burning power plants already belch out.

This second plan calls for simply extending the smokestacks at a few strategically located plants. So instead of spewing their sulfur-laden smoke several hundred feet into the air, these smokestacks would release it some eighteen miles high, into the stratosphere , where it would have the same net cooling effect as the garden-hose scheme. This plan is

appealing because it simply repurposes existing pollution without adding any more. Although an eighteen-mile-high smokestack might sound like a hard thing to build, IV has figured out how—essentially by attaching a long, skinny hot-air balloon to an existing power-plant smokestack, creating a channel that lets the hot sulfur gases rise by their own buoyancy into the stratosphere. This project if dubbed, naturally, “chimney to the sky.” “On balance, the role of clouds is to produce a cooling,” says Latham. “If clouds didn’t exist in the atmosphere, the earth would be a lot hotter than it is now.” There are at least three essential ingredients for the formation of clouds: ascending air, water vapor, and solid particles known as cloud condensation nuclei. When planes fly, particles in the exhaust plume serve as the nuclei. Over landmasses, dust

particles do the job. But there are far fewer cloud-friendly nuclei over the world’s oceans, Latham explains, so the clouds contain fewer droplets and are therefore less reflective. As a result, more sunlight reaches the earth’s surface. The ocean, because it is dark, is particularly good at absorbing the sun’s heat. As it happens,

the salt-rich spray from seawater creates excellent nuclei for cloud formation. All you have to do is get the spray into the air several yards above the ocean’s surface. From there, it naturally lofts upward to the altitude where clouds form. IV has considered a variety of ways to make this happen. At the moment, the favorite idea is a fleet of wind-powered fiberglass boats, designed by Stephen Salter, with underwater turbines that produce enough thrust to kick up a steady stream of spray. Because there is no engine, there is no pollution. The only ingredients—seawater and air—are of course free. The volume of spray (and,

therefore, of cloud reflectivity) would be easily adjustable. Nor would the clouds reach land, where sunshine is so important to agriculture. The estimated price tag: less than $50 million for the first prototypes and then a few billion dollars for a fleet of vessels large enough to offset projected warming at least until 2050. In the annals of cheap and simple solutions to vexing problems, it is hard to think of a more elegant example than John Latham’s soggy mirrors—geoengineering that the greenest green could love.

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India CPCP Text: The Republic of India should provide all necessary resources for the National Remote Sensing Centre of the Indian Space Research Organization to increase its remote sensing satellites globally.

India has the technology and desire to spread their remote sensing satellites globallyNational Remote Sensing Centre of the Indian Space Research Organization No Date [ National Remote Sensing Centre of the Indian Space Research Organization, “ INDIAN REMOTE SENSING SATELLITES”, no date givin, http://www.nrsc.gov.in/satellites.html]

The launch of IRS-P6 (Resourcesat-1 ) in October 2003, provided an excellent opportunity to obtain high resolution multi-spectral data and moderate

resolution data in 10-bi, while providing continuity of data. IRS-P5 (Cartosat-1), launched on May 5, 2005, catapulted the Indian Remote Sensing program into the world of large scale mapping and terrain modeling applications. Subsequently in Jan 2008 CARTOSAT-2 was launched , which led Indian Remote Sensing to the class of high resolution satellites. It has a PAN camera with 0.8 m resolution. Oceansat-2 was launched on September 23, 2009. Continuing the journey, the Indian Space Research Organization is planning to offer much more to the user

community through its future IRS missions. RISAT-1 is the next new missions which is scheduled to be launched during 2009-2010. Today, IRS data is being used for a diverse range of applications such as crop acreage and production estimation of major crops, drought monitoring and assessment based on vegetation condition, flood risk zone mapping and flood damage assessment, hydro-geo-morphological maps for locating underground water resources, irrigation command area status monitoring, snowmelt run-off estimation, land use and land cover

mapping, urban planning, biodiversity characterization, forest survey, wetland mapping, environmental impact analysis, mineral prospecting, coastal studies, integrated surveys for developing sustainable action plans and so on. India is playing a lead role in the world and would like to extend this role in providing access to the remote sensing data from an Indian satellite to students / scientists in the developing countries. Keeping this in view, ISRO has launched the Indian Mini Satellite – 1 (IMS-1) on April 28, 2008 as an auxiliary satellite on PSLV-C11. The satellite carries two payloads namely, Multi-spectral camera (Mx) and Hyper-Spectral Imager (HySI). IMS-1 is a mini satellite weighing 83 kg and has a mission life of two years. Apart from supplying the data for the Indian Remote Sensing Satellites, we also supplement the data requirements of users through other Remote Sensing Satellites

Net Bens: politics, US spending DA

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Multilateral CP (Russia, Cuba, Venezuela)

CP Text: The Russian Federation working with the Republic of Cuba and Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela should provide all necessary resources to developing and enhancing remote sensing satellite capabilities in space.

Russia would share the technology with Cuba and VenezuelaGPS Daily 2008 [Staff writer, “ Russia In Talks With Cuba, Venezuela On Joint Use Of Glonass”, 9/24/2008, http://www.gpsdaily.com/reports/Russia_In_Talks_With_Cuba_Venezuela_On_Joint_Use_Of_Glonass_999.html]

Russia is negotiating with Cuba and Venezuela on the joint use of Russia's Glonass navigation satellites, the head of the

federal space agency said on Tuesday. "I have just returned from a working visit to Cuba. They are very interested in cooperating with us in the use of the Glonass system, which will cover the globe by 2010," Roscosmos chief Anatoly Perminov told reporters in Moscow. He said

Moscow and Havana are working on a space cooperation agreement and have considered ways of jointly using earth remote sensing satellites. Russia has previously said it intends to share its space technology with Cuba, and has begun

discussions on building a space center in the country. Perminov also said Russia would like to station several ground based space communication facilities in Venezuela, but stressed that they would have no military application. Glonass (Global

Navigation Satellite System) is the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS), which is designed for both military and civilian use, and allows users to identify their positions in real time. Russia plans to launch six satellites in the next three months to increase the existing Glonass grouping to 18-19 spacecraft. According to the Central Research Institute for Machine Building, the Glonass system currently consists of 16 satellites, with 13 satellites working in orbit, two undergoing maintenance, and one due to be withdrawn from the orbital grouping. Perminov earlier said that the number of Glonass satellites will be increased from the current 16 to 30 by 2011. A total of 9.9 billion rubles (around $400 million at the current exchange rate) was allocated for Glonass from the federal budget in 2007, and 4.7 billion rubles ($190 million) in 2006. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin signed a directive on September 12 allocating an additional $2.6 billion to develop the Glonass system.

Multilateral cooperation is key to solving major space venturesInternational Space Exploration Update 2006 [“U.S. Leadership, International Cooperation, and Space Exploration”, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 4/26/06, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/060426_us_space_leadership.pdf]The environment for civil space is indeed more complex today than ever. Civil space activities have now reached “global status.” In the world of nuclear proliferation, initially only 5 nations, China, France, the UK, the United States, and the former USSR, had nuclear weapons and were able to discuss the topic behind closed doors.

Now, there are more than 10 nations with the technology base needed to make and deliver nuclear warheads over thousands of miles. This new situation is completely different, and nuclear proliferation is difficult to control. The

situation is wellknown and understood even if it is difficult to manage. The same situation has occurred with space technology, though this situation is much less well-known and understood—which is strange, as rocket technology is missile technology. The UN Office of Outer

Space Affairs in Vienna has only been able to generate progress on the issue of space debris, and there is still no international forum to discuss other space issues. The lack of international cooperation on critical issues arises largely from the view shared by many states that space is a strategic high ground. As such, countries are reluctant to engage with each other, fearing that their respective asymmetric advantages in space exploration might be eliminated or exploited. Whereas, in the 1950s and the 1960s, there were 2 main actors in space, there are currently 6 nations with full space capabilities and many more, such as Israel, Ukraine, Brazil, Pakistan, and Korea, with partial capabilities.

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Multilateral CP (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine)CP Text: The Russian Federation working with the Republic of Belarus and Ukrayina should provide all necessary resource to developing and enhancing remote sensing satellite capabilities in space. Russia working with Belarus and Ukraine solves remote sensing technology bestBelarusian Telegraph Agency 2011 [“ Belarus, Russia, Ukraine consider remote sensing satellite constellation”, 6/23/11, http://news.belta.by/en/news/society?id=639296]

MINSK, 23 June (BelTA) – Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are looking into an opportunity to develop and mutually use a virtual remote sensing satellite constellation, Chairman of the Presidium of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (NASB) Anatoly Rusetsky

told media on 23 June. In his words, the use of a virtual remote sensing satellite constellation involves the use of their information resources. “As regards the projects, then it is the use of the Russian fleet , first of all,” he noted. Belarus has signed an agreement with Ukraine, and this cooperation is still in its initial stage. Belarus plans to develop cooperation with Kazakhstan which is busy designing its own satellite system.

Speaking about the joint operation of the satellites, Anatoly Rusetsky emphasized that it would be done not only for information sharing but also for economic sense. “Any exchanges can be either free of charge or provided on a paid basis. But, basically, these are commercial projects that can make money,” he said. Anatoly Rusetsky noted that today it is worth having an information field and having an

opportunity to integrate into it. One satellite can deal with a relatively small amount of issues. That is why we need a satellite constellation. “I think in the future we will be able to use the whole cosmic information field of the countries participating in the project,” he stressed. On 23-24 June the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus is holding a meeting of representatives of the CIS member states on cooperation in space. The meeting discussed the use of remote sensing of the Earth in the interests of the CIS countries and the prospects for further cooperation of the CIS in space. The meeting participants will present reports on the processing the data from remote sensing satellites for drawing and updating digital topographic maps, the experience in using the results of the cosmic activity for the benefit of the social and economic development of the regions, a possibility of using a virtual remote sensing satellite constellation of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. A part of the session will be held at the NASB United Institute of Computer Science to consider the major areas of research on Belarus’ national space program and the Union State Cosmos-NT program and demonstrate a space information processing and operation center. Belarus pays great attention to the development of space vehicles and technologies. Since 1999 Belarus has been involved in the Belarusian-Russian space programs Cosmos-BR, Cosmos-SG and

Cosmos-MT. In accordance with Presidential Decree of 2007, Belarus has been working on creating the Belarusian space system of remote sensing. Belarus is preparing for the launch of a remote sensing satellite together with Russia. The National Program for the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space for the period 2008-2012 is currently underway. Belarus cooperates with Ukraine and Russia at the state

level. On 12 June 2009 Belarus and Ukraine signed a framework intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in exploring and using outer space for peaceful purposes. The agreement involves the exploration and use of outer space, development and implementation of space technology, joint space programs and activities to develop and use advanced technologies. On 15 March 2011 Belarus and Russia signed an intergovernmental agreement on cooperation in exploring and using outer space for peaceful purposes. At the previous meeting of representatives of the CIS member states on cooperation in space, which took place on 25 March 2010 in Moscow, it was considered appropriate to reinstate the Interstate Space Council and further amend the agreement on the council as multilateral cooperation in space activities grows stronger. In addition, meeting participants noted the interest in joint projects on remote sensing, use of global navigation satellite system (GLONASS) and use of space

communications and space exploration.

Multilateral cooperation is key to solving major space venturesInternational Space Exploration Update 2006 [“U.S. Leadership, International Cooperation, and Space Exploration”, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 4/26/06, http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/060426_us_space_leadership.pdf]The environment for civil space is indeed more complex today than ever. Civil space activities have now reached “global status.” In the world of nuclear proliferation, initially only 5 nations, China, France, the UK, the United States, and the former USSR, had nuclear weapons and were able to discuss the topic behind closed doors.

Now, there are more than 10 nations with the technology base needed to make and deliver nuclear warheads over thousands of miles. This new situation is completely different, and nuclear proliferation is difficult to control. The

situation is wellknown and understood even if it is difficult to manage. The same situation has occurred with space technology, though this situation is much less well-known and understood—which is strange, as rocket technology is missile technology. The UN Office of Outer

Space Affairs in Vienna has only been able to generate progress on the issue of space debris, and there is still no international forum to discuss other space issues. The lack of international cooperation on critical issues arises largely from the view shared by many states that space is a strategic high ground. As such, countries are reluctant to engage with each other, fearing that their respective asymmetric advantages in space exploration might be eliminated or exploited. Whereas, in the 1950s and the 1960s, there were 2 main actors in space, there are currently 6 nations with full space capabilities and many more, such as Israel, Ukraine, Brazil, Pakistan, and Korea, with partial capabilities.

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Neg: K Gender Key to solve

Cant solve for aff without first assessing genderDalby 09 (Simon, Ph.D and Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University, “security and environmental change”, P133)

Oswald Spring's (2008) formulation of gender extends it beyond a simple male-and-female dichotomy to suggest that gender is key to a more complicated sociological imagination that includes children, elders, indigenous peoples, and other minorities as agents in the human dimensions of environmental challenges, in the need for peacebuilding in numerous places, and in attempts to tackle equity issues. Gender understood in these terms connects with security understood in terms of livelihood, food, health, education, public safety, and

cultural diversity. This challenges hierarchies and violence that have made so many vulnerable by the way gender roles have shaped societies, and suggests very clearly that human security has to focus on these people rather than on maintaining the social order that simply perpetuates the control and safety of rich men running states. HUGE thus also looks to other social organizations, equity, and development, and such things as ethical investment strategies, and broad public participation in political decision-making to tackle discrimination and violence, to secure humanity. Consequently "environmental security" concerns are incorporated because a healthy environment and strategies of resilience-building for vulnerable groups, and especially for women, should reduce the impacts of hazards. To do so, especially in areas that are hazard prone, this approach focuses on both the potential for financial and technical innovations that enhance women's own resilience from the bottom up, and the provision of state institutions that can warn of impending hazards, organize evacuations,

and facilitate relief and reconstruction efforts subsequently. Advance planning to deal with disasters in isolated regions might help greatly to prevent famine or violent conflict in their aftermath. But to do all this requires both an understanding of the complexity of human networks and support systems and a political commitment to aid all citizens facing hazards. It also requires a recognition of the increasingly interconnected social and ecological systems that are the contemporary human context. Finally it requires making resources available to plan for contingencies, and this is especially difficult in developing countries where state capacity is limited and

recent development priorities have been about the private sector and the supposed superiority of the market to provide for people's needs.

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Militarization DA Impact

Militarization of space may be an advantage now, but its results are deadly: the U.S. is simultaneously encouraging other countries to also develop space weaponization technology, resulting in war to a much larger scale; there is a huge possibility that the U.S. will lose that war.Mowthorpe, 04, Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom (The Militarization and Weaponization of Space)

The fact that Iraq had no antisatellite systems, enabled the contribution satellites made to assist the coalition forces to become extraordinarily simple. As Lambakis

argues, "as a consequence of the growing reliance on satellites to perform military functions, a future ASAT wielding adversary of the United States might be capable of leveraging a victory out of otherwise hopeless military circumstances.” The integration of space systems within the U.S. military operations may lead to space rapidly becoming the country's Achilles” heel. The Gulf War demonstrated that space is increasingly becoming an important arena in war. If Iraq had possessed the ability to use the GPS satellites, its ballistic missile tactics might have been far more devastating. The possibility that in the future the United States may encounter an enemy with an ASAT capability has to be considered in the planning for future conflicts. The use of space in providing information for C4I that space could consequently become another dimension that can affect the outcome of war.

For the United States to militarize space would be to further alienate ourselves from other countries as a “go-it-alone” power, thus defeating our purposes to stay the hegemon.O’Hanlon, 04, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings and holder of the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair (Neither Star Wars Nor Sanctuary)But any U.S. policy to pursue the actual weaponization of space in the near term would be a mistake. It would probably lead to an arms competition that would put American assets at risk sooner than they otherwise would be. Coming in the face of strong international opposition, it would further exacerbate the image of the United States as a go-it-alone power. That could, in turn, weaken Washington's ability to hold other countries to their arms control and nonproliferation commitments and to induce multilateral cooperation on other security issues.

The 1AC does not take into account the potency undeterred nations’ nuclear weapons that could easily destroy satellites constructed with today’s known technology, which would cause more awkward international tensions that the United States could not easily handle. O’Hanlon, 04, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings and holder of the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair (Neither Star Wars Nor Sanctuary)

Nuclear weapons are an effective means of targeting satellites. They are often carried by ballistic missiles with guidance systems that could

easily be reprogrammed to detonate at a point in space; if it was known when a given satellite would pass near that point, close-proximity intercept would not be difficult to achieve (even without testing for that purpose). Nuclear weapons are, of course, lethal from close range, even against hardened satellites . Any country with nuclear weapons and even relatively short-range ballistic missiles might be able to generate this type of threat, since low-Earth orbit is so near and this type of

attack does not require great accuracy or finesse. Some argue that adversaries would desist from using nuclear weapons in space out of fear of retaliation. It is true, certainly, that this would be a provocative action with considerable potential for inciting some type of escalation from the United States. But the assumption that an enemy would be deterred for that reason is unconvincing and too optimistic. What better way to use nuclear weapons than to destroy a key military capability of an enemy country without killing any of its population? The United States could threaten nuclear retaliation after such an attack, but it is far from clear that such a threat would be credible—or even appropriate. And an enemy might feel it had little to lose anyway, if the United States was already bent on regime overthrow as its ultimate objective in the war in question. On balance, this concern is considerably more serious than many appreciate.

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Militarization DA Impact

There is no reason for the United States to develop space weapons that will only exacerbate our already too-reactive reputation amongst all countries and cause worse war faster.O’Hanlon, 04, Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings and holder of the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair (Neither Star Wars Nor Sanctuary)By racing to develop its own space weapons, the United States would cause two unfortunate sets of consequences. Militarily, it would legitimate a faster space arms race than is otherwise likely--something that can only hurt a country that effectively monopolizes military space activities today. Second, it would reinforce the current prevalent image of a unilateralist United States, too quick to reach for the gun and impervious to the stated will of other countries (as reflected in the huge

majority votes at the United Nations in favor of negotiating bans on space weaponry). Among its other implications, this perception can make it harder for the United States to oppose treaties that it has good reasons to oppose—as was the case when the Bush administration withdrew from the ABM Treaty. It can also be harder for the United States to uphold international nonproliferation norms if its own actions weaken its credibility in demanding that others comply with arms control regimes.

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Militarization CP

CP: Shared use of satellites during friendly times but denial for use by enemy countries during wartime, in which case satellites will become military tools. Mowthorpe, 04, Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom (The Militarization and Weaponization of Space) (RMA=Revolution in Military Affairs)The RMA is underpinned by space systems that provide much of information which is utilized when acquiring an illumination of the battlefield. Space provides the arena for the sensors, and the transmission through the sensors of the information that allows the battlefield commander to know much more than the opponent. If the ability to utilize these space systems is hampered then the enabling edge these assets provide will be affected detrimentally. Although there are other ways to deploy sensors, space offers superior performance. Indeed, the recognition of the increasing importance of space is made clear in the Annual

Report to Congress when it declares. "DOD must be able to ensure freedom of access in space for friendly forces and, when directed, limit or deny an adversary's ability to use the medium for hostile purposes…DOD must have the appropriate capabilities to deny when necessary an adversary's use of space systems to support hostile military forces. Implicit within this is that the capability to use space for the benefits provides is the key element of the RMA.

Adv. CP: To allow for the militarization and weaponization of space. Wars involving space will distract countries from ideas involving nuclear war and will not cause the same level of destruction as nuclear war.Mowthorpe, 04, Ministry of Defense in the United Kingdom (The Militarization and Weaponization of Space)

Russian views of future war are expected to be global in their aspirations and they stress that control of space will be the decisive determinant in operations concerned with controlling sections of the earth. The characteristic of war is deemed to

have altered. Large quantities of ground troops will no longer be employed. They will be replaced substantial strikes delivered by remotely piloted precision-guided weapons. A country will be subjugated to precision strikes and will battlefield in war without flanks. The distinction of front versus rear replaced with that of targets and nontargets, in that there will clearly drawn battle lines. Conventional assets will be able to

achieve strategic objectives. The Russians declared the Gulf War as the first of the technological operations. The ability of advanced nonnuclear technology to accomplish missions previously earmarked to nuclear forces means that these assets will achieve the objectives envisioned in a nuclear war. These aims will be achieved without the collateral damage and political considerations associated with nuclear weapons.

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