Mini-Debate – Deference

Backstory

Need one volunteer to read the 1AC

Need another to read the 1NC

Everyone should prep as though they may be called upon to give the 2AC. The 2AC will be allowed to read no more than 3 total 2AC cards. There is no time limit on the speech.

Need everyone to prep a 2NC – using the “E.E.D. R. I. R” method discussed in lab.

- The speech will be up to 4 minutes long. - The 2NC-1NR should select 3 arguments to “shadow extend”- The 2NC-1NR should also select 2 arguments to extend in-depth.

1AC

Deference Adv

Advantage # __ is Agency Deference

Trump’s election meant legal setbacks for Grimm’s pro-trans- position. But – ironically – the legal questions from the Grimm case can now be used to set precedents against deference to Trump’s Executive agencies. Shapiro ‘17

et al; Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review. He holds an AB from Princeton University, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School. He has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, L.A. Times, USA Today, Weekly Standard, New York Times Online, and National Review Online. He also regularly provides commentary for various media outlets, including CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision and Telemundo, the Colbert Report, and NPR. “Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.: Judicial Overdeference Is Still a Massive Problem” - Federalist Society Review, Volume 18 – March 23rd – Modified for potentially objectionable language - #CutWithKirby - http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/gloucester-county-school-board-v-gg-judicial-overdeference-is-still-a-massive-problem

In early March , the Supreme Court punted the transgender bathroom-access case Gloucester County School

Board v. (Grimm) G.G., probably the highest-profile case of the term , back down to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the

Fourth Circuit.[1] The Trump administration had recently rescinded the Department of Education (DOE) guidance letters

at the heart of the lawsuit,[2] so the Court wanted the parties and the lower court to reevaluate the case in light of

the new development. But while the future of this particular litigation—and whether it will return to the high court—may now be uncertain, the core legal questions about how much deference courts should give administrative agency determinations remain as live as ever. Notably, Judge Neil Gorsuch, the presumptive next justice, has made a name for himself as a critic of judicial deference to executive agencies.[3] There is also legislation pending in the Senate—

commonly known as the REINS Act—that would require congressional approval of any new major regulation.[4] If anything, the debate over judicial deference doctrines is only heating up, and the arguments made in Gloucester County will continue to be relevant for some time.

Here’s how the issue was joined here: Title IX, part of the U.S. Education Amendments of 1972, was passed to ensure that schools and universities did not discriminate on the basis of sex. It states that “[n]o person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”[5] The statute itself allows for certain exceptions to this prohibition, and its implementing regulations have always allowed schools to provide “separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex.”[6] This regulation has been uncontroversial for most of its history, and the traditional reading of the exception—interpreting “sex” to refer to the biological difference (particularly regarding reproductive organs) between males and females—was never challenged before the present litigation.

Gavin Grimm (G.G.), at the time of the events relevant to this litigation, was a student at Gloucester High School in Virginia. Grimm was born biologically female but has identified as a boy from about the age of 12. He remains biologically female, though he

is on hormone therapy. This case arose from Grimm’s opposition to the school board’s policy of not allowing him to use the boys’ restroom and locker room (although he was given access to private unisex bathrooms open to all students). Upon hearing of the controversy from a transgender-rights activist, a Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) employee named James A. Ferg-Cadima sent a letter to the activist stating that “Title IX . . . prohibits recipients of Federal financial assistance from discriminating on the basis of sex, including gender identity.”

Grimm then sued the school board , alleging that its policy violated Title IX and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a “statement of interest,” holding the Ferg-Cadima letter out as the controlling interpretation of Title IX and its implementing regulations. The district court refused to give controlling deference to the letter, and Grimm appealed to the

Fourth Circuit. The Fourth Circuit reversed the district court’s dismissal, affording the OCR’s interpretation of the regulation

Auer deference (the near-absolute deference courts give to agency interpretations of their own regulations). Indeed, the Fourth Circuit’s deference to the Ferg-Cadima letter was outcome-determinative.

Without such deference, the court acknowledged, the interpretation was “perhaps not the intuitive one.”[7]

Following the Fourth Circuit’s ruling, federal officials in the DOE and DOJ issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to every Title IX

“recipient[] of Federal financial assistance” in the country, affirming and expanding on the contents of the Ferg-Cadima letter. The school board sought Supreme Court review, which was granted October 28, 2016.

On February 22, 2017, the new Trump administration’s DOE rescinded both the Ferg-Cadima letter and the

“Dear Colleague” letter. After considering briefing from the parties on how to proceed, the Supreme Court vacated the Fourth Circuit ruling and remanded the case back to that court for further consideration . The Fourth Circuit hadn’t decided the Title IX statutory-interpretation question, so the Court is allowing it to do so in the first instance.

While advocates on both sides of this contentious cultural issue may have wished to draw the Court into their debates over the nature of sexuality, the more straightforward legal path—before the withdrawal of the OCR guidance—would simply have been to reverse the Fourth

Circuit’s deference to the Ferg-Cadima letter and leave the arguments over privacy and nondiscrimination to other forums. Judicial deference to informal agency statements of this sort—statements that have not been tested in notice-and-comment

rulemaking—undermines the separation of powers, defeats the purposes of notice-and-comment as set forth in the Administrative

Procedure Act, thwarts the protections of judicial review of agency rulemaking, and encourages regulatory brinkmanship

(assertiveness)without full consideration of congressional will or practical consequences . Notice-and-comment rulemaking has a purpose. Auer deference to informal agency opinions is antithetical to that purpose.

We take no position here on Title IX’s definition of “discrimination on the basis of sex,” the meaning of the statute’s exception for “separate living facilities for the different sexes,” or the meaning of OCR regulations extending that exception to bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, or sports teams.[8] Congressional and administrative hearings—and public discourse more generally—are the best ways for our society to ruminate on such novel questions. A letter written by a low-level bureaucrat is not. Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of Policy Ferg-Cadima may be the wisest man since Solomon—or not—but our system of legislation and regulation is not dependent on the Solomonic wisdom of acting deputy assistant secretaries.

The deference issues in this case are important because process matters . Those who hold the reins of political power will not always be benevolent, self-restrained public servants, and the procedural safeguards that seem frustrating and counterproductive in one instance may very well be necessary bulwarks against arbitrariness or oppression in another. As anyone who has lived in a hurricane-prone area can attest, the right time to board up your windows is before the storm hits, not after they’ve already been shattered.

A ruling in favor of Grimm sets a precedent that will broadly hamper unfettered agency deference. Cleveland ‘17

Margot Cleveland is an Adjunct Professor and Instructor for the University of Notre Dame – whose work often touches on issues related to business, economics, and legal issues. The author is also a lawyer and holds a JD from the University of Notre Dame. “The Grimm Transgender Case Is What Happens When Unelected Bureaucrats Make Law” – The Federalist - March 14, 2017 – Modified for potentially objectionable language - #CutWithKirby - http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/14/grimm-transgender-case-happens-unelected-bureaucrats-make-law/

When the Supreme Court announced last week it would no longer hear (take up) Gavin Grimm’s “transgender

bathroom case,” competing narratives quickly emerged: LGBT rights versus local control. These dueling

storylines miss the larger lesson about the real culprit in so many of these high-profile culture wars cases: the uncontrollable administrative state.

After all, nothing had changed since the Fourth Circuit ruled last year that a Virginia school board must allow Grimm, a biological female who suffers from gender dysphoria, to use the boy’s bathroom. Yet the Supreme Court not only dismissed the appeal but also sent

Grimm’s case back for the Fourth Circuit to reconsider. Nothing had changed, that is, except the reigning president and “guidance” issued by his administrative overlords.

We’re Arguing about Opposite Interpretations of Law

Before we go there, let’s do a brief review. The law at issue, Title IX, hasn’t changed since Congress passed that statute in 1972. It quite simply provides: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance . . . .”

Since 1975, federal regulations from the Department of Education, the federal agency charged with enforcing Title IX, have authorized schools to provide “separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex,” so long as the “facilities provided for students of one sex [are] comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex.”

Fast-forward 40 years: On May 13, 2016, the Obama departments of Justice and Education issued a joint letter stating: “The Departments treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations. This means

that a school must not treat a transgender student differently from the way it treats other students of the same gender identity.”

The Fourth Circuit relied to this letter to hold that the local school board had violated Title IX by refusing to allow Grimm to use the boys’ bathroom. After losing in the appellate court, the school board had sought review in the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal and had scheduled oral argument for later this month.

But the transfer of power following Trump’s inauguration handed over the presidential pen. And what the pen giveth, the pen taketh away. On February 22, 2017 with a brief two-page letter, the Trump administration withdrew and

rescinded the May 13, 2016 letter. With a mere (electronic) signature, then, the Trump administration jettisoned the Fourth Circuit’s sole justification for ruling in Grimm’s favor. With the Obama administration’s guidance rescinded, the Supreme Court summarily disposed of Grimm’s appeal, sending the case back to the Fourth Circuit, which will now need to decide anew the outcome given this change in circumstance.

This Way of Governing Lets Agencies Effectively Make Law

If rule by bureaucratic decree seems a strange procedure for a constitutional republic, it should. Therein lies the true import of Grimm: not the

battle of competing rights, but the power of our adminstrative state. What the Grimm case lays bare is disquieting: Grimm exposes the charade used to justify the deference afforded federal agencies —that they possess subject-matter expertise.

The Grimm case began and ended with deference. Not to the Constitution. Not to the applicable statute, Title IX. Not even a regulation. But deference, a judicial genuflection, to the views of unelected, unaccountable so-called “experts.” This deference to an agency’s interpretation of its own “ambiguous” regulations was mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1997 decision in Auer v. Robbin. The court justified this with the specialized subject-matter expertise administrative agencies supposedly possess.

But it is pure folly to believe that interpreting the word “sex” requires any expert or specialized knowledge. It is beyond parody to claim that the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—all distinct federal agencies that have reinterpreted sex to include sexual identity—possess the same specialized knowledge. Further, if the word “sex,” as used in Title IX and its implementing regulations, is ambiguous there is truly no limit to what an agency could redefine under the auspices of “expertise.”

It is the absurdity of deferring to a federal agency’s view of the law based on a purported subject-matter expertise that merits the press and

public’s focus, not the transgender angle, because Grimm exposes the too-long ignored reality: The administrative state does not have an expertise. It has a political agenda.

Bureaucrats Have Power, and Power Corrupts

The Grimm case also bares the administrative state’s stealth attack on our constitutional framework. America’s founders devised this framework “to fetter the federal government, and the presidency in particular, to prevent the republic from turning into anything like tyranny.”

The rise of the administrative state—rule by unelected, unchecked executive-branch bureaucrats—over the last 100 years has rendered our republic a mere sliver of the Founders’ vision. As Chief Justice John Roberts put it in his dissent in City of Arlington, Texas v. FCC: “The Framers could hardly have envisioned today’s ‘vast and varied federal bureaucracy’ and the authority administrative agencies now hold over our economic, social, and political activities. ‘[T]he administrative state with its reams of regulations would leave them rubbing their eyes.’”

This modern reality exists because, while the Constitution established three co-equal branches of government, each with specific and limited powers designed to check the other branches, the executive branch has, as Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch put it, “swallow[ed] huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power.” Simultaneously, the judicial and legislative branches have abdicated their constitutionally appointed roles to check the abuse of executive power.

The Grimm case should open the public’s eyes to constitutional modernity. While Congress properly exercised its legislative powers in passing Title IX in 1972 to prohibit sex discrimination, the Fourth Circuit in Grimm did not rely on that statute. Instead, it ruled in favor of Grimm based

solely on a letter from two federal agencies. The Grimm decision thus simultaneously showcased the executive branch’s overreach— its making of new laws —and the judicial branch’s abdication of its duty to interpret the law.

The Supreme Court’s dismissal of Grimm’s appeal should cement this disturbing reality in the public’s conscience.

Think about it: The Supreme Court of the United States—the highest court in the land, the final arbiter of the law, which

emphatically has the province and duty to say what the law is —tiptoed off, stage left, once the new president entered

reciting a different soliloquy.

This result should disturb any lover of freedom, whether he (one) supported former President Obama’s interpretation of Title IX or the current administration’s more circumspect position. Let’s hope the Grimm case can finally bring the administrative state’s attack on liberty into focus.

Grimm win would re-shape precedents on EPA discretion. That would limit judicial deference to EPA decisions. Walton ‘16Katherine Walton is an Attorney with the firm Schiff Hardin. Katherine works as an Environmental Associate – representing clients in a wide range of environmental matters. Katherine holds a Doctor of Law (J.D.) from the University of Michigan Law School and a B.A. in journalism from Northwestern University. “Transgender Bathroom Issue: Is Agency Deference Waning?” – National Law Review - December 6, 2016 – #CutWithKirby - Modified for language that may offend - http://www.natlawreview.com/article/transgender-bathroom-issue-agency-deference-waning

It’s not often that we write about a transgender bathroom case for our environmental blog. But we’re making an exception for Gloucester County School Board v. G.G. (Grimm), which could affect future challenges to EPA actions .

The appellant in G.G. (Grimm) has asked the Supreme Court to limit so-called Auer deference to agency actions.

For nearly 20 years, the Supreme Court has held that courts must defer to an agency’s interpretation of its

own regulations if (1) the regulation is ambiguous and (2) the agency’s interpretation is not plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the

regulation. See Auer v. Robbins, 519 U.S. 452, 461 (1997). Auer grew out of the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), which held that an agency’s construction of an ambiguous statute is controlling as long as it is reasonable. 467 U.S. at 844.

EPA has frequently invoked Auer as a defense to challenges to its actions, including a challenge to its Industrial Stormwater Rule in Decker v. Nw. Envtl. Def. Ctr., 133 S. Ct. 1326, 1332 (2013). In that case, a divided Supreme Court invoked Auer in upholding EPA’s Industrial Stormwater Rule, which required that certain sources of storm water runoff obtain a permit under the CWA.

EPA may be less able to rely upon Auer to fight future legal challenges . The appellant in (Grimm) G.G. has asked the Supreme Court to consider whether courts should extend Auer deference to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation when that regulation is set forth in an unpublished agency letter. The case involves a letter written in response to a question

posed by the appellant’s attorney. Depending on the breadth of the Court’s ruling, it could impact the extent to which courts defer to EPA opinion letters.

Some factual background about the case: G.G. (Grimm) was filed by a transgender high school student who challenged a school board resolution that required him—and other transgender students—to use the bathroom associated with his “biological gender.” G.G. ex rel. Grimm v. Gloucester Cty. Sch. Bd., 822 F.3d 709, 716 (4th Cir. 2016), cert. granted in part, No. 16-273, 2016 WL 4565643 (U.S. Oct. 28, 2016). G.G. argued that the resolution violated Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause.

Climate change is real. Pruitt will successfully lean on deference to roll-back the carbon endangerment finding.Bade ‘17

Before joining Industry Dive, Gavin Bade worked for a number of media publishers, including The American Prospect, NPR, the New America Foundation, and WGVU. He has a BS in Culture and Politics from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. “Trump team scrutinizing EPA climate science, grants in agency review” – Utility Dive - Jan. 26, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - http://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-team-scrutinizing-epa-climate-science-grants-in-agency-review/434837/

In his confirmation hearings, Trump's pick to head the agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt (R), told lawmakers that he believed there is still room for debate on the causes of climate change. Pruitt's climate stance was echoed by a number of Trump appointees, including Rex Tillerson, Rep. Ryan Zinke, and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the picks for Secretary of State, Department of Interior, and the Department of Energy, respectively.

That perspective breaks with the overwhelming majority of climate scientists , who hold that humans are the dominant cause of global warming since the middle of last century. If it becomes the default perspective of the U.S. government, the change could have wide-reaching effects on agency rulemaking, clean energy funding and more.

In his hearing, Pruitt called his opinion of climate change "immaterial" because the EPA is under a legal obligation to regulate carbon under the Clean Air Act. But that could change if Congress acts to amend the law or the Trump administration attacks the EPA's 2009 carbon endangerment finding, which holds that greenhouse gas pollution is a threat to public health and should be regulated .

Power sector lawyers say challenging the finding would be difficult, as the Trump EPA would likely have to prove in court that greenhouse gases are not a threat. Pruitt has shown an appetite for the issue, signing

onto a legal challenge to the finding in 2012, though he also affirmed the EPA's legal obligation to regulate carbon under the endangerment finding in his nomination hearing.

That suit was thrown out by the D.C. Circuit Court, but the Trump EPA could have an advantage in future challenges due to judicial deference — the legal concept that courts should allow federal agencies wide leeway to make rules, so long as they do not explicitly break the law. The concept was one of the sticking points in the Clean Power Plan

court hearing last year, with a number of energy lawyers saying they expected the D.C. Circuit to defer to EPA's authority on the plan.

Roll-back of the Endangerment finding would end all US carbon regulation. McQuaid ‘17

John McQuaid is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist specializing in science, environment, and government. His reporting at the New Orleans Times-Picayune won shares in three Pulitzer Prizes. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Slate, U.S. News, Wired, and Mother Jones, among other publications. “One Big Legal Obstacle Keeps Trump from Undoing Greenhouse Gas Regulation” – Scientific American – April 26th - #CutWithKirby - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/one-big-legal-obstacle-keeps-trump-from-undoing-greenhouse-gas-regulation/

One Big Legal Obstacle Keeps Trump from Undoing Greenhouse Gas Regulation

The Supreme Court backed a federal rule that CO2 emissions endanger health, and the White House is having trouble working around it

Pres. Donald Trump’s administration has announced plans to dismantle an array of federal efforts to fight global warming, including a program to reduce carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, a rule limiting methane gas leaks and a mandate that aggressively boosts auto emissions standards.

But Trump officials face a major roadblock in their efforts, legal scholars say. It is the U.S. Environmental Protection

Agency’s 2009 formal “endangerment finding,” which states carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases emitted from smokestacks and other man-made sources “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” This agency rule, supported by two Supreme Court decisions, legally compels the government to do exactly what its new leaders want to avoid: regulate greenhouse gases . Although EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt publicly doubts a connection between human-produced carbon emissions and global warming, any attempt to undo this rule “would be walking into a legal buzz saw,” says Michael Gerrard, faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Endangerment is “ the linchpin for everything —all of the carbon regulation under the Clean Air Act,” says Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at Vermont Law School.

The rule’s fundamental power is exactly why Pruitt has to remove it, says Myron Ebell, who oversaw the Trump transition team at the EPA. “You can’t just take out the flowers—you have to take out the roots—starting with the endangerment finding,” says Ebell, a

senior fellow at the conservative think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “You can undo the Obama climate agenda on the surface by reopening the Clean Power Plant rule, the methane rule, rescinding the [auto emissions] standards and so on. But the underlying foundation remains.” The conservative Web site Breitbart, read widely among Trump’s supporters and still tied to its former publisher, White House adviser Steve Bannon, has attacked Pruitt as a political careerist for reportedly resisting pressure to revoke the finding.

The rule rests on a 2007 Supreme Court decision in the case Massachusetts v. EPA, which determined the agency has the authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases. When the finding itself was later challenged, the Court upheld it. The endangerment finding prevents Pruitt from ignoring climate change or eliminating greenhouse gas regulations outright. The EPA can attempt to water down these standards and regulations, perhaps substantially. But Pruitt “would have to come up with a scientific basis for saying that greenhouse gas

emissions do not in fact pose a threat to public health and welfare,” Gerrard says. “That would be a very difficult finding, considering every court that has addressed the issue of the science of climate change has found there to be a solid factual, scientific basis for it.”

To begin to remove the endangerment rule, the EPA would have to go through a formal rule-making process. That means inviting public comments, reviewing available evidence and scientifically justifying every point. Formulating and then defending such a document in court would be a big challenge, given it cuts against the legal and scientific consensus linking carbon to climate change. Even Ebell concedes this is a formidable obstacle. “That’s why a lot of people on our side say it’s not worth the trouble,” he says. “The people who disagree with me are not nuts—they are making substantial arguments for why we should not do it.”

The endangerment finding has its roots in the waning days of the Clinton administration, when then–EPA General Counsel Jonathan Cannon drafted a legal memo stating the agency had the authority to regulate carbon emissions. At the time this was a novel and counterintuitive idea. CO2 is a ubiquitous, naturally occurring gas, essential to photosynthesis and other basic processes of life on Earth. It’s not poisonous like smog and other dangerous pollutants targeted by the Clean Air Act. “CO2 is a different sort of pollutant than many that the EPA regulates,” says Cannon, now a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Its effects are felt over time through the climate system, not as immediate effects on one’s lungs or physical systems.”

But the Clean Air Act “has a very broad definition of what a pollutant can be and what harm a pollutant causes,” says George Kimbrell, legal director of the International Center for Technology Assessment and the Center for Food Safety, two related groups among a coalition of environmental organizations that formally petitioned the EPA to regulate carbon in 1999. The law defines “air pollutant” as "any air pollution agent or combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical, biological, radioactive...substance or matter, which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air.” According to Kimbrell, “The breadth of that language suggested greenhouse gas emissions would qualify under the statute.”

The language prompted a lawsuit from states and small environmental groups, during the George W. Bush administration, to sue the EPA to force it to regulate carbon. The result was the Supreme Court’s 5–4 2007 Massachusetts decision. Following that ruling, the endangerment finding then spelled out the legal rationale and the scientific basis for regulation.

What can the Trump administration do to get out of this regulatory box? It could push Congress to amend the

Clean Air Act to explicitly exclude carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the list of air pollutants. But even if it passed the

Republican-dominated House, Parenteau notes, such a bill could be effectively opposed by Democrats in the Senate, who have enough votes to hold up or change legislation. . The EPA could also target climate rules not based on the endangerment finding, such as procedures for monitoring and reporting greenhouse gases, according to Gerrard.

The most likely outcome , legal scholars say, is a series of incremental battles in which the administration and

Congress try to weaken individual climate rules and enforcement—while those efforts are repeatedly challenged in court by states and environmental groups hoping to run out the clock on the Trump administration. “One reason the endangerment finding is important,” Cannon says, “is that, should administrations change, it provides the basis for further climate initiatives.”

Paris isn’t key – there are bigger green victories that may get rolled-back. Preserving the endangerment finding is key.Atkin ‘17

Emily - “Climate-Change Deniers Aren’t Tired of Winning Yet” - New Republic - June 15, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - https://newrepublic.com/article/143287/climate-change-deniers-arent-tired-winning-yet

Climate-Change Deniers Aren’t Tired of Winning Yet

Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement came as a huge relief to them. Now they're setting their sights on bigger prizes.

In the days and months before President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw the United States from the Paris accord, climate-change deniers were preparing for the worst. Trump twice postponed meetings about whether to remain in the agreement, raising questions about whether Trump would cave to overwhelming pressure from some of his closest advisers (not to mention scientists, corporations, and the international community). “His views are evolving,” Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser and a supporter of the agreement, claimed in late May.

This was supposed to be a straightforward decision. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to “cancel” the accord. After his election, he appointed libertarian think-tanker Myron Ebell—an ally of the fossil-fuel industry who has been labeled a “climate criminal” by green activists—to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition. After inauguration, Trump appointed then–Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, another climate denier who’s cozy with industry, to lead the EPA, and signed executive orders directing the EPA to dismantle climate-change regulations.

But two months in, some prominent members of the denier community began to worry. “We have a problem,” Ebell said at a March conference for the Heartland Institute, an organization dedicated to discrediting climate science. “Swamp creatures are still [at the White House]. They are trying to infiltrate the administration. And some of them are succeeding.” Alarmed by Trump’s indecision on Paris, Ebell’s organization—the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is partly funded by coal companies—began running television ads pressuring Trump to exit.

Paris wasn’t the only issue raising alarms, as several members of Ebell’s EPA transition team expressed concerns about Pruitt. They complained that he wasn’t speaking strongly enough against climate science; wasn’t acting quickly enough to repeal regulations; and had not acted to undo the EPA’s categorization of carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Breitbart’s James Delingpole—one of the most prolific anti-environmentalist trolls on the internet—tore into Pruitt and Trump for not being aggressive enough in rejecting climate science, and even suggested Pruitt consider resigning. “If the Trump administration is serious about dealing with the vast and out-of-control Climate Industrial Complex which has done so much harm to the U.S. and the world these past few decades, then it is going to need to seriously up its game,” Delingpole wrote.

Then Trump decided to withdraw from Paris after all—the debate was “mostly a charade,” Axios reported—and the president and Pruitt were denier-heroes once more. Ebell took to the cable news shows to praise the president. Breitbart celebrated, too. “I thought [Trump] was going to fudge it much more than he did; that he’d end up compromising to please Ivanka,” Delingpole wrote. “Just when even some of his fans were starting to doubt him, he has made his presidency great again.”

Now, as the U.S. has isolated itself from the rest of the world in the climate-change debate , those same deniers who influenced Trump on Paris are setting their sights on other policy priorities . Because if it wasn’t entirely clear that the Trump administration was on their side, it is now. “Our concern before was whether the things we wanted were going to

get done at all,” said David Stevenson, a former EPA transition team member and policy director at the Caesar Rodney Institute. “Now we’re just talking about how you do it.”

What’s next on the deniers’ policy wishlist? Stevenson’s answer: undoing the EPA’s “ endangerment finding.” This was demand also dominated the discussion at the Heartland Institute conference, and Ebell called it his biggest priority during a closed-door meeting at a conservative conference last month. At least three conservative groups have also petitioned the EPA to undo the finding, according to Reuters, as have other figures in the climate denier community.

The endangerment finding is the EPA’s official document stating that carbon dioxide emissions are harmful to human health and the environment, and that they therefore must be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The document ensures environmentalists have standing to sue the EPA if it doesn’t act on climate change. “As long as that’s sitting there, the potential for legal challenges just goes on and on and on, and that’s not productive for any of us,” Stevenson said.

Many conservatives want to undo the endangerment finding for the same reason so many of them wanted to exit the Paris agreement:

They believed its existence exposes the U.S. to lawsuits from environmentalists alleging that the government isn’t acting to reduce emissions. In other words, conservatives want to permanently ensure that the U.S. has no future legal obligation to do anything about climate change.

But it’s not just about the future. Undoing the endangerment finding would also empower the federal government to instantly repeal all existing regulations that reduce global warming. That includes the Clean Power Plan, President Barack

Obama’s effort to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, as well as Obama-era fuel economy standards for cars and light trucks, known as CAFE standards. As it happens, repealing CAFE standards and the Clean Power Plan are two of the Heartland Institute’s top five environmental policy priorities.

Despite Paris’ global reductions, US roll-back would mean the globe crosses the Two-Degree threshold. Sneed ‘17

Internally quoting Ben Sanderson - a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Annie Sneed is an Environmental Reporter / Associate Editor at Scientific American - Scientific American - “Trump Day 1: Global Warming's Fate” – Scientific American - January 20, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-day-1-global-warmings-fate/

Average global temperature has already risen at least 0.8 degree C above preindustrial levels, and Sanderson estimates the most

current number is likely between 0.9 to 1.3 degrees C . Under the Paris agreement nearly 200 countries agreed to limit the global temperature rise this century to less than 2 degrees C as well as consider ways to reach an even tighter

1.5-degree C target. There is little margin left between where the world is now and where it does not want to go. If the U.S ., the world’s second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, fails to act , the world will find it incredibly difficult to meet the 2-degree C goal. “The consequences of a delay in action,” Sanderson says, “ are that we permanently miss our target .”

To hit the 2-degree C mark, Sanderson estimates global emissions would have to peak in the next decade,

decline to zero by 2060–70, then go negative. In order to help make that happen the U.S. has pledged to cut emissions 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, which would reduce the country’s climate pollution down to between 4.6 billion and 5.5 billion metric tons annually. The latest EPA estimate put U.S. greenhouse gas emissions around 6.9 billion metric tons in 2014.

Two-degrees is a tipping point.Wagner & Weitzman ‘15

Martin L. Weitzman is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Previously he was on the faculties of MIT and Yale. He has been elected as a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published widely in many leading economic journals and written three books. His current research is focused on environmental economics, including climate change. Also internally quoting Gernot Wagner – who is a Research Associate at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, lecturer on Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard, and a Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. He’s a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a former Adjunct Associate Professor of energy economics at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs - PBS NewsHour Making Sen$e with Paul Solman - December 3rd, 2015 - #CutWithKirby - http://gwagner.com/pbs-newshour-making-sene-with-paul-solman-paris-qa/

Everyone is talking about 2 degrees Celsius. Why? What happens if the planet warms by 2 degrees Celsius ?

Martin L. Weitzman : Two degrees Celsius has turned into an iconic threshold of sorts, a political target, if you will.

And for good reason. Many scientists have looked at so-called tipping points with huge potential changes to the climate system: methane being released from the frozen tundra at rapid rates , the Gulfstream shutting down and

freezing over Northern Europe, the Amazon rainforest dying off. The short answer is we just don’t — can’t — know with 100

percent certainty when and how these tipping points will, in fact, occur. But there seems to be a lot of evidence that things can go horribly wrong once the planet crosses that 2 degree threshold.

In “Climate Shock,” you write that we need to insure ourselves against climate change. What do you mean by that?

Gernot Wagner: At the end of the day, climate is a risk management problem. It’s the small risk of a huge catastrophe that ultimately ought to drive the final analysis. Averages are bad enough. But those risks — the “tail risks” — are what puts the “shock” into “Climate Shock.”

Martin L. Weitzman: Coming back to your 2 degree question, it’s also important to note that the world has already warmed by around 0.85 degrees since before we started burning coal en masse. So that 2 degree threshold is getting closer and

closer. Much too close for comfort.

The impact’s existential. The best risk calculus dictates that this impact outweighs all others. Wagner & Weitzman ‘15

Gernot Wagner is a Research Associate at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, lecturer on Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard, and a Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment. He’s a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a former Adjunct Associate Professor of energy economics at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Co-authored with Martin L. Weitzman – who is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Previously he was on the faculties of MIT and Yale. He has been elected as a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published widely in many leading economic journals and written three books. His current research is focused on environmental economics, including climate change. “How does climate stack up against other worst-case scenarios?” – EcoBusiness - 8 April 2015 - #CutWithKirby – Modified for language that may offend - http://www.eco-business.com/opinion/how-does-climate-stack-up-against-other-worst-case-scenarios/

Climate isn’t the only catastrophe threatening the planet, but it may be the one most in need of attention and resources, say Environmental Defense Fund lead economist Gernot Wagner and Harvard University economics professor Martin Weitzman.

What we know about climate change is bad. What we don’t know makes it potentially much worse. But climate change isn’t the only big problem facing society.

Opinions differ on what should rightly be called (considered) an “existential risk” or planetary-scale “catastrophe.”

Some include nuclear accidents or terror ism . Others insist only nuclear war, or at least a large-scale nuclear attack, reaches dimensions worthy of the “global” label.

There are half a dozen other candidates that seem to make it on various lists of the worst of the worst, and it’s

tough to come up with a clear order of which most demands our attention and limited resources. In addition to climate change , let’s consider asteroids, biotechnology, nanotechnology, nukes, pandemics , robots and “strangelets,” strange matter with the potential of swallowing the Earth in a fraction of a second.

That might strike some as a rather short list. Aren’t there thousands of potential risks? One could imagine countless ways to die in a traffic accident alone. That’s surely the case. But there’s an important difference: While traffic deaths are tragic on an individual level, they are hardly catastrophic as a class.

Every entry on our list has the potential to wipe out civilization as we know it. All are global, highly impactful and mostly irreversible in human

timescales. Most are highly uncertain .

One response to any list like this is to say that each such problem deserves our (appropriate) attention, independently of what we do with any of the others. If there’s more than one existential risk facing the planet, we ought to consider and address each in turn.

That logic has its limits. If catastrophe policies were to eat up all the resources we have, we’d clearly have to pick and choose. But we don’t seem to be

anywhere close. A first step, then, should always be to turn to benefit-cost analysis, which in turn is something that every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan has affirmed as a guiding principle of government policy.

Ideally, society should conduct serious benefit-cost analyses for each worst-case scenario: estimate probabilities and possible impact s , multiply the two, and compare it to the costs of action in each instance. If climate change and asteroids and biotechnology and nanotechnology and nukes and pandemics and robots and strangelets emerge as problems worthy of more of our attention, society should devote more resources to each.

But we can’t just hide behind standard benefit-cost analysis that ignores extremes . Each of these scenarios may also have their own variant of “fat tails,” or underestimated and possibly unquantifiable extreme events that could dwarf all else. The analysis soon moves toward some version of a precautionary principle focused on extreme events. The further we move away from standard benefit-cost analysis, the more acute the need to compare across worst-case scenarios — a comparison that is getting increasingly difficult.

How, then, to analyze these potential worst-case scenarios and decide which deserves more of our attention?

For one, only two on the list — asteroids and climate change — allow us to point to history as evidence of the enormity of the problem. For asteroids, go back 65 million years to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. For climate, go back a bit over 3 million years to find today’s concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and sea levels up to 20 meters (66 feet) higher than today.

Asteroids come in various shapes and sizes. We begin our book Climate Shock by looking at the one that exploded above Chelyabinsk Oblast in February 2013. The impact injured 1,500 and caused some limited damage to buildings. We shouldn’t wish for more of these impacts to happen just for the spectacular footage, but we’d be hard pressed to call an asteroid of that size a “worst-case scenario.”

NASA’s attempts at cataloguing and defending against objects from space aims at much larger asteroids, the ones that come in civilization-destroying sizes. Astronomers may have been underestimating the likelihood of Chelyabinsk Oblast–size asteroids all along. That’s a problem that needs to be rectified, but it’s not a problem that will wipe out civilization. If we estimated the likelihood of a much larger impact incorrectly, the consequences could be significantly more painful.

Luckily, when it comes to asteroids, there’s another feature working for us. Science should be able to observe, catalog and divert every last one of these large asteroids — if sufficient resources are provided. That’s a big if, but not an insurmountable one: A National Academy study puts the cost at $2 to $3 billion and 10 years’ research to launch an actual test of an asteroid deflection technology. That’s much more than we are spending at the moment, but the decision seems rather easy: Spend the money, solve the problem, move on.

Strangelets are the opposite of the Chelyabinsk Oblast asteroid in that they have never been observed. They are straight out of science fiction and may be theoretically impossible. If it is possible, though, there may be a chance that large heavy-ion colliders like the one ramping up once again at CERN near Geneva could create them. That has prompted research teams to calculate the likelihood of a strangelet actually happening. Their verdict: Concrete numbers for the upper bound hover between 0.0000002 percent and 0.002 percent. That’s not zero, but it might as well be.

So yes, swallowing the entire planet would be the ultimate bad — clearly worse, say, than melting the poles and raising sea levels by several meters or feet. Stranger things have happened. But strangelets very, very, very likely won’t.

The same could be said of autonomous robots reproducing and taking over the world. It’s not that it can’t ever happen, but it certainly hasn’t happened before. That doesn’t mean it won’t, but if forced to put a probability on the eventuality, it would be very, very small.

If we could rank worst-case scenarios by how likely they are to occur, we’d have taken a huge step forward. If the chance of a strangelet or robot takeover is so small as to be ignorable, probabilities alone might point to where to focus. But that’s not all. The size of the impact matters, too. So does the potential to respond.

What then, if anything, still distinguishes climate change from the others remaining: biotechnology, nanotechnology, nukes

and pandemics?

For one, the relatively high chance of eventual planetary catastrophe . In Climate Shock, we zero in on eventual average global warming of 6 °C (11 °F) as the final cutoff few would doubt represents a true planetary catastrophe. Higher temperatures are beyond anyone’s grasp.

Yet our current path doesn’t exclude eventual average global warming above 6 °C. In fact, our own analysis puts the likelihood at around 10

percent, and that’s for an indisputable global catastrophe. Climate change would trigger plenty of catastrophic events with temperatures rising by much less than 6 °C. Many scientists would name 2 ° C (3.6 °F) as the threshold, and we are well on our way to exceeding that, unless there is a major global course correction.

Second, the gap between our current efforts and what’s needed on climate change is enormous. We are no experts on any of the other worst-case scenarios, but there at least it seems like much is already being done.

Take nuclear terrorism. The United States alone spends many hundreds of billions of dollars each year on its military, intelligence and security services. That doesn’t stamp out the chance of terrorism. Some of the money spent may even be fueling it, and there are surely ways to approach the problem more strategically at times, but at least the overall mission is to protect the United States and its citizens.

It would be hard to argue that U.S. climate policy today benefits from anything close to this type of effort. As for mitigating pandemics, more could surely be spent on research, monitoring and rapid response, but here too it seems like needed additional efforts would plausibly amount to a small fraction of national income.

Third, climate change has firm historical precedence. There’s ample reason to believe that pumping carbon dioxide

into the atmosphere is reliving the past — the distant past, but the past nonetheless. The planet has seen today’s carbon dioxide levels before: over 3 million years ago, with sea levels some 20 meters higher than today, and camels roaming the high Arctic. There are considerable

uncertainties in all of this, but there’s little reason to believe that humanity can cheat basic physics and chemistry.

Contrast the historical precedent of climate change with that of biotechnology, or rather the lack of it. The fear that bioengineered genes and genetically modified organisms will wreak havoc in the wild is a prime example. They may act like invasive species in some areas, but a global takeover seems unlikely, to say the least. Much like climate change, historical precedent can give us some guidance. But unlike climate change, that same historical precedent gives us quite a bit of comfort.

Nature itself has tried for millions of years to create countless combinations of mutated DNA and genes.

The process of natural selection all but guarantees that only a tiny fraction of the very fittest permutations has survived. Genetically modified crops grow bigger and stronger and are pesticide-resistant. But they can’t outgrow natural selection entirely. None of that yet guarantees that scientists wouldn’t be able to develop permutations that could wreak havoc in the

wild, but historical experience would tell us that the chance is indeed slim.

In fact, the best scientists working on biotechnology seem to be much less concerned about the dangers of “Frankenfoods” and GMOs than the

general public.

The reverse holds true for climate change. The best climate scientists appear to be significantly more concerned

about ultimate climate impacts than the majority of the general public and many policy makers. That alone should give us pause.

1NC

1NC Frontlines

Frontline

Gorsuch means agency deference will decline in the status quoDorf ‘17

Michael C. Dorf is a Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. He has written or edited three books, including No Litmus Test: Law Versus Politics in the Twenty-First Century, and Constitutional Law Stories. Dorf is a former law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. While at Harvard as an undergraduate, he was the American Parliamentary Debate Association national champion. “Will Gorsuch Make the Supreme Court Less Polarized” – Newsweek - 4/10/17 - http://www.newsweek.com/michael-dorf-will-gorsuch-make-supreme-court-less-polarized-581081

The confirmation of Neil Gorsuch brings the Supreme Court back to full strength for the first time since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last February.

Gorsuch’s record provides strong evidence that he will fit comfortably in the conservative wing of the high court. Had the Senate confirmed Merrick Garland instead of Gorsuch, we might have witnessed a sea change, but replacing Scalia with Gorsuch implies a return to the prior status quo, does it not?

Not entirely. Justice Byron White, for whom Gorsuch served as a law clerk, used to say that whenever a new justice is named to the Supreme Court, the replacement creates “a different court.”

Gorsuch’s record provides strong evidence that he will fit comfortably in the conservative wing of the high court. Had the Senate confirmed

Merrick Garland instead of Gorsuch, we might have witnessed a sea change, but replacing Scalia with Gorsuch implies a return to the prior status quo, does it not?

Not entirely. Justice Byron White, for whom Gorsuch served as a law clerk, used to say that whenever a new justice is named to the Supreme Court, the replacement creates “a different court.”

Gorsuch may be as conservative as Scalia was, but he is not Scalia. Consider that Gorsuch is a leading critic of judicial deference to administrative agencies , which Scalia championed. That difference could ultimately herald a deregulatory turn by the court, but in the short run it could place Justice Gorsuch in opposition to the president who appointed him.

Deference isn’t key to any Aff module. Agencies offer other rationales for their policies and deference doesn’t ensure agencies get their agenda when challenged in court.

Deference isn’t key – Trump could still win in Court. Ending deference only means judges will be forced to rule on the merits – not that they can’t still side with Trump’s EPA.

Pruitt won’t support Trump roll-back – he doesn’t support ending the endangerment finding.Restuccia ‘17

et al; Andrew Restuccia is a senior policy reporter at POLITICO. Prior to joining POLITICO, Restuccia covered energy and environmental politics and policy at The Hill. He also reported on energy policy for The Washington Independent and Inside Washington Publishers. Restuccia graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in journalism. “Pruitt takes fire from conservatives in climate showdown” – Politico - 03/28/2017 - #CutWithKirby - http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/pruitt-climate-change-236572

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is coming under fire from conservatives amid a simmering behind-the-scenes fight

over how far to take President Donald Trump's push to undo his predecessor's climate change agenda.

In discussions with the White House over the executive order Trump is scheduled to sign on Tuesday, Pruitt successfully argued against including language revoking the agency's 2009 “endangerment finding," according to two sources close to the issue.

The endangerment finding declared that greenhouse gas emissions threaten human health and welfare and made EPA legally responsible for regulating carbon dioxide. It later set in motion much of former President Barack Obama's climate agenda. To many conservative skeptics of mainstream climate science, overturning the finding is an essential first step toward successfully undoing Obama administration climate regulations on everything from power plants to vehicles.

But Pruitt, with the backing of several White House aides, argued in closed-door meetings that the legal hurdles to overturning the finding were massive, and the administration would be setting itself up for a lengthy court battle.

Paris withdraw spurred State action. That will compensate for Federal inaction.Waters ‘17

Hannah Waters is an associate editor at Audubon.org. Audubon is a non-profit environmental organization dedicated to conservation. Audubon is one of the oldest of such organizations in the world and uses science, education and grassroots advocacy to advance its conservation mission - “U.S. Exit from Paris Climate Agreement Sets America on Lonely, Misbegotten Path” – Audubon - June 01, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - http://www.audubon.org/news/us-exit-paris-climate-agreement-sets-america-lonely-misbegotten-path

Those actions don’t make the U.S. climate movement hopeless; it just means that the onus to reduce U.S. emissions will fall on citizens, states, and local governments without help from the federal government.

Already around the country, states and cities are setting their own carbon emissions goals and passing laws to meet them.

After Trump's address, 61 U.S. mayors made a promise to uphold the goals laid out by the Paris Agreement, while the

governors of Washington, New York, and California announced a new climate alliance. California is leading the effort in other

ways, too: Yesterday its State Senate passed a bill to produce all of its energy from renewable or zero-carbon sources by 2045. Twenty-eight other states plus Washington, D.C. have set similar renewable energy standards. Many corporations have followed by setting their own reduced emissions targets.

All of these efforts ensure a U.S. market for renewable energy sources, which are already thriving. Solar and wind prices are falling fast, and last year the number of solar installations doubled compared to the year before.

Even though Trump is having the nation exit the Paris Agreement, the American people and local governments can still make a difference and help the countries that remain commited to the pact curb global emissions. If the international community

holds it together and millions of U.S. residents commit to climate action locally, Trump may end up being a catalyst for the climate action that he so decries as unfair to American interests.

Domestic rollback isn’t key – US withdraw from Paris is more important.Oppenheimer ‘17

Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. Oppenheimer is interviewed in this piece by Robinson Meyer, who is an associate editor at The Atlantic – “Avoiding Two Degrees of Warming 'Is Now Totally Unrealistic'” – The Atlantic – June 3rd - #CutWithKirby - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/oppenheimer-interview/529083/

Meyer: Do you think it’s the withdrawal from Paris that puts us over the edge? The Trump administration has already cancelled a lot of the Obama programs to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions—are those more important?

Oppenheimer: No, I don’t think that cancelling domestic regulations will actually have as much effect as the withdrawal from Paris could. I am fairly confident it’s going to discourage some other countries from being aggressive in their commitments.

The two do go together, they’re of a piece. But, in fact, there is no immediate effect from some of the work the Trump

administration has done on the Obama regulations. Because you can’t just cancel them. Even with the Clean Power Plan—if the courts determine that the plan is legal, then it will take years for the adminstration to rewrite it. They can slow down implementation but they can’t eliminate it. Also, a lot of the momentum in the markets—in terms of low prices for solar and wind and natural gas—is going to continue, no matter what.

Warming not real- recent temperatures show no increaseHapper ‘12 (William is a professor of physics at Princeton. “Global Warming Models Are Wrong Again”, Wall Street Journal, 3/27/12, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577291352882984274.html)

What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years . Monthly values of the global temperature anomaly of the lower atmosphere, compiled at the University of Alabama from NASA satellite data, can be found at the website http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/. The latest (February 2012)

monthly global temperature anomaly for the lower atmosphere was minus 0.12 degrees Celsius, slightly less than the average since the satellite record of temperatures began in 1979

2 degree threshold is contrived. Too many other factors mean that the world will either inevitably cross it… or inevitably miss it. There’s no way that rollback under the Trump administration is key.

It’s too late – impossible to meet the 2 degree target.Mooney ‘17

Internally quoting Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research. Chris Mooney writes about energy and the environment at The Washington Post. Chris also has published four books about science and climate change. “ Analysis: Trump's climate deal departure makes already tough target harder to hit” Chicago Tribune - June 1st - #CutWithKirby - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-trump-paris-climate-agreement-analysis-20170601-story.html

Still, there's no way to read the U.S. departure as good news for the 2 degree s C goal.

The commitments made by countries in Paris , on their own, did not achieve sufficient reductions in

greenhouse gas emissions to meet the agreed target .

Some scientists have been skeptical of the Paris target for some time -- simply because there's only a finite amount of carbon dioxide that humans can put in the air before the earth is committed to a 2 degree Celsius rise in temperature.

That so-called "carbon budget" gets narrower every year.

"There's so many things that need to go right for 2 degrees . Essentially we've emitted too much , which makes the 2-degree challenge hard ," said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo.

Warming won’t cause the worst impacts - mitigation and adaptation solve Mendelsohn ‘9

(Robert O. Mendelsohn 9, the Edwin Weyerhaeuser Davis Professor, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, June 2009, “Climate Change and Economic Growth,” online: http://www.growthcommission.org/storage/cgdev/documents/gcwp060web.pdf)

These statements are largely alarmist and misleading . Although climate change is a serious problem that deserves

attention, society’s immediate behavior has an extremely low probability of leading to catastrophic

consequences. The science and economics of climate change is quite clear that emissions over the next few

decades will lead to only mild consequences. The severe impacts predicted by alarmists require a century (or

two in the case of Stern 2006) of no mitigation. Many of the predicted impacts assume there will be no or little

adaptation . The net economic impacts from climate change over the next 50 years will be small regardless. Most of the more

severe impacts will take more than a century or even a millennium to unfold and many of these

“ potential ” impacts will never occur because people will adapt. It is not at all apparent that

immediate and dramatic policies need to be developed to thwart long ‐ range climate risks . What is needed

are long‐run balanced responses.

Narrowing deference collapses the patent systemWasserman ‘13

Melissa F. Wasserman, B.S. in chemical engineering, Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton. She received her J.D. magna cum laude from New York University School of Law. “The Changing Guard of Patent Law: Chevron Deference for the PTO”, 54 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1959 (2013), http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol54/iss6/5

III. NORMATIVE CASE FOR DEFERENCE: COMPARATIVE INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS

This Article has thus far predominantly focused on the analytical question of how existing administrative law principles should apply to the judicial review of the PTO’s legal interpretations. The previous Part showed first that Congress intended the PTO’s postgrant review proceedings to be effectuated through formal adjudication, and second, that this grant of formal adjudicatory power was accompanied by the ability to speak with the force of law. Although this descriptive and analytical account is sufficient to guide courts, it does not address the normative question of how the institutional relationship between the PTO and the Federal Circuit should be structured. This Part begins this normative inquiry, taking as its baseline the principal goal of the patent system—the promotion of innovation.203 To guide this analysis, I draw on the large and growing body of literature on the topic of comparative institutional analysis.204 This Part does not purport to elucidate the ideal institutional arrangement between courts and agencies. Instead, the following discussion compares the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Federal Circuit and the PTO with respect to the two canonical institutional design considerations: expertise and avoidance of capture or bias.

A. Expertise

Scholars generally accept that the standards of patentability are fundamentally policy questions that need to be decided on the basis of sound economic and technological insight .205 For example, consider patentable subject matter, which delineates the types of inventions that may be subject to patent protection. Section 101 of the Patent Act is quite broad, setting forth the subject matter that can be patented as “process[es], machine[s], manufacture[s], or composition[s] of matter.”206 Early on, the Supreme Court carved out abstract ideas, natural phenomena, and laws of nature from patent eligible subject matter. As the Supreme Court explained, these principles represent “the basic tools of scientific and technological work,”207 and they are “part of the storehouse of knowledge of all men[,] ... free to all men and reserved exclusively to none.”208 Thus, decisions on whether new inventions, such as genes, which may or may not fall within an exception, should be patent eligible are largely being driven by policy concerns of whether social welfare is enhanced or decreased by extending patents to these inventions.

As a result, there is near-universal agreement that the institution charged with creating sound patent policy

needs access both to economic and to technological data , as well as sufficient expertise to analyze and interpret this information.209 Although one of the hallmarks of the comparative institutional literature is that agencies possess superior information-gathering procedures and technical expertise than courts,210 the specialization of the Federal Circuit casts doubt on

whether this norm should extend to the patent system. In fact, a number of scholars have argued that the Federal Circuit is the best institution to develop patent policy, in part because of the court’s expertise.211 Even taking into consideration the Federal Circuit’s specialization, this Section concludes that the PTO is more likely than the appellate court to possess

the prerequisite characteristics necessary to adjust the patentability standards towards an optimal innovation level.

To begin, the PTO, in general, enjoys superior mechanisms of gathering info rmation necessary to make informed patent policy decisions. The agency conducts hearings,212 partakes in research studies,213 and works closely with other expert federal agencies.214 The PTO also engages in rule-making procedures, even when it is not

legally obligated to do so, that are specifically designed to encourage interested parties to communicate relevant

viewpoints and information to the Agency.215 The PTO could expand this host of information-gathering techniques and rely upon them more heavily to collect the technological and economic data necessary to craft substantive patent law standards that promote innovation.

By contrast, like all appellate courts, the Federal Circuit is largely confined to the record developed by interested parties.216 While it is true that litigants present expert witnesses that provide courts with scientific and technical information that may be critical to their decisional process, it is generally thought that these witnesses are

biased towards their retaining party. The result is that in almost every case, the decision maker sees a “battle of the experts,” which likely diminishes the value of information garnered from such witnesses .217 Moreover,

it seems unlikely that individual parties, with arguably narrow interests in upholding or invalidating a patent, will even provide the court with the type of information necessary to make informed policy decisions, such as data on how broader or narrower patentability standards affect social welfare .218 Although courts have some ad hoc mechanisms to increase their access to information, these approaches are poor substitutes for the

information-gathering powers of agencies.219 For example, while the Federal Circuit routinely considers amicus curiae briefs, the

appellate court is still dependent on the amici submitting the right information necessary to adjust the standards of

patentability to promote innovation. If such information is not submitted, the Federal Circuit cannot, unlike the PTO, order its own fact findings to make up for the deficiency.220

However, even assuming that the Federal Circuit had the same access to technological and economic data as the PTO, little reason exists

to believe its ability to analyze and understand this information is superior to that of the PTO. Only a handful of the Federal Circuit judges hold scientific degrees.221 Even considering that the majority of law clerks have a scientific

background, the court’s technical expertise is still quite limited. By contrast, the PTO employs close to 7000 patent examiners, all of whom have been scientifically trained .222 In fact, many of the patent examiners hold

advanced scientific degrees in the precise areas in which they work.223 Although patent examiners may not on a day-to-day basis partici- pate in the development of guidelines or other documents that represent the PTO’s viewpoint on patent policy, they are at the disposal of the Agency when needed.224

The Fed eral Circuit fares even worse when its economic proficiency is considered. None of the Federal Circuit judges or their technical personnel are trained in economics.225 Thus, even if economic data was provided to the court through some means, the judges are highly unlikely to be able to evaluate the merits of such studies. They will not, for example, be able to determine methodological shortcomings of the empirical investigations, such as selection effects or data-gathering bias. Nor are they likely to be able to fully appreciate the limitations on the conclusions that can be made from these studies—that is, whether the study demonstrates only a correlation or whether casual inferences may be drawn. Further, even though the court’s jurisprudence has been routinely

criticized for being formalistic and failing to consider policy,226 the court has shown little interest in developing an innovation policy expertise.227 The appellate court’s hesitancy to embrace an explicit policy-making function is, in some ways, understandable. Unequivocal policy pronouncements are somewhat antithetical to judicial decision-making norms. Yet, at the same time, it is difficult to understand the court’s role, especially when deciding the meaning of an ambiguous term of the Patent Act, as not involving a policy determination. As noted earlier, the heart of the gene-patent debate is whether society would be better off with or without patents on genes.

Notably, in contrast to courts, agencies are expressly charged with making policy and weighing the costs and benefits of competing outcomes. Such explicit authority enables agencies to more fully embrace a policy-making role of making discretionary judgments based on a range of competing options. Even with such intellectual freedom, the PTO has historically lacked robust

economic expertise that is needed to make informed policy decisions.228 Unlike other agencies that specialize in technological innovation, the PTO has never employed a large number of policy-oriented thinkers or economists. Importantly, the Agency has recently made strides to rectify this shortcoming. In 2010 the PTO created an Office of the Chief Economist.229 This Office had an immediate impact on the Agency’s decision making.230 Although ample room still exists to improve the PTO’s personnel and infrastructure so that the Agency can make sound economic judgments, the creation of the Office of the Chief Economist represents an important victory—a recognition by the PTO and the executive branch of the import of expertise in innovation policy in patent law decision making.

Moreover, the enactment of the AIA makes future reforms to the PTO considerably more likely.231 Perhaps most significantly, the AIA granted the PTO fee-setting authority, which enables the chronically underfunded Agency to raise revenue to support a robust innovation policy group.232 Thus, although the PTO’s current structure is not optimal for promoting innovation policy by tailoring patentability standards, the Agency has the potential to change into one that does. In contrast, little hope exists that the Federal Circuit will ever possess the requisite expertise or institutional design needed to achieve the underlying goals of the patent system.

B. Capture and Institutional Bias

Even though expertise may give rise to distinctive advantages with respect to institutional competence, specialization has an associated drawback—the potential of “capture.” An institution’s repeated interaction with particular groups holding narrow interests may result in at least two pathologies. First, an institution may develop “tunnel vision,” pursuing its own technocratic worldview without sufficient regard for larger normative concerns.233 Second,

a narrow set of rights holders may directly capture an institution’s viewpoints. The latter concern stems from the logic that concentrated, well-financed groups are more likely than diffuse, less organized entities to influence decision makers.234 The result in either situation is that the institution will systematically make decisions that favor the interest of a narrow set of constituencies over those of the general public.

The concerns associated with capture theory are most frequently attributed to agencies that have repeated interactions with their regulatory constituents that could lead to distortions in agency decision making. More recently, scholars astutely observed that the adjudicative process is also susceptible to the influence of interest groups and expanded the applications of the theory to the judiciary as well.235 Of course, beyond capture concerns, other institutional structures may exist that also systematically bias the organization’s decision making. Although these influences may not be directly related to expertise, any bias in an institution’s decisional process is concerning—whether the institution is a court or an agency. Like many agencies, the PTO is not immune from charges of capture or institutional bias. The Agency has traditionally been structured to favor patent grants. My previous work has shown that the PTO’s historical fee structure likely biased the PTO towards issuing patents because the Agency garnered over half of its patent operating budget through fees it could collect only if it granted patents.236

Moreover, widespread agreement among scholars exists that the historical examiner compensation system favored allowance.237 Notably, all that is being asked of the PTO is to grant patents. The patent prosecution process occurs ex parte; no third party is present to argue that a patent should not be issued. These constant one-way demands to issue patents raise concerns that the Agency may develop tunnel vision. In fact, the Agency’s past rhetoric that its mission includes “help[ing] customers get patents” reveals a culture that appears to be unduly influenced by the interests of patentees.238 However, the PTO has made strides to overcome this pathology. The Agency recently revamped its examiner compensation system, among other things, to diminish incentives to grant patents.239 Recent empirical work by Mark Lemley and Bhaven Sampat finds a correlation between the length of patent examiner experience and an examiner’s propensity to grant a patent, and suggests that the incentives facing examiners are much more complicated than they were typically perceived.240

The passage of the AIA should further help alleviate some concerns of capture or bias. Because Congress granted the PTO feesetting authority, the Agency has taken steps, at least to some extent, to decrease its reliance on patent issuance fees.241 The enactment of robust postgrant review proceedings should broaden the Agency’s perspective, as the PTO will now routinely interact with constituents that are arguing to narrow the scope of patent law. Additionally, the low-cost design of the postgrant review proceedings will hopefully enable substantial participation from public interest groups, whose primary focus is the protection of the public domain.242 The result should be increased awareness, promoting innovation not only by granting patent but also by protecting the public domain. Nevertheless, like all agencies, capture remains a point of concern with the PTO.

Agency capture, however, represents a substantial objection to extending Chevron deference to the PTO only to the extent that the judicial alternative is superior. The specialization of the Federal Circuit has led some commentators to suggest that the appellate court is prone to the same institutional pathologies of tunnel vision and bias of which they have accused the PTO.243 The Federal Circuit hears disproportionately from the patent bar and has increasingly begun to draw its technical staff—most notably its clerks—from patent law firms.244 Although intellectual property law firms represent both plaintiffs and defendants in patent litigation, they are generally likely to benefit from broad patent rights, especially with respect to patentable subject matter.245 As Arti Rai recently noted, empirical data on amicus briefs supports this contention: patent bar associations file amicus briefs in favor of patentees at a significantly higher rate than the government or high-tech companies.246 More directly, the court’s patent law jurisprudence has exhibited some symptoms that are consistent with bias. Several commentators have noted that Federal Circuit precedent has trended towards strengthening patent rights.247 Empirical evidence also suggests that the Federal Circuit has propatentee tendencies.248 The Supreme Court’s renewed interest in the development of substantive patent law and its repeated reversal of Federal Circuit jurisprudence is also suggestive of tunnel vision.249 Definitively proving capture of an agency or a court is difficult, if not impossible. Some scholars have certainly taken issue with the notion that the patent bar has captured the Federal Circuit.250 Nevertheless, the possibility that the Federal Circuit’s decision-making process is unduly influenced by factions, at the very least, gives pause to dismissing the concept of the PTO playing a larger role in patent policy based on agency capture alone.251

Beyond concerns of capture or of an institutional bias to allow patents, granting the PTO primary interpretive authority over the core patentability standards may give rise to a fear that the Agency’s policy decisions will be overly influenced by its production function—that is, its growing backlog of unreviewed patent applications.252 Michael Abramowicz and John Duffy have noted that “PTO officials might become too focused on the agency’s own workload problems” to fully account for the nuances of the policy issues at stake.253 As a result, Abramowicz and Duffy conclude that the Agency may favor bright line rules that can be quickly applied in an effort to speed up the processing of patent applications but may also prevent the fine tuning needed to optimize innovation policy.254 Again, however, a concern that the PTO may be overly concerned with the administration of substantive patent law represents a significant opposition to extending Chevron deference to the Agency only to the extent this pathology is absent in Federal Circuit decision making. The appellate court, however, has also been charged with favoring bright line, formulistic rules that may be oversimplifying the policy interests at stake in the development of substantive patent law. Numerous scholars have noted the Federal Circuit’s penchant for easy-to-apply rules.255 Moreover, the Supreme Court’s pattern of repeatedly overturning the Federal Circuit’s bright line rules, while concurrently emphasizing the need for more flexible standards, provides further evidence that the appellate court may be giving too much weight to the administration of its pronouncements.256 Thus, concerns that the Agency’s substantive law determi nations may be influenced by its production function alone do not appear to represent a significant obstacle to granting the PTO Chevron deference.

In sum, the PTO possesses superior pathways to acquire technological and economic data , as well as the expertise to evaluate and analyze this information to craft substantive patent law standards to promote innovation . Even though neither the Federal Circuit nor the PTO has historically shown strength in policy making, the PTO has

recently made significant strides to correct this deficiency. Moreover, although agencies in general are more likely to be captured

by organized interests, the fact that the Federal Circuit has exhibited symptoms consistent with tunnel vision at

times suggests that this concern is not significant enough to outweigh the PTO’s associated benefits of expertise. Thus, this Section ultimately concludes that both expertise and the avoidance of capture support the Fed eral Circuit granting Chevron deference to the PTO.

CONCLUSION

This Article has argued that the AIA rejects over two hundred years of court dominance in patent policy by granting the PTO, for the first time, the power to interpret the core patentability standards with the force of law. While an application of administrative law principles to the AIA

has substantial implications for the roles of patent institutions, it also, as the Article argues, produces a normatively desirable result. Making the PTO the primary interpreter of the core patentability standards ushers the patent system into the modern administrative era , which has long recognized the deficiencies associated with judge-driven policy . This Article, however, leaves for future research whether enabling the PTO to speak with the force of law only through case-by-case adjudication, rather than by robust substantive rule-making authority, is ideal.

Effective patents stops antibiotic resistanceLaxminarayan ‘1

[Ramanan Laxminarayan directs the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy. He is also a Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer at Princeton University. - See more at: http://www.cddep.org/profile/ramanan_laxminarayan#sthash.YqaghohJ.dpuf Spring 2001 http://www.rff.org/files/sharepoint/WorkImages/Download/RFF-Resources-143-antibiotic.pdf]

The Role of Patents

Firms that manufacture antibiotics face conflicting incentives with respect to resistance. On the one hand, bacterial resistance to a product can reduce the demand for that product. On the other hand, the resistance makes old drugs obsolete and can therefore encourage investment in new antibiotics. Pharmaceutical firms are driven to maximize profits during the course of the drug’s effective patent life—the period of time between obtaining regulatory approval for the antibiotic and the expiration of product and process patents to manufacture the drug. Given the paucity of tools at the policymaker’s disposal,

the use of patents to influence antibiotic use may be worth considering. A longer effective patent life could increase

incentives for a company to minimize resistance , since the company would enjoy a longer period of monopoly benefits from its antibiotic’s effectiveness.

Patent breadth is another critical consideration. When resistance is significant , other things being equal, it may be prudent to assign broad patents that cover an entire class of antibiotics rather than a single antibiotic. In

such a situation, the benefits of preserving effectiveness could outweigh the cost to society of greater monopoly power associated with broader patents. Broad patents may prevent many firms from competing inefficiently for the same pool of effectiveness embodied in a class of antibiotics, while providing an incentive to develop new antibiotics.

ExtinctionPlotkin 2K

(Mark J., Ph.D., President – Amazon Conservation Team and Research Associate – Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History, Trained Ethnobotanist, and Tropical Researcher, “Searching for Nature’s Medicines”, Action Bioscience, October, http://www.actionbioscience.org/biodiversity/plotkin.html)

Rain forests and coral reefs have incredible potential for natural medicines.

Plotkin: The hottest regions, in terms of immediate potential, would be rain forests and coral reefs. As I pointed out in my first book [Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Amazon Rain Forest], the rainforest is one for obvious reasons. My new book shows that coral reefs are drawing even more attention than the rainforest. Now it’s interesting that you mention the desert because the organization that I run is the Amazon Conservation Team but one of our major programs is in the Sonoran desert. It is headed by my good friend and colleague Gary Nabham. Although this is one of the most difficult and challenging environments on the planet, local and indigenous people have figured out how to ecolive from it. One of the ways they’ve been able to do that is by understanding the resources and managing them wisely. Now if you were a plant and want to survive in the desert, you have to be tough and be able to protect yourself. These people’s lives depend on knowing this ecosystem. Why not look to them to not only understand it but also to protect and maybe even use it?

Is it possible to find an organism in nature that will alleviate the threat of antibiotic resistance?

We desperately need to solve the antibiotic resistance crisis and nature may hold the key .

Plotkin: I really do believe we’re at a crisis point . There is a bug called Staph aureus that you may have heard of and there is a

bug that you may or may not have heard of called Vancomycin-resistant enterococcus (VRE). If VRE transfers its Vancomycin

resistance to Staph aureus, we are toast . It is going to melt the human species like a wax museum on fire . Doctors have gone from concerned to worried to verging on frightened in some cases . These are quotes

now; I’m not making this up . We desperately need new drugs for drug-resistant Staph, drug resistant enterococcus,

and all these other drug- resistant bacteria that are out there, gram negative and gram positive.

It’s interesting that you mention the word “organism” to treat this. We tend to think of antibiotics as things that come from microbes. There is an even more exciting, or at least as exciting, development and that is the use of tiny tiny tiny viruses called bacteriophages. Bacteriophages eat bacteria. They were developed in France and in Soviet Georgia in the 30’s and, guess what, the Russians and Georgians have never stopped using this stuff. There is, in fact, evidence that Russian troops in Chechnya are still using bacteriophages. Certainly the Soviet soldiers carried them into World War II so it is clear that these things can be effective. There are several startup companies now in the U.S. and in parts of

Europe investigating bacteriophages as a source of new treatments for drug-resistant bacteria. They are claiming phenomenal rates of success.

So it’s that mixture of nature and science, which promises so much for the future .

2AC Backlines

A-to Specific Neg args

A-to “Gorsuch means squo will solve deference now”

Gorsuch’s arrival is insufficient to solve deference in the squo.Szoka ‘17

Berin Szóka is a lawyer and also a president of TechFreedom, a non-partisan think tank dedicated to technology policy. “Under Trump, Democrats have new incentive to disarm the bureaucracy” - The Hill – #CutWithKirby - http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/the-judiciary/322187-under-trump-democrats-have-new-incentive-to-disarm-the

Justice Gorsuch , who is likely to be vigorously opposed by Democrats , might actually be their savior when it comes to checking the Trump administration and the independent regulatory agencies.

If Senate Democrats wise up, they’ll use the Gorsuch hearings to pivot on Chevron and other forms of deference to agencies.

They’ll recognize that Gorsuch and SOPRA represent a clean break with the kind of deference to government once championed by Justice Scalia. They’ll rediscover the concerns that Justice Breyer and other Democratic Supreme Court appointees have long expressed: giving unelected bureaucrats free rein in deciding what Congress meant is profoundly un-democratic.

It would take several more new Supreme Court Justices and many years to overturn Chevron and other deference decisions . So everything hinges on whether Congress moves some version of SOPRA. Instead of rejecting the bill outright, Democrats should propose specific amendments to change exactly how SOPRA would work — while still leveling the playing field in court battles with the administrative state.

Gorsuch won’t solve deference – his socially conservative ideology comes before his commitment to fight deference.Tillman ‘17

Zoe - The author is a former Reporter for National Law Journal and Legal Times and a current reporter for BuzzFeed News. The author holds a BA in Urban Studies and Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Internally quoting Elliot Mincberg, a senior fellow at the group People For the American Way, “Neil Gorsuch Wants The Supreme Court To Rethink Agency Power — And That Could Hurt Trump” – BuzzFeed News - February 15, 2017 – #CutWithKirby - https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoetillman/neil-gorsuch-wants-the-supreme-court-to-rethink-agency-power?utm_term=.eyBkQnR78#.axgkyN3gn

Elliot Mincberg, a senior fellow at the liberal group People For the American Way, wrote that it was “bogus” to think that Gorsuch’s aversion to agency deference meant he could be counted on to challenge executive overreach by Trump . Mincberg pointed to cases that he believed offer ed proof that Gorsuch would defer to executive authority , such as a case that involved a decision by the governor of Utah to suspend funding to a Planned Parenthood state affiliate.

In that case, a three-judge appeals panel ruled against the governor, based on evidence about his motivations in suspending the funds. A majority of the full Tenth Circuit voted not to reconsider the case in 2016, and Gorsuch dissented. He wrote that the panel should have given more deference to the district

court judge, who had originally ruled in favor of the governor.

Gorsuch won’t solve deference – Neg misreads Gorsuch’s true record.Mincberg ‘17

Elliot Mincberg, a senior fellow at the group People For the American Way. Mincberg has been cited as an expert in national publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Nation and has appeared on national broadcast outlets such as CNN and NPR. He’s testified before Congress on key issues and his work has been published in outlets such as the Aspen Journal of Ideas, Salon, and the Huffington Post. He has actively participated in federal and state court litigation at all levels on religious liberty, discrimination, and voting rights issues. He also serves on the Committee on Religious Liberty of the National Council of Churches and the National Advisory Board of the Religious Freedom Center of the Newseum Institute. – “The Bogus Argument that Gorsuch Will Stand Up to Trump Abuse of Presidential Authority” - People For the American Way - February 9, 2017 – #CutWithKirby - modified for language that may offend - http://www.pfaw.org/blog-posts/the-bogus-argument-that-gorsuch-will-stand-up-to-trump-abuse-of-presidential-authority/

As more and more Americans express concern about President Trump’s abuse of presidential authority and his derision of

judges who do not rubber stamp his agenda, questions are also being raised about whether Supreme Court nominee Neil

Gorsuch can be expected to stand up to (oppose) the President and members of his administration. Gorsuch defenders are understandably racing to respond, but their arguments are without merit. In particular, they cite Gorsuch’s statements in private to several Senators that Trump’s recent attacks on the federal judiciary are “disheartening” and “demoralizing.”

And they cite Gorsuch’s record questioning the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to executive branch agencies,

as evidence he will stand up to (oppose) abuses of executive branch officials’ authority. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, his record demonstrates likelihood that he would not exercise the necessary independence.

Factually – plan revisits both Chevron and Auer.

Factually – plan revisits both Chevron and Auer deference.Schroeder ‘17

et al; Kathryn "Kit" Schroeder, an associate in Bracewell s Austin, Texas, office, advises companies on environmental matters, helping them navigate environmental audits, permitting issues and the environmental aspects of business transactions. Formerly an attorney with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, she assisted with matters pertaining to industrial and hazardous waste, as well as municipal solid waste. “Gorsuch May Further Tip Balance Against Deference To EPA” – Law 360 - February 14, 2017 – #CutWithKirby - Modified for language that may offend - https://www.law360.com/articles/890417/gorsuch-may-further-tip-balance-against-deference-to-epa

And now the court may have that case: Gloucester County School Board v. (Grimm) G.G. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case to decide whether to accept the U.S. Department of Education’s interpretation of Title IX and its implementing regulations as applied to the right of access to particular bathrooms by a transgender

student in a public school . The case raises the question of judicial deference to agencies under both Chevron (statutory interpretation) and Auer (regulatory interpretation).

A-to “Court doesn’t defer to agencies in all instances now”

Counter-examples are irrelevant – they ignore the extent to which Trump will rev-up use of Agencies as a needed “end-around” to secure his agenda.

The Aff decreases Trump’s odds of success by 90%.

Schroeder ‘17

et al; Kathryn "Kit" Schroeder, an associate in Bracewell s Austin, Texas, office, advises companies on environmental matters, helping them navigate environmental audits, permitting issues and the environmental aspects of business transactions. Formerly an attorney with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, she assisted with matters pertaining to industrial and hazardous waste, as well as municipal solid waste. “Gorsuch May Further Tip Balance Against Deference To EPA” – Law 360 - February 14, 2017 – #CutWithKirby - Modified for language that may offend - https://www.law360.com/articles/890417/gorsuch-may-further-tip-balance-against-deference-to-epa

Pacific Legal Foundation provides an interesting example. In its amicus brief, the foundation argues that deferring to the U.S. Department of Education in Gloucester would imply that judicial review of jurisdictional determinations (JDs) under the Clean Water Act would be a dead letter. In a JD, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issues to a landowner an interpretation of its jurisdiction over “waters of the United States” on the property. If JDs were due judicial deference under Auer, the foundation believes

judicial review of JDs would become a mere formality.

Many other examples could be adduced that raise similar questions in environmental and natural resources law. In the modern regulatory state, the executive branch routinely relies upon judicial deference doctrines to defend against challenges to agency authority . A forthcoming article in the Michigan Law Review, “Chevron in the Circuit Courts” (K. Barnett and J. Walker), reports that federal appellate courts applied Chevron in some 75 percent of the roughly 1,500 cases in which the courts reviewed agency interpretations between 2003 and

2013. Moreover, the agency prevailed more than 90 percent of the time when the courts applied Chevron to an agency interpretation where Congress’s intent was not clear (i.e., Chevron "Step Two" cases). If the U.S. Supreme Court — perhaps with Judge Gorsuch — chooses to revise deference doctrines in the future, the picture for agencies and environmental law may look substantially different.

Deference can be used to promote regulation or de-reg

Deference can be used to promote regulation or de-reg. Somin ‘17

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University. “Gorsuch is right about Chevron deference” - Washington Post – March 25th – #CutWithKirby - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/25/gorsuch-is-right-about-chevron-deference/?utm_term=.95a5b834ebce

As a general rule, deference to agencies tends to promote a pro-regulatory agenda, whether of the right or of the left. But there are notable cases where it might instead promote deregulation. It is worth remembering that Chevron itself deferred to a Reagan-era agency EPA policy that liberals thought did not regulate industry stringently enough. The plaintiff challenging the agency was the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent liberal environmentalist group. Ironically, Neil Gorsuch’s mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, was the EPA administrator at the time the lawsuit began. The fact that his mother’s agency ultimately won the case evidently has not prevented Gorsuch from wanting to overrule it.

Precedent Solvency for Deference

Breaking down the precedent for agency deference creates a political coalition on the Supreme Court that can broadly check Trump’s administrative actionsPazzanese ‘16

Christina - two decades of experience as a print and digital journalist for both consumer and trade press, 11/23/16, “Trump and the law,” http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/11/trump-and-the-law/

As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office in January, the legal community has begun to ponder and

prepare for the changes the incoming administration may make.

During a panel discussion Tuesday, analysts at Harvard Law School (HLS) discussed the scope and limits of a president’s executive and judicial powers, the role the courts may play, and the ways in which Trump could reshape the authority and operation of an array of government agencies.

Adrian Vermeule ’90, J.D. ’93, the Ralph S. Tyler Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, sees two possible prospects for administrative law under Trump.

One involves what he called “ bipartisan retrenchment .” Liberals and conservatives in the Supreme Court could form a new coalition, deciding for different reasons that administrative law during the Obama era has been too favorable to presidential power . Vermeule advised students to watch how two moderate

conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy , react going forward . Both have previously expressed some anxiety over the administrative state , though not as vociferously as have more conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

In a climate of uncertainty for the incoming administration, “ If we see the conservative centrists starting to take on board some of the stronger skepticism from the justices on the rightward flank, and especially if we see them joined in coalition by liberal justices like [Stephen] Breyer, who are occasionally skeptical about deference , then we have the makings of a supermajority coalition to rein in administrative power ,” he said.

While such a coalition is unlikely to take drastic steps, Vermeule added, it’s possible that meaningful constraints could be implemented , such as giving deference to government agencies when interpreting their own rules; loosening rules that would allow for more court cases challenging administrative action ; and taking a more permissive approach to complaints about agency inaction if the Trump administration “ slow walks ” mandatory reg ulation s . There may also be less tolerance for political rationales offered by the Trump White House than those given

by expert civil servants within agencies, as well as a tightening up of interpretive parameters so that more statutes are deemed “clear.”

Outside the courts , Democrats and congressional Republicans opposed to some Trump initiatives could consider pending legislation or take new action to rein in his administration , though Vermeule thinks such a move would be unlikely to succeed .

Constraining deference enables state attorneys general to successfully block Trump’s administrative law agenda Dayen ‘16

David - contributor to The Nation, The Intercept, The American Prospect, etc., 12/6/16, “The Most Important Appointment Since the Election Wasn’t Made by Trump,” https://www.thenation.com/article/the-most-important-appointment-since-the-election-wasnt-made-by-trump/

On Monday, the first day of the new legislative session in the unofficial capital of liberal America, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon was defiant in his opposition to Donald Trump. “Unity must be separated from complicity,” Rendon thundered. “Californians do not need healing. We need to fight.”

The legislature kicked off that fight with a mostly symbolic resolution urging Trump “to not pursue mass deportation strategies” that one lawmaker likened to ethnic cleansing. Other bills introduced Monday seek to fund grants for legal representation for immigrants facing deportation, train public defenders in immigration cases, prohibit state agencies from delivering information that could be used to create a registry of Muslim Americans, force any border wall in environmentally sensitive areas to obtain voter approval, and terminate contracts with privately run immigrant detention facilities.

But despite the whirlwind of action, the leader of the state’s resistance against Trump will possibly not work in the Capitol

rotunda but in the state’s Department of Justice.

Last week, Governor Jerry Brown tapped Congressman Xavier Becerra for a ttorney general, an appointment made necessary after

current AG Kamala Harris won election to the Senate. This may be the most vital appointment of the transition period,

and it wasn’t even Trump’s. The California a ttorney general is well-positioned to thwart the conservative agenda, a model we’ve seen in reverse throughout the Obama administration .

Former Texas a ttorney general Greg Abbott, who rose to prominence in conservative circles through high-profile fights against the Obama Administration, once described his workday as “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and then I go home.” Overall, Texas

has filed 46 separate lawsuits against the federal government since the beginning of Obama’s presidency, often leading coalitions of other states (and bearing the exorbitant costs, which smaller states cannot).

In just the last month, Abbott’s successor, indicted securities fraudster Ken Paxton, challenged environmental protections to “critical habitats” for endangered species, fought the Education Department rule on transgender bathrooms in public schools, and obtained an injunction on the Department of Labor’s overtime rule, denying raises to millions of workers. Add to that fights on religious freedom, Internet regulations, marriage equality, immigration executive orders, the EPA Clean Power plan, Obamacare…

These lawsuits haven’t always succeeded —so far only seven cases have ended in a Texas victory, with 21 losses and the rest still

awaiting final action—but they have swallowed up significant time and energy and effectively provided an alternative governing philosophy. And states have broad legal standing to bring cases of this type , giving a ttorney s g eneral unmatched power .

Could California’s attorney general do the same? Becerra, previously a member of the House Democratic leadership, will have some opportunities and some hurdles. First of all, it’s a bit easier to challenge a regulatory advance than a regulatory rollback. With an advance, state AGs can assert that the government has substantively violated the Constitution or federal statutes. With a rollback, there’s less grounding for substantive objections.

Procedural objections remain available, however. The A dministrative Procedures Act is the controlling statute for regulatory alterations. So if a Trump federal agency killed an agency rule without timely notice or seeking public comment, that could draw a challenge. Additionally, federal agencies must not promulgate rules found to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” This allows plaintiffs to challenge the factual basis for agency rule making .

In discrete cases, state prosecutors have other options. For example, the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA committed the government to taking steps to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. If the Trump administration nullified Obama’s Clean Power Plan, AGs could argue that they’re shirking a statutory duty under the Clean Air Act. Other policies, like a Muslim registry, may run afoul of constitutional religious-freedom protections. And if Trump’s federal agencies choose to not enforce various policies, essentially repealing through neglect, state AGs might have a window to argue the failure to comply with statute, if it harms their citizens.

Then there are state-specific policies that Trump might try to upend. As Becerra said in a conference call last week,

“California right now is ahead of the country when it comes to clean energy , common-sense treatment of immigrants, real health security and so much more .… If you want to take on a forward-leaning state that is prepared to defend its rights and interests, then come at us.”

Indeed, decades of conservative jurisprudence on federalism could give Becerra an upper hand in getting the federal government to mind its own business. And the more conservatives push at this —like attempting to overturn the “Chevron deference ” that gives federal agencies wide latitude in interpreting congressional statutes—the more power Becerra and his AG colleague s will have . “Judge-made doctrines developed to protect states’ rights against progressive legislation can also be used to protect cities against Trump’s conservative policies ,” wrote Harvard law professor Noah Feldman recently at Bloomberg. “Ain’t constitutional law grand?”

Among the first fights will be on so-called sanctuary cities , which refuse to cooperate fully with federal immigration

authorities. Trump and allies in Congress have threatened to block millions of dollars in Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs) for sanctuary cities. Becerra could argue in court that CDBGs have nothing to do with immigration policy and cannot be used to punish cities for noncompliance with requests. Rulings against coercing states to into enforcing federal law will also make it difficult to deny sanctuary cities funding of any kind.

Other fights loom . This fall, California joined seven other states by legalizing marijuana for recreational use;

clashes with the Justice Department on what is still a banned substance at the federal level could ensue. The state’s cap-and-trade system for climate emissions and aggressive plan to mandate renewable sources of energy could be a target. A border wall would have to be constructed in part on California soil.

Will Becerra enact an expansive pro-resistance agenda? Politically, there are incentives to go big . Most state political observers view Becerra as a placeholder (Dave Jones, the popular two-term Insurance Commissioner, has an active campaign for attorney general in 2018), perhaps for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat in two years, when she will be 85 and presumably retiring. Nothing would cut through the noise that defies political headlines in California more than repeatedly suing Trump. There’s also a model of action, not only from Texas but from California in the George W. Bush Administration, which successfully blocked offshore oil leases in the Pacific.

But after hinting strongly in this direction in his initial post-selection remarks, yesterday he offered a more measured tone in a press conference with Governor Brown. “We won’t shy away from representing and defending what we stand for as Californians, but we’re not out there to pick fights,” Becerra said.

While this could simply be a matter of affect rather than substance, it would be a grave mistake if Becerra proved cautious. Californians

thoroughly rejected Trump (by 4 million votes and counting) and expect vigorous action. California has some big-state allies in New York and Illinois, but Becerra’s office has the resources and experience to fight Trump on multiple fronts. Picking and choosing battles won’t do when there’s so much at stake.

Rolling back court deference to executive power is key to broadly constrain TrumpNagle ‘16

John Copeland - professor at the Notre Dame Law School, 11/8/16, “What We Don’t Want a President to Do,” http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/what-we-dont-wanta-president-to-do

There has been a robust debate about the increasingly bold executive actions taken by President Obama, and by President George W. Bush

before him, but we can all agree that unilateral presidential action will be a recipe for disaster with a president elected as the lesser of two evils.

Unilateral presidential authority relies on three devices: executive orders (commands the president issues to other

governmental officials), executive agreements (which operate as substitutes for international treaties) and executive deference (where judges accept an agency’s view of the law). We need to limit all of them.

First, executive orders: These have morphed from mundane guidance for government departments into sweeping declarations that affect the rights of millions of people. Mr. Bush’s blocking of federally funded stem-cell research and Mr. Obama’s order to grant temporary legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants are cases in point.

Second, executive agreements: The Constitution was designed to ensure that international agreements must win the approval of two-thirds of senators, but executive agreements allow the president to bypass the Senate, exploiting a blurry line between executive agreements and treaties. It was this power that enabled Mr. Obama to sign the Paris climate change agreement and conclude the controversial deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Third, executive deference : According to the Constitution, it is for Congress to enact laws and for the president to enforce them, but for several decades, courts have deferred to government agencies’ interpretation of old laws to make new rules (subject only to judicial correction if the law clearly prohibited a new policy). Thus the Supreme Court deferred to the Reagan administration’s regulation that prohibited abortion counseling by federally funded providers. Such deference may well allow the E.P.A. to use the Clean Air Act, originally enacted to combat the smokestack pollution in the 1960s, to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Whether one blames President Obama or Congress for the expansion of presidential powers, a new administration that relies on unchecked executive authority could be especially dangerous . Would those who want to empower President Clinton to reform immigration concede the same power to President Trump? Would those who look to President Trump to guarantee Second Amendment rights allow the same powers over gun-ownership policy to President Clinton?

Congress has tried to correct some presidential actions, but the president can often use the veto power to block change. Members of Congress must return to the historical practice of protecting the institution itself, rather than using it simply to further partisan ends. The recent override of President Obama’s veto of Sept. 11 compensation legislation illustrates how both parties can come together to promote a shared goal.

If Congress fails to enforce its prerogatives, then it falls to the Supreme Court to define the limits on presidential power. But the next president will set the direction of the court, so in coming confirmation hearings, senators must focus on how aggressively any new member of the court will police the limits on presidential authority.

The election of an unpopular president is inevitable, but we can try to ensure that an unpopular president will do less harm.

Institutions and informal checks and balances are already failing to restrain Trump---only tangible legal restraints on his goals matterSnyder ‘17

Timothy - professor of history at Yale University, 2/7/17, “We have at most a year to defend American democracy, perhaps less,” interviewed by Matthias Kolb, http://international.sueddeutsche.de/post/157058066625/we-have-at-most-a-year-to-defend-american

SZ: Donald Trump has been president for three weeks. How would you describe his start?

Timothy Snyder: The first thing that we have to notice is that the institutions have not thus far restrained him . He never took them seriously, acts as if they don’t exist , and clearly wishes they didn’t . The story that

Americans have told themselves from the moment he declared his candidacy for president, was that one institution or another would defeat him or at least change his behavior – he won’t get the nomination; if he gets the nomination, he will be a normal

Republican; he will get defeated in the general election; if he wins the presidency will mature him (that was what Obama said). I never thought any of that was true. He doesn’t seem to care about the institutions and the laws except insofar as they appear as barriers to the goal of permanent kleptocratic authoritarianism and immediate

personal gratification. It is all about him all of time, it is not about the citizens and our political traditions.

Endangerment Finding - backlines

Yes, Reverse Causal – Courts will step-in without Deference

Absent deference, Courts will review Trump’s efforts to roll-back climate initiatives. Dlouhy ‘17

et al; Jennifer A. Dlouhy is an Energy and environmental policy reporter for Bloomberg News– internally quoting Denise Grab, a senior attorney with Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and Brian Potts, an environmental lawyer at Perkins Coie LLP - “Trump's court pick may be obstacle to his anti-regulatory moves”- available via Arca Max – #CutWithKirby - Feb 2, 2017 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2dDEvZsDBgYJ:https://www.arcamax.com/currentnews/newsheadlines/s-1922602%3Fprint+&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

"Chevron deference became really important in the later part of the Obama administration because Congress hadn't acted on a number of environmental issues in a while," said Denise Grab, a senior attorney with Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law.

For example, in the absence of legislation, the EPA used the Clean Air Act to try to rein in carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector. Instead of imposing specific requirements on individual power plants -- a more traditional approach -- the agency tried a novel tactic that set goals for each state. Facing challenges from 27 states, the Obama administration's lawyers argued that its interpretation of the law should be given deference by the court.

Trump's EPA is expected to significantly revise that rule, the Clean Power Plan. To defend that change, he'll need to ask the courts to defer to his regulators.

"Any new rule he wants to promulgate that rolls back environmental protections or interprets the Clean Air Act or any other statute narrowly is going to be looked at anew by the courts if there's no Chevron , " Potts said.

Deference key to Trump’s anti-climate agenda

Deference is vital for Trump’s efforts to de-regulate climate initiatives.Dlouhy ‘17

et al; Jennifer A. Dlouhy is an Energy and environmental policy reporter for Bloomberg News– internally quoting Denise Grab, a senior attorney with Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law and Brian Potts, an environmental lawyer at Perkins Coie LLP - “Trump's court pick may be obstacle to his anti-regulatory moves”- available via Arca Max – #CutWithKirby - Feb 2, 2017 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2dDEvZsDBgYJ:https://www.arcamax.com/currentnews/newsheadlines/s-1922602%3Fprint+&cd=11&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Appellate Judge Neil Gorsuch has been a vigorous critic of the so-called "Chevron doctrine " that gives federal agencies latitude when interpreting ambiguous laws. The Obama administration relied heavily on that 33-year-old

principle to impose a host of mandates on energy, the environment and the workplace.

Now Trump's agencies may need the same leeway to undo them .

"It's pretty ironic that Trump is appointing someone that is going to take power away from him," said Brian Potts, an environmental lawyer at Perkins Coie LLP. "Trump is definitely tying his hands to some extent, assuming Gorsuch does what he has done in the past."

Gorsuch, a judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, has called the Chevron doctrine a "Goliath of modern administrative law," and argued it

may be time to face "the behemoth." In a concurring opinion last year, he cast Chevron as allowing "executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the framers' design."

If he holds to that position, Gorsuch is unlikely to be inclined to give agencies a long leash to interpret confusing or muddled directives from

Congress. That could come back to constrain Trump's regulatory moves as federal courts consider the inevitable legal challenges to his efforts to roll back Obama-era regulations.

Just as Chevron gives agencies leeway to interpret confusing statutes , it also empowers new administrations to change direction from their predecessors -- exactly the kind of reversals Trump has signaled on regulations limiting methane leaks from oil wells, carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and water pollution . In addition to environmental rules, it could come into play with a Labor Department regulation requiring businesses to provide more overtime pay.

Deference key to EPA rollback

Trump’s efforts to de-regulate the EPA will lose absent Chevron.Oren ‘17

Craig N. Oren is a professor of law at Rutgers Law School. In the early 1980s, he was assistant counsel to the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, and over the years he has written extensively on the Clean Air Act. He has served on three National Academy of Sciences committees that studied the Act. “Will the Trump Administration Drastically Deregulate Environmental Protection?” - The Regulatory Review - Feb 22, 2017 https://www.theregreview.org/2017/02/22/oren-trump-administration-deregulate-environmental-protection/

There were several constraints on the Reagan Administration, many of which still exist. One limiting factor was the grassroots activity of environmental groups, as with the groups’ successful defeat of efforts to alter the Clean Air

Act. Such activity is on full display today: the advent of the Trump Administration has brought about a remarkable growth in fundraising by environmental groups, just as was true in the Reagan years.

Another constraint was litigation brought by these groups . The courts did at times defer to the Reagan EPA’s deregulatory actions (the decision in the famous Chevron case being a prime example). But in the

1970s, the courts had made it clear that agency actions would be carefully examined to determine if they were the product of reasoned decision-making , and the courts established procedural requirements (such as disclosing relevant data and responding to material comments) to help judges make that examination. The Supreme Court made it clear in the State Farm case early in the Reagan Administration that these requirements apply

to deregulation as well as regulation. These judicial mandates still exist today; if anything, they may become more limiting now that Chevron deference is being challenged by conservative judges. Thus the courts will remain an obstacle to deregulation.

(Note: The Chevron case was decided in 1984 – in the middle of the Reagan Administration.)

A-to “Pruitt won’t support Trump on EPA rollback”

If Pruitt doesn’t follow Trump on the endangerment finding he’ll get Comey’d.Restuccia ‘17

et al; Andrew Restuccia is a senior policy reporter at POLITICO. Prior to joining POLITICO, Restuccia covered energy and environmental politics and policy at The Hill. He also reported on energy policy for The Washington Independent and Inside Washington Publishers. Restuccia graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in journalism. “Pruitt takes fire from conservatives in climate showdown” – Politico - 03/28/2017 - #CutWithKirby - http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/pruitt-climate-change-236572

A cadre of conservative climate skeptics are fuming about the decision — expressing their concern to Trump

administration officials and arguing Pruitt is setting himself up to run for governor or the Senate. They hope the White

House, perhaps senior adviser Stephen Bannon, will intervene and encourage the president to overturn the endangerment finding.

Trump administration officials have not totally ruled out eventually targeting the endangerment finding.

Conservative groups have petitioned the EPA to look at reopening it, one source said, and the agency may eventually be compelled to respond to the petition. Axios first reported the news of the petition.

"Getting rid of the Clean Power Plan is just not enough," said Myron Ebell, the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the former leader of Trump’s EPA transition team.

Ebell warned that leaving the endangerment finding in place would compel the Trump administration to come up with a replacement approach to regulating emissions from power plants and other sources that might not be too dissimilar from Obama's Clean Power Plan.

"Before you know it you end up having to do a Trump Clean Power Plan," he said.

James Delingpole, a Breitbart News columnist, blasted Pruitt on Monday, arguing he is "more interested in building his political career than he is taking on the Green Blob, insiders report." Bannon ran Breitbart before joining the Trump campaign last summer.

Delingpole, who first reported that Pruitt advocated against reopening the endangerment finding, even suggested that the EPA administrator should resign.

"But what President Trump needs now more than ever are administrators with the political will to do the right thing — which is, after all, the reason so many Americans voted for him," he wrote. "If Scott Pruitt is not up to that task, then maybe it’s about time he did the decent thing and handed over the reins to someone who is."

Pruitt will push to end endangerment findingInside EPA ‘17

InsideEPA has – for over 25 years - provided exclusive, relevant news about the federal policymaking process to professionals who have a need to know about the process. Inside EPA.com is an online news service from the publishers of Inside EPA - From the article: Will Pruitt review GHG endangerment finding? June 06, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - https://insideepa.com/daily-feed/will-pruitt-review-ghg-endangerment-finding

Recent statements from EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt are renewing speculation that he might review the prior administration's finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare, a landmark document that forms the basis of all of the agency's climate regulations.

Pruitt alluded to the possibility in a June 5 interview on Breitbart Radio, where he was defending President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the United Nations Paris Agreement.

“What the American people deserve is a true, legitimate, peer-reviewed, objective, transparent discussion about [carbon dioxide (CO2)],” he said, according to a transcript.

Pruitt is opposed to the endangerment finding. Chow ‘17

Lorraine Chow - Journalist for Eco Watch – internally quoting David Stevenson, a former EPA transition team member for the Trump Admin - “What Climate Deniers Want Next After Winning Paris Pullout” – EcoWatch – June 19th - #CutWithKirby - https://www.ecowatch.com/endangerment-finding-2444376537.html

So what do these politically powerful forces have next on the agenda?

The first target could be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) endangerment finding , David Stevenson, a former EPA transition team member and policy director at the libertarian think tank Caesar Rodney Institute told New Republic.

This Obama-era finding that greenhouse gas emissions endangers public health and welfare might seem wholly unremarkable. However, the endangerment finding not only cemented a consensus within the scientific community, it also legally obligates the EPA to regulate sources of that pollutant under the Clean Air Act—including power plants, cars, trucks and other sources that combust coal, oil and natural gas. By unraveling the endangerment finding, the U.S. is legally washing its hands of climate change litigation brought by environmental groups.

"As long as that's sitting there, the potential for legal challenges just goes on and on and on, and that's not productive for any of us," Stevenson explained.

Undoing the 2009 finding was a major topic of discussion at a March conference hosted by the Heartland Institute, the nation's leading climate skeptic think tank. Reuters reported that at least three conservative groups has petitioned the EPA to undo the finding. Myron Ebell, who led Trump's EPA transition team, similarly considers it a major priority.

As it happens, current EPA administrator and former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt filed a lawsuit in 2010 to overturn the endangerment finding , which he and his fellow litigants characterized as "arbitrary and capricious." And let's not forget that Pruitt, who urged Trump to exit from the Paris accord, does not even believe that carbon dioxide is a "primary contributor" to climate change.

A-to “too late to reach Two Degrees; Pais = insufficient”

2 degrees is still attainable – best studies confirmPhys.org ‘17

Internally quoting Timothy Canty, a research professor in atmospheric and oceanic science at The University of Maryland - “UMD researchers share optimistic vision for Paris Climate Agreement” - Phys.org - January 10, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - https://phys.org/news/2017-01-umd-optimistic-vision-paris-climate.html#jCp

In December 2015, the world's nations negotiated the Paris Climate Agreement, which seeks to limit global

warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures. Scientists at the University of Maryland

have developed an empirical model of global climate, which they have used to comprehensively analyze the Paris Agreement.

In a new book titled Paris Climate Agreement: Beacon of Hope, the authors describe their findings. They suggest that if countries achieve the greenhouse gas reductions pledged during the Paris meeting, there is a good chance that the world will be able to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

"We've developed an empirical model of global climate that we use to forecast future temperature out to the year 2100," said Timothy Canty, a

research professor in atmospheric and oceanic science at UMD and a co-author of the book. "This is a model that ingests massive amounts of observational data."

Climate models that forecast global warming use of one of four numbered scenarios to describe greenhouse gases in the future atmosphere.

Researchers refer to these projections as representative concentration pathway (RCP) scenarios, each of which accounts for the influence of greenhouse gases and other pollutants on climate out to year 2100. RCP 4.5, one of the more optimistic pathways, assumes that human emissions of greenhouse gases will level off soon and then decline after a few decades.

"The most important result from our modeling efforts is that the RCP 4.5 scenario is the two degree global warming pathway," said Austin Hope, a graduate student in atmospheric and oceanic science at UMD and a co-author of the book. "If the world keeps emissions to RCP 4.5, then we will likely stay beneath 1.5 degrees of global warming and almost certainly beneath two degrees of global warming,"

Even assuming past emissions, 2 degrees goal is attainable Huq ‘15

et al; Saleemul Huq is senior fellow in International Institute for Environment and Development’s Climate Change Group and is also Director of The International Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation. “A 1.5 degree goal could save us from ourselves” – IIED - 10 June 2015 - #CutWithKirby - https://www.iied.org/15-degree-goal-could-save-us-ourselves

Experts still remain optimistic that a 2-degree target is still technically and economically feasible.

2 or 1.5 degrees?

Although some warming is "locked in" because of historical emissions that will take years to impact global temperatures, the urgency of limiting greenhouse gases (GHG) has not been fully realised by most developed countries, as demonstrated by their weak mitigation and adaptation measures over the years. So, you may be asking, why should we lower the target to 1.5 degrees instead?

Put simply, a 1.5 degree target has significantly fewer uncertainties – making it easier to predict and understand the future risks we face from a changing climate.

To keep emissions below acceptable levels, all major world economies will need to drastically reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and move towards green energy in the near future.

Not too late to still reach Two Degree threshold Sutter ‘15

Internally quoting Carlo Jaeger, chair of the Global Climate Forum – John D. Sutter is an award-winning columnist for CNN and creator of the network's "2 degrees" project, which aims to involve readers in climate change coverage. Sutter was a post-graduate fellow at the Poynter Institute. Sutter earned a bachelor's degree in international studies and journalism from Emory University. “2 degrees: The most important number you've never heard of” – CNN Reports –Nov 24 th - #CutWithKirby – Modified for language that may offend - http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/21/opinions/sutter-climate-two-degrees/index.html

But here's why it matters: If we humans warm the world more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), we greatly up the odds of climate catastrophes.

Think super droughts , rising seas, mass extinctions and acidifying oceans .

We don't want to cross that mark.

Humans never have lived in post-2-degree world , said Carlo Jaeger, chair of the Global Climate Forum, based in Germany, and author of a paper on this history of 2 degrees.

"If we start warming the planet way beyond what humans have ever experienced, God (Heaven only) knows what will wait for us," he told me.

Good news, though. If we drastically cut carbon emissions , we can stay below the 2-degree threshold . As part of this series, I'll be exploring exactly what it would take to do so.

This matters a great deal this year, since the United Nations will gather leaders and policy experts in Paris in

December to try to hammer out a new international agreement on climate change. Two degrees will be one useful benchmark to see if the world is on track.

"It's almost kind of like a truth keeping mechanism," said Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate change program at the World Resources Institute. "It would be hard if it didn't exist to have a sense of whether countries are on track or not."

It's not a perfect yardstick. But it's a reasonable one. Think of it like a speed limit, said Jaeger, the economist in Germany. Would a 51 mph limit be better than 50? Or maybe it should be 49? The point isn't the exact number, it's the ballpark: 200 mph would certainly be too fast, as he put it, but 20 mph is too slow.

For climate change, the point is we don't know the world will fall into crisis at exactly 2 degrees and not 2.1 or 1.8. But that range is certainly dangerous.

"The way I think of it is like smoking," said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech. "How many cigarettes are too many? I don't know. I have no idea. Nobody has any idea. But we do know the more cigarettes you smoke, the greater the risk."

Two degrees, then, is our most educated estimate . A way to focus attention.

It's incredibly valuable in that respect.

Since the number emerged from a relatively obscure academic paper in the 1970s, it's become widely agreed upon in the

international community. In 2009, for example, 114 countries initially signed onto the "Copenhagen Accord," a nonbinding

agreement that recognizes the "scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius."

That level of consensus is rare on this topic.

Paris can be met if the next US president rejoins. But, Trump’s current rollback is still key – enough to make 2 degrees unreachable. Hare ‘17

Bill Hare - Director, Climate Analytics, Berlin; Adjunct Professor, Murdoch University, Perth; Visiting scientist, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research – “Will the Paris Agreement still be able to deliver after the US withdrawal?” - The Conversation - June 1, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - http://theconversation.com/will-the-paris-agreement-still-be-able-to-deliver-after-the-us-withdrawal-78727

President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, combined with the repeal of domestic actions resulting in halting the decline in US emissions, will likely make it more difficult and costly overall to meet the Paris Agreement temperature goal of holding warming well below 2°C, and limiting it to 1.5°C.

If sustained, the additional US emissions, above the levels that would have occurred with the full

implementation of the Obama-era package of climate policies, could add an additional warming of about to

0.1 to 0.2°C by 2100. This will need to be compensated by larger and faster reductions by others than would otherwise be necessary.

In the longer term, the Paris Agreement temperature goals are likely not be able to be met unless the US rejoins global efforts within the next five to ten years, so that globally aggregated CO₂ emissions can be reduced to zero by around mid-century.

A-to “Two Degree Threshold = contrived threshold”

Two Degrees is a good threshold – has enormous consensusSutter ‘15

Internally quoting Carlo Jaeger, chair of the Global Climate Forum – John D. Sutter is an award-winning columnist for CNN and creator of the network's "2 degrees" project, which aims to involve readers in climate change coverage. Sutter was a post-graduate fellow at the Poynter Institute. Sutter earned a bachelor's degree in international studies and journalism from Emory University. “2 degrees: The most important number you've never heard of” – CNN Reports –Nov 24 th - #CutWithKirby – Modified for language that may offend - http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/21/opinions/sutter-climate-two-degrees/index.html

But here's why it matters: If we humans warm the world more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), we greatly up the odds of climate catastrophes.

Think super droughts , rising seas, mass extinctions and acidifying oceans .

We don't want to cross that mark.

Humans never have lived in post-2-degree world , said Carlo Jaeger, chair of the Global Climate Forum, based in Germany, and author of a paper on this history of 2 degrees.

"If we start warming the planet way beyond what humans have ever experienced, God (Heaven only) knows what will wait for us," he told me.

Good news, though. If we drastically cut carbon emissions, we can stay below the 2-degree threshold. As part of this series, I'll be exploring exactly what it would take to do so.

This matters a great deal this year, since the United Nations will gather leaders and policy experts in Paris in December to try to hammer out a new international agreement on climate change. Two degrees will be one useful benchmark to see if the world is on track.

"It's almost kind of like a truth keeping mechanism," said Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate change program at the World Resources Institute. "It would be hard if it didn't exist to have a sense of whether countries are on track or not."

It's not a perfect yardstick. But it's a reasonable one. Think of it like a speed limit, said Jaeger, the economist in Germany. Would a 51 mph limit be better than 50? Or maybe it should be 49? The point isn't the exact number, it's the ballpark: 200 mph would certainly be too fast, as he put it, but 20 mph is too slow.

For climate change, the point is we don't know the world will fall into crisis at exactly 2 degrees and not 2.1 or 1.8. But that range is certainly dangerous.

"The way I think of it is like smoking," said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech. "How many cigarettes are too many? I don't know. I have no idea. Nobody has any idea. But we do know the more cigarettes you smoke, the greater the risk."

Two degrees, then, is our most educated estimate . A way to focus attention.

It's incredibly valuable in that respect.

Since the number emerged from a relatively obscure academic paper in the 1970s, it's become widely agreed upon in the

international community. In 2009, for example, 114 countries initially signed onto the "Copenhagen Accord," a nonbinding

agreement that recognizes the "scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius."

That level of consensus is rare on this topic.

A-to “Trump rollback alone is not key”

Trump rollback would cause 0.3 degrees of warmingHausfather ‘17

Zeke Hausfather is an energy systems analyst and environmental economist. He was previously the chief scientist at C3, an energy management and efficiency company. He also cofounded Efficiency 2.0, a behavior-based energy efficiency company. He received a bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College, a master’s degree in environmental science from Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, and another master’s degree in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He has published papers in the fields of environmental economics, energy modeling, and climate science. “Meeting Paris Pledges would Prevent at least 1C of Global Warming” – Resilience – June 7th- #CutWithKirby - http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-07/meeting-paris-pledges/

While dramatic, the decision by the US to withdraw from the Paris Agreement does not necessarily commit the world to any additional warming . Prior to announcing the withdrawal, which will not actually take effect until November

2020, the Trump administration was already moving to gut climate policies put in place by the prior administration. A world where the US remained in the agreement, but failed to put any effort into meeting its targets, would have likely had the same impact on domestic emissions.

What really matters is what the US does in the future : does it completely eschew mitigation for the next 83 years and continue emitting CO2 at its current or even an increasing rate? Or does a future administration bring the US back into the fold and pursue deep reductions in CO2 emissions?

To help answer this question Carbon Brief used a simple climate model to analyse different emission scenarios to try to determine what the Trum p administration’s policies will mean for global temperatures at the end of the

century and our ability to limit warming to well below 2C in 2100.

Carbon Brief looked at five different scenarios for future US emissions. The first is a world where the US begins an immediate pathway toward deep decarbonisation, meeting its Paris commitments, continuing on to reduce emissions by 80% in 2050, and reaching net-zero emissions by the end of the century.

The second is a variation of this deep reduction scenario where the US abandons climate policies until a new administration in 2021 reverses course and pursues deep reductions. The third is a similar scenario where a new administration in 2025 (rather than 2021) does the same.

The fourth looks at a low business-as-usual scenario where emissions slowly return to where they were back in 2005 and remain roughly constant, and the fifth examines a high business-as-usual scenario where rapid economic and population growth swamp continued reductions in emission intensity, resulting in increased emissions through 2100.

These scenarios are purely illustrative; models that attempt to predict the future are always wrong but sometimes useful, and these provide a range of possible paths that the US could take.

It is hard to foresee a world where climate policy and mitigation are completely ignored for the rest of the century, and there is a strong argument that existing trends in energy systems and cost reductions in renewables and storage should at least keep emissions flat, if not lead to future declines. Action on a state or local level within the US could also drive additional declines in emissions regardless of policies adopted at the federal level.

To estimate the impact of these scenarios on global temperatures , Carbon Brief assumed the rest of the world pursues policies aimed at limiting warming to 2C following the IPCC's RCP2.6 scenario. For each scenario, Carbon Brief used a simple climate model to determine the increase in temperatures over time from additional US carbon emissions relative to "deep reduction".

Here, the business-as-usual world where the US continues to increase its emissions results in just under 0.3C additional warming, similar to projections widely reported in the media. A somewhat more plausible scenario where US emissions remain flat through the end of the century yields just under 0.2C additional warming.

That’s sufficient to cross the 2 degree threshold.Hausfather ‘17

Zeke Hausfather is an energy systems analyst and environmental economist. He was previously the chief scientist at C3, an energy management and efficiency company. He also cofounded Efficiency 2.0, a behavior-based energy efficiency company. He received a bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College, a master’s degree in environmental science from Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, and another master’s degree in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He has published papers in the fields of environmental economics, energy modeling, and climate science. “Meeting Paris Pledges would Prevent at least 1C of Global Warming” – Resilience – June 7th- #CutWithKirby - http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-07/meeting-paris-pledges/

While 0.2 to 0.3C additional warming may not sound like much, it would make it nearly impossible for the world to limit warming to 2C. Similarly, a small amount of warming can make a big difference at the margin, as Carbon Brief previously explained when discussing the difference between 1.5C and 2C warming scenarios.

A temporary delay in US emission reduction of a few years would have a much smaller climate impact, assuming that the rest of the world does not follow in the US's footsteps.

Conclusion

While it is possible to meet a 2C target with temporary delays in US mitigation, the large additional emission reductions needed compared to current Paris commitments are daunting.

US is key

US is key. US rollback means 0.3 more degrees.Johnston ‘17

et al; Ellie Johnston leads Climate Interactive’s global climate and energy efforts. Ellie is also on the Board of Directors of SustainUS and formerly led the organization. This piece is co-authored with several authors – including Andrew Jones. Andrew trained in environmental engineering and system dynamics modeling through a B.A. at Dartmouth College and a M.S. in technology and policy at MIT. Previously, he worked in the 1990s at Rocky Mountain Institute and in the 2000s with Dana Meadows at Sustainability Institute. Andrew and his team at Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan developed C-ROADS, the user-friendly climate simulation in use by climate analysts around the world. His interviews have appeared in multiple media, including the New York Times, U.S. News, and NPR’s Morning Edition. Andrew teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in system dynamics, systems thinking, and sustainability at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and in Executive Education at MIT Sloan. “Analysis: U.S. Role in the Paris Agreement” – Climate Interactive - April 27, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - https://www.climateinteractive.org/analysis/us-role-in-paris/

To explore the possible consequences we have examined a variety of scenarios using the C-ROADS interactive climate policy simulation.

Highlights

The U.S. matters a great deal. The US emissions reduction pledge under the agreement accounts for more than a fifth of all emissions avoided through 2030 (21% of the total of pledged by all nations ).

The difference between the US pledge and the US following the business-as-usual scenario (an unlikely

outcome, but illustrative of the scale of the US role in climate action in the Paris Agreement) is that US emissions are estimated to be 6.7 Gigatons of CO2 equivalents per year by 2025, compared to emissions of 5.3 GtCO2e/year if the US follows through on its commitments. Global annual emissions would be 57.3 gigatons per year instead of 55.8 gigatons per year, a

difference of nearly 3%. US emissions in 2016 were 6.5 GtCO2e/year. If US emissions follow the business-as-usual scenario

instead of meeting its Paris pledge, while all other countries fulfill their commitments (and no further action is

taken), the world would warm an additional 0 .3 °C (about one-half a degree Fahrenheit) by 2100.

That’s sufficient to cross the 2 degree threshold.Hausfather ‘17

Zeke Hausfather is an energy systems analyst and environmental economist. He was previously the chief scientist at C3, an energy management and efficiency company. He also cofounded Efficiency 2.0, a behavior-based energy efficiency company. He received a bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College, a master’s degree in environmental science from Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands, and another master’s degree in environmental management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He has published papers in the fields of environmental economics, energy modeling, and climate science. “Meeting Paris Pledges would Prevent at least 1C of Global Warming” – Resilience – June 7th- #CutWithKirby - http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-06-07/meeting-paris-pledges/

While 0.2 to 0.3C additional warming may not sound like much, it would make it nearly impossible for the world to limit warming to 2C. Similarly, a small amount of warming can make a big difference at the margin, as Carbon Brief previously explained when discussing the difference between 1.5C and 2C warming scenarios.

A temporary delay in US emission reduction of a few years would have a much smaller climate impact, assuming that the rest of the world does not follow in the US's footsteps.

Conclusion

While it is possible to meet a 2C target with temporary delays in US mitigation, the large additional emission reductions needed compared to current Paris commitments are daunting.

Two Degree Threshold = key

2 degree threshold is key to check runaway warming. US failure to meet targets crosses that threshold. Mooney ‘17

Internally quoting Bill Hare, a climate scientist and CEO of Climate Analytics, a group that analyzes climate change scenarios. Also internally quoting Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a physicist who heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Chris Mooney reports on science and the environment for The Washington Post - “Trump's Paris withdrawal makes already tough target harder to hit” –SF Gate - Thursday, June 1, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Trump-s-reasons-for-leaving-the-Paris-climate-11189569.php

"President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, combined with the repeal of domestic actions resulting in halting the decline in U.S. emissions, will likely make it more difficult and costly overall to meet the Paris Agreement temperature goal of holding warming well below 2°C , and limiting it to 1.5°C," said Bill Hare, a climate scientist and CEO of Climate Analytics, a group that analyzes climate change scenarios.

Warming over 2 degrees celsius would have dramatic consequences : the planet's ice sheets would be far

more likely to melt , triggering more sea level rise , than at 1.5 degrees, which is considered the safer limit, according to Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a physicist who heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

"Particular on sea level rise, every tenth of a degree really matters," Schellnhuber said. "We find that with 1.5 degrees warming you probably will get in the end something below a 1 meter sea level rise and then it stabilizes , with 2 degrees it just keeps on rising, because many of the ice sheets kick in."

Other major climate impacts at 2 degrees Celsisus include severe threats to coral reefs across the globe, a greater risk of long lasting heat waves and extreme rainfall events, and the risk of lower yields for key crops like wheat in the globe's tropical regions.

The think tank Climate Interactive has estimated that the U.S. on its own would account for an additional .3 degrees Celsuis (.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by the year 2100 - if it leaves the Paris deal and takes no actions to

reduce emissions for the rest of the century but other countries fully live up to their current pledges.

Schellnhuber similarly puts that number at a few tenths of a degree Celsius under this scenario. Even a tenth of a degree , he notes,

can make the difference between crossing one of the Paris agreement's two temperature targets.

A-to “Kritik - Two degree standard ignores that some people already experience violence”

( ) Zero link – they’re arg hoists statements upon us. None of our args said current warming is okay. We only said more would be worse. We also said that specific “tipping points” have not been reached- not that other tipping points have not been crossed.

( ) Perm – do the Aff and all non-competitive parts of the alt.

( ) No link and turn:The foundational study *does* have a two-degree benchmark – but it also EXPLICITLY says “current warming is bad”. Rejecting “two-degrees” is new worse for those lacking privilege. Also proves “doing both” is best.Huq ‘15

et al; Saleemul Huq is senior fellow in International Institute for Environment and Development’s Climate Change Group and is also Director of The International Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation. “A 1.5 degree goal could save us from ourselves” – IIED - 10 June 2015 - #CutWithKirby - https://www.iied.org/15-degree-goal-could-save-us-ourselves

Expert scientific opinion is clear that a stronger global target for limiting temperature rise would significantly reduce the risks from climate change to vulnerable and marginal groups. Yet as negotiators meet in Bonn to finalise details for the proposed Paris climate agreement in December this year, one of the challenges seems to be in recognising this scientific evidence in the text.

The point was made clear in the recent report (PDF) that followed the structured expert dialogue, which aimed to assess the adequacy of the 2-degree global goal currently contained in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

While the report mentioned that no target can be seen as providing a total defence from climate change , it re-emphasised that global warming is a threat multiplier for millions of individuals – exacerbating existing problems at the local level.

It took more than 100 years of human-induced greenhouse emissions to push the global temperature up by almost 1 degree Celsius. While this

might not sound like much, it has already caused enormous changes to our climate. Worse, this has disproportionately affected

developing countries (nations lacking privilege), leading to, for example, severe heat waves in India that have taken the lives of 2,000 people.

We know most countries in the Global South are poorly prepared to deal with such changes, but this awareness has not persuaded negotiating parties to adopt a binding international target. Instead, current policies place the world on a path towards 3.6 to 4.2 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels according to the Climate Action Tracker.

Experts still remain optimistic that a 2-degree target is still technically and economically feasible.

2 or 1.5 degrees?

Although some warming is "locked in" because of historical emissions that will take years to impact global temperatures, the urgency of limiting greenhouse gases (GHG) has not been fully realised by most developed countries, as demonstrated by their weak mitigation and adaptation measures over the years. So, you may be asking, why should we lower the target to 1.5 degrees instead?

Put simply, a 1.5 degree target has significantly fewer uncertainties – making it easier to predict and understand the future risks we face from a changing climate.

To keep emissions below acceptable levels, all major world economies will need to drastically reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and move towards green energy in the near future.

While this will mean some countries will need to bypass industrialisation and move towards sustainable development instead, it is obvious that the rate and cost of this will vary tremendously across different countries.

As the 2013-15 review on the structured expert dialogue mentions, "the longer we wait to bend the currently increasing curve of global emissions downward, the steeper we will have to bend it".

Until global temperatures begin to stabilise, the rate and frequency of glacial melt, sea level rise, heat waves, drought, bleaching of coral reefs, and cyclonic activity (to name a few) will continue to increase, creating dangerous levels of risk to vulnerable and poor communities.

A 1.5-degree target would increase pressure on governments and would allow us to more accurately predict the time it takes to stabilise global

temperatures – but that is not to say 2 degrees, or even 1.5 degrees of warming is "safe".

As a Human Rights report (PDF) published by the UN has emphasised, the global goal is a matter of human rights, particularly for vulnerable

communities who will be adversely affected. Neither a 1.5 nor a 2 degree target should be seen as guaranteeing defence, since both still risk dangerous consequences.

But at the very least, since mitigation and adaptation are closely correlated, a 1.5 degree target would mean more manageable adaptation measures, particularly for those countries that will face the brunt of global warming.

( ) Rejecting Two Degrees causes backsliding – causing the same violence their K seeks to counter.Sutter ‘15

Internally quoting Carlo Jaeger, chair of the Global Climate Forum – John D. Sutter is an award-winning columnist for CNN and creator of the network's "2 degrees" project, which aims to involve readers in climate change coverage. Sutter was a post-graduate fellow at the Poynter Institute. Sutter earned a bachelor's degree in international studies and journalism from Emory University. “2 degrees: The most important number you've never heard of” – CNN Reports –Nov 24 th - #CutWithKirby – Modified for language that may offend - http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/21/opinions/sutter-climate-two-degrees/index.html

Good news, though. If we drastically cut carbon emissions, we can stay below the 2-degree threshold . As part of this series, I'll be exploring exactly what it would take to do so.

This matters a great deal this year, since the U nited N ations will gather leaders and policy experts in Paris in

December to try to hammer out a new international agreement on climate change. Two degrees will be one useful benchmark to see if the world is on track.

"It's almost kind of like a truth keeping mechanism," said Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate change program at the

World Resources Institute. " It would be hard if it didn't exist to have a sense of whether countries are on track or not."

It's not a perfect yardstick . But it's a reasonable one. Think of it like a speed limit, said Jaeger, the economist in Germany. Would a 51 mph limit be better than 50? Or maybe it should be 49? The point isn't the exact number, it's the ballpark: 200 mph would certainly be too fast, as he put it, but 20 mph is too slow.

For climate change, the point is we don't know the world will fall into crisis at exactly 2 degrees and not 2.1 or 1.8. But that range is certainly dangerous.

"The way I think of it is like smoking," said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech. "How many cigarettes are too many? I don't know. I have no idea. Nobody has any idea. But we do know the more cigarettes you smoke, the greater the risk."

Two degrees, then, is our most educated estimate. A way to focus attention .

It's incredibly valuable in that respect.

Since the number emerged from a relatively obscure academic paper in the 1970s, it's become widely agreed upon in the

international community. In 2009, for example, 114 countries initially signed onto the "Copenhagen Accord," a nonbinding

agreement that recognizes the "scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius."

That level of consensus is rare on this topic.

A-to “Paris pull-out tubes the impact”

Paris is an Aff argument. US withdraw means everyone else is acting. The US would be the lone major emitter.Brown ‘17

Paul Brown is a former environment correspondent for The Guardian and currently writes for the Climate News Network. “Al Gore: Despite Paris Pull-Out, Trump Can't Derail Clean Energy Revolution” – AlterNet – June 17 - #CutWithKirby - http://www.alternet.org/environment/al-gore-despite-paris-pull-out-trump-cant-derail-clean-energy-revolution

Donald Trump “cannot rewrite history”, and no matter what he says or does the Paris Agreement to limit climate change will survive and is even stronger as a result of Trump’s rejection. This is the verdict pronounced by a former U.S. vice-president turned climate campaigner as Al Gore spurns Trump for a failed attempt to derail the energy revolution.

Speaking in London Thursday, Gore said: “I was worried when the president of my country announced he was making an

announcement about climate change, that if he hauled the US out of the Paris Agreement other nations would use it as an excuse to follow.

“There has been no such cascade . Indeed, no-one else has left. What we have seen is increasing support for the agreement from across the world, and within the U.S. expressions of solidarity from American governors, mayors and business.

A-to “Can adapt to warming”

Can’t adapt to warming – rates likely to be too fast to ensure resilience. EPA ‘7[United States Environmental Protection Agency. “Climate Change-health and environmental effects: ecosystems and biodiversity.” http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/effects/ecosystemsandbiodiversity.html -- 12/20]

Observations of ecosystem impacts are difficult to use in future projections because of the complexities involved in human/nature interactions

(e.g., land use change). Nevertheless, the observed changes are compelling examples of how rising temperatures can affect the natural world and raise questions of how vulnerable populations will adapt to direct and indirect effects associated

with climate change. The IPCC (IPCC, 2007) has noted, During the course of this century the resilience of many ecosystems ( their ability to adapt naturally) is likely to be exceeded by an unprecedented combination of change in climate and in other global change drivers (especially land use change and overexploitation), if greenhouse gas emissions and other changes continue at or above current rates. By 2100 ecosystems will be exposed to atmospheric CO2 levels substantially higher than in the past 650,000 years, and global temperatures at least among the highest as those

experienced in the past 740,000 years. This will alter the structure, reduce biodiversity and perturb functioning of most ecosystems , and compromise the services they currently provide.

A-to “Warming Not Real”

Global Warming is happening – most recent and best evidence concludes that it is human induced Muller ‘12[Richard, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former MacArthur Foundation fellow, “The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic”, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all]

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very

existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists , I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct . I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the B erkeley E arth S urface T emperature project , which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC ] , the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. It was possible, according to the I.P.C.C. consensus statement, that the warming before 1956 could be because of changes in solar activity, and that even a substantial part of the more

recent warming could be natural. Our Berkeley Earth approach used sophisticated statistical methods developed largely by our lead scientist , Robert Rohde, which allowed us to determine earth land temperature much further back in time. We carefully studied issues raised by skeptics: biases from urban heating (we duplicated our results using rural data alone), from

data selection (prior groups selected fewer than 20 percent of the available temperature stations; we used virtually 100 percent), from poor station quality (we separately analyzed good stations and poor ones) and from human intervention and data adjustment (our work is completely automated and hands-off). In our papers we demonstrate that none of these potentially troublesome effects unduly biased our conclusions. The historic temperature pattern we observed has abrupt dips that match the emissions of known explosive volcanic eruptions ; the particulates from such events reflect sunlight, make for beautiful sunsets and cool the earth’s surface for a few years. There are small, rapid variations attributable to El Niño and other ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream; because of such oscillations, the “flattening” of the recent temperature rise that some people claim is not, in our view, statistically significant. What has caused

the gradual but systematic rise of two and a half degrees? We tried fitting the shape to simple math functions ( exponentials, polynomials ), to solar activity and even to rising functions like world population . By far the best match was to the record of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), measured from atmospheric samples and air trapped in polar ice.

Consensus is on our sideEDF ‘9[ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND, 1-13 “GLOBAL WARMING MYTHS AND FACTS” -- http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=1011]

FACT: There is no debate among scientists about the basic facts of global warming . The most respected scientific bodies have stated unequivocally that global warming is occurring, and people are causing it

by burning fossil fuels (like coal, oil and natural gas) and cutting down forests. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which in 2005 the White House

called "the gold standard of objective scientific assessment ," issued a joint statement with 10 other

National Academies of Science saying " the scientific understanding of climate change i s now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action. It is vital that all nations identify cost-effective steps that they can take now, to contribute to substantial and long-

term reduction in net global greenhouse gas emissions." (Joint Statement of Science Academies: Global Response to Climate Change [PDF], 2005) The only debate in the science community about global warming is about how much and how fast warming will continue as a result of heat-trapping emissions. Scientists have given a clear warning about global warming, and we have more than enough facts — about causes and fixes — to implement solutions right now.

A-to “Aff = Biased Authors”

Our climate models are the most accurate- studies of studies prove

Science Daily ‘8 (4/6, "Climate Models Look Good When Predicting Climate Change", http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080402100001.htm)

The accuracy of computer models that predict climate change over the coming decades has been the subject of debate among politicians, environmentalists and even scientists. A new study by meteorologists at the University of Utah shows that current climate models are quite accurate and can be valuable tools for those seeking solutions on reversing global warming trends. Most of these models project a global warming trend that amounts to about 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the

next 100 years. Scientific opinion on climate change In the study, co-authors Thomas Reichler and Junsu Kim from the Department of

Meteorology at the University of Utah investigate how well climate models actually do their job in simulating climate. To

this end, they compare the output of the models against observations for present climate . The authors apply

this method to about 50 different national and international models that were developed over the past two decades at major climate research centers in China, Russia, Australia, Canada, France, Korea, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Of course, also included is the very latest model generation that was used for the very recent (2007) report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

"Coupled models are becoming increasingly reliable tools for understanding climate and climate change, and

the best models are now capable of simulating present-day climate with accuracy approaching conventional atmospheric observations," said Reichler. "We can now place a much higher level of confidence in model-based projections of climate change than in the past." The many hours of studying models and comparing them with actual climate changes fulfills the increasing wish to know how much one can trust climate models and their

predictions. Given the significance of climate change research in public policy, the study's results also provide important response to critics of global warming. Earlier this year, working group one of the IPCC released its

fourth global warming report. The University of Utah study results directly relate to this highly publicized report by showing that the models used for the IPCC paper have reached an unprecedented level of realism.

Neg authors are worse- they’re just special interest hacksHansen ‘6(Jim. Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “The Threat to the Planet” The New York Review of Books. Pages 11-12. http://www.pdfdownload.org/pdf2html/pdf2html.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.astro.columbia.edu%2F~roban%2Flab_2006_fall%2Fhansen.pdf&images=yes )

Why are the same scientists and political forces that succeeded in controlling the threat to the ozone layer now failing miserably to deal with the global warming crisis? Though we depend on fossil fuels far more than we ever did on CFCs, there is plenty of blame to go around. Scientists

present the facts about climate change clinically, failing to stress that business-as- usual will transform the planet. The press and television, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus concerning global warming, give equal time to fringe "contrarians " supported by the fossil fuel industry . Special interest groups mount effective disinformation campaigns to sow doubt about the reality of global warming. The government appears to be strongly influenced by special interests, or

otherwise confused and distracted, and it has failed to provide leadership. The public is understandably confused or uninterested. I used to spread the blame uniformly until, when I was about to appear on public television, the producer informed me that the program "must" also include a "contrarian" who would take issue with claims of global warming. Presenting such a view, he told me, was a common practice in commercial television as well as radio and newspapers. Supporters of public TV or advertisers, with their own special interests, require "balance" as a price for their continued financial support. Gore's book reveals that while more than half of the recent newspaper articles on

climate change have given equal weight to such contrarian views, virtually none of the scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals have questioned the consensus that emissions from human activities cause global warming. As a

result, even when the scientific evidence is clear, technical nit-picking by contrarians leaves the public with the false impression that there is still great scientific uncertainty about the reality and causes of climate change .

Yes, climate change impactWarming causes extinction---experts agreeGriffin ‘15

(David Ray, - emeritus professor of philosophy of religion at Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, Co-Director of the Center for Process Studies – “Unprecedented: Can Civilization Survive the CO2 Crisis?”, p142-143, Clarity Press)

Although the idea of extinction was mentioned a few times above, the issue deserves a section to itself. Indeed, even if it seldom makes the

evening news, extinction is one of the major stories of our time, because we are in the midst of one of the six mass extinctions since the emergence of life on our planet . The previous five mass extinctions were: • The extinction at the end of the Ordovician Period (referred to as “the end-Ordovician extinction”), which occurred about 440 mya (million years ago);• The

end-Devonian extinction, which occurred some 370 mya; • The end-Permian extinction, which was the worst of the extinctions thus far, occurred about 245 mya, having evidently been triggered by a massive lava flow in Siberia that increased global temperatures by 6 ̊ C, which melted frozen methane deposits, which in turn raised the temperature even

further. This “Great Dying,” as it is called, evidently caused about 95 percent of the planet’s complex organisms to go extinct – a catastrophe so great that “[it] took about 50 million years for life again to develop the diversity that it had prior to the event.”29• The end-Triassic extinction, which occurred some 210 mya (shortly after mammals and dinosaurs had evolved), and came about when “an increase in atmospheric CO2 caused acidification of the oceans and global warming” (which is believed to have been caused by volcanoes).30• The end-Cretaceous extinction, which occurred about 65 mya, eliminated (among other animals) the last

of the dinosaurs. Whereas all of those extinctions were caused by various types of natural causes, the sixth mass extinction, which may prove to be the worst ever , is unique in being caused by human beings . It began about 100,000 years ago, when humans began spreading from Africa to the rest of the world. The extinction speeded up qualitatively after agriculture began in the

Holocene epoch, and even more after the industrial revolution.31 In fact, human beings, who now emit about 100 times more CO2 than volcanoes, are evidently extinguishing species – according to a 2010 article in a special issue on biological diversity published by the Royal Society – at a rate that “ far exceeds anything in the fossil record .” 32Another article in the same issue, written by Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography ,

discussed extinction caused by ocean acidification. Explaining that “massive influxes of carbon at the end of the Paleocene caused intense global warming, ocean acidification, mass extinction throughout the deep sea and the worldwide disappearance of coral reefs,” Jackson said that unless there is immediate and decisive conservation action , “another great mass extinction affecting all ocean ecosystems and comparable to the upheavals of the geological past appears inevitable .”33At the end of her 2014 book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert asked, “In an extinction event of our own making, what happens to us?” Many people seem to think that we self-named Homo sapiens are so wise and powerful that nothing could drive us to extinction. However, she points out, “When a mass extinction occurs, it takes

out the weak and also lays low the strong.” The famous anthropologist Richard Leakey , she added, warned that “Homo sapiens might not only be the agents of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims .”34

There are now some scientists who believe that human extinction , or at least near extinction, will happen in the near future. Kevin Anderson , director of England’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change , said in 2009 that if th e global temperature rises by 4 ̊ C, about 90 percent of the Earth ’ s people will die - although human extinction will not be total, because “a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive.”35

Anderson’s view is considered overly optimistic by others, such as atmospheric and marine scientist Ira Leifer of the University of California Santa Barbara. Asking what portion of the population would be able to adapt to a global temperature increase of 4 ̊C, Leifer said he believed that it would be “just a few thousand people [seeking refuge] in the Arctic or Antarctica.”36 Even Leifer’s

view is too optimistic for other scientists, such as Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner - who had announced the eradication of

smallpox to the World Health Assembly in 1980. In 2010, Fenner, the author of 22 books and hundreds of scientific articles, said: “Homo sapiens will become extinct , perhaps within 100 years .”37 Some scientists who expect an imminent

extinction of the human race regard methane emissions from thawing permafrost as the most likely cause. A good introduction to the thinking of some scientists about the danger of extinction from methane is provided by a 2013 video called “Mass Extinction: Let’s Not,” which was narrated and co-authored by Thom Hartmann.38 Given the seriousness of the danger from methane, the present book might better have been subtitled, “Can Civilization Survive the CO2-CH4 Crisis?” Probably the scientist who has written the

most about the demise of the human race within the next several decades is Guy R. McPherson , professor emeritus of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. In various articles, at a blog called “Nature Bats Last,” and in a 2013 book entitled Going Dark, McPherson has presented an array of scenarios through which humanity could become extinct, one of which is due to

methane emissions from thawing permafrost.39 The prediction of human extinction through methane emissions has been central to the thinking of retired Earth-systems scientist Malcolm Light. In 2012, Light wrote that the process of significant methane release, which began in 2010, “will accelerate exponentially, release huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere and lead to the demise of all life on earth before the middle of this century .” From Light’s

point of view, the only hope for human survival is a massive reduction in CO2 emissions combined with the immediate use of geoengineering “as a cooling method in the Arctic to counteract the effects of the methane buildup.”40

Tipping points and positive feedbacks Klein ‘14

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, member of the board of directors of 350.org, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, pp. 12-14

In a 2012 report, the World Bank laid out the gamble implied by that target. “As global warming approaches and exceeds 2-degrees Celsius, there is a risk of triggering nonlinear tipping elements . Examples include the disintegration of the West

Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy production, and livelihoods. This would further add to 21st-century global warming and impact entire continents.” In other words, once we allow temperatures to climb past a certain point, where the mercury stops is not in our control.¶ But the bigger problem—and the reason Copenhagen caused such great despair—is that because governments did not agree to binding targets, they are free to pretty much ignore their commitments. Which is precisely what is happening. Indeed, emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something radical changes within our economic structure, 2 degrees now

looks like a utopian dream. And it’s not just environmentalists who are raising the alarm. The World Bank also warned when it released its report that “we’re on track to a 4-C warmer world [by century’s end] marked by extreme heat waves , declining global food stocks , loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise .” And the report cautioned that,

“there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4-C world is possible .” Kevin Anderson, former director (now deputy

director) of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, which has quickly established itself as one of the U.K’s premier climate research institutions, is even blunter; he

says 4 degrees Celsius warming—7.2 degrees Fahrenheit—is “incompatible with an organized, equitable, and civilized global community.”¶ We don’t know exactly what a 4 degree Celsius world would look like, but even the best-case scenario is likely to be

calamitous. Four degrees of warming could raise global sea levels by 1 or possibly even 2 meters by 2100 (and would lock in at least a few additional meters over future centuries). This would drown some island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much of California and the northeastern United States as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast

Asia. Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles, Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.¶ Meanwhile, brutal heat waves that can kill tens of thousands of people, even in wealthy countries, would become entirely unremarkable summer events on every continent but Antarctica. The heat would also cause staple crops to suffer dramatic yield losses across the globe (it is possible that Indian wheat and U.S. could plummet by as much as 60 percent), this

at a time when demand will be surging due to population growth and a growing demand for meat . And since

crops will be facing not just heat stress but also extreme events such as wide-ranging droughts, flooding, or pest outbreaks, the losses could easily turn out to be more severe than the models have predicted. When you add ruinous hurricanes , raging wildfires, fisheries collapses , widespread disruptions to water supplies, extinctions, and globe-trotting diseases to the mix, it indeed becomes difficult to imagine that a peaceful, ordered society could be sustained (that is, where such a thing exists in the first place).¶ And keep in mind that these are the optimistic scenarios in which warming is more or less stabilized at 4 degrees Celsius and does not trigger tipping points beyond which runaway warming would occur. Based on the latest modeling, it is becoming safer to

assume that 4 degrees could bring about a number of extremely dangerous feedback loops—an Arctic that is regularly

ice-free in September, for instance, or, according to one recent study, global vegetation that is too saturated to act as a reliable “sink”, leading to more carbon being emitted rather than stored. Once this happens, any hope of predicting impacts pretty much goes out the window. And this process may be starting sooner than anyone predicted. In May 2014, NASA and the University of California, Irvine scientists revealed that glacier melt in a section of West Antarctica roughly the size of France now “appears unstoppable.” This likely spells down for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which according to lead study author Eric Rignot “comes with a sea level rise between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people worldwide.” The disintegration, however, could unfold over centuries and there is still time for emission reductions to slow down the process and prevent the worst. ¶ Much more frightening than

any of this is the fact that plenty of mainstream analysts think that on our current emissions trajectory, we are headed for even more than 4 degrees of warming . In 2011, the usually staid International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report predicting that we are actually on track for 6 degrees Celsius —10.8 degrees Fahrenheit—of warming. And as the IEA’s chief economist put it: “Everybody, even the

school children, knows that this will have catastrophic implications for all of us .” (The evidence indicates that 6 degrees of warming is likely to set in motion several major tipping points—not only slower ones such as the aforementioned breakdown of

the West Antarctic ice sheet, but possibly more abrupt ones, like massive releases of methane from Arctic permafrost .) The accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers as also published a report warning businesses that we are headed for “4-C , or even 6-C” of warming.¶ These various projections are the equivalent of every alarm in your house going off simultaneously. And then every alarm on your street going off as well, one by one by one. They

mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species . The only historical

precedent for a crisis of this depth and scale was the Cold War fear that we were headed toward nuclear holocaust, which would have made much of the planet uninhabitable. But that was (and remains) a threat; a slim possibility, should geopolitics spiral out of control. The vast majority of nuclear scientists never told us that we were almost certainly going to put our civilization in peril if we kept going about our daily lives as usual, doing exactly what we were already going, which is what climate scientists have been telling us for years. ¶ As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G. Thompson, a world-renowned specialist on glacier melt,

explained in 2010, “Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or

speaking before Congressional committees. When then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization .”

2NC-1NR backlines

Backlines - Endangerment Finding

Extension – Domestic Rollback not key

Other nations won’t fill the gaps left by US departure from Paris.Oppenheimer ‘17

Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University. Oppenheimer is interviewed in this piece by Robinson Meyer, who is an associate editor at The Atlantic – “Avoiding Two Degrees of Warming 'Is Now Totally Unrealistic'” – The Atlantic – June 3rd - #CutWithKirby - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/oppenheimer-interview/529083/

But the Trump action can’t actually have any positive effect on any of that. I don’t believe the arguments that the rest of the countries are going to buckle up, redouble their efforts, and compensate for the absence of U.S. leadership and participation. I think the immediate consequence will be a ripple effect, making countries think twice about doing much about climate change. It won’t be China or Europe. It will be a lot of countries whose economies will exert substantial leverage on global emissions over the next 10, 20, 30 years, as

they grow—those are the ones that I expect to hesitate. And that hesitation, in and of itself, could be enough to condemn the two-degree target to oblivion.

Extension - States Solve

Paris withdraw has spurred States to compensate for Federal inaction.Uren ‘17

Adam Uren – Senior Producer, Go Media and 2014 winner of the Online Journalist of the Year as awarded by The Association of British Insurers Financial Media Awards - “4 reasons why the U.S. leaving Paris climate deal might not be the end of the world” – Go MN - June 5, 2017 - #CutWithKirby - http://www.gomn.com/news/4-reasons-u-s-leaving-paris-climate-deal-might-not-end-world/

As we say above, the Paris Agreement was a series of voluntary commitments to reducing emissions, but now that the U.S. is no Longer pursuing these emissions targets at the federal Level , it doesn't stop governments from doing so at the state and local level.

In the wake of Trump's decision, the states of California, Washington and New York formed a coalition committed to upholding the Paris accord, which has since been joined by 10 more states (including

Minnesota). Between them, more than 30 percent of U.S. carbon emissions come from these states.

In Minnesota, although he said the decision to withdraw was "damaging," gov. Mark Dayton said his state would continue to pursue its aggressive strategy to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.

A similar coalition has been springing up at city-level as well, with St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges among the mayors of 82 cities that as of Friday had pledged to uphold the spirit of the Paris Agreement.

The White House is actively encouraging this, with spokesman Sean Spicer saying on Friday, according to the Malt online: "We believe in states' rights and so, if a locality, municipality or a state wants to enact a policy that their voters, or their citizens believe in, then that's what they should do."

Extension - It’s too late to meet the 2 degree target.

Impossible to reach the 2 degree target – even a perfectly implemented Paris agreement couldn’t get there..Rott ‘17

et al; Nathan Rott is a reporter on NPR's National Desk and was the first recipient of the Stone and Holt Weeks Fellowship “5 Changes That Could Come From Leaving The Paris Climate Deal” – NPR Reports – June 1st - #CutWithKirby - http://www.npr.org/2017/06/01/531056661/5-things-that-could-change-when-the-u-s-leaves-the-paris-climate-deal

The main goal of the Paris deal was to limit global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (or, aspirationally, even 1.5

degrees). Beyond that point, scientists worry that catastrophic impacts of warming become irreversible. The various Paris pledges by each nation were not actually enough to achieve that target . And even with the environmental regulations passed under President Barack Obama, the U.S. was unlikely to meet its original commitment — to reduce carbon emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels. Now, the U.S. may fall further from that goal.

At best, Paris goals will get to 3 degrees Irfan ‘16

Umair Irfan covers the Department of Energy, technology, research and health for ClimateWire. In 2014, Umair went to Germany under the Arthur F. Burns fellowship to report on the country's drastic shift away from nuclear power toward renewables. He completed his bachelor's degree in biochemistry and his master's degree in journalism “Climate Pledges Will Fall Short of Needed 2 Degree C Limit” – Scientific American - November 3, 2016 - #CutWithKirby - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-pledges-will-fall-short-of-needed-2-degree-c-limit/

The U.N. Environment Programme dumped a bucket of cold water this morning on nations riding high from the Paris climate change accords’ taking effect this week.

In a new report, UNEP found that even if every country that made an emissions-cutting pledge in the

Paris Agreement keeps its promise, the world will still fall 12 to 14 gigatons short each year of keeping temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.

The individual commitments would only keep warming below 3 degrees at best , the report finds. Meanwhile, nations are on course to further miss the mark of the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious pledge to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels” by 15 to 17 gigatons per year.

Paris is insufficient for reaching the 2 degree threshold.Mooney ‘17

Internally quoting Michael Oppenheimer, a climate researcher at Princeton University. Chris Mooney writes about energy and the environment at The Washington Post. Chris also has published four books about science and climate change. “ Analysis: Trump's climate deal departure makes already tough target harder to hit” Chicago Tribune - June 1st - #CutWithKirby - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-trump-paris-climate-agreement-analysis-20170601-story.html

President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement on Thursday could make it difficult, if not impossible , for the world to stay on track to reach an internationally agreed goal of limiting dangerous global warming, scientists said.

That goal, which sought to limit warming to "well below" a 2 degree Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit) rise above pre-industrial

temperatures, was already a stretch, even before Trump announced the U.S. exit at the White House rose garden.

Now with the U.S., the world's second largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions after China, walking away from the accord, other countries would presumably have to ramp up their ambitions still further if they want to avoid the prospect of dangerous warming.

"Avoiding a two degree warming was already hard when all of the key countries were rowing together," said Michael Oppenheimer, a climate researcher at Princeton University. " With the U.S. becoming a climate outlaw by withdrawing from Paris, that target becomes nearly impossible. It looks like Trump has condemned the U.S., the rest of the country, and future generations to live in the climate danger zone."

Extension – Warming D

No warming impact -- their science is wrong -- ipcc predicted warming at 4x the rate it actually happened at from 1998-2002

-- warming has stopped, based on actual data, as opposed to models

-- correlation between ghgs and warming is suspect at best: the warming rate in degrees/decade from 1951-2002 = 0.11, and from 1998-2012 = 0.04, despite actual ghg use being 25% more than what the ipcc assumed when it made predictions about warming

Goklany ‘15

Indur Goklany, science and technology policy analyst at the DoI, former delegate to the IPCC, and author of multiple books on climate science with a PhD in electrical engineering from MSU (September 2015, “CARBON DIOXIDE: The good news,” http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/10/benefits.pdf

Firstly, the global climate has not been warming as rapidly as projected in the IPCC assessment reports. Figure

5 compares observed global surface temperature data from 1986 through 2012 versus modelled results. It confirms that models have been running hotter than reality. But these are the projections that governments have relied on to justify

global warming policies, including subsidies for biofuels and renewable energy while increasing the overall cost of energy to the general consumer – costs that disproportionately burden those that are poorer. A comparison of performance of 117 simulations using 37 models versus empirical data from the HadCRUT4 surface temperature data set indicates that the vast majority of the simulations/models have

overestimated warming.143 The models indicated that the average global temperature would increase by 0.30±0.02◦Cper decade during the period from 1993 to 2012 but empirical data show an increase of only 0.14±0.06◦C

per decade.144 Model performance was even worse for the more recent 15-year period of 1998–2012. Here the average modelled trend was 0.21±0.03 ◦C per decade, quadruple the observed trend of 0.05±0.08◦C. Considering the confidence interval , the observed trend is indistinguishable from no trend at all; that is, warming has, for practical purposes, halted. Even the IPCC acknowledges the existence of this ‘hiatus’.145 Moreover, the HadCRUT4 temperature database indicates that the global warming rate declined from 0.11◦C per decade from 1951–2012 to 0.04◦C per decade from 1998–2012 . 146 This is despite the fact that, per the IPCC, the anthropogenic g reen h ouse g a s forcing for 2010 (2.25 W/m2) exceeded what was used in the models for 2010 (1.78–1.84 W/m2) by around 25%. 147 Some have argued that satellite temperature data should be preferred over surface datasets. In fact, satellite coverage is more comprehensive and more representative of the Earth’s surface than is achievable using surface stations, even if the latter were to number in the thousands. A recent review paper notes that satellites can provide ‘unparalleled global- and fine-scale spatial coverage’ presumably because of ‘more frequent and repetitive coverage over a large area than other observation means’.148 In addition, surface measurements are influenced by the measuring stations’ microenvironments, which will vary not only from station to station at any given time, but also over time at the very same station, as vegetation and man-made structures in their

vicinity spring up, evolve and change.149 Satellite temperature data indicates that the globe has been warming at the rate of 0.12–0.14◦C per decade since 1979;150 by contrast, the IPCC assessments over the last 25 years have been projecting a warming trend of 0.2–0.4◦C per decade . 151,152 The differences between modelled

trends and those from satellites and weather balloons are shown in Figures 6 and 7.153 Nevertheless, based on these chains of unvalidated computer models, orthodox thinkers on climate change claim tha t global warming will, among

other things, lower food production, increase hunger, cause more extreme weather, increase disease, and threaten water supplies. The cumulative impact will, they claim, diminish living standards and threaten species, and if

carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not curbed soon, pose an existential threat to humanity and the rest of nature.

Some claim it may already be too late.154 The group 350.org, for instance, agitates for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, currently at 400 ppm, to 350 ppm, a level the earth last experienced in 1988.155 But since then, global GDP per capita has increased 60%, infant mortality has declined 48%, life expectancy has increased by 5.5 years, and the poverty headcount has dropped from 43% to 17% despite a population increase of 40%. Nostalgia for a 350 ppm world seems somewhat misplaced, if not downright perverse. 156,157

No impact to warmingHart ‘15

Michael Hart, Simon Reisman Chair at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Former Fulbright-Woodrow Wilson Center Visiting Research, Former Scholar-in-Residence in the School of International Service and Senior Fellow in the Center for North American Studies at American University in Washington, a former official in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, where he Specialized in trade policy and trade negotiations, MA from the University of Toronto, “Hubris: The Troubling Science, Economics, and Politics of Climate Change”, p. 242-246

As already noted, the IPCC scenarios themselves are wildly alarmist , not only on the basic science but also on the underlying

economic assumptions , which in turn drive the alarmist impacts. The result cannot withstand critical analysis . Economists Ian

Castles and David Henderson, for example, show the extent to which the analysis is driven by the desire to reach predetermined outcomes.50 Other economists have similarly wondered what purpose was served by pursuing such unrealistic scenarios. It is hard to credit the defense put forward by Mike Hulme, one of the creators of the scenarios, that the IPCC is not engaged in forecasting the future but in creating “plausible” story lines of what might happen under various

scenarios.51 Each scare scenario is based on linear projections without any reference to tech nological developments or adaptation . If, on a similar linear basis, our Victorian ancestors in the UK, worried about rapid urbanization and population

growth in London, had made similar projections, they would have pointed to the looming crisis arising from reliance on horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses; they would have concluded that by the middle of the 20th century, London would be knee-deep in horse manure, and all of the southern counties would be required to

grow the oats and hay to feed and bed the required number of horses. Technology progressed and London adapted. Why should the rest of humanity not be able to do likewise in the face of a trivial rise in temperature over the course of more than a century ? The work on physical impacts is equally over the top . All the scenarios assume only negative impacts , ignore the reality of adaptation , and attribute any and all things bad to global warming. Assuming the GHG theory to be correct means that its impact would be most evident at night and during the winter in reducing atmospheric heat loss to outer space.52 It would have greater impact in increasing minimum temperatures than in

increasing maximum temperatures. Secondary studies, however, generally ignore this facet of the hypothesis. The IPCC believes that a warmer world will harm human health due, for example, to increased disease, malnutrition, heat-waves, floods, storms, and cardiovascular incidents. As already noted there is no basis for the claim about severe- weather -related threats or malnutrition . The claim about heat-related deaths gained a boost during the summer of 2003 because of the

tragedy of some 15,000 alleged heat-related deaths in France as elderly people stayed behind in city apartments without air conditioning while their children enjoyed the heat at the sea shore during the August vacation. Epidemiological studies of so-called "excess" deaths resulting from heat waves are abused to get the desired results. Similar studies of the impact of cold spells show that they are far more lethal than heat waves and that it is much easier to adapt to heat than to cold.53 More fundamentally, this, like most of the alarmist literature, ignores the basics of the AGW hypothesis: the world will not see an exponential increase in summer, daytime heat (and thus more heat waves), but a decrease in night-time and winter cooling, particularly at higher latitudes and altitudes. Based on the AGW hypothesis, Canada, China, Korea, Northern Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina will see warmer winters and warmer nights. There are clear benefits to such a development, even if there may also be problems, but the AGW industry tends to ignore the positive aspects of their alarmist scenarios.

The feared spread of malaria , a much repeated claim, is largely unrelated to climate . Malaria’s worst recorded outbreak was in Siberia long before there was any discussion of AGW . Similarly, the building of the Rideau Canal in Ottawa

in the 1820s was severely hampered by outbreaks of malaria due to the proximity of mosquito-infested wetlands in the area. Malaria remains widespread in tropical countries today in part because of the UN’s lengthy embargo on the use of DDT, the legacy of an earlier alarmist disaster. Temperature is but one factor, and a minor one at that, in the multiple factors that affect the rise or decline in the presence of disease-spreading mosquitoes. Wealthier western countries have pursued

public health strategies that have reduced the incidence of the dis- ease in their countries. Entomologist Paul Reiter, widely recognized as the leading specialist on malaria vectors and a contributor to some of the early work of the IPCC, was aghast to learn how his careful and systematic analysis of the potential impacts had been twisted in ways that he could not endorse. In a recent paper, he concludes: “Simplistic reasoning on the future prevalence of malaria is ill-founded; malaria is not limited by climate in most temperate regions, nor in the tropics, and in nearly all cases, ’new' malaria at high altitudes is well below the maximum altitudinal limits for transmission. Future changes in climate may alter the prevalence and incidence of the disease, but obsessive emphasis on ’global warming' as a dominant

parameter is indefensible; the principal determinants are linked to ecological and societal change, politics and economics.”54 Catastrophic species loss similarly has little foundation in past experience .55 Even if the GHG hypothesis were to be correct ,

its impact would be slow , providing significant scope and opportunity for adaptation , including by flora and fauna. One of the more irresponsible claims was made by a group of UK modelers who fed wildly improbable scenarios and data into their computers and produced the much-touted claim of massive species loss by the end of the

century. There are literally thousands of websites devoted to spreading alarm about species loss and

biodiversity. Global warming is but one of many claimed human threats to the planet’s biodiversity . The claims , fortunately, are largely hype , based on computer models and the estimate by Harvard naturalist Edward O. Wilson that 27,000 to 100,000 species are lost annually - a figure he advanced purely hypothetically but which has become one of the most persistent of environmental urban myths. The fact is

that scientists have no idea of the extent of the world's flora and fauna , with estimates ranging from five million to 100

million species, and that there are no reliable data about the rate of loss. By some estimates, 95 per cent of the species that ever existed have been lost over the eons , most before humans became major players in altering their environment. A much more

credible estimate of recent species loss comes from a surprising source, the UN Environmental Program. It reports that known species loss is slowing reaching its lowest level in 500 years in the last three decades of the 20th century, with some 20 reported extinctions despite increasing

pressure on the biosphere from growing human population and industrialization.57 The alarmist community has also introduced the scientifically unknown concept

of "locally extinct,” often meaning little more than that a species of plant or animal has responded to adverse conditions by moving to more hospitable circumstances, e.g., birds or butterflies becoming more numerous north of their range and disappearing at its

extreme southern extent. Idso et al. conclude: “Many species have shown the ability to adapt rapidly to changes in climate .

Claims that global warming threatens large numbers of species with extinction typically rest on a false definition of extinction

(the loss of a particular population rather than en- tire species) and speculation rather than real-world evidence . The world’s species have proven very resilient , having survived past natural climate cycles that involved much greater warming and higher C02 concentrations than exist today or are likely to exist in the coming centuries ?“

Patents Turn – backlines

Yes, ABR impactIt’s likely – only new drugs solveSample ‘14

Ian Sample, science correspondent 1-23-2014 http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jan/23/antibiotic-resistant-diseases-apocalyptic-threat

HEALTH - Britain’s most senior medical adviser has warned MPs that the rise in drug-resistant diseases could trigger a national emergency comparable to a catastrophic terrorist attack, pandemic flu or major coastal flooding. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, said the threat from infections that are resistant to frontline antibiotics was so serious that the issue should be added to the government’s national risk register of civil emergencies. She described what she called an “ apocalyptic scenario ” where people going for simple operations

in 20 years’ time die of routine infections “because we have run out of antibiotics.” The register was established in 2008 to advise the public and businesses on national emergencies that Britain could face in the next five years. The highest priority risks on the latest register include a deadly flu outbreak, catastrophic terrorist attacks, and major flooding on the scale of 1953, the last occasion on which a national emergency was declared in the UK. Speaking to MPs on the Commons science and technology committee, Davies said she would ask the Cabinet Office to add antibiotic resistance to the national risk register in the light of an annual report on infectious disease she will publish in March. Davies declined to elaborate on the report, but said its publication would coincide with a government strategy to promote more responsible use of antibiotics among doctors and the clinical

professions. “We need to get our act together in this country,” she told the committee. She told the Guardian: “There are few public health issues of potentially greater importance for society than antibiotic resistance. It means we are at increasing risk of developing infections that cannot be treated – but resistance can be managed. “That is why we will be publishing a new cross-government strategy and action plan to tackle this issue in early spring.” The issue of drug resistance is as old as antibiotics themselves, and arises when drugs knock out susceptible infections, leaving hardier, resilient strains behind. The survivors then multiply, and over time can become unstoppable with frontline medicines. Some of the best known are so-called hospital superbugs such as MRSA that are at the root of outbreaks among patients. “In the past, most people haven’t worried because we’ve always had new antibiotics to turn to,” said Alan Johnson, consultant clinical scientist at the Health Protection Agency. “What has changed is that the development pipeline is running dry. We don’t have new antibiotics that we can rely on in the immediate future or in the longer term.” Changes in modern medicine have exacerbated the problem by making patients

more susceptible to infections. For example, cancer treatments weaken the immune system, and the use of catheters increases the chances of bugs entering the bloodstream. “We are becoming increasingly reliant on antibiotics in a whole range of areas of medicine. If we don’t have new antibiotics to deal with the problems of resistance we see, we are going to be in serious trouble ,” Johnson added. The supply of new antibiotics has dried up for

several reasons, but a major one is that drugs companies see greater profits in medicines that treat chronic conditions, such as heart disease, which patients must take for years or even decades. “There is a broken market model for making new antibiotics,” Davies told the MPs. Davies has met senior officials at the World Health Organisation and her counterparts in other countries to develop a strategy to tackle antibiotic resistance globally. Drug resistance is emerging in diseases across the board. Davies said 80% of gonorrhea was now resistant to the frontline antibiotic tetracycline, and infections were rising in young and middle-aged people. Multi-drug resistant TB was also a major threat, she said. Another worrying trend is the rise in infections

that are resistant to powerful antibiotics called carbapenems, which doctors rely on to tackle the most serious infections. Resistant bugs carry a gene variant that allows them to destroy the drug. What concerns some scientists is that the gene variant can spread freely between different kinds of bacteria, said Johnson. Bacteria resistant to carbapenems were first detected in the UK in 2003, when three cases were reported. The numbers remained low until 2007, but have since leapt to 333 in 2010, with 217 cases in the first six months of 2011, according to the latest figures from the HPA.

Drug resistance increasing now – causes extinction without new drugsMcKenna ‘13

{Maryn, syndicated journalist specializing in public and global health, Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism (Brandeis University) and the 2013-14 Knight Science Journalism Project Fellow at MIT, recipient of the 2013 Byron H Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences and finalist for a James Beard Foundation Award, cum laude graduate of Georgetown University, has a master’s degree with highest honors from Northwestern, served fellowships at Harvard Medical School, “Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future,” 11/20, https://medium.com/editors-picks/imagining-the-post-antibiotics-future-892b57499e77#THUR}

Predictions that we might sacrifice the antibiotic miracle have been around almost as long as the drugs themselves. Penicillin was first discovered in 1928 and battlefield casualties got the first non-experimental doses in 1943, quickly saving soldiers who had been close to death. But just two years later, the drug’s discoverer Sir Alexander Fleming warned that its benefit might not last . Accepting the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine, he said: “It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them… There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug make them resistant .” As a biologist, Fleming knew that evolution was inevitable :

sooner or later, bacteria would develop defenses against the compounds the nascent pharmaceutical industry was aiming at them. But what worried him was the possibility that misuse would speed the process up . Every inappropriate prescription and insufficient dose given in medicine would kill weak bacteria but let the strong survive. (As would the micro-dose

“growth promoters” given in agriculture, which were invented a few years after Fleming spoke.) Bacteria can produce another generation in as little as twenty minutes; with tens of thousands of generations a year working out survival strategies, the organisms would soon overwhelm the potent new drugs . Fleming’s prediction was correct . Penicillin-resistant staph emerged in 1940, while the drug was still being given to only a few

patients. Tetracycline was introduced in 1950, and tetracycline-resistant Shigella emerged in 1959; erythromycin came on the market in 1953, and erythromycin-resistant strep appeared in 1968. As antibiotics became more affordable and their use increased, bacteria developed defenses

more quickly. Methicillin arrived in 1960 and methicillin resistance in 1962; levofloxacin in 1996 and the first resistant cases the same year; linezolid in 2000 and resistance to it in 2001; daptomycin in 2003 and the first signs of resistance in 2004. With antibiotics losing usefulness so quickly  — and thus not making back the estimated $1 billion per drug it costs to create them — the pharmaceutical industry lost enthusiasm for making more. In 2004, there were only five new antibiotics in development, compared to more than 500 chronic-disease drugs for which resistance is not an issue — and which, unlike antibiotics, are taken for years, not days. Since then, resistant bugs have grown more numerous and by sharing DNA with each other, have become even tougher to treat

with the few drugs that remain. In 2009, and again this year , researchers in Europe and the United States sounded the alarm over an ominous form of resistance known as CRE, for which only one antibiotic still works. Health authorities have struggled to convince the public that this is a crisis. In September, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention, issued a blunt warning: “ If we’re not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era . For some patients and

some microbes, we are already there .” The chief medical officer of the United Kingdom, Dame Sally Davies — who calls antibiotic resistance as serious a threat as terrorism  — recently published a book in which she imagines what might come next. She sketches a world where infection is so dangerous that anyone with even minor symptoms would be locked in confinement until they recover or die. It is a dark vision, meant to disturb. But it may actually underplay what the loss of antibiotics would mean . In 2009, three New York physicians cared for a sixty-seven-year-old man who had major surgery and then picked up a

hospital infection that was “pan-resistant” — that is, responsive to no antibiotics at all. He died fourteen days later. When his doctors related his case in a medical journal months afterward, they still sounded stunned. “It is a rarity for a physician in the developed world to have a patient

die of an overwhelming infection for which there are no therapeutic options,” they said, calling the man’s death “the first instance in our clinical experience in which we had no effective treatment to offer.” They are not the only doctors to endure that lack of options. Dr. Brad Spellberg of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine became so enraged by the ineffectiveness of antibiotics that he wrote a book about it. “Sitting with a family, trying to explain that you have nothing left to treat their dying relative — that leaves an

indelible mark on you,” he says. “This is not cancer; it’s infectious disease, treatable for decades.” As grim as they are, in-hospital deaths from resistant infections are easy to rationalize: perhaps these people were just old, already ill, different somehow from the rest of us. But deaths like

this are changing medicine. To protect their own facilities, hospitals already flag incoming patients who might carry untreatable bacteria . Most of those

patients come from nursing homes and “long-term acute care” (an intensive-care alternative where someone who needs a ventilator for weeks or months might stay). So many patients in those institutions carry highly resistant bacteria that hospital workers isolate them when they arrive,

and fret about the danger they pose to others. As infections become yet more dangerous, the healthcare industry will be even less willing to take such risks. Those calculations of risk extend far beyond admitting possibly contaminated patients from a nursing home. Without the protection offered by antibiotics, entire categories of medical practice would be rethought. Many treatments require suppressing the immune system , to help destroy cancer or to keep a transplanted organ viable. That

suppression makes people unusually vulnerable to infection. Antibiotics reduce the threat; without them, chemotherapy or radiation treatment would be as dangerous as the cancers they seek to cure . Dr. Michael Bell, who leads an infection-prevention division at the CDC, told me: “We deal with

that risk now by loading people up with broad-spectrum antibiotics, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. But if you can’t do that, the decision to treat somebody takes on a different ethical tone. Similarly with transplantation. And severe burns are hugely susceptible to infection. Burn units would have a very, very difficult task keeping people alive.” Doctors routinely perform procedures that carry an extraordinary infection risk unless antibiotics are used. Chief among them: any treatment that requires the construction of

portals into the bloodstream and gives bacteria a direct route to the heart or brain. That rules out intensive-care medicine, with its ventilators, catheters, and ports—but also something as prosaic as

kidney dialysis, which mechanically filters the blood . Next to go: surgery , especially on sites that harbor large populations of bacteria such as the intestines and the urinary tract. Those bacteria are benign in their regular

homes in the body, but introduce them into the blood, as surgery can, and infections are practically guaranteed. And then implantable devices, because bacteria can form sticky films of infection on the devices’ surfaces that can be broken down only by antibiotics Dr. Donald Fry, a member of the American College of Surgeons who finished medical school in 1972, says: “In my professional life, it has been breathtaking to watch what can be done with synthetic prosthetic materials: joints, vessels, heart valves. But in these operations, infection is a catastrophe.”

British health economists with similar concerns recently calculated the costs of antibiotic resistance. To examine how it would affect surgery, they picked hip replacements, a common procedure in once-athletic Baby Boomers.

They estimated that without antibiotics, one out of every six recipients of new hip joints would die. Antibiotics are administered prophylactically before operations as major as open-heart surgery and as routine as Caesarean sections and prostate biopsies.

Without the drugs, the risks posed by those operations, and the likelihood that physicians would perform them, will change. “In our current malpractice environment, is a doctor going to want to do a bone marrow transplant, knowing there’s a very high rate of infection that you won’t be able to treat?” asks Dr. Louis Rice, chair of the department of medicine at

Brown University’s medical school. “Plus, right now healthcare is a reasonably free-market, fee-for-service system; people are interested in doing procedures because they make money. But five or ten years from now, we’ll probably be in an environment where we get a flat sum of

money to take care of patients. And we may decide that some of these procedures aren’t worth the risk.” Medical procedures may involve a high risk of infections, but our everyday lives are pretty risky too. One of the

first people to receive penicillin experimentally was a British policeman, Albert Alexander. He was so riddled with infection that his scalp oozed pus and one eye had to be removed. The source of his illness: scratching his face on a rosebush. (There was so little penicillin available that,

though Alexander rallied at first, the drug ran out, and he died.) Before antibiotics, five women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth . One out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite. Three out of ten

people who contracted pneumonia died from it. Ear infections caused deafness; sore throats were followed by heart failure. In a post-antibiotic era, would you mess around with power tools? Let your kid climb a tree? Have another child? “Right now, if you want to be a sharp-looking hipster and get a tattoo, you’re not putting your life on the line ,” says the CDC’s Bell. “Botox injections,

liposuction, those become possibly life-threatening. Even driving to work: We rely on antibiotics to make a major accident something we can get through, as opposed to a death

sentence.” Bell’s prediction is a hypothesis for now—but infections that resist even powerful antibiotics have already entered everyday life. Dozens of college and pro athletes, most recently Lawrence Tynes of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, have lost playing time or entire seasons to infections with drug-resistant staph, MRSA. Girls who sought permanent-makeup tattoos have lost their eyebrows after getting

infections. Last year, three members of a Maryland family — an elderly woman and two adult children — died of resistant pneumonia that took hold after simple cases of flu. At UCLA, Spellberg treated a woman with what appeared to be an everyday urinary-tract infection — except that it was not quelled by the first round of antibiotics, or the second. By the time he saw her, she was in septic shock, and the infection had destroyed the bones in her spine. A last-ditch course of the only remaining antibiotic saved her life, but she lost the use of her legs. “This is what we’re in danger of,” he says. “People who are living normal lives who develop almost untreatable infections.” In 2009, Tom Dukes — a fifty-four-year-old inline skater and body-builder — developed diverticulosis , a common problem in which pouches develop in the wall of the intestine. He was coping with it, watching his diet and monitoring himself for symptoms, when searing cramps doubled him over and sent him to urgent care. One of the thin-walled pouches had torn open and dumped gut bacteria into his abdomen — but for reasons no one could explain, what should have been normal E. coli were instead highly drug-resistant. Doctors excised eight inches of his colon in emergency surgery. Over several months, Dukes recovered with the aid of last-resort antibiotics, delivered intravenously. For years afterward, he was exhausted and in pain. “I was living my life, a really healthy life,” he says. “It never dawned on me that this could happen.” Dukes believes, though he has no evidence, that the bacteria in his gut became drug-resistant because he ate meat from animals raised with routine antibiotic use. That would not be difficult:

most meat in the United States is grown that way. To varying degrees depending on their size and age, cattle, pigs, and chickens  — and, in other countries, fish and shrimp — receive regular doses to speed their growth, increase their weight, and protect them from disease. Out of all the antibiotics sold in the United States each year, 80 percent by weight are used in agriculture, primarily to fatten animals and protect them from the conditions in which they are raised. A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals’ own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on their land, and in human illnesses as well. Resistant bacteria move from animals to humans in groundwater and dust, on flies,

and via the meat those animals get turned into. An annual survey of retail meat conducted by the Food and Drug Administration—part of a larger project involving the CDC and the U.S. Department of Agriculture that examines animals, meat, and human illness—finds resistant organisms every year. In its 2011 report, published last February, the FDA found (among many other results) that 65 percent of chicken breasts and 44 percent of ground beef carried bacteria resistant to tetracycline, and 11 percent of pork chops carried bacteria resistant to five classes of drugs. Meat transports those bacteria into your kitchen, if you do not handle it very carefully, and into your body if it is not thoroughly cooked—and resistant infections result. Researchers and activists have tried for decades to get the FDA to rein in farm overuse of antibiotics, mostly without success. The agency attempted in the 1970s to control agricultural use by revoking authorization for penicillin and tetracycline to be used as “growth promoters,” but that effort never moved forward. Agriculture and the veterinary pharmaceutical industry pushed back, alleging that

agricultural antibiotics have no demonstrable effect on human health. Few, though, have asked what multi-drug–resistant bacteria might mean for farm animals. Yet a post-antibiotic era imperils agriculture as much as it does medicine . In addition to growth promoters, livestock raising uses antibiotics to treat individual animals, as well as in routine dosing called “prevention and control” that protects whole herds. If antibiotics became useless , then animals would suffer: individual illnesses could not be treated, and if the crowded conditions in which most meat animals are raised were not changed, more diseases would spread . But if the loss of antibiotics change how livestock are raised, then farmers

might be the ones to suffer. Other methods for protecting animals from disease—enlarging barns, cutting down on crowding, and delaying weaning so that immune systems have more time to develop—would be expensive to implement, and agriculture’s profit margins are already thin . In 2002, economists for the National Pork Producers Council estimated that removing antibiotics from

hog raising would force farmers to spend $4.50 more per pig, a cost that would be passed on to consumers. H. Morgan Scott, a veterinary epidemiologist at Kansas State University, unpacked for me how antibiotics are used to control a major cattle illness, bovine respiratory disease. “If a

rancher decides to wean their calves right off the cow in the fall and ship them, that’s a risky process for the calf, and one of the things that permits that to continue is antibiotics,” he said, adding: “If those antibiotics weren’t available, either people would pay a much lower price for those same calves, or the rancher might retain them through the winter”

while paying extra to feed them. That is, without antibiotics, those farmers would face either lower revenues or higher costs. Livestock

raising isn’t the only aspect of food production that relies on antibiotics, or that would be threatened if the drugs no longer worked. The drugs are routinely used in fish and shrimp farming, particularly in Asia, to protect against bacteria that spread in the pools where seafood is raised—and as a result, the aquaculture industry is struggling with antibiotic-resistant fish diseases and searching for alternatives. In the United States, antibiotics are used to control fruit diseases, but those protections are breaking down too. Last year, streptomycin-resistant fire blight, which in 2000 nearly destroyed Michigan’s apple and pear industry, appeared for the first time in orchards in upstate New York, which is (after Michigan) one of the most important apple-growing states. “Our growers have never seen this, and they aren’t prepared for it,” says Herb Aldwinckle, a

professor of plant pathology at Cornell University. “Our understanding is that there is one useful antibiotic left.” Is a post-antibiotic era inevitable ? Possibly not  — but not without change. In countries such as as Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands, government regulation of medical and agricultural antibiotic use has helped curb bacteria’s rapid evolution toward untreatability. But the U.S. has never been willing to institute such controls, and the free-market alternative of asking physicians and consumers to use antibiotics conservatively has been tried for decades without much success. As has the long effort to reduce farm antibiotic use; the FDA will soon issue new rules for agriculture, but they will be contained in a voluntary “guidance to industry,” not a regulation

with the force of law. What might hold off the apocalypse , for a while, is more antibiotics —but first

pharmaceutical companies will have to be lured back into a marketplace they already deemed unrewarding. The need for new compounds could force the federal government to create drug-development incentives: patent extensions, for instance, or changes in the requirements for clinical trials. But whenever drug research revives, achieving a new compound takes at least 10 years from concept to drugstore shelf. There will be no new drug to solve the problem soon—and given the relentlessness of bacterial evolution, none that can solve the problem forever. In the meantime, the medical industry is reviving the old-fashioned solution of rigorous hospital cleaning, and also trying new ideas: building automatic scrutiny of prescriptions into computerized medical records, and developing rapid tests to ensure the drugs aren’t prescribed when they

are not needed. The threat of the end of antibiotics might even impel a reconsideration of phages, the individually brewed cocktails of viruses

that were a mainstay of Soviet Union medical care during the Cold War. So far, the FDA has allowed them into the U.S. market only as food-safety preparations, not as treatments for infections. But for any of that to happen, the prospect of a post-antibiotic era has to be taken seriously , and those staring down the trend say that still seems unlikely. “Nobody relates to themselves lying in an ICU bed on a ventilator,” says Rice of Brown University. “And after it happens, they generally want to forget it.”

A-to “burnout”No burn outGuterl ‘12

Fred Guterl, Executive Editor of Scientific American, Former Senior Editor at Newsweek, Professor at Princeton University, The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, p. 1-2

Over the next few years, the bigger story turned out not to be SARS, which trailed off quickly, bur avian influenza, or bird flu. It had been making the rounds among birds in Southeast Asia for years. An outbreak in 1997 Hong Kong and another in 2003 each called for the culling of thousands of birds and put virologists and health workers into a tizzy. Although the virus wasn't much of a threat to humans, scientists fretted over the possibility of a horrifying pandemic. Relatively few people caught the virus, but more than half of them died. What would happen if this bird flu virus made the jump to humans? What if it mutated in a way that allowed it to spread from one person to another, through tiny

droplets of saliva in the air? One bad spin of the genetic roulette wheel and a deadly new human pathogen would spread across the globe in a matter of days . With a kill rate of 60 percent , such a pandemic would be devastating , to say the least.

Scientists were worried, all right, but the object of their worry was somewhat theoretical. Nobody knew for certain if such a supervirus was

even possible. To cause that kind of damage to the human population, a flu virus has to combine two traits: lethality and transmissibility. The more optimistically minded scientists argued that one trait precluded the other, that if the bird flu acquired the ability to spread like wildfire, it would lose its ability to kill with terrifying efficiency. The virus would spread, cause some fever and sniffles, and take its place among the pantheon of ordinary flu viruses that come and go each season.

The optimists, we found out last fall, were wrong. Two groups of scientists working independently managed to create bird flu viruses in the lab that had that killer combination of lethality and transmissibility among humans. They did it for the best reasons, of course—to find vaccines and medicines to treat a pandemic should one occur, and more generally to understand how influenza viruses work. If we're lucky, the scientists will get there before nature manages to come up with the virus herself, or before someone steals the genetic blueprints and turns this knowledge against us.

Influenza is a natural killer, but we have made it our own. We have created the conditions for new viruses to flourish —among pigs in factory farms and live animal markets and a connected world of international trade and travel—and we've gone so far as to fabricate the virus ourselves. Flu is an excellent example of how we have, through our technologies and our dominant presence on the planet,

begun to multiply the risks to our own survival .

A-to “Can’t get Deference”Deference applies to patentsLiu ‘16

Cory Liu, Law Clerk, Hon. Danny J. Boggs, United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; J.D., Harvard Law “Chevron's Domain And The Rule Of Law,” Texas Review of Law & Politics20.2 (Spring 2016): 391-420

Another example of a skirmish over Chevron 's domain deals with patent law . Courts do not currently give Chevron deference to the United States Patent and Trademark Office when it examines patents, but a number of scholars have begun to challenge this thinking. In a 2007 law review article, Professors Stuart Benjamin and Arti Rai argued that

“the analysis in Mead suggests that Chevron may be the appropriate standard for patent denials.”121 More recently, Professor

Melissa Wasserman set forth a highly detailed argument for why the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act , passed in 2011, evinces a congressional intent for courts to follow Chevron when reviewing the Patent and Trademark Office's decisions.122 On the other hand, Professor Orin Kerr has argued strongly against the application of Chevron because patent law predates the modern administrative

state and operates using different mechanisms.123 The Federal Circuit--which has near-exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals124--has yet to apply Chevron in the context of patent law. Nevertheless , the vigorous debate between these professors provides another example of how the malleable , case-by-case inquiry set forth in Mead, Barnhart, and King can result in increased litigation and uncertainty over the scope of Chevron's domain

Patents are key to pharma sector

Strong patent regime key to the pharmaceutical industryAbbott, ’16

Alden, Rumpel Senior Legal Fellow and Deputy Director of the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, Adjunct Professor at George Mason Law School, a member of the Leadership of the American Bar Association’s Antitrust Section, and a Non-Governmental Advisor to the International Competition Network, “Legal Threats to Strong Returns on Pharmaceutical Patents Grow, Threatening Innovation,” 1/17, http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2016/01/17/legal-threats-to-strong-returns-on-pharmaceutical-patents-grow/id=65013/, bgm

Pharma ceuticals is the industry sector where a strong patent system, promising substantial returns to successful innovation, is of paramount importance . A large proportion of R&D in pharmaceuticals fails to yield new approved drugs , so pharma ceutical companies must earn substantial profits on the drugs that are successful to support their continuing drug development efforts. Legal rules that ratchet down on such profits , in the name of limiting “profiteering,” are counterproductive. Whatever static short term price reductions they may achieve are swamped by the harm they create in soften ing incentives to invest in R&D – a result which reduces pharma innovation, harming future patients and undermining the long-term vitality of a critically important industry.

Deference key to effective patents

Deference necessary for patent effectiveness and innovationWasserman ‘13

Melissa F. Wasserman, B.S. in chemical engineering, Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton. She received her J.D. magna cum laude from New York University School of Law. “The Changing Guard of Patent Law: Chevron Deference for the PTO”, 54 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1959 (2013), http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol54/iss6/5

In general, the patent system has historically suffered from a lack of serious engagement with administrative law,15 even though Supreme Court intervention in 1999 made clear that standard administrative law norms—including the Administrative Procedure Act—apply to the

PTO.16 Applying administrative law principles to the AIA provides that the PTO’s legal interpretations of the Patent Act, as announced

by its new adjudicatory proceedings, are entitled to the highly deferential standard of review articulated in Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. 17 As this Article argues, this deference is a normatively desirable

outcome.18 Making the PTO the primary interpreter of the core patentability standards ushers the patent system into the modern administrative era, which has long recognized the deficiencies associated with judge- driven policy.19 This provides the institutional foundation for infusing economic policy into the patent system, enabl ing the tailoring of patentability standards to advance the system’s constitutionally mandated goal: the promotion of

innovation . Additionally, the incorporation of administrative law principles into the patent system has substantial implications for administrative law. As this Article attempts to reconcile the distinctive features of patent administration with existing administrative law jurisprudence, it tests, and at times, brings into better focus, the contours of this doctrine. This exercise in reconciliation offers insight into a prolonged circuit split on the proper approach to determining the triggering provisions of formal adjudication and when a grant of formal adjudicatory authority carries the ability to speak with the force of law. Even though an agency’s eligibility for Chevron deference turns on whether its actions carry the force of law, in the adjudicatory context the force-of-law concept has been largely undertheorized.20

Less prone to industry captureWasserman ‘13

Melissa F. Wasserman, B.S. in chemical engineering, Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton. She received her J.D. magna cum laude from New York University School of Law. “The Changing Guard of Patent Law: Chevron Deference for the PTO”, 54 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1959 (2013), http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmlr/vol54/iss6/

Even though expertise may give rise to distinctive advantages with respect to institutional competence, specialization has an associated drawback—the potential of

“capture.” An institution’s repeated interaction with particular groups holding narrow interests may result in at least two pathologies. First, an institution may develop “ tunnel vision ,” pursuing its own technocratic worldview without sufficient regard for larger

normative concerns.233 Second, a narrow set of rights holders may directly capture an institution’s viewpoints. The latter concern stems from

the logic that concentrated, well-financed groups are more likely than diffuse, less organized entities to influence decision makers.234 The result in either

situation is that the institution will systematically make decisions that favor the interest of a narrow set of constituencies over those of the general public.

The concerns associated with capture theory are most frequently attributed to agencies that have repeated interactions with their regulatory constituents that could lead to distortions in agency decision making. More recently, scholars astutely observed that the adjudicative process is also susceptible to the influence of interest groups and expanded the applications of the theory to the judiciary as well.235 Of course, beyond capture concerns, other institutional structures may exist that also systematically bias the organization’s decision making. Although these influences may not be directly related to expertise, any bias in an institution’s decisional process is concerning—whether the institution is a court or an agency. Like many agencies, the PTO is not immune from charges of capture or institutional bias. The Agency has traditionally been structured to favor patent grants. My previous work has shown that the PTO’s historical fee structure likely biased the PTO towards issuing patents because the Agency garnered over half of its patent operating budget through fees it could collect only if it granted patents.236

Moreover, widespread agreement among scholars exists that the historical examiner compensation system favored allowance.237 Notably, all that is being asked of the PTO is to grant patents. The patent prosecution process occurs ex parte; no third party is present to argue that a

patent should not be issued. These constant one-way demands to issue patents raise concerns that the Agency may develop tunnel vision. In fact, the Agency’s past rhetoric that its mission includes “help[ing] customers get patents” reveals a culture that appears to be unduly influenced by the interests of patentees.238 However, the PTO has made strides to overcome this pathology. The Agency recently revamped its examiner compensation system, among other things, to diminish incentives to grant patents.239 Recent empirical work by Mark Lemley and Bhaven Sampat finds a correlation between the length of patent examiner experience and an examiner’s propensity to grant a patent, and suggests that the incentives facing examiners are much more complicated than they were typically perceived.240

The passage of the AIA should further help alleviate some concerns of capture or bias. Because Congress granted the PTO fee setting authority, the Agency has taken steps, at least to some extent, to decrease its reliance on patent issuance fees .241 The enactment of robust postgrant review proceedings should broaden the Agency’s perspective, as the PTO will now routinely interact with constituents that are arguing to narrow the scope of patent law. Additionally, the low-cost design of the postgrant review proceedings will hopefully enable substantial participation from public interest groups, whose primary focus is the protection of the public domain.242 The result should be increased awareness, promoting innovation not only by granting patent but also by protecting the public domain. Nevertheless, like all agencies, capture remains a point of concern with the PTO.

Agency capture, however, represents a substantial objection to extending Chevron deference to the PTO only to the extent that the judicial

alternative is superior. The specialization of the Federal Circuit has led some commentators to suggest that the appellate court is prone to the same institutional pathologies of tunnel vision and bias of which they have accused the PTO.243 The Fed eral Circuit hears disproportionately from the patent bar and has increasingly begun to draw its technical staff —most notably its clerks—from patent law firms .244 Although intellectual property law firms represent both plaintiffs and defendants in patent litigation, they are generally likely to benefit from broad patent rights, especially with respect to patentable subject matter.245 As Arti Rai recently noted, empirical data on amicus briefs supports this contention: patent bar associations file amicus

briefs in favor of patentees at a significantly higher rate than the government or high-tech companies.246 More directly, the court’s patent law jurisprudence has exhibited some symptoms that are consistent with bias . Several commentators have noted that Federal Circuit precedent has trended towards strengthening patent rights.247 Empirical evidence also suggests that the Federal Circuit has propatentee tendencies.248 The Supreme Court’s renewed interest in the development of substantive patent law and its repeated reversal of Federal Circuit jurisprudence is also suggestive of tunnel vision.249 Definitively proving capture of an agency or a court is difficult, if not impossible. Some scholars have certainly taken issue with the notion that the patent bar has captured the Federal Circuit.250 Nevertheless, the possibility that the Federal Circuit’s decision-making process is unduly influenced by factions, at the very least, gives pause to dismissing the concept of the PTO playing a larger role in patent policy based on agency capture alone.251

Deference key to effective regulation--speed

--expertise

--uniformity

Hao ‘14

Whitney Ruijuan Hao, “City of Arlington v. FCC: Jurisdictional or Nonjurisdictional, Where to Draw the Line?”, Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary, Spring, 34 J. Nat'l Ass'n L. Jud. 151, Lexis

The Chevron two-step inquiry that the Supreme Court established almost two decades ago officially acknowledged and confirmed the agencies' rule-making power, which mandates the reviewing court to defer to an agency's interpretation of statutory ambiguities if it is reasonable. n205 Yet in Chevron, as one commentator noted, the Court did not discuss Marbury or the governing provisions of APA; instead it put forward two

"pragmatic" arguments: "judges lack expertise," and "they are not politically accountable." n206 More specifically,

according to the Court, interpreting statutory ambiguities calls for technical expertise and political accountability, and therefore agencies have " conspicuous" advantages compared to courts . n207 Furthermore, agencies can act more promptly and effectively to adapt statutes than courts, as courts are relatively decentralized and the judicial processes are considerably more cumbersome . n208

Therefore, even though Marbury holds that it is up to the judicial department to say what the law is, the Court has legitimated the executive's rule-making power in Chevron regarding its interpretations of ambiguous statutory terms. Borrowing one scholar's words, this "reflects a salutary appreciation of the fact that the law's meaning is not a "brooding omnipresence in the sky.'" n209 In other words, "the executive, with

its comparative expertise and accountability, is in the best position to make the judgments of policy and principle on which resolution of statutory ambiguities often depends." n210

The dispute in City of Arlington was over whether courts should defer under Chevron to an agency's interpretation of its own [*183] scope of authority. n211 Essentially it was a "Chevron Step Zero" issue, which was distinct from the issue in Chevron where the dispute was over the agency's interpretation of a statutory ambiguity when the agency was acting within its jurisdictional power. n212 Deciding in favor of applying Chevron deference to the "Step Zero" inquiry regarding an agency's determination of its own scope of jurisdiction, the majority in City of Arlington followed the same path of reasoning in Chevron and further expanded agencies' rule-making power. As one commentator analyzed:

For the majority, as dangerous as giving agencies broad interpretive power under Chevron may be, it is better than giving judges leeway to pick and choose when to defer to agencies and when not to. Judges are even less politically accountable than are agencies, and more prone to generating disuniform interpretations of statutes based on ad hoc judgments . According to the majority: "The excessive agency power that the

dissent fears would [ absent a strong Chevron deference doctrine] be replaced by chaos." n213