Dedev

1NC

1. Economic decline doesn’t cause war – diversionary theory is wrong and their statistics are flawed.Boehmer 10 (Charles, associate professor of political science at the University of Texas, Defense and Peace Economics, “Economic Growth and Violent International Conflict: 1875-1999” June 2010, Volume 21: 249-68, Hopkins)

Crisis-Scarcity as a Source of Violent Conflicts I term the next body of literature the ‘Crisis-Scarcity’ perspective because it links violent interstate conflicts to domestic or international economic crises. The first group of studies within this broad perspective argues that downswings in Kondratieff cycles in the global economy or other crises of capitalism increase the risk of war. The theories of imperialism by Hobson (1917, 1938) and Lenin (1939 [1916]) make broad arguments in this manner. World-systems or Dependency scholars advance similar arguments (Chase-Dunn, 1978; Frank, 1978; Bosquet, 1980; Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1982; Bergesen, 1983, 1985). However, many of the theories in this category are difficult to test due to conceptual ambigu- ities and the number of available observations, considering that the temporal length of an entire cycle is purportedly 50 to 60 years. Moreover, World-Systems theory lacks an opera- tional definition by which to categorize states into ‘periphery’, ‘semi-periphery’, and ‘core’, making it difficult to quantitatively assess some of its claims. Although there could be strong consensus on how to categorize many states into the core or periphery categories, the roster ECONOMIC GROWTH AND VIOLENT CONFLICT 253 of semi-periphery states is much less clear. However, some propositions in these theories have been tested with historical data or have been covered in studies at the systemic level of analysis. The studies by Mansfield (1988), Goldstein (1988), Pollins (1996), and Pollins and Murrin (1999) yielded results contrary to some of the claims made by World-System theory, or similar theories, relating global economic cycles to violent conflicts. On the one hand, the historical analysis of World-Systems theory examines a longer time-frame than extant quan- titative studies, but on the other hand these historical approaches must assume that the main economic and political processes that shaped much of the past millennium will continue into the future, which may be heroic. Because I am in particular interested in whether individual states become more or less prone to involvement in violent interstate conflicts as their economic growth rises or falls, I do not offer further tests of systemic-level propositions found in the literature. In contrast, studies of diversionary theory make state-level (monadic) or dyadic arguments.

Most studies to date have been monadic and only a few have examined strategic diversionary behavior from a dyadic perspective. Of central importance to this study are those theories of diversionary conflict arguing that economic crisis induces foreign conflicts. However, while diversionary theory has been popular, the bulk of extant research examines the foreign policy of the United States (Ostrom and Job, 1986; James and Oneal, 1991; Morgan and Bickers, 1992; DeRouen, 1995; Hess and Orphanides, 1995; Wang, 1996; Fordham, 1998; Mitchell and

Moore, 2002; Foster, 2006). Meernik (1994) and Meernik and Waterman (1996) find no evidence of diversionary behavior. Of

more importance to this analysis are those studies that theorize or examine cases more generally at the state-level of analysis. Russett (1987) finds an inverse relationship between economic growth (two and three year moving averages) and conflict involvement using a pooled time series of 23 countries. In an extension of this study, he later finds evidence that negative growth leads to a higher rate of militarized conflict participation by democracies but that the opposite is true of autocracies (Russett, 1990). When disaggregating by power and polity type, the results appear less clear. Positive growth leads to a higher participation rate in war for democracies (the sign is positive for autocracies but insignificant), whereas non-democratic major powers were more apt to use force. The sign directions for minor powers of both regime types were negative and statistically insignificant. However, Russett (1990: 126) notes in a larger sample of 100 states from 1953–1976, using the Penn World Tables (Summers and Heston, 1991), that economic growth was statistically

insignificant. Considering the limitations in data and the lack of control for autocorrelation, these results could be inaccurate. Heldt (1999) similarly finds at the state level that while high depriva- tion increases the use of force by states, this is unrelated to regime type or any strategic interactions with other states. His sample though only includes challengers in territorial disputes with negative growth rates, leading to 187 cases, and he thus neither provides a general test of growing states compared with non-growing states nor compares conflict participants to non-conflict participants (non-barking dogs). Enterline and Gleditsch (2000) examine whether political leaders substitute diversionary tactics with other states for repres- sion when confronted with domestic pressure using the ‘leader-year’ as the unit of

analysis. While they find that leaders often use both repression and diversion when pressured domestically, the results were unclear concerning economic growth rates and inflation. They dropped these variables from most of their discussion due to limited data and the resulting loss in cases.

2. Growth is unsustainable – increased complexity and diminishing returns prove. Collapse is the only way to create dedevelopment and avoid extinctionMackenzie 08 (Deborah Mackenzie 08 – BBC Correspondant. Quotes Joe Tainter - an archaeologist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Sociceties, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts 4/5/2008 (“Are WE doomed?” Ebsco))

DOOMSDAY. The end of civilisation. Literature and film abound with tales of plague, famine and wars which ravage the planet, leaving a few

survivors scratching out a primitive existence amid the ruins. Every civilisation in history has collapsed, after all. Why should ours be any different? Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic . Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later? A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as

complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down. Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep disaster at bay. History is not on our side. Think of Sumeria, of ancient Egypt and of the Maya. In his 2005 best-seller , Jared Diamond of the University of California, Los Angeles, blamed environmental mismanagement for the fall of the Mayan civilisation and others, and warned that we might be heading the same way unless we choose to stop destroying our environmental support systems. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington DC agrees. He has that governments must pay more attention to vital environmental resources. "It's not about saving the planet. It's about saving civilisation," he says. Others think our problems run deeper. From the moment our ancestors started to settle down and build

cities, we have had to find solutions to the problems that success brings. "For the past 10,000 years, problem solving has produced increasing complexity in human societies," says Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and

author of the 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies . If crops fail because rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yields lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the sums paid. That much the Sumerians knew . D iminishing returns There is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all human efforts, from building canals to educating scribes. And increasing complexity, Tainter realised, produces diminishing returns. The extra food produced by each extra hour of labour - or joule of energy invested per farmed hectare - diminishes as that investment mounts. We see the same thing today in a declining number of patents per dollar invested in research as that research investment mounts . This law of diminishing returns appears everywhere, Tainter says. To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for your buck. Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses. What

emerges is a less complex society, which is organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group. Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart. Western industrial civilisation has become bigger and more complex than any before it by exploiting new sources of energy, notably coal and oil, but these are limited. There are increasing signs of diminishing returns: the energy required to get is mounting and although global is still increasing,

constant innovation is needed to cope with environmental degradation and evolving - the yield boosts per unit of investment in innovation are shrinking. "Since problems are inevitable," Tainter warns, "this

process is in part ineluctable." Is Tainter right? An analysis of complex systems has led Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the same conclusion that Tainter reached

from studying history. Social organisations become steadily more complex as they are required to deal both with environmental problems and with challenges from neighbouring societies that are also becoming more complex, Bar-Yam says.

This eventually leads to a fundamental shift in the way the society is organised. "To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point. This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised. Things are not that simple, says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, and author of the 2006 book The Upside of Down . "Initially, increasing connectedness and diversity helps: if one village has a crop failure, it can get food from another village that didn't The very nature of civilisation may make its demise inevitable, says Debora MacKenzie New Scientist April 5, 2008 As connections increase, though, networked systems become increasingly tightly coupled. This means the impacts of failures can propagate: the more closely those two villages come to depend on each other, the more both will suffer if

either has a problem. "Complexity leads to higher vulnerability in some ways," says Bar-Yam. "This is not widely

understood." The reason is that as networks become ever tighter, they start to transmit shocks rather than absorb them. "The intricate networks that tightly connect us together - and move people, materials, information, money and energy - amplify and transmit any shock," says Homer-Dixon. "A financial crisis, a terrorist attack or a disease outbreak has almost instant destabilising effects, from one side of the world to the other." For instance, in 2003 large areas of North America and Europe suffered when apparently insignificant nodes of their respective electricity grids failed. And this year China suffered a similar blackout after heavy snow hit power lines. Tightly coupled networks like these create the potential for propagating failure across many critical industries, says Charles Perrow

of Yale University, a leading authority on industrial accidents and disasters. Credit crunch Perrow says interconnectedness in the global production system has now reached the point where "a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere". This is especially true of the world's financial systems, where the coupling is very tight. "Now we have a debt crisis with the biggest player, the US. The consequences could be enormous." "A networked society behaves like a multicellular organism," says Bar-Yam, "random damage is like lopping a chunk off a sheep." Whether or not the sheep survives depends on which chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear - it may not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late. "When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more

sophisticated ways, we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable." So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep" does not get injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel

and mineral resources dwindle. Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system. "It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of

conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one. Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits." Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined,

their economy became less monetised, and they switched from professional army to peasant militia." Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second, we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action." The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise

inefficiency in the public interest. Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to.

These include population growth, the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns -

just as we are running out of cheap and plentiful energy. "This is. the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If

the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse. Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has

been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse ?" Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits. Studies of the way by Luis

Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable. chunk is lost. And while we are pretty sure which chunks a sheep needs, it isn't clear - it may not even be predictable - which chunks of our densely networked civilisation are critical, until it's too late. "When we do the analysis, almost any part is critical if you lose enough of it," says Bar-Yam. "Now that we can ask questions of such systems in more sophisticated ways,

we are discovering that they can be very vulnerable. That means civilisation is very vulnerable." So what can we do? "The key issue is really whether we respond successfully in the face of the new vulnerabilities we have," Bar-Yam says. That means making sure our "global sheep" does not get injured in the first place - something that may be hard to guarantee as the climate shifts and the world's fuel and mineral

resources dwindle. Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system. "It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions,"

says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one. Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits." Is there an alternative? Could we heed these warnings and start carefully climbing back down the complexity ladder? Tainter knows of only one civilisation that managed to decline but not fall. "After the Byzantine empire lost most of its territory to the Arabs, they simplified their entire society. Cities mostly disappeared, literacy and numeracy declined, their economy became less monetised,

and they switched from professional army to peasant militia." Pulling off the same trick will be harder for our more advanced society. Nevertheless, Homer-Dixon thinks we should be taking action now. "First, we need to encourage distributed and decentralised production of vital goods like energy and food," he says. "Second, we need to remember that slack isn't always waste. A manufacturing company with a large inventory may lose some money on warehousing, but it can keep running even if its suppliers are temporarily out of action." The electricity industry in the US has already started identifying hubs in the grid with no redundancy available and is putting some back in, Homer-Dixon points out. Governments could encourage other sectors to follow suit. The trouble is that in a world of fierce competition, private companies will always increase efficiency unless governments subsidise inefficiency in the public interest.

Homer-Dixon doubts we can stave off collapse completely. He points to what he calls "tectonic" stresses that will shove our rigid, tightly coupled system outside the range of conditions it is becoming ever more finely tuned to. These include population growth, the growing divide between the world's rich and poor, financial instability, weapons proliferation, disappearing forests and fisheries, and climate change In imposing new complex solutions we will run into the problem of diminishing returns - just as we are running out of cheap and

plentiful energy. "This is. the fundamental challenge humankind faces. We need to allow for the healthy breakdown in natural function in our societies in a way that doesn't produce catastrophic collapse, but instead leads to healthy renewal," Homer-Dixon says. This is what happens in forests, which are a patchy mix of old growth and newer areas created by disease or fire. If the ecosystem in one patch collapses, it is

recolonised and renewed by younger forest elsewhere. We must allow partial breakdown here and there, followed by

renewal, he says, rather than trying so hard to avert breakdown by increasing complexity that any resulting crisis is actually worse. Lester Brown thinks we are fast running out of time. "The world can no longer afford to waste a day. We need a Great Mobilisation, as we had in wartime," he says. "There has been tremendous progress in just the past few years. For the

first time, I am starting to see how an alternative economy might emerge. But it's now a race between tipping points - which will come first, a switch to sustainable technology, or collapse ?" Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-

based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits. Studies of the way by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico,

support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.

3. Economic growth is the principal driver of environmental decline.Speth, 2013 (James Gustave Speth, “Growth Fetish: Five Reasons Why Prioritizing Growth is Bad Policy,” Huffington Post, September 20th 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-gustave-speth/growth-fetish-five-reason_b_4018166.html, 7/17/14, LI)

Economic activity and its growth are the principal drivers of massive environmental decline. In a remarkable passage of his environmental history of the twentieth century, Something New Under the Sun, historian J. R. McNeill writes that the "growth fetish" solidified its hold on imaginations and institutions in the twentieth century: "Communism aspired to become the universal creed of the twentieth century, but a more flexible and seductive religion succeeded where communism failed: the quest for economic growth. Capitalists, nationalists -- indeed almost everyone, communists included -- worshiped at this same altar because economic growth disguised a multitude of sins. ... Social, moral, and ecological ills were sustained in the interest of economic growth; indeed, adherents to the faith proposed that only more growth could resolve such ills. Economic growth became the indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere.

"The growth fetish, while on balance quite useful in a world with empty land, shoals of undisturbed fish, vast forests, and a robust ozone shield, helped create a more crowded and stressed one. Despite the disappearance of ecological buffers and mounting real costs, ideological lock-in reigned in both capitalist and communist circles. ... The overarching priority of economic growth was easily the most important idea of the twentieth century." The relationship between economic

gains and environmental losses is a close one, as McNeill notes. The economy consumes natural resources (both renewable and nonrenewable resources), occupies the land, and releases pollutants. As the economy has

grown, so have resource use and pollutants of great variety. As Paul Ekins says in Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability, "the sacrifice of the environment to economic growth. . . has unquestionably been a feature of economic development at least since the birth of industrialism." And so it remains.

4. Mindset shift WILL happen – collapse forces a change to sustainable civilizationLewis 2k - Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder (Chris H, “The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization” http://www.cross-x.com/archives/LewisParadox.pdf)

A more hopeful cause of the collapse of global industrial civilization is a global economic collapse “financial crises have become increasingly common with the speed and growth of global capital flows.” The financial crises caused by the 1994 collapse of the Mexican peso, the 1997 Asian financial panic, the 1998 Russian financial panic, and the 1998 bailout of Long Term Capital Management by the United States Federal Reserve and Global Banks are all examples of recent financial crises that greatly stressed the global financial system. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said,

“There was a moment when I thought it could have come undone.” He was, of course, referring to the global financial

system. A global depression caused by a financial panic could finally undermine the entire structure of globalization. With the loss of trillions of dollars of paper money, First World elites would find that they don’t have the funds to bail out Third World countries and banks, and even bail their own banks and corporations

out. With the loss of trillions of dollars, the global economy would come to a grinding halt and there wouldn’t be the collective resources or the will to restart it. Of course, these are the precise sorts of crises that lead to World Wars and military conflict. No

matter how it collapses, through economic collapse and the development of local and regional economies and/or

through a global military struggle by the First World to maintain its access to Third World resources, global industrial civilization will collapse because its demands for wealth, natural resources, energy, and ecosystem services aren't sustainable.

2NC

2NC – Growth Unsustainable

Continuing consumption inevitably means collapseMacKenzie 12 (Debora, contributor to New Scientist, “Boom and Doom: Revisiting Prophecies of Collapse,” Counter Currents,

January 10, 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826501.500-why-the-demise-of-civilisation-may-be-inevitable.html)

This was unexpected and shocking. Why should the world’s economy collapse rather than stabilise? In World3, it happened because of the complex feedbacks between different global subsystems such as industry, health and agriculture. More industrial output meant more money to spend on agriculture and healthcare, but also more pollution, which could damage health and food production. And most importantly, says Randers, in the real world there are delays before limits are understood, institutions act or remedies take effect. These delayed responses were programmed

into World3. The model crashed because its hypothetical people did not respond to the mounting problems before underlying support systems, such as farmland and ecosystems, had been damaged. Instead, they carried on consuming and polluting past the point the model world could sustain. The result was what economists call a bubble and Limits called overshoot. The impact of these response delays was “the fundamental scientific message” of the study, says Randers. Critics, and even fans of the study, he says, didn’t get this point.

Increasing population limitations will result in collapse MacKenzie 12 (Debora, contributor to New Scientist, “Boom and Doom: Revisiting Prophecies of Collapse,” Counter Currents, January 10, 2012, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826501.500-why-the-demise-of-civilisation-may-be-inevitable.html)

We already know the future will be different from the standard run in one respect, says Bar-Yam. Although the actual world population up to 2000 has been similar, in the scenario the rate of population growth increases with time – one of the exponential drivers of collapse. Although Limits took account of the fact that birth rates

fall as prosperity rises, in reality they have fallen much faster than was expected when the book was written. “It is reasonable to be concerned about resource limitations in fifty years,” Bar-Yam says, “but the population is not even close to growing [the way Limits projected in 1972].” The book itself may be partly responsible. Bar-Yam thinks some of the efforts in the 1970s to cut population growth were at least partly due to Limits. “If it helped do that, it bought us more time, and it’s a very important work in the history of humanity,” he

says. Yet World3 still suggests we’ll hit the buffers eventually. The original Limits team put out an updated study using World3 in 2005, which included faster-falling birth rates. Except in the stabilising scenario, World3 still collapsed.

Maintaining current levels of growth makes economic collapse inevitable—consumption and recourse statistics prove Trainer 07— Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales [Ted, “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society”, p. 125-159] Rich countries, with about one-fifth of the world's people, are consuming about three-quarters of the world's resource production. Our per capita consumption of assets like oil is

about 15 to 20 times that of the poorest half of the world's people. World population will probably stabilise around 9 billion, somewhere

after 2060. If all those people were to have the present Australian per capita resource consumption, then annual world production of resources would have to be eight to ten times as great as it is now. If we tried to raise present world production to that level by 2060, we would by then have completely exhausted all probably recoverable resources of one third of the basic mineral items we use. All probably recoverable resources of coal, oil, gas, tar sand oil, shale oil, and uranium (via

burner reactors) would have been exhausted by 2050 (Trainer, 1985. Chapters 4 and 5). • Petroleum appears to be especially limited. As was noted at the start of Chapter 1. a number of

geologists have concluded that world oil supply will probably peak by 2010 and be down to half that level by 2025-30. with big price increases soon after the peak. None of the limits-to-growth themes is as potentially teoninal in the short teon for

consumer society. • If all 9 billion people were to use timber at the rich-world per capita rate, we would need 3.5 times the world's present forest area. If all 9 billion were to have a rich-world diet, which takes about 0.5 ha of land to produce, we would need 4.5 billion ha of food-producing land. But there is only 1.4 billion ha of cropland in use today, and this is not likely to increase . • Recent "Footprint" analysis (Wachernagel

and Rees, 1996) estimates that it probably takes 7+ ha of productive land to provide water, energy settlement area and food for one person living in Australia. The US figure is close to 12 ha. So if 9 billion people were to live as we do in rich countries, we would need about 70 billion ha of productive land. But that is about 10 times all the available productive land on the planet. • As was explained in Chapter I, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that if the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is to be kept to sensible levels, and carbon use was shared equally among the world's people, then rich-world per capita carbon release

would probably have to be reduced to somewhere under 5% of the present amount. These are some of the main limits to growth arguments which lead to the conclusion that there is no possibility of all people rising to anywhere near the living standards we take

for granted today in rich countries. We can only live the way we do because we are taking and rapidly using up most of the scarce resources, and preventing most of the world's people from having anything like a fair share. Therefore we cannot morally endorse our affluent way of life. We must accept the need to move to far less resource-expensive ways. Few people seem to grasp the magnitude of

the required reductions. It follows from the foregoing discussion that the world is over-populated. However the most serious problem we have is not over-population. It is over-consumption.

--Methodology Indict

Growth is not sustainable—your methodology is flawed Trainer 07— Senior Lecturer of School of Social Work @ University of New South Wales [Ted, “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society”, p. 125-159]

Above all it must be stressed how far beyond sustainable levels of production and consumption we are. The foregoing figures show that we must develop ways of living in which we can have a good quality of life on per capita resource rates that are a small fraction of today's rates. Overall,

consumer society shows a stunning inability to respond to the alarming challenges now facing it. Most people seem to be totally unaware of and indifferent to the fact that their high "living standards" are delivered by a massively unjust global economy which so severely deprives the majority that tens of thousands of people die prematurely every day,

and to the fact that their "living standards" are grossly unsustainable. The fact that their supreme values remain raising

"living standards" and the GDP testifies to the overwhelming failure, refusal, to recognise the fundamental problem. Indeed among governments, academics, the media, educational institutions and the general public there is an almost universal and impenetrable mentality of delusion and denial.

2NC – Environment Impact

Growth rapidly increases global warming and exacerbates poverty. Dedevelopment solves sustainability.Victor 10 (Peter, Professor in Environmental Studies at York University where he teaches an undergraduate course in environmental management and graduate and undergraduate courses in ecological and environmental economics, Nature: Vol. 468, 11/18/2010, “Questioning economic growth” ND)

An alternative is to encourage growth in sectors of the economy that use fewer resources, such as the service sector. Such a strategy could buy some time, but not if it simply shifts the production of resource-intensive products and their related environmental burdens to other countries,

as has been the pattern in recent years. A third option is to limit growth itself. The battle against climate change illustrates the attractiveness of this strategy. To reduce greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG) by 80% over 50 years, an economy that increases its real gross domestic product (GDP) by 3% a year must reduce its emissions intensity -- tonnes of GHG per unit of GDP — by an astonishing 6% a year. For an economy that does not grow, the annual cut would be a still very challenging 3.2%. The view that we should curb planetary impacts by reducing growth in richer countries is reinforced by several considerations. First, there is mounting evidence that this growth is largely unrelated to measures of happiness. Second, in recent decades, increasing inequality has accompanied much of this growth, leading to problems ranging from poor public health to social unrest. Third, the prospects for real improvement in the developing world are likely to be diminished if developed countries continue to encroach on more ecological space. Removing economic growth as a major policy priority runs counter to the

views of governments and many international agencies. Many nations responded to the recent financial crisis with desperate measures to resume economic growth. Yet when we recognize how briefly economic growth has held such prominence in policy circles, dethroning it seems less improbable. Regular estimates of GDP by governments date back only to the 1940s, and the measure was initially used in support of specific objectives, such as stimulating employment.

Only in the 1950s did economic growth become a policy priority in its own right6. Economists and other social scientists now need to map out functional economies in which growth is sidelined, and stability, resilience and wellbeing are the prime objectives, within environmental and resource constraints.

Ecological economist Herman Daly, who has investigated and promoted a steady-state economic model for several decades, has formulated a useful set of principles for limiting material use, including: the harvest of renewable resources should not exceed their regeneration rate; the rate of extraction of non-renewable resources should not exceed the rate of creation of renewable substitutes; and waste emissions should not exceed the environment’s capacity to assimilate them. To these we should add the protection of land and water to reduce

competition among humans and other species. Among the many successful applications of these principles is the crea- tion of protected areas and green belts. Daly, with theologian John Cobb, also proposed an alternative measure of macro- economic success: the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW), incorporating environmental degradation, resource depletion and other factors. Estimates of this index show a major divergence from GDP per person for many countries In one study by environmental charity Friends of the Earth7, the gap between US GDP and the ‘Genuine Progress Indicator’ (GPI), calculated similarly to the ISEW, was particularly marked: whereas GDP per person rose from the 1970s, GPI actually declined (see ‘Genuine progress?’).

Ecocide will kill all life without dedev – overexploitation and biodiversity loss proveThe Observer 02 (The Observer, July 7, 2002, http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,750783,00.html)

A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), to be released on Tuesday, warns that the human race is plundering the planet at a pace that outstrips its capacity to support life. In a damning condemnation of

Western society's high consumption levels, it adds that the extra planets (the equivalent size of Earth) will be required by the year 2050 as existing resources are exhausted. The report, based on scientific data from across the world, reveals that more than a third of the natural world has been destroyed by humans over the past three decades. Using the image of the need for mankind to colonise space as a stark illustration of the problems facing Earth,

the report warns that either consumption rates are dramatically and rapidly lowered or the planet will no longer be able to sustain its growing population. Experts say that seas will become emptied of fish while forests - which absorb carbon dioxide emissions - are completely destroyed and freshwater supplies become scarce and polluted. The report offers a vivid warning that either people curb their extravagant lifestyles or risk leaving the onus on scientists to locate another planet that can sustain human life. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only option is to cut consumption now. Systematic overexploitation of the planet's oceans has meant the North Atlantic's cod stocks have collapsed

from an estimated spawning stock of 264,000 tonnes in 1970 to under 60,000 in 1995. The study will also reveal a sharp fall in the planet's ecosystems between 1970 and 2002 with the Earth's forest cover shrinking by about 12 per cent, the ocean's biodiversity by a third and freshwater ecosystems in the region of 55 per cent. The Living Planet report uses an index to illustrate the shocking level of deterioration in the world's forests as well as marine and freshwater ecosystems. Using 1970 as a baseline year and giving it a value of 100, the index has dropped to a new low of around 65 in the space of a single generation. It is not just humans who are at risk. Scientists, who examined data for 350 kinds of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish, also found the numbers of many species have more than halved. Martin Jenkins, senior adviser for the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge, which helped compile the report, said: 'It

seems things are getting worse faster than possibly ever before. Never has one single species had such an overwhelming influence. We are entering uncharted territory.'

--A2: Tech Solves

Tech can’t fix the environment. Even renewables have unintended consequencesTrainer 12 (Ted, Dr. Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, “Can Renewable Energy Sustain Consumer Societies? A Negative Case”, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/04/CanRenewableEnergySustainConsumerSocietiesTrainer.pdf)

The total investment sum arrived at above is considerably less than that derived in ¶ Trainer [112], but the derivation is much more soundly based mainly due to recent ¶ access to more confident estimates of output and future capital costs. The general conclusion supported by

this discussion is that the capital costs for a totally renewable global energy supply would be far beyond affordable. This means that greenhouse and energy problems cannot be solved by action on the supply side, i.e., by technical ¶ developments which promise to provide quantities taken for granted in energy intensive societies. This general “limits to growth” perspective is that these and the 15 other major

global problems can only be solved by action on the demand side, i.e., by ¶ moving to ways, values, institutions and systems which greatly reduce the need for materials, energy and ecological resources.¶ It should be stressed that the 700 EJ/y supply target would give the world’s expected 10 billion people by 2050 a per capita energy consumption of 70 GJ/y, which is around only

one third of the present Australian level. Thus if renewable sources were to provide all the world’s people in 2050 with the present Australian per capita energy consumption, the supply target would have to be three times that taken in this exercise.¶ This analysis is not an argument against transition to full reliance on renewable energy

sources. It is only an argument against the possibility of sustaining high energy societies on them. Trainer

[113] and [114] detail the case that the limits to growth predicament cannot be solved by technical reforms to or within consumer capitalist society and that there must be radical social transition to some kind of

‘Simpler Way.’¶ This vision includes developing mostly small and highly self sufficient local economies, ¶ abandoning the growth economy, severely controlling market forces, shifting from ¶ representative to participatory democracy, and accepting frugal and cooperative ¶ lifestyles . Chapter 4 of Trainer [115] presents numerical support for the claim that ¶ footprint and energy costs in the realm of 10% of those in present rich countries could be achieved, based on renewable energy sources. Although at this point in time the ¶ prospects for making such a transition would seem to be highly unlikely, the need to ¶ consider it will probably become more evident as greenhouse and energy problems ¶ intensify. It is not likely to be considered if the present dominant assumption that high ¶ energy societies can run on renewable energy remains relatively unchallenged.

2NC – Disease Impact

Growth and globalization guarantees disease spread -- makes transmission quicker and likelier Gannon 10 – Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (John C., “The Global Infectious Disease Threat and Its Implications for the United States”, http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/nie99-17d.htm) SP

The increase in international air travel, trade, and tourism will dramatically increase the prospects that infectious disease pathogens such as influenza--and vectors such as mosquitoes and rodents--will spread quickly around the globe, often in less time than the incubation period of most diseases. Earlier in the decade,

for example, a multidrug resistant strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae originating in Spain spread throughout the world in a matter of weeks, according to the director of WHO's infectious disease division. The cross-border movement of some 2 million people each day, including 1 million between developed and developing countries each week, and surging global trade ensure that travel and commerce will remain key factors in the spread of infectious diseases.

We control the only internal link into disease spread Kaferstein et al. 97 (F.K., Motarjemi, Y. & Bettcher D.W., World Health Organization, Switzerland, Emerging Infectious Disease Vol. 3 No.4 “Foodborne Disease Control: A transitional Challenge”)

Many factors have contributed to the increase in foodborne disease. Industrialization, leading to increased

wealth and urbanization, has revolutionized the food supply system, resulting in mass production and an explosive increase in

the number of food service establishments and food outlets. Mass production, environmental factors, and inadequate knowledge on the part of food handlers have contributed to increased contamination of primary foodstuffs. The increase in international trade has increased the risk for cross-border transmission of infectious diseases. The globalization of food (and feed) trade, facilitated by the liberalization of world trade, while offering many benefits and opportunities, also presents new risks (3). Food, a major trade commodity, is also an

important vehicle for transmission of infectious diseases. Because food production, manufacturing, and marketing are now global, infectious agents can be disseminated from the original point of processing and packaging to locations thousands of miles away. This multinational approach to food production and distribution and the progressive opening up of world markets have allowed the international food trade to flourish. The value of food trade, U.S. $266 billion in 1994, was more than 300% greater

than it was 20 years ago and continues to grow rapidly (4). The globalization of foodborne diseases also results from increased travel. International travel is more accessible today. The World Tourism Organization estimates world tourist

arrivals at 567 million in 1995, and this figure is expected to rise to 660 million by the year 2000. Over the past 200 years, the average distance traveled and the speed of travel have increased 1,000 times while incubation periods for diseases have not changed. As a result, a person can be exposed to a foodborne illness in one country and expose others to the infection in a location thousands of miles from the original source of the infection (5). Depending on their destination, travelers are estimated to run a 20% to 50% risk of contracting a foodborne illness. As international trade and travel increase, foodborne disease outbreaks of the same origin are more likely to occur in different parts of the globe. Food safety in the late 20th century represents a transnational challenge requiring enhanced levels of international cooperation in setting standards and regulations and in strengthening surveillance systems. Effective food

safety programs, built on a clear understanding of the epidemiology of foodborne disease, must be developed and implemented. The globalization of the world’s economy has been accompanied by intense economic competition and

increased pressure on governments to downsize. Public sector austerity has reduced disease surveillance in many countries (6). For example, in Great Britain, the failure to maintain public health infrastructures has, in the words of the British Medical Association, resulted in “Britain returning to the 19th century in terms of public health, with problems such as dirty water, contaminated food, and old infectious diseases reemerging” (7). Failing a reversal of this trend, public health authorities and health services may be overwhelmed in the near future by outbreaks or epidemics of foodborne diseases. The 1991 epidemic of cholera in Peru and the 1996 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157 in Japan demonstrate how one single foodborne disease epidemic or outbreak may disrupt the functioning of a health-care system

Diseases lead to extinctionFox 97 (C. William. Lieutenant COLONEL. 6/24/97. http://se1.isn.ch/serviceengine/FileContent?serviceID=ISN&fileid=4341F68C-1AF1-FEB7-10D7-5EE127216D05&lng=en.)

HIV is a pandemic killer without a cure, and viruses such as Ebola-Zaire are merely a plane ride away from the population centers of the developed world. Viruses like ebola, which are endemic to Africa, have the potential to inflict morbidity and mortality on a scale not seen in the world since the Black Plague epidemics of medieval Europe (which killed a full quarter of Europe's population in the 13th and 14th centuries.)18 These diseases are not merely African problems, they present a real threat to mankind. They should be taken every bit as seriously as the concern for deliberate use of weapons of mass destruction.

--A2: Tech Solves

Multinational corporations are drowning out local developing world producers and creating medicine for profit, not for the cure – tuberculosis proves.Saker et al. 4 (Lance. Lee, Kelley. Cannito, Barbara. Gilmore, Anna. Campbell-Lendrum, Diarmid, Centre on Global Change and Health & ECOHOST, “Globalization and infectious diseases: A review of these linkages”)

In low and middle-income countries, pharmaceuticals account for about 30% of total health expenditure. The potential health benefits and risks posed by trade liberalization to access to pharmaceuticals are varied. Baris and McLeod (2000) argue that, as freer trade reduces tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals, drug imports will increase. In theory, countries will benefit from enhancing the range of drugs available particularly where there is little or no domestic capacity to produce such products, and foreign competition should exert more pressure on prices overall. In practice, however, the effects on production and consumption are more complex given the changing structure of the pharmaceutical industry.

Like the food industry, pharmaceuticals are increasingly dominated by a small number of large TNCs. In 1992, the top ten pharmaceutical companies were based in the US and Europe, accounting for about one-third of total combined sales worldwide (Baris and McLeod, 2000). No low-income country appears in this super league (with the exception of China, which produces all of its essential drugs), but such countries do have the advantage of cheap labour and indigenous medicinal plants. Hence, there is a thriving genetics industry in the developing world, and rapidly growing international trade. However, increased access by large TNCs to markets in the developing world could undermine these local producers. Under the TRIPS agreement, domestic subsidies on drugs could be deemed an unfair trade advantage, and there may be a tightening of regulations around the production and trade of generic drugs. In relation to drug development, an emerging global market for pharmaceuticals raises concerns about a greater focus on conditions and markets deemed most profitable, regardless of the global burden of disease. How drugs will be developed for infectious diseases afflicting the poorest population groups within such a context remains unclear. For example, only 13 of the 1223 new chemical entities commercialized between 1975 and 1997

were for tropical diseases (Pecoul et al, 1999), and no new drugs for tuberculosis have been developed for over 60 years because, despite its enormous toll, only 5% of the 16 million infected can afford medication. These inequities contribute to the 10/90 gap in which 90 per cent of research funds address the health needs of 10 per cent of the world’s population (Global Forum for Health Research, 1999). Finally, unregulated access to, and inappropriate consumption of, pharmaceuticals in a global market-place raises the issue of drug resistance. These factors have, for example, contributed to the spread of multidrug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) worldwide, and will lead to further spread of resistance to antiretroviral for HIV, particularly given the important role that the

unregulated private sector plays in providing care for stigmatizing conditions (Brugha, 2003). Control of such disease could therefore be jeopardized, and the misuse of pharmaceutical products facilitated, if sufficient regulatory mechanisms (including proscribed standards of use with adequate monitoring and enforcement) are not implemented alongside globalization of the pharmaceutical industry.

2NC – Mindset Shift

Collapse now creates a mindset shift towards small local civilizationsLewis 2k - Ph.D. University of Colorado at Boulder (Chris H, “The Paradox of Global Development and the Necessary Collapse of Global Industrial Civilization” http://www.cross-x.com/archives/LewisParadox.pdf)

With the collapse of global industrial civilization, smaller, autonomous, local and regional civilizations, cultures, and polities will emerge. We can reduce the threat of mass death and genocide that will surely accompany

this collapse by encouraging the creation and growth of sustainable, self-sufficient regional polities. John Cobb

has already made a case for how this may work in the United States and how it is working in Kerala, India. After the collapse of global industrial civilization, First and Third World peoples won't have the material resources, biological capital, and energy and human resources to re-establish global industrial civilization. Forced by economic necessity to become dependent on local resources and ecosystems for their survival, peoples throughout the world will work to conserve and restore their environments. Those societies that destroy their local environments and economies, as modern people so often do, will themselves face collapse and ruin.

--Movements Now

Movements to localize civilization and end ecological destruction are rapidly gaining strength; global economic collapse is the critical mass for achieving dedevelopmentTrainer 03 Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, Modified 5/29/2003, http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/D24TheTransIsUnderway.html

Although a minor phenomenon at present, it can be confidently predicted that this paradigm shift will accelerate in coming years given the pace at which the globalisaztion of the economy will make it painfully obvious to more and more people that the old values and systems will not provide well for all. Building new systems. Much more impressive than the evidence of a change in world view is the growth of alternative

settlements and systems. As Ife says, "At the grassroots level...increasing numbers of people in different countries are experimenting with community-based alternatives, such as local economic systems, community-based education, housing co-operatives...a community-based strategy based on principles of ecology and social justice is already emerging, as a result of the initiative of ordinary people at grass-roots level, who are turning away from mainstream structures..." (Ife, 1995, p. 99.)

According to Norberg-Hodge, "Around the world, people are building communities that attempt to get away from the waste, pollution, competition, and violence of contemporary life. (Norberg-Hodge, 1996, p. 405.) The agency she has founded, the International Society for Ecology and Culture, works in Ladakh to reinforce local economies and its video Local Futures, is an inspiring illustration of what is being done in many parts of the world. The New Economic Foundation in London works to promote local economic development, with a special interest in bujilding local quality of life indicators and in establishing local

currencies. Schroyer"s book Towards a World That Works (1997) documents many alternative community initiatives. "Everywhere people are waking up to the realities of their situation in a globalising economy and are beginning to recognise that their economies’ resources and socio-political participations must be regrounded in their local and regional communities." (p. 225) "Everywhere social and economic structures are re-emerging in the midst of the market system that are spontaneously generated social protections to normatively re-embed the market..." "It is no exaggeration to say that local communities everywhere are on the front lines of what might well be characterised as World War III." (p. 229.) "It is a contest between the competing goals of economic growth to maximise profits for absentee owners vs creating healthy communities that are good places for people to live." (p. 230.) "In Britain, over 1.5 million people now take regular part in a rainbow economy of community economic initiatives." (New Internationalist, 1996, p. 27.) Friberg and Hettne (1985) argue that two main groups are behind the emergence of self reliant communities, viz., those holding "post materialist" values, and those who have been marginalised, such as the unemployed and the Third World poor. In Living Lightly Schwarz

and Schwarz discuss the many alternative settlements they visited on a recent world tour. They say that these people "...hope that the tiny islands of better living which they inhabit will provide examples which will eventually supplant the norms of unfettered capitalism which rule us today. Their hope is not in revolution but in persuasion by example." ( p. 2.) "What is new is that small groups of Living Lightly people are now part of an articulate and increasingly purposeful global culture which promotes values that run counter to those of the mainstream." (p. 2.) "They think the empire will eventually disintegrate...In anticipation of that collapse islands of refuge must be prepared." (p. 3.) Living Lightly people "...can only hope to prevail through their own example and the gradual erosion of the dominant system through local initiatives that exchange high living standards for a high quality of life." (p. 165.) Living Lightly people "...are in revolt against the emerging global economy and want to set up viable local alternatives." (p. 150.)

Movements exist now—all is needed is the jolt for a large scale conciousness shift towards sustainable livingTrainer 02 - Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of New South Wales (Ted, “Debating the Significance of the Global Eco-village Movement: A Reply to Takis Fotopoulos” Democracy & Nature, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2002)

The basic task before us at this point in time is to get the mainstream to grasp (a) that capitalist society is grossly and unavoidably unjust and unsustainable , and that it is delivering a falling quality of life, and (b) that only The Simpler Way, centred on more materially simple, co-operative and self-sufficient ways within a zero-growth economy can solve the major global problems. Unless these points become widely understood

there will be no possibility of change in the required direction. Continuing to write books and articles about these themes as many of us have been doing for decades will not be sufficient to get them to become widely understood and accepted. My argument is that what is likely to contribute most to this end is the development of many impressive radically alternative settlements, systems and local economies. These need to be seen and experienced as delivering very satisfactory living standards despite very low ecological footprints. This is not all that has to be done but my belief is that is constitutes the best beginning point and direction for action, and the best base from which to do the other things that need to be done, notably the

educational work. It is conceivable to me that this general strategic beginning point could achieve a more or less peaceful replacement of the capitalist system. Remember that it is very likely that within 20 years capitalist-consume r society will have run into huge problems, especially to do with environmental deterioration, Third World squalor, armed conflict, deteriorating social cohesion and above all a sudden, major and insoluble petroleum crisis. It is in other words quite possible that we will soon enter conditions that will both jolt people in general towards recognising the need for change to The Simpler Way and dramatically undercut the system’s capacity to persuade or force people to adhere to the capitalist way. Traditional Left theoreticians must realise that if this happens all will be lost if we have not by then sufficiently

developed the new ways and built the examples that could be rapidly taken up. The window of opportunity will soon close.

Movements exist—it’s only a question of economic collapse to strengthen themTrainer 2K, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales, (Ted, What Should We Do? Build Eco-Villages)

Although a minor phenomenon at present, it can be confidently predicted that this paradigm shift will accelerate in coming years given the pace at which the globalisaztion of the economy will make it painfully obvious to more and more people that the old values and systems will not provide well for all. Building new systems. Much more impressive than the evidence of a change in world view is the growth of alternative settlements and systems. As Ife says, "At the grassroots level...increasing numbers of people in different countries are experimenting with community-based alternatives, such as local economic systems, community-based education, housing co-operatives...a community-based strategy based on principles of ecology and social justice is already emerging, as a result of the initiative of ordinary people at grass-roots level, who are turning away from mainstream structures..." (Ife, 1995,

p. 99.) According to Norberg-Hodge, "Around the world, people are building communities that attempt to get away from the waste, pollution, competition, and violence of contemporary life. (Norberg-Hodge, 1996, p. 405.) The agency she has founded, the International Society for Ecology and Culture, works in Ladakh to reinforce local economies and its video Local Futures, is an inspiring illustration of what is being done in many parts of the world. The New Economic Foundation in London works to promote local economic development, with a special interest in bujilding local quality of life indicators and in establishing local currencies.

Schroyer"s book Towards a World That Works (1997) documents many alternative community initiatives. "Everywhere people are waking up to the realities of their situation in a globalising economy and are beginning to recognise that their economies’ resources and socio-political participations must be regrounded in their local and regional communities." (p. 225) "Everywhere social and economic structures are re-emerging in the midst of the market system that are spontaneously generated social protections to normatively re-embed the market..." "It is no exaggeration to say that local communities everywhere are on the front lines of what might well be characterised as World War III." (p. 229.) "It is a contest between the competing goals of economic growth to maximise profits for absentee owners vs creating healthy communities that are good places for people to live." (p. 230.) "In Britain, over 1.5 million people now take regular part in a rainbow economy of community economic initiatives." (New Internationalist, 1996, p. 27.) Friberg and

Hettne (1985) argue that two main groups are behind the emergence of self reliant communities, viz., those holding "post materialist" values,

and those who have been marginalised, such as the unemployed and the Third World poor. In Living Lightly Schwarz and Schwarz discuss the many alternative settlements they visited on a recent world tour. They say that these people "...hope that the tiny islands of better living which they inhabit will provide examples which will eventually supplant the norms of unfettered capitalism which rule us today. Their hope is not in revolution but in persuasion by example." ( p. 2.) "What is new is that small groups of Living Lightly people are now part of an articulate

and increasingly purposeful global culture which promotes values that run counter to those of the mainstream." (p. 2.) "They think the empire will eventually disintegrate...In anticipation of that collapse islands of refuge must be prepared."

(p. 3.) Living Lightly people "...can only hope to prevail through their own example and the gradual erosion of the dominant system through local initiatives that exchange high living standards for a high quality of life." (p. 165.) Living Lightly people "...are in revolt against the emerging global economy and want to set up viable local alternatives." (p. 150.)

2NC – War

Global war will kill everyone in 2025 without dedevChase-Dunn and Podobnik 99 (Christopher Chase-Dunn, Director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems, University of California-Riverside, and Bruce Podobnik, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lewis and Clark College, 1999, in The Future of Global Conflict, ed. Bornschier and Chase-Dunn, p. 43)

While the onset of a period of hegemonic rivalry is in itself disturbing, the picture becomes even grimmer when the influence of long-terni

economic cycles is taken into account. As an extensive body of research documents (see especially Van Duijn, 1983), the 50 to 60 year business cycle known as the Kondratieff wave (K-wave) has been in synchronous operation on an international scale for at least the last two centuries. Utilizing data gathering by Levy (1983) on

war severity, Goldstein (1988) demonstrates that there is a corresponding 50 to 60 year cycle in the number of battle deaths per year for the period 1495-1975. Beyond merely showing that the K-wave and the war cycle are linked in

a systematic fashion, Goldstein’s research suggests that severe core wars are much more likely to occur late in the upswing phase of the K-wave. This finding is interpreted as showing that, while states always desire to go to war, they can afford to do so only when economic growth is providing them with sufficient resources. Modelski and Thompson (1996) present a more complex interpretation of the systemic relationship between economic and war cycles, but it closely resembles Goldstein’s hypothesis. In their analysis, a first economic upswing generates the economic resources required by an ascending core state to make a bid for hegemony; a second period of economic growth follows a period of global war and the establishment of a new period of hegemony. Here, again, specific economic upswings are associated with an

increased likelihood of the outbreak of core war. It is widely accepted that the current K-wave, which entered a downturn around 1967-73, is probably now in the process of beginning a new upturn which will reach its apex around 2025. It is also widely accepted that by this period US hegemony, already unravelling, will have been definitively eroded. This convergence of a plateauing economic cycle with a period of political multicentricity within the core should, if history truly does repeat itself, result in the outbreak of full-scale warfare between the declining hegemon and the ascending core powers. Although both Goldstein (1991) and Modelski and Thompson (1996) assert that such a global war can (somehow) be avoided,

other theorists consider that the possibility of such a core war is sufficiently high that serious steps should be taken to ensure that such collective suicide does not occur (Chase-Dunn and O’Reilly, 1989; Goldfrank, 1987).

Growth cycles make severe wars inevitableModelski and Thompson 96 (George Modelski, professor of political science, University of Washington; and William R. Thompson, professor of political science; director, Center for the Study of International Relations; Indiana University, 1996, Leading Sectors and World Powers, pp. 20-22)

Goldstein (1985, 1987, 1988, 1991a) has probably contributed more than anyone else to reviving the question of how wars and prosperity are linked. His 1988 analysis went some way in summarizing many of the arguments concerning economic long waves and war. His 1991 analysis is one of the more sophisticated empirical studies to emerge after nearly a century of controversy (spatiotemporal boundaries: world system from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries).3 The basic perspective that emerges from his analyses, outlined in

figure 2.2, sees economic upswings increasing the probability of severe wars. Severe wars usher in a phase of stagnation from which the world economy eventually recovers leading to another resurgence of robust economic growth. Goldstein’s analysis suggests that this process has gone on since at least 1495. Economic upswings create economic surpluses and full war chests. The ability to wage war makes severe wars more likely. Severe wars, in turn, consume the surpluses and war chests and put an end to the growth upswing. Decades are required to rebuild. While there may be some gains registered in terms of resource mobilization for combat purposes, these gains are offset by the losses brought about by wartime distortions and

destruction. Goldstein is careful to distinguish between production and prices. Prices, in his view, are functions of war. Other things being equal, the severity of the war greatly effects the rate of war-induced inflation—in other words, the greater the severity, then the higher the rate of inflation. When prices rise, real wages decline. Yet he also notes that production (production waves are said to precede war/price waves by some ten to fifteen years) is already stagnating toward the end of the upswing. This phenomenon is explained in terms of demand increases outstripping supply. As a result, inflation occurs. The lack of clarity on this issue may be traceable to the lack of specification among innovation, investment, and production. Cycles in innovation and investment are viewed as reinforcing the production long wave. Increases in innovation facilitate economic growth but growth discourages further innovation. Investment increases on the upswing but, eventually, over investment results. Investors retrench and growth slows down as a consequence. What is not exactly specified is whether innovation, investment, war, or some combination of the three processes is responsible for ending the upswing.

Goldstein also raises the question of how these economic/war cycles impact the distribution of capabilities among the major powers. War severity increases capability concentration. Relative capabilities then begin a process of diffusion as they move toward equality among the major powers. Another bout of severe war ensues and the cycle repeats itself. In addition to war, differential rates of innovation and production influence relative capability standings. Presumably, all three factors share some responsibility for generating the fluctuations in capability concentration.

2NC – Water Shortages

Fast and unsustainable growth ensure water shortages and conflicts – also triggers biodiversity collapseSpeth, 8 – Rhodes Scholar @ Oxford University, Chairman of Council on Environmental Quality for Executive Office, Founder of World Recourses Institute (Think-Tank), Led the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development, Administrator of United Nations Development Program, Dean of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Leader of the President’s Task Force on Global Recourses and the Environment, Holds multiple awards—National Wildlife Federation’s Recourse Defense Award and Lifetime Achievement Award of Environmental Law Institute, and Blue Planet Prize [James, “The Bridge at the Edge of the World”)

It has been said that there are alternative sources of energy, but there are no alternatives to water. There are several dimensions to what has correctly been called the world water crisis .40 First, there is the crisis of natural watercourses and their attendant wetlands. No natural areas have been as degraded by human activi ties as freshwater systems. Natural water courses and the vibrant life associated with them have been extensively affected by dams, dikes, diversions, stream channelization, wetland filling and other modifica tions, and,

ofcourse, pollution. Six percent of the world's major river basins have been severely or moderately fragmented by dams or other construction. Since 1950 the number of large dams has increased from 5,700 worldwide to more than 41,000. Much of this activity is done to

secure access to the water, but power production, flood control, navigation, and land reclamation have also been important factors. As freshwater is diverted from natural sources, ecosystems dependent on that water suffer, including aquatic

systems, wetlands, and forests. About half the world's wetlands have been lost, and more than a fifth of known freshwater species have already been driven to extinction.41 The second crisis is the crisis of freshwater supply.

Human demand for water climbed sixfold in the twentieth century, and the trend continues today. Humanity now withdraws slightly over half of accessible freshwater, and water withdrawals could climb to 70 percent by 2025.42 Meeting the world's demands for freshwater is proving problematic. About 40 percent of the world's people already live in countries that are classified as "water stressed," meaning that already 20 to 40 percent of liate pressures the available

freshwater is being used by human societies. Projections indicate that the percentage of people living in water- stressed countries could rise to 65 percent by 2025. 43 A large portion of freshwater withdrawals, about 70 percent, goes to agricultu re. Since 1960, acreage under irrigation has more than doubled. A special problem is occurring in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia where tens of millions of tube wells are depleting "fossil" ground waters. The New Scientist reports that

"hundreds of millions of Indians may see their land turned to desert.,,44 Overall, according to a study by top water specialists from around the world, world demand for water could double by 2050 .45 "At the worst," the New York Times

reported, "a deepening water crisis would fuel violent conflicts, dry up rivers and increase groundwater pollution.... It would also force the rural poor to clear ever-more grasslands and forests to grow food and leave many more people hungry."46 Last, there is the

crisis of pollution. Pollutants of all types are discharged into the world's waters in enormous quantities, reducing the capacities of bodies of water to support life in the water and to support human communities. Contamination denies a large portion of the world's population access to clean water supplies. About a billion people, a fifth of the world's population, lack clean drinking water; 40 percent lack sanitary services. The World Health Organization calculates that each year about 1.6 million children die from diseases caused by unsafe drinking water and lack of water for sanitation and hygiene.47 Water supply issues will become increasingly prevalent in the United States. Freshwater withdrawals per capita from surface and ground waters in the United States are twice that of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) as

a whole. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that if current American water use remains constant at a hundred gallons per person per day, thirtysix states will face water shortages by 2013. As a result, humanity's "first need" will soon be privatized. Investors are moving into a water related market that is estimated to be worth at least $15° billion in the United States by 20IO. "Water is a growth driver for as long and as far as the eye can see," a Goldman Sachs water analyst told the New York Times in 2006. 48

Water shortages will trigger nuclear war and extinction.NASCA 06 [“Water shortages – only a matter of time,” National Association for Scientific and Cultural Appreciation, http://www.nasca.org.uk/Strange_relics_/water/water.html]

Water is one of the prime essentials for life as we know it. The plain fact is - no water, no life! This becomes

all the more worrying when we realise that the worlds supply of drinkable water will soon diminish quite rapidly. In fact a recent report commissioned by the United Nations has emphasised that by the year 2025 at least 66% of the worlds population will be without an adequate water supply. As a disaster in the making water shortage

ranks in the top category. Without water we are finished, and it is thus imperative that we protect the mechanism through which we derive our supply of this life giving fluid. Unfortunately the exact opposite is the case. We are doing incalculable damage to the planets capacity to generate water and this will have far ranging consequences for the not too distant future. The United Nations has warned that burning of fossil fuels is the prime cause of water shortage. While there may be other reasons such as increased solar activity it is clear that this is a situation over which we can exert a great deal of control. If not then the future will be very bleak indeed! Already the warning signs are there. The last year has seen devastating heatwaves in many parts of the world including the USA where the state of Texas experienced its worst drought on record. Elsewhere in the United States forest fires raged out of control, while other regions of the globe experienced drought conditions that were even more severe. Parts of Iran, Afgahnistan, China and other neighbouring countries experienced their worst droughts on record. These conditions also extended throughout many parts of Africa and it is clear that if circumstances remain unchanged we are facing a disaster of epic proportions.

Moreover it will be one for which there is no easy answer. The spectre of a world water shortage evokes a truly frightening scenario. In fact the United Nations warns that disputes over water will become the prime source of conflict in the not too distant future. Where these shortages become ever more acute it could forseeably lead to the brink of nuclear conflict. On a lesser scale water, and the price of it, will acquire an importance somewhat like the current value placed on oil. The difference of course is that while oil is not vital for life, water most certainly is! It

seems clear then that in future years countries rich in water will enjoy an importance that perhaps they do not have today. In these circumstances power shifts are inevitable, and this will undoubtedly create its own strife and tension. In the long term the implications do not look encouraging. It is a two edged sword. First the

shortage of water, and then the increased stresses this will impose upon an already stressed world of politics. It means that answers need to be found immediately. Answers that will both ameliorate the damage to the environment, and also find new sources of water for future consumption. If not, and the problem is left unresolved there will eventually come the day when we shall find ourselves with a nightmare situation for which there will be no obvious answer.

2NC – Inequality

Growth makes poverty, ecological destruction, and conflict inevitable-- transitioning away from accelerated consumption is a necessary moral action. Trainer 10- Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales. (Ted, "THE LIMITS TO GROWTH PERSPECTIVE: A SUMMARY" 10/20/10, http://socialsciences.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/Limits.Shrt.html)//AP

Our way of life is grossly unsustainable. Our levels of production and consumption are far too high. We

can only achieve them because we few in rich countries are grabbing most of the resources produced and therefore depriving most of the world's people of a fair share, and because we are depleting stocks faster than they can

regenerate. Because we consume so much we are rapidly using up resources and causing huge ecological damage. It would be impossible for all the world's people to rise to our rich world per capita levels of consumption. Most people have no idea how far we are beyond sustainable levels. Although present levels of production, consumption, resource use and environmental impact are unsustainable we are obsessed with economic growth, i.e., with increasing production and consumption, as much as

possible and without limit! Most of the major global problems we face, especially environment, Third World poverty, conflict and social breakdown are primarily due to this limits problem ; i.e., to over-consumption. (This does not mean over-population is not a serious problem.) Following are some of the main facts and arguments that support the limits to growth

position. · Rich countries, with about one-fifth of the world's people, are consuming about three quarters of the world's resource production. Our per capita consumption is about 15-20 times that of the poorest half of the world's

people. · World population will probably stabilise around 9 billion, somewhere after 2060. If all those people were to have present Australian per capita resource consumption, then rates of production of resources would have to be 5 to 10 times as great as they are now. If we tried to rise to those levels of resource output we would completely exhaust all probably recoverable resources of coal, oil, natural gas, tar sand oil, shale oil and uranium (assuming the present "burner" reactors) well before 2050. We would also have exhausted potentially recoverable resources for one third of the mineral items by then. · Petroleum is especially limited. World oil supply will probably peak between 2005 and 2010. · If all 9 billion people were to use timber at the rich world per capita rate we would need 3.5 times the world's present forest area. · If all 9 billion were to have a US diet, which takes about .5 ha of land to produce, we would need 4.5 billion ha of food producing land. But there is only 1.4 billion ha of cropland in use today and this is likely to decrease. · Recent "Footprint" analysis estimates that it takes about 8 ha of productive land to provide water,

energy settlement area and food for one person living in an Australian world city. So if 9 billion people were to live as we do in rich world cities we would need about 72 billion ha of productive land. But that is 10 times all the productive land on the planet. (Note that a number of other factors could be added to the footprint calculation, such as the land needed to absorb pollution.) Even though only one-fifth of the world’s people are resource-affluent, we are using resources at rate that would

take 1.4 planet earths to provide sustainably, (because we are consuming stocks such as forests faster than they can reproduce.) · The biological diversity and resilience of the planet is deteriorating alarmingly. There are serious problems of water, food scarcity , forest and soil loss, decline of fish stocks, loss or coral reefs and tropical forests and mangroves and grasslands. We are heading into an era of massive species extinction . The cause of these problems is the fact that humans are taking so much from nature and dumping so many wastes back into nature. · It will probably soon be generally accepted that we must totally eliminate all CO2 emissions to the atmosphere by 2050. (Hansen, 2008, Meinshausen et al, 2009.) There is a strong case that it will not be possible to do this while maintaining consumer-capitalist society. Firstly it will not be possible to burn coal and sequester the resulting CO2 because only 80-90% of it can be captured for storage, and because the 50% of emissions from non-stationary sources cannot be captured. Secondly there is a strong case that it will not be possible to substitute alternative energy sources for carbon emitting fuels on the scale required. (Trainer, 2008.) These are some of the main limits to growth arguments which lead to the conclusion that there is no possibility of all people rising to the living standards we take for granted today in rich countries. We can only live like this because we are taking and using up most of the world’s scarce resources, preventing most of the world's people from having anything like a

fair share, and depleting the planet’s ecological capital. Therefore we cannot morally endorse our affluent way of life. We must accept the need to move to far simpler and less resource-expensive ways.

Rapid Economic growth promotes totalitarian regimesGassebner 07

(Martin, et al., Princeton university, “Extreme Bounds of Democracy”, http://www.princeton.edu/~pcglobal/conferences/globdem/papers/Gassebner-Lamla-Vreeland.pdf)

In an early large-n study of democracy, Almond and Verba (1963) propose a cultural¶ explanation of democracy. Using survey-based research in five countries, they argue that ¶ a “participant” culture (as opposed to a “subject” or “parochial” culture) is required for ¶ democracy . The “civic culture” argument is tested cross-nationally in the work, of¶ Inglehart (1988), who finds that democracy is correlated with the percentage of people ¶ reporting high levels interpersonal trust, low levels of support for revolutionary change, ¶ and high levels of life satisfaction . His findings are of course, disputed

by Seligson¶ (2002), who shows that the correlation disappears when one controls for level of¶ economic development. Przeworski et al. (2000) test a full range of other cultural¶ variables, finding that none has a robust relationship with democracy once one accounts¶ for level of economic development.¶ Economic explanations of democracy date back to Lipset (1959) who is often cited as the¶ first “modernization theorist.” Modernization Theory argues that as countries develop¶ economically, social structures become too complex for authoritarian regimes to manage¶ – technological change endows owners of capital with some autonomy and private¶

information, complex labor processes require active cooperation rather than coercion, and¶ civil society emerges. At some point in this process, dictatorship collapses and¶ democracy emerges as the alternative.¶ Huntington (1968) adds that sustainable democracy requires political development along¶ with economic development, but basically agrees that as a dictatorship experiences¶ economic development

democratization becomes more likely. Without political ¶ development, however, rapid economic development can also destabilize democracies . ¶ Thus he proposes a “bell-shaped” pattern of stability of regimes with respect to economic¶ development.¶ In their expansive large-n study of democracy and development, Przeworski et al. (2000)¶ thoroughly explore the relationship. They begin with the observation that the correlation¶ between level of economic development and democracy is strong. They question,¶

however, the process by which this correlation is driven. They suggest, in contrast to ¶ modernization theorists, that this correlation is possible even if the emergence of ¶ democracy is completely random with respect to economic development. The correlation ¶ may be driven instead by a relationship between economic development and the survival ¶ of democra cy.¶ This is in fact what their book argues. The emergence of democracy has no relationship ¶ with level of economic development; the correlation instead is entirely driven by the¶ survival of democracy. In other work, Przeworski (2005: 253) argues that “Democracy¶ prevails in developed societies because too much is at stake in

turning against it.”¶ Conversely, in poor democracies, “the value of becoming a dictator is greater and the ¶ accumulated cost of destroying capital stock is lower” (Przeworski and Limongi, 1997:¶ 166 fn. 1).¶ It should be noted, however, that while Przeworski et al. (2000) show that transitions to¶ democracy are not well predicted by economic development and survival of democracy¶ is, the estimated effect of economic development on the transition to democracy is¶ statistically significant in their specification.1 We suspect (and show below) that it is not¶ a robust relationship.¶ Since the Przeworski et al. (2000) study, many large-n studies of democracy have been¶ pursued – too many to adequately review here. We are in the process of collecting data¶ from all available studies and we describe them briefly in the appendix. (Suggestions of¶ data from studies we still need to collect would be greatly appreciated.) Given the¶ interests of the particular audience for this conference, we continue by highlighting some¶ specific studies.¶ The Przeworski et al. (2000) study ignores the oil rich countries of the Middle East. As¶ these scholars were originally interested in estimating the effect of regime on economic¶ growth, they chose not to include oil rich countries, whose process of augmenting GDP¶ per capita is much different from that of other countries. Nevertheless, these countries¶ present a real challenge to the modernization theory argument that should be considered.¶ The argument of Boix (2003) provides a compelling answer.2 He argues that level of¶ economic development, income distribution, and –

importantly – asset specificity¶ together impact the probability of the emergence of democracy. Where asset specificity is ¶ high and the income distribution is highly skewed, such as in many oil-rich countries, the ¶ rich face severe redistributional consequences for allowing popular sovereignty, and they ¶ have no credible threat to flee the country taking their productive capacity with them. ¶ Thus, it is in their interest to pay high costs of repressing democracy, maintaining ¶ dictatorial rule. If assets are not highly specific, however, the rich have a credible exit¶ threat. If the rich flee the country, taking the productive capacity along with them, they¶ can severely harm the national economy. The credible threat restrains the redistributional¶ demands of the poor and may make democracy possible even in countries with relatively¶ low levels of economic development, such as India. Asset specificity aside, if¶ redistributional demands diminish at higher levels of economic development, Boix argues¶ that economic development should make democracy more likely both to emerge and to¶ survive.

Their studies are wrong – empirical evidence are coincidences and modern growth forces the poor to work more without gaining more money – means growth doesn’t solve poverty Irwin 6/4 (Neil, senior economics correspondent for The New York Times, 6/4/14, New York Times, “Growth Has Been Good for Decades. So Why Hasn’t Poverty Declined?,” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/upshot/growth-has-been-good-for-decades-so-why-hasnt-poverty-declined.html?_r=0, ND)

The surest way to fight poverty is to achieve stronger economic growth. That, anyway, is a view embedded in the thinking of a lot of politicians and economists. “The federal government,” Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “needs to remember that the best anti-poverty program is economic growth,” which is not so different from the argument put forth by John F. Kennedy (in a somewhat different context) that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” In Kennedy’s era, that had the benefit of being true. From 1959 to 1973, the nation’s economy per person grew 82 percent, and that was enough to drive the proportion of the poor population from 22 percent to 11 percent. But over the last generation in the United States, that simply hasn’t happened. Growth has been pretty good, up 147 percent per capita. But rather than decline further, the poverty rate has bounced around in the 12 to 15 percent range — higher than it was even in the early 1970s. The mystery of why — and how to change that — is one of the most fundamental challenges in the nation’s fight against poverty. The disconnect between growth and poverty reduction is a key finding of a sweeping new study of wages from the Economic Policy Institute. The liberal-leaning group’s policy prescriptions are open to debate, but this piece of data the researchers find is hard to dispute: From 1959 to 1973, a more robust United States economy and fewer people living below the poverty line went hand-in-hand. That relationship broke apart in the mid-1970s. If the old relationship between growth and poverty had held up, the E.P.I. researchers find, the poverty rate in the United States would have fallen to zero by 1986 and stayed there ever since. “It used to be that as G.D.P. per capita grew, poverty declined in lock step,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at E.P.I. and an author of the study. “There was a very tight relationship between overall growth and fewer and fewer Americans living in poverty. Starting in the 70s, that link ′broke.” Now, one shouldn’t interpret that too literally. The 1959 to 1973 period might be an unfair benchmark. The Great Society social safety net programs were being put in place, and they may have had a poverty-lowering effect separate from that of the overall economic trends. In other words, it may be simply that during that time, strong growth and a falling poverty rate happened to take place simultaneously for unrelated reasons. And there presumably is some level of poverty below which the official poverty rate will never fall, driven by people whose

problems run much deeper than economics. But the facts still cast doubt on the notion that growth alone will solve America’s poverty problem. If you are committed to the idea that poor families need to work to earn a living, this has been a great three decades. For households in the bottom 20 percent of earnings in the United States — in 2012, that meant less than $14,687 a year — the share of income from wages, benefits and tax credits has risen from 57.5 percent of their total income in 1979 to 69.7 percent in 2010. The percentage of their income from public benefits, including Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security

and unemployment insurance, has fallen in that time. The fact that more of poor families’ income is coming from wages doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re getting paid more, though. In fact, based on the E.P.I.'s analysis of

data from the Census Bureau, it appears that what income gains they are seeing are coming from working more hours, not from higher hourly pay. Indeed, if you adjust for the higher number of hours worked, over the

1979 to 2007 period (selected to avoid the effects of the steep recession that began in 2008), hourly pay for the bottom 20 percent of households rose only 3.2 percent. Total, not per year. In other words, in nearly three decades, these lower-

income workers saw no meaningful gain in what they were paid for an hour of labor. Their overall inflation-adjusted income rose a bit, but mainly because they put in more hours of work. The researchers at E.P.I. also looked at demographic factors that contribute to poverty, including race, education levels and changes in family structure (such as the number of one-parent versus

two-parent households). This look at the data also shows rising inequality as the biggest factor in contributing to the poverty rate, dwarfing those other shifts. Debates over what kind of social welfare system the United States ought to have are always polarizing, from the creation of the Great Society in the 1960s to the Clinton welfare reforms of the 1990s to the Paul Ryan

budgets of this era. Conservatives tend to attribute the persistence of poverty, even amid economic growth, to the perverse incentives that a welfare state creates against working. But the reality is that low-income workers are putting in more hours on the job than they did a generation ago — and the financial rewards for doing so just haven’t increased. That’s the real lesson of the data: If you want to address poverty in the United States, it’s not enough to say that you need to create better incentives for lower-income people to work. You also have to devise strategies that make the benefits of a stronger economy show up in the wages of the people on the edge of poverty, who need it most desperately.

2NC – Decline =/= War

Economic decline doesn’t cause extinction Heinberg 04 – journalist, teaches at the Core Faculty of New College of California, on the Board of Advisors of the Solar Living Institute and the Post Carbon Institute (Richard, “Power Down”, Published by New Society Publishers, pg. 149-150)

These are the lessons of the past. However, we should also keep in mind the ways in which present circumstances differ from previous ones. Today’s industrial society is the first global civilization in history. It is characterized by interlocking systems of trade such that hardly a single country today is entirely self-sufficient in food, energy, or other basic necessities. Its environmental impacts are global in extent, so that the survivors will not be able simply to move elsewhere in order to escape. Moreover, today’s industrial civilization has developed weapons capable of extinguishing all higher life on the planet. In the worst imaginable case, the collapse of our current civilization will be absolute and permanent:

no one will survive. However, it is more likely that collapse will be survivable, at least for some. More significantly, because industrial civilization is drawing down important resources far more quickly than they can be replenished, its fall will almost certainly have the characteristics of a depletion-led collapse. According to Greer, if depletion is limited by decreased drawdown of resources as a consequence of diminished production, the crisis may play out much like a maintenance crisis. However, “a society in which depletion is advanced…may not be able to escape catabolic collapse even if such steps are taken. Cultural and political factors may also make efforts to avoid catabolic collapse difficult to accomplish, or indeed to

contemplate. A possible scenario for the collapse of our own civilization might go something like this: Energy shortages commence in the second decade of the century, leading to economic turmoil, frequent and lengthening power blackouts, and general chaos. Over the course of several years, food production plummets, resulting in widespread famine, even if formerly wealthy countries. Wars – including civil wars – rage intermittently. Meanwhile ecological crisis also tears at the social fabric, with water shortages, rising sea levels, and severe storms wreaking further havoc. While previous episodic disasters could have been dealt with by disaster management and rescue efforts, by now societies are too disorganized to mount such efforts. One after another, central governments collapse. Societies attempt to shed complexity in stages, thus buying time. Empires devolve into nations; nations into smaller regional or tribal states. But each

lower stage – while initially appearing to offer a new beginning and a platform of stability – reaches its own moment of unsustainability and further collapse ensues. Between 2020 and 2100, the global population declines steeply, perhaps to fewer than one billion. By the start of the next century, the survivors’ grandchildren are entertained by stories of a great civilization of the recent pas”:t in which people flew in metal birds and got everything they wanted by pressing buttons.

Recent empirics go negBarnett, senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC, contributing editor/online columnist for Esquire, 8/25/’9 (Thomas P.M, “The New Rules: Security Remains Stable Amid Financial Crisis,” Aprodex, Asset Protection Index, http://www.aprodex.com/the-new-rules--security-remains-stable-amid-financial-crisis-398-bl.aspx)

When the global financial crisis struck roughly a year ago, the blogosphere was ablaze with

all sorts of scary predictions of, and commentary regarding, ensuing conflict and wars -- a rerun of the Great Depression leading to world war, as it were. Now, as global economic news brightens and recovery -- surprisingly led by China and emerging markets -- is the talk of the day, it's interesting to look back over the past year and realize how globalization's first truly

worldwide recession has had virtually no impact whatsoever on the international security

landscape. None of the more than three-dozen ongoing conflicts listed by GlobalSecurity.org can be clearly attributed to the global recession. Indeed, the last new entry (civil conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestine) predates the economic

crisis by a year, and three quarters of the chronic struggles began in the last century. Ditto for the 15 low-intensity conflicts listed by Wikipedia (where the latest entry is the Mexican "drug war" begun in 2006). Certainly,

the Russia-Georgia conflict last August was specifically timed, but by most accounts the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was the most important external trigger (followed

by the U.S. presidential campaign) for that sudden spike in an almost two-decade long struggle

between Georgia and its two breakaway regions. Looking over the various databases, then, we see a

most familiar picture: the usual mix of civil conflicts, insurgencies, and liberation-themed terrorist movements. Besides the recent Russia-Georgia dust-up, the only two potential state-on-state wars (North v. South Korea, Israel v. Iran) are both tied to one side acquiring a nuclear weapon capacity -- a process wholly unrelated to global economic trends. And with the United States effectively tied down by its two ongoing major interventions (Iraq and Afghanistan-bleeding-into-

Pakistan), our involvement elsewhere around the planet has been quite modest, both leading up

to and following the onset of the economic crisis: e.g., the usual counter-drug efforts in Latin America,

the usual military exercises with allies across Asia, mixing it up with pirates off Somalia's coast). Everywhere else we find serious instability we pretty much let it burn, occasionally pressing the

Chinese -- unsuccessfully -- to do something. Our new Africa Command, for example, hasn't led us to anything beyond advising and training local forces.

A2: Transition Wars

Transition wars are unlikely and the chance of reaching sustainable society outweighs any risk Trainer 02 - Lecturer, School of Social Work, University of New South Wales (Ted, “Debating the Significance of the Global Eco-village Movement: A Reply to Takis Fotopoulos” Democracy & Nature, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2002)

However I am not convinced the transition must inevitably involve overt conflict, let alone violence. It probably will,

but it is conceivable that as conditions deteriorate and as the existence of a more sensible way becomes more evident, and as access to it increases as a result of Eco-village building, there will be a more or less

peaceful shift to The Simpler Way. Again I do not think this is very likely, but it is possibility to be worked for . Nothing is foregone in heading down that path, on the understanding that in time it might become clear that overt confrontation might have to be

accepted. The longer we can grow while avoiding confrontation the less likely that we will be crushed if it does

occur. However the issue is of no practical importance at this point in time. Whatever conclusion one comes to on it our best strategy here and now is to plunge into establishing and spreading the new ways. It will be a long time before it

will be evident whether or not we must contest those who have power now, or whether they will lose their power in a collapse of the present resource-expensive infrastructures and of legitimacy.

First World economic collapse prevents lashoutLewis 98 Chris H. Lewis, Professor of American Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998, in The Coming Age of Scarcity, ed Dobkowski and Wallimann, p 56-57

It is also entirely possible that the global economy is already so fragile that developed countries cannot afford to engage in these neocolonial wars, especially if they do not do it as a global block of developed nations through the United Nations. The desperate struggle among competing modern empires to maintain their resource pipelines into the underdeveloped world will only further undermine global civilization. Warring nations’ attempts to cripple their enemies by denying access to their economies and resources will only hasten the collapse of the global economy. No matter how it collapses, through economic collapse and the development of local and regional economies or through a global military struggle by the First World to maintain its access to Third World resources, or

both modern industrial civilization will collapse because its demands for energy, natural resources, and ecosystem services are not sustainable. The current collapse of economies and states in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union demonstrate that this global collapse is already occurring. The inability of the United States and the United Nations in the 1990s to solve the economic and political problems that exacerbate conflicts in Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union demonstrate that the developed countries might be under such economic and political stress that they cannot afford to use the political or military capital necessary to force recalcitrant nations and peoples to remain within the global industrial economy. Although many would argue that the massive death and suffering caused by these conflicts must be stopped, it could be that this death will

be less than if the First World intervened and tried to force Third World countries to remain within global civilization. Attempts to intervene in these growing regional conflicts, on the basis of liberal internationalism and global civilization, will backfire and cause only more suffering. In fact, these interventions will further accelerate the collapse of global civilization.

Backlash is impossible; once dedev starts, shortages force all nations to followLewis 98 Chris H. Lewis, Professor of American Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 1998, in The Coming Age of Scarcity, Dobkowski and Wallimann, eds, pp. 55-56.

The successful collapse of global industrial civilization is, in part, dependent on the 80 percent not fully integrated with the global economy breaking free from their ties to modern industrial civilization. Faced with growing threats of economic and ecological collapse, many underdeveloped nations and regions should declare their independence from the global economy, recognizing that this economy is the larger cause of their poverty. After breaking free from the First World’s economic and political hegemony, underdeveloped countries can then use their resources and people to feed themselves and improve their quality of life. Of course, we have been witnessing such attempts for the past fifty years after World War II as colonial and neocolonial struggles for independence. The wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, and in the nations of the former Soviet Union were all struggles to win independence from foreign domination. The cold war was, in large part, a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union over who would dominate the modern world and the so-called nonaligned nations of the Third World.

With the global instability created by the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the decline of American hegemony, underdeveloped countries may find that they have the strategic opportunity to demand their independence from First World domination. They can refuse to pay their debts, withdraw from the global industrial economy, nationalize foreign corporations that are exploiting their wealth, and create local and regional economies to support their own people. But Third World independence from the First World-dominated global economy will not come without a heavy economic, political, and military price. With the withdrawal of underdeveloped countries from the global economy within the next thirty to fifty years, the developed countries will face continual material, ecological, and energy shortages that will force them to downscale their economies. The First World will, ironically, be forced to follow the lead of the Third World and create local and regional economies that are sustainable and self-sufficient. In many instances, nations will break up, forming smaller polities tied together by ethnic, religious, or social bonds. If these polities and nations take responsibility for helping their peoples survive the hardship and suffering imposed by the devolution of the

global industrial civilization and economy, they will be better able to reduce the real threat of mass death and genocide that will arise from the collapse of modern industrial civilization.

A2: Heg Good

Hegemony ensures U.S. involvement in overseas conflicts and nuclear warLayne 06 Christopher Layne (Associate Professor in the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University) 2006 “The Peace of Illusions” p 169

Rather than being instruments of regional pacification, today America's alliances are transmission belts for war that ensure that the U.S. would be embroiled in Eurasian wars. In deciding whether to go war in Eurasia, the United States should not allow its hands to be tied in advance. For example a non—great power war on the Korean

Peninsula—even if nuclear weapon were not involved—would be very costly. The dangers of being entangled in a great power war in Eurasia, of course, are even greater, and could expose the American homeland to nuclear attack. An offshore balancing grand strategy would extricate the United States from the danger of being entrapped in Eurasian conflicts by its alliance commitments.

No impact from loss of heg – threats exaggeratedLayne 97 (Christopher Layne, Visiting Associate Professor at Naval Postgraduate School, “From Preponderance to Offshore Balancing: America’s Future Grand Strategy”, International Security, Vol. 22 Issue. 1 Summer 1997).

The security /interdependence nexus results in the exaggeration of threats to American strategic interests because it requires the United States to defend its core interests by intervening in the peripheries. There are three reasons for this. First, as Johnson

points out, order-maintenance strategies are biased inherently toward threat exaggeration. Threats to order generate an anxiety “that has at its center the fear of the unknown. It is not just security, but the pattern of order upon which the sense of security

depends that is threatened.” Second, because the strategy of preponderance re quires U.S. intervention in places that

concededly have no intrinsic strategic value , U.S. policymakers are compelled to overstate the dangers to American

interests to mobilize domestic support for their policies. Third, the tendency to exaggerate threats is tightly linked to the strategy of preponderance’s concern with maintaining U.S. credibility .

A2: Food Scarcity

Dedev promotes environmentally beneficial, sustainable technologies that are still agriculturally viableOphlus 97 (William Ophuls, Professor of Political Science at Northwestern, 1997, Requiem For Modern Politics, p. 10)

Technological intervention in nature does indeed foster entropy, but does this mean that our situation is

hopeless or that we need to give up all the perceived gains of scientific advance and economic development? As

the previous paragraphs show, the answer is clearly no, provided we learn to understand and respect nature instead of merely exploiting it. Although all human interaction with the environment necessarily involves some disruption of natural cycles, and therefore has entropic costs, different types of technology and

different ways of life have radically different ecological consequences. Consider, for example, the horticultural agriculture of Bali, where farmers have maintained the fertility and health of the soil for millennia using only the natural flow of solar energy, as contrasted with the mechanical agriculture of Iowa, where farmers mine the soil for short-term profit and require vast inputs of polluting fossil-fuel energy to produce a crop. In other words, technologies can be more or less thermodynamically efficient and ways of life can be more or less ecologically harmonious. Many earlier forms of technology, such as the wind and water mills of medieval Europe, were relatively less en-tropic. Possible future forms of technology—more “ethereal” and based on sustainable flow

resources such as solar energy—promise to provide a sufficiency of material well-being at reasonable ecological cost. But more efficient technologies must be matched by more harmonious ways of living. At the very least, since continual growth in human numbers and in human demand must eventually overwhelm even the most efficient technology, the goal of economic life must be redefined as plenitude for a reasonable number of people rather than as affluence for an ever-growing population. Thus a technological future in reasonable harmony with the laws of ecology and thermodynamics is attainable, but it depends on a political decision to live a different kind of life.

A2: Tech Solves (General)

Newly developed technologies will worsen the problem. It’s basic science, yo.Huesemann and Huesemann, 11 (Michael, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, M.B.A., Arizona State University, Joyce, activist and academic, “Techno-fix: why technology won't save us or the environment,” New Society Publishers, pg. 17, Tashma)

As discussed in Chapter 1, many negative environmental consequences resulting from the technological exploitation, control and modification of nature are inherently unavoidable because human actions cannot really "improve" nature, a complex interconnected system that is continually adapting to change through the process of evolution. In addition, the conservation of mass principle as well as the first and second laws of

thermodynamics can be invoked to demonstrate that it is impossible to escape the negative environmental effects of newly introduced technologies.

Tech solutions won’t work – need to have shift from growth Trainer 12 (Ted, Dr. Ted Trainer is a Conjoint Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, and a contributing author at the Simplicity Institute. This Report is an improved version of a paper published in Energy Policy (2010), made possible by the recent publication of better cost and output data., “CAN RENEWABLE ENERGY SUSTAIN CONSUMER SOCIETIES? A NEGATIVE CASE”, Simplicity Institute Report 12e, 2012, http://simplicityinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/CanRenewableEnergySustainConsumerSocietiesTrainer.pdf)

The total investment sum arrived at above is considerably less than that derived in Trainer [112], but the derivation is much more soundly

based mainly due to recent access to more confident estimates of output and future capital costs. The general conclusion supported by this discussion is that the capital costs for a totally renewable global energy supply would be far beyond affordable. This means that greenhouse and energy problems cannot be solved by action on

the supply side, i.e., by technical developments which promise to provide quantities taken for granted in energy- ‐ intensive societies. This general “limits to growth” perspective is that these and the other major global problems can only be solved by action on the demand side, i.e., by moving to ways, values, institutions and systems which greatly reduce the need for materials,

energy and ecological resources. It should be stressed that the 700 EJ/y supply target would give the world’s expected 10 billion people by 2050 a per capita energy consumption of 70 GJ/y, which is around only one- ‐third of the present Australian level. Thus if renewable sources were to provide all the world’s people in 2050 with the present Australian per capita energy consumption, the supply target would have to be three times that taken in this exercise. This analysis is not an argument against transition to full reliance on renewable energy sources. It is only an argument against the possibility of sustaining high energy societies on them. Trainer [113] and [114] detail the case

that the limits to growth predicament cannot be solved by technical reforms to or within consumer- ‐capitalist society and that there must be radical social transition to some kind of ‘Simpler Way.’ This vision includes developing mostly small and highly self-‐sufficient local economies, abandoning the growth economy, severely controlling market forces, shifting from representative to participatory democracy, and accepting frugal and cooperative lifestyles. Chapter 4 of Trainer [115] presents numerical support for the claim that footprint and energy costs in the realm of 10% of those in present rich countries could be achieved, based on renewable energy sources. Although at this point in time the prospects for making such a transition would seem to be highly unlikely, the need to consider it will probably become more evident as greenhouse and energy problems intensify. It is not likely to be considered if the present dominant assumption that high energy societies can run on renewable energy remains relatively unchallenged.