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Generic Links (Policy Affs)Development and exploration of the oceans is inherently capitalistic and exploitative Clark and Clausen, 8 (Brett, teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Rebecca, teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, “The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem,” Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August), http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem/) --CRG

Humans have long been connected to the ocean’s metabolic processes by harvesting marine fish and vegetation. Harvesting methods and processes have varied depending on the structure of social production. Subsistence fishing is a practice woven throughout human history, beginning with the harvesting of shellfish along seashores and shallow lakes, and progressing with the development of tools such as stone-tipped fishing spears, fishhooks, lines, and nets. This was originally based upon fishing for use of

the fish. What was caught was used to feed families and communities. Through the process of fishing, human labor has been intimately linked to ocean processes, gaining an understanding of fish migrations, tides, and ocean currents. The size of a human population in a particular region influenced the extent of exploitation. But the introduction of commodity markets and private ownership under the capitalist system of production altered the relationship of fishing labor to the resources of the seas. Specific species had an exchange value. As a result, certain fish were seen as being more valuable. This led to fishing practices that focused on catching as many of a particular fish, such as cod, as possible. Non-commercially viable species harvested indiscriminately alongside the target species were discarded as waste.

As capitalism developed and spread, intensive extraction by industrial capture fisheries became the norm. Increased demands were placed on the oceans and overfishing resulted in the severe depletion of wild fish stocks. In Empty Ocean, Richard Ellis states, “Throughout the world’s oceans, food fishes once believed to be immeasurable in number are now recognized as greatly depleted and in some cases almost extinct. A million vessels now fish the world’s oceans, twice as many as

there were twenty-five years ago. Are there twice as many fish as before? Hardly.” How did this situation develop?10 The beginning of capitalist industrialization marked the most noticeable and significant changes in fisheries practices. Mechanization, automation, and mass production/consumption characterized an era of increased fixed capital investments. Profit-driven investment in efficient production led to fishing technologies that for the first time made the exhaustion of deep-sea fish stocks a real possibility. Such transformations can be seen in how groundfishing, the capture of fish that swim in close proximity to the ocean’s bottom, changed through the years.

Ocean exploration and development is a tool of capitalism to enhance productionPSL, 13 – Party for Socialism and Liberation (“The pillaging of the Earth’s oceans”, Liberation News, May 31st 2013, http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/newspaper/vol-7-no-7/the-pillaging-of-the-earths-oceans.html)//jk

The oceans of the world are vast and deep. They cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and contain 97 percent

of the planet’s water. The oceans seem boundless in water, marine life and energy to sustain the planet’s life and atmosphere. But the oceans are experiencing profound stress, due to escalating factors directly related to capitalist production and the degradation of the

environment. Alarming reports by marine scientists have been sounding the danger to the world’s oceans and the need for urgent action. The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) warns that “ massive marine extinction” already may be underway due to rapidly worsening stresses on marine ecosystems. But, as capitalism’s search for profits intensifies, the devastation of the oceans is only accelerating. Three main stresses — global warming, acidification of the oceans, and decreased oxygen —have led to such declines in many of the marine ecosystems that the conditions have met or surpassed “worst-case scenarios” predicted in the first decade of this 21st century. IPSO

stated in 2011, “[ W]e now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems , such as coral reefs, within a single generation. Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing , through the combined effects of climate change, overexploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean. It is notable that the occurrence of multiple high intensity stressors has been a prerequisite for all the five global extinction events of the past 600 million years.” Such a catastrophe would , needless to say, affect humanity and all life on Earth. Yet capitalists have rejected in international forums even basic accords to limit the exploitation of the oceans or to slow down the belching of fossil fuels into the environment . By far the biggest abuser of the environment is the United States.

The affirmative commodifies the ocean by framing it as a resource that can be exploited for self-interested gain and economic growth Mansfield, Professor of Geography at Oklahoma State University, 04 Becky, “Neoliberalism in the oceans,” Geoforum, 35:3, May, SCIENCEDIRECT)

Examining the ways that past policy orientations toward fisheries have influenced the development of neoliberal approaches to

ocean governance, I contend that neoliberalism in the oceans centers specifically around concerns about property and the use of privatization to create markets for governing access to and use of ocean resources. Within the Euro – American tradition that has shaped international law of the sea, the oceans (including the water column, seabed, and living and mineral resources) were long treated as common property––the “common heritage of mankind” (Pardo, 1967)––open to all comers with the means to create and exploit oceanic opportunities. Although historically there has also been continual

tension between this openness of access and desire for territorialization (especially of coastal waters), treating the oceans as a commons is consistent with the idea that oceans are spaces of movement and transportation, which have facilitated mercantilism, exploration, colonial expansion, and cold war military maneuvering (Steinberg, 2001).1 Oceans have also long been sites for resource extraction, yet it has not been until recent decades that new economic desires and environmental contradictions

have contributed to a pronounced move away from open access and freedom of the seas. New technologies for resource extraction combined with regional overexploitation have contributed to conflicts over resources, to which representatives from academia, politics, and business have responded by calling for enclosing the oceans within carefully delimited regimes of property rights, be those regimes of state, individual, or collective control. At the center of this

new political economy of oceans, as it has evolved over the past 50 years, has been concern about “the commons,” and the extent to which common and open access property regimes contribute to economic and environmental crises, which include overfishing and overcapitalization. As

such, the question of the commons has been at the center of numerous, seemingly contradictory approaches to ocean governance and fisheries regulation. Thus, the first argument of the paper is that neoliberal approaches in fisheries cannot be treated simply as derivative of a larger neoliberal movement that became entrenched starting in the 1980s. Instead, examining trajectories of neoliberalism in fisheries over the past half century reveals that the emphasis on property and the commons has contributed to a more specific dynamic of neoliberalism operating in ocean fisheries and, therefore, to distinctive forms of neoliberalism. To be clear, it is not the emphasis on property in itself that ties this history into neoliberalism, but rather the

particular perspective that links property specifically to market rationality. The underlying assumption of all the

approaches to property discussed in this paper is that market rationality (i.e. profit maximization) is

natural. Given this, property rights harness this rationality to the greater good, while a lack of property rights inevitably leads to economic and environmental problems. It is this set of assumptions that underlies the neoliberal emphasis on privatization and marketization .

Ocean development and exploration continues capitalist pillage of the oceans. PSL 13 (PSL 5-31-13, Liberation Party for Socialism, http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/newspaper/vol-7-no-7/the-pillaging-of-the-earths-oceans.html, accessed 5-31-13

The oceans of the world are vast and deep. They cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and contain 97 percent of the planet’s water. The oceans seem boundless in water, marine life and energy to sustain the planet’s life and atmosphere. But the oceans are experiencing profound stress, due to escalating factors directly related to capitalist production and the degradation of the environment. Alarming reports by marine scientists have been sounding the danger to the world’s oceans and the need for urgent action. The International Programme on the

State of the Ocean (IPSO) warns that “massive marine extinction” already may be underway due to rapidly worsening stresses on marine ecosystems. But, as capitalism’s search for profits intensifies, the devastation of the oceans is only accelerating. Three main stresses —

global warming, acidification of the oceans, and decreased oxygen —have led to such declines in many of the marine ecosystems that the conditions have met or surpassed “worst-case scenarios” predicted in the first decade of this 21st century. IPSO stated in 2011, “[W]e now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, within a single generation. Unless action is taken now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of causing, through the combined effects of climate change, overexploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant extinction event in the ocean. It is notable that the occurrence of multiple high intensity stressors has been a prerequisite for all the five global extinction events of the

past 600 million years.” Such a catastrophe would, needless to say, affect humanity and all life on Earth. Yet capitalists have rejected in international forums even basic accords to limit the exploitation of the oceans or to slow down the belching of fossil fuels into the environment. By far the biggest abuser of the environment is the United States

The 1AC’s call for development creates the ocean as a new space for neoliberal capitalismSteinberg (Department of Geography, Royal Holloway University of London) 10(Philip E., Sekula, Allan and Noël Burch 2010 The Forgotten Space, reviewed by Philip E. Steinberghttp://societyandspace.com/reviews/film-reviews/sekula/)

In other words, in the capitalist imagination, the sea is idealized as a flat surface in which space is abstracted from geophysical reality. As the sea’s space is reduced to an abstract quantity of distance, or time, it is constructed as amenable to annihilation by technologies that enable the compression (or, better yet, the transcendence) of space-time, like the containership. While this construction of the ocean provides rich material for geographers of capitalism and modernity (e.g. Steinberg 2001), it provides precious little material for filmmakers. Under capitalism, the ocean is valued only in its (idealized) absence, and absence is notoriously difficult to film. Thus, as Brett Story, the other geographer who has commented on the film, has noted, ‘he film spends surprisingly little time on actual water’ (Story 2012, page 1576, emphasis added). By my count, only about ten minutes of the 110-minute film are spent at sea (all on the Hanjin Budapest) and even in this footage the material ocean is not a force that needs to be reckoned with, except as a source of rust. For viewers who are familiar with Sekula’s book Fish Story, as well as with his other film The Lottery of the Sea, the relative absence of the ocean in The Forgotten Space is, as Story suggests, surprising. In contrast with The Forgotten Space, Fish Story begins with a meditation on the ‘crude materiality’ of the sea (Sekula 1995, page 12) and he reminds the reader throughout the book that the ocean’s materiality persists despite the best intentions of capital to wash it away. Thus, for instance, we learn in Fish Story that ‘large-scale material flows remain intractable. Acceleration is not absolute : the hydrodynamics of large-capacity hulls and the power output of diesel engines set a limit to the speed of cargo ships not far beyond that of the first quarter of [the twentieth] century’ (Sekula 1995, page 50). In Fish Story, the ocean is a space of contradictions and a non-human actor in its own right. However, no such references to the sea’s geophysical materiality and the barriers that this might pose to its idealization as a friction-free surface of movement appear in The Forgotten Space. Human frictions on the sea likewise feature in Fish Story: militant seafarers, longshoremen, and mutineers all make appearances in the text. In contrast, these individuals receive scant attention in The Forgotten Space (a point noted by Story as well), and much of the attention that they do receive is about their failings. A relatively hopeful account of union organizing in Los Angeles is paired with a story of labour’s defeat in the face of automation in Rotterdam and that of a faded movement in Hong Kong where the union hall has become a social

club for retirees and their widows. For Sekula, the heterotopia of the ship celebrated by Foucault has become a neoliberal dystopia. The world of containerization is Foucault’s dreaded ‘civilization without boats, in which dreams have dried up, espionage has taken the place of adventure, and the police have taken the place of pirates’ (adapted from Foucault 1986, page 27). Echoing Foucault, Sekula asks near the beginning of the film, ‘Does the anonymity of the box turn the sea of exploit and adventure into a lake of invisible drudgery?’ Although Sekula never answers this question directly, his response would seem to be in the affirmative:

the sea is no longer a romantic space of resistance; it has been tamed. Sekula and Burch’s

failure to depict the ocean as a space of dialectical encounters (whether between humans or

among human and non-human elements) reproduces a dematerialization of the sea that is frequently found in narratives of globalization, including critical narratives (Steinberg

2013). This leads the filmmakers to inadvertently reaffirm the capitalist construction of the ocean as an external space beyond politics. By turning away from the frictions encountered at sea, Sekula and Birch end up tacitly endorsing the very ‘forgetting’ of the sea promoted by capital, as it subscribes to an ideology of limitless mobility.

The affirmative lens of technological development toward the ocean guarantees destruction of the environment – we must analyze the harms of the aff through the lens of capitalism.Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen 2008 The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August), http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

Scientific analysis of oceanic systems presents a sobering picture of the coevolution of human society and the marine environment during the capitalist industrial era. The particular

environmental problems related to the ocean cannot be viewed as isolated issues or aberrations of human ingenuity, only to be corrected through further technological development. Rather these ecological conditions must be understood as they relate to the systematic expansion of capital and the exploitation of nature for profit. Capital has a

particular social metabolic order—the material interchange between society and nature—that subsumes the world to the logic of accumulation. It is a system of self-expanding value, which must reproduce itself on an ever-larger scale.4 Here we examine the social metabolic order of capital and its relationship with the oceans to (a) examine the anthropogenic causes of fish stock depletion, (b) detail the ecological consequences of ongoing capitalist production in relation to the ocean environment, and (c) highlight the ecological contradictions of capitalist aquaculture.

Working within the capitalist system continues the exploitation of the Ocean. Clausen, 08 [‘The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of the Marine Ecosystems’, by Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen.. Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. Jul/Aug2008, Vol. 60 Issue 3, p91-111. 21pg.]The findings are clear: No area of the world ocean “is unaffected by human influence,” and over 40 percent of marine ecosystems are heavily affected by multiple factors. Polar seas are on the verge of significant change. Coral reefs and continental shelves have suffered severe deterioration. Additionally, t he world ocean is a crucial factor in the carbon cycle, absorbing approximately a third to a half of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. The increase in the portion of carbon dioxide has led to an increase in ocean temperature and a slow drop in the pH of surface waters—making them more acidic—disrupting shell-forming plankton and reef-building species. Furthermore, invasive species have negatively affected 84 percent of the world’s coastal waters—decreasing biodiversity and further undermining already stressed fisheries. Scientific analysis of oceanic systems presents a sobering picture of the coevolution of human society and the marine environment during the capitalist industrial era. The particular environmental problems related to the ocean cannot be viewed as isolated issues or aberrations of human ingenuity, only to be corrected through further technological development. Rather these ecological conditions must be understood as they relate to the systematic expansion of capital and the exploitation of nature for profit. Capital has a particular social metabolic order—the material interchange between society and nature—that subsumes the world to the logic of accumulation. It is a system of self-expanding value, which must reproduce itself on an ever-larger scale.

Development in the ocean is capitalist, oceans are deemed empty spaces for the sole purpose of profit and power projectionPhilip E. Steinberg 98, geography professor at Florida State University, 10/28/1998, “The maritime mystique: sustainable development, capital mobility, and nostalgia in the world ocean,” Environment and Planning Journal, http://mailer.fsu.edu/~psteinbe/garnet-psteinbe/s%26s.pdf.

Thus the ocean became discursively constructed as removed from society and the terrestrial places of progress, civilization, and development. Movement across spaces that resisted

development, although necessary, was rhetorically defined as a subordinate activity outside social organization. The ocean was to serve capitalism as an empty space across which the free trade of liberal capitalist fantasy could transpire without hindrance from natural or social obstacles. As an 'other' space, the ocean was con-structed not so much as a space within which power could be deployed (as it had been during the mercantilist era, when control of channeled circulation was an essential component in garnering social power) but as an empty space across which power could be projected (Latour, 1986; Law, 1986).<2>Evidence of this abstraction of ocean space during the industrial era can be observed in both the regulatory and representational spheres. When regulations were required for certain maritime activities, such as shipping or piracy, policymakers continued the mercantilist-era practice of avoiding territorial control by sovereign states. However, unlike in the previous era, the sea was now also discursively constructed as a subordi-nate arena beyond the social practice of formal interstate competition. In the case of shipping, states largely abandoned global shipping regulation, leaving the industry to govern itself and, in some cases, effectively giving national industry associations the authority to negotiate international treaties (Gold, 1981). Recognizing shipping's dependence on the maintenance of an indivisible ocean, hegemonic players developed a series of regulations and institutions that reflected their diverse interests and their desire for systemic stability rather than promoting regimes crudely calculated to multi-ply their social power and maximize short-term accumulation of economic rents(Cafruny, 1987).A somewhat different route was taken with regard to piracy, but here too regulation in ocean space was crafted so as to define the ocean as a space beyond state competition (Thomson, 1994). Ships not flying a national flag—that is, ships not claiming allegiance and rootedness in one of the civilised 'places' of the land—were declared to be of the wild, of the anticivilization of the sea. They were defined in international law as hostis humani generis (the enemy of humankind), a designation that transcended the division of land space into sovereign states and left pirate ships legitimate prey for ships of all land-based 'civilized' nations. The axis of social power enabling regulation of piracy in ocean space was thus scripted as a 'free-for-all' between the forces of land space and ocean space rather than a structured, intrasystemic competition among land powers seeking riches from assertions of social power in the sea. In representation, there was similarly a complex set of continuities and disconti-nuities with the mercantilist era. In general, the significance of marine space was diminished; once perceived as an arena for one of the economy's essential activities(the movement of goods across space), the ocean was now reduced to an in-between space that separated the terrestrial places of development. This shift in perception of the ocean can be observed in its representation on navigational charts and other maps of the era. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maps portrayed an ocean cluttered with ships, sea monsters, and rhumb lines, all of which were intended to portray the complex 'reality' of a space rich with natural and social features. By the early eighteenth century, however, the ocean was perceived as a space unworthy of social interest (Whitfield, 1996), Cartographers reduced the ocean to an empty, blue expanse, at most punctuated by placeless latitude and longitude coordinates and often—as in LewisCarroll's parody—as "a perfect and absolute blank" (Carroll, 1973, page 115).

The ocean is the new frontier to enrich the pockets of capitalists, exploration and development will always be utilized towards that aim. Farrell, 13 Market Watch: The wall Street Journal, writer, 13 (Rob, 4-23-13, Indian Country Today, www.marketwatch.com/story/10-ways-capitalists-get-rich-destroying-our-oceans-2013-12-04, accessed 6-29-8, AFB)

Yes, many capitalists are getting rich off the high seas, a vast reservoir of wealth holding 95% of the planet’s water, spanning 70% of the Earth’s surface. Often called the last frontier, a return to America’s 18th century Wild West. it’s virtually unregulated, a new free market where capitalists roam like pirates, plundering wealth and treating our oceans as a freebie gold mine and trash dump. Bad news for seven billion people living on the planet. And by 2050 we’ll be adding three billion more people. We already know we can’t feed 10 billion. Now we’re polluting their water. Won’t be enough clean water for all to drink, triggering wars. Yes, bad news getting worse: As Alan Sielen of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography warns in the Foreign Affairs journal: “Over the last several decades, human activities have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse: a return to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.” Evolution in reverse? Yes, planet Earth is regressing eons to an earlier primitive era. Unregulated free-market competition on the high seas is turning back the evolutionary clock. That doesn’t bother today’s short-term-thinking capitalists. But it should. Because, ironically, shifting evolution into reverse will also self-destruct the very global economy that capitalism needs for future growth. Today’s capitalists see another three billion people as the new customers needed to expand free markets globally. But in the process they are also cutting their own throats, unaware they’re pushing a hidden self-destruct button lodged in their brains. Nature designed all systems with these built-in termination buttons. Deny it all you want, but humans have our entrances and exits, as Shakespeare said. We all do. Same with economic systems: Yale’s Immanuel Wallerstein sees capitalism at the end of its 500-year cycle. Solar systems last for billions of years. Someday, as our sun cools, Earth could go the way of Mars. And the sun will eventually exit in a blazing supernova. Capitalists deny their role in their

endgame, dismiss the long economic cycle. That’s natural. Capitalist brains are designed to focus on the short term, profits, high frequencies, microseconds, day-end closing prices, quarterly earnings, annual bonuses. Rarely longer. Myopia is the built-in self-destruct trigger for capitalists, their society, the human race, our planet’s water. Can’t blame them, the capitalist’s brain isn’t designed to think long-term. Why? Capitalists see a new world like the Wild West. No lawmen, just free-market competitors, free to do whatever they want, whenever, unregulated, uncontrolled, no restraints, skimming, mining, plundering the wealth of the high seas, free to use, misuse and abuse vast oceans of water at no real cost.

Specific Links (Policy Affs)

AquacultureAquaculture is fundamentally aligned with capitalism – it is designed achieve capital accumulation Phyne 1997 [John. “Capitalist Aquaculture and the Quest for Marine Tenure in Scotland and Ireland” Studies in Political Economy, 1997. Available via Ebscohost.]

During the enclosure of English agriculture, commoners became subject to poaching violations for continuing to exercise customary rights, which dated from "time immemorial. The law converted common lands into the private property necessary for capital accumulation. Yet, in England and elsewhere, the marine environment remained subject to public, private and

customary rights. Currently, the introduction of industrial aquaculture into a multipurpose marine environment presents conflicts analogous to the struggle for enclosure. Industrial

aquaculturalists, like capitalist farmers, want legal and en- forceable property rights to ensure their interests in capital accumulation." Within the context of late twentieth century capitalism, however, this is contingent upon the legal frame- work used by the state in coastal areas.

Aquaculture is capitalist – it involves subjecting nature to further exploitation and will exclusively benefit large corporations while environmental destruction gets worse.

Clark & Clausen, professors of sociology at North Carolina State & Fort Lewis College, 2008 (Brett and Rebecca, “The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem,” Monthly Review, 60:3, July, Online: http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem/)

The immense problems associated with the overharvest of industrial capture fisheries has led some optimistically to offer aquaculture as an ecological solution. However, capitalist aquaculture fails to reverse the process of ecological degradation. Rather, it continues to sever the social and ecological relations between humans and the ocean. Aquaculture: The Blue Revolution? The massive decline in fish stocks has led capitalist development to turn to a new way of

increasing profits—intensified production of fishes. Capitalist aquaculture represents not only a quantitative change in the intensification and concentration of production; it also places organisms’ life cycles under the complete control of private for-profit ownership.31 This new industry, it is claimed, is “the fastest-growing form of agriculture in the world.” It boasts of having

ownership from “egg to plate” and substantially alters the ecological and human dimensions of a fishery.32 Aquaculture (sometimes also referred to as aquabusiness) involves subjecting nature to the logic of capital. Capital attempts to overcome natural and social barriers through its constant innovations. In this, enterprises attempt to commodify, invest in, and develop new elements of nature that previously existed outside the political-economic competitive sphere: As Edward Carr wrote in the Economist, the sea “is a resource that must be preserved and harvested….To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters.”33 As worldwide commercial fish stocks decline due to overharvest and other anthropogenic causes, aquaculture is witnessing a rapid expansion in the global economy. Aquaculture’s contribution to global supplies of fish increased from 3.9 percent of total worldwide production by weight in 1970 to 27.3 percent in 2000. In 2004, aquaculture and capture fisheries produced 106 million tons of fish and “aquaculture accounted for 43 percent.”34 According to Food and Agriculture Organization statistics, aquaculture is growing more rapidly than all other animal food producing sectors. Hailed as the “Blue Revolution,” aquaculture is frequently compared to agriculture’s Green Revolution as a way to achieve food security and economic growth among the poor and in the third world. The cultivation of farmed salmon as a high-value, carnivorous species destined for market in core nations has emerged as one of the more lucrative (and controversial) endeavors in aquaculture

production.35 Much like the Green Revolution, the Blue Revolution may produce temporary increases in yields, but it does not usher in a solution to food security (or environmental

problems). Food security is tied to issues of distribution. Given that the Blue Revolution is driven by the pursuit of profit, the desire for monetary gain trumps the distribution of food to those in need.36 Industrial aquaculture intensifies fish production by transforming the

natural life histories of wild fish stocks into a combined animal feedlot. Like monoculture agriculture, aquaculture furthers the capitalistic division of nature, only its realm of operation is the marine world. In order to maximize return on investment, aquaculture must raise thousands of fish in a confined net-pen. Fish are separated from the natural environment and the various relations of exchange found in a food web and ecosystem. The fish’s reproductive life cycle is altered so that it can be propagated and raised until the optimum time for mechanical harvest.

Claims of ‘sustainable’ aquaculture are a smokescreen for the invasive economic model posed by the 1ac – aquaculture locks in capitalist production paradigms and maintains a profound wealth gapMacabuac 5 [Maria Cecilia F. Macabuac, PHD in Philosophy of Sociology, Virginia Polytechnic University, July 15, 2005, “After the Aquaculture Bust,” http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07242005-083742/unrestricted/03Ch123.pdf]

The Boom-to-Bust Cycle of Aquaculture¶ Many, if not all, economies of poor countries are dependent on export-oriented extractive¶ industries which include gas, oil, and mining ventures, logging, and agro-industrial aquaculture¶ and plantations. Such extractive enclaves:¶ 1. are capital-intensive;¶ 2. are

generally run by the state or by large corporations, in ways that lead to high rates of¶ corruption, repression and conflict;¶ 3. use little unskilled or semi-skilled labor;¶ 4. are geographically concentrated and create small pockets of wealth;¶ 5. produce social and environmental problems that disproportionately impact the poor;¶ 41¶ 6. follow a boom-and-bust cycle that creates economic insecurity (Ross 2001).¶ Many of the peripheral countries that are most highly dependent on extractive

industries¶ are classified as “ highly indebted poor countries ” (Ross 2001)-- demonstrating the degree to¶ which

these enterprises have failed to fuel either healthy economic growth for the nation or¶

alleviation of the impoverishment of citizens.¶ Aquaculture is one of those peripheral extractive industries which booms only as long as¶ ecological resources and market prices are at supportive levels. When environmental degradation¶ threatens the supply base or new producers enter the market and cause price drops, aquaculture¶ operations tend to “bust” very quickly. Export-oriented shrimp ponds typically bust only after five¶ to ten years of intensive farming, primarily because of shrimp diseases and ecological degradation¶ (McGinn 2002). Only a few investments are directed toward reinvigoration of abandoned shrimp¶ farms while most corporations transfer to other promising areas, leaving behind land and¶ waterways that will be unsuited for cultivation for several

centuries (Skladany¶ et. al.¶ 1995).¶ While ecological degradation accounts for the bust cycle in shrimp production, competition from¶ synthetics and from alternative agricultural commodities (such as

corn starch) are much more¶ likely to trigger bust cycles in seaweed production. Between 1978 and 1984, the Philippines was¶ the top producer of seaweed. By 2000, China was the number one exporter, followed by the¶ Philippines and Chile (Trade Data International 2003).¶ Worldwide, fish comprise 17 percent of the animal protein in the human diet, and fish are the most¶ 42¶ important source of animal protein in the diets of peripheral populations. According to Shiva¶ (2000: 43):¶ The two primary justifications for industrial aquaculture are the crisis of depletion¶ of marine resources and the crisis of malnutrition among the poor in the Third¶ World. . . . Though pushed by both national and international organization as an¶ answer to world food scarcity. . ., shrimp contributes little to the nutritional needs¶ of the world’s population, being a luxury item that is consumed mainly by the rich¶ in the developed world.¶ On the one hand, aquaculture has vastly expanded world output of fish and marine foods.¶ On

the other hand, aquaculture has now integrated into global commodity chains peripheral fish¶ and marine resources, resulting in two impacts on the food chains of those poor countries that¶

undertake aquaculture projects.¶ 1. Aquaculture removes fish and marine resources from local

consumption chains and¶ exports those foods to rich countries– thereby threatening traditional food chains in¶ producing countries. ¶ 2. Because less fish is available to peripheral populations, malnutrition and hunger are on the¶ rise, especially in those countries with large aquaculture and fishing sectors (Shiva 2000).¶ Despite all its purported advantages, the Blue Revolution is really “food imperialism”¶

(Yoshinori 1987). Aquaculture is an industry controlled by core-based transnational corporations,¶

and it has concentrated control over the world’s fish and marine foods into the hands of a few¶

companies. Rather than eradicating hunger or expanding resources to feed peripheral populations,¶ aquaculture has further polarized world food distribution and consumption. At the turn of the 21st century, the richest fifth of the world consumes nearly half of all meat and fish, the poorest fifth¶ only 5 percent. ¶ 4¶ While poor countries supply 85 percent of the internationally traded fishery¶ products, core countries consume 40 percent of the world total supply of fish (McGinn 1998).¶ 5¶ Core citizens have benefitted greatly from the new global food chains stimulated by the¶ Blue Revolution, and they now consume three times more fish than people in the developing¶ countries. However, the horrible irony is that peripheral populations cannot afford the luxury¶ meats available in abundance to core citizens, so they must rely on fish for animal protein. While¶ North Americans and Western Europeans acquire more than 90 percent of their animal protein¶ from beef, pork, and chicken , Africans and Asians are dependent on fish for about one-third of¶ their animal protein (McGinn 1998). Aquaculture also drains away peripheral fish supplies for¶ uses outside the human food chain. Non-food uses of fish in rich countries (such as animal feed¶ and

oils) is greater than the total human consumption of fish in Latin America, Africa and India¶ combined.¶ 6¶ In reality, fish resources are drained away to rich countries and threaten the local food ¶ chain in two ways. First, the aquaculture outputs overwhelmingly are exported to the core as¶ luxury foods . Second, the production of those exports and of non-food uses of marine resources¶ requires high levels of inputs of other smaller fishes. Aquaculture and agro-industrial fisheries¶ redirect resources from the human food chains to fishponds of producing countries (Shiva 2000:¶ 44¶ 7¶ For example, the US price for shrimp dropped from $5 per pound to $3.38 in 2003 (Public Citizen 2004).¶ 8¶ In Malaysia, the high demands of prawn farms for fish feed has also caused a shortage of fish for the salted fish¶ industry (Wilks 1995:122).¶ 43). Consequently, less fish are now available

to poor Asian consumers because aquaculture¶ requires such high levels of inexpensive small fish as pond feed (Food and Agriculture¶ Organization 2004). To complicate matters, agro-industrial fisheries consume more resources¶ than they produce, thereby threatening food security even further . In 2000, 5.7 million tons of¶ cultured fish were produced in Asia, requiring 1.1 million tons of feed, derived from a staggering¶ 5.5 million tons of wet-weight

fish (Shiva 2000: 43). Thus, one ton of smaller fish that are¶ typically a significant part of the diets of poor households are absorbed to cultivate every ton of¶ export fish that will provide luxury sea cuisine for rich households.¶ Peripheral food security is threatened in another way. While core consumers enjoy¶ declining prices that result from the expanding supply of tropical shrimp and deep-sea specialty¶ fishes, the cost of fish rises in peripheral countries that engage in export-oriented aquaculture¶ (Public Citizen 2004).¶ 7¶ In Indonesia, world demand for prawn has pushed up local prices for¶ small fish, such as sardines, that were traditionally consumed by the poor. Ordinary consumers in¶ Malaysia can no longer afford one kind of prawn (¶ Panaeidae)¶ because aquaculture producers¶ prefer to export this commodity at higher prices to Japan. ¶ 8¶ In Sri Lanka, the traditional shrimp¶ curry has disappeared from the diets pressure to export has driven up ¶ price s (Yoshinori 1987).

Aquaculture is underpinned by the logic of capitalism which ultimately exploits the ocean in the interest of industrialization and profit.Brett Clark and Rebecca Clausen 2008, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August) The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem

http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem

The expansion of the accumulation system, along with technological advances in fishing, have intensified the exploitation of the world ocean; facilitated the enormous capture of fishes (both target and bycatch); extended the spatial reach of fishing operations; broadened the species deemed valuable on the market; and disrupted metabolic and reproductive processes of the ocean. The quick-fix solution of aquaculture enhances capital’s control over production without resolving ecological contradictions. It is wise to recognize, as Paul Burkett has stated, that “short of human extinction, there is no sense in which capitalism can be relied upon to permanently ‘break down’ under the weight of its depletion and degradation of

natural wealth.”44 Capital is driven by the competition for the accumulation of wealth, and short-term profits provide the immediate pulse of capitalism. It cannot operate under conditions that require reinvestment in the reproduction of nature, which may entail time scales of a hundred or more years. Such requirements stand opposed to the immediate interests of profit. The qualitative relation between humans and nature is subsumed under the drive to accumulate capital on an ever-larger scale. Marx lamented that to capital, “Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most, time’s carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything.”45 Productive relations are concerned with production time, labor costs, and the circulation of capital—not the diminishing conditions of existence. Capital subjects natural cycles and processes (via controlled feeding and the use of growth hormones) to its economic cycle. The maintenance of natural conditions is

not a concern. The bounty of nature is taken for granted and appropriated as a free gift. As a result, the system is inherently caught in a fundamental crisis arising from the transformation and destruction of nature. István Mészáros elaborates this point, stating: For today it is impossible to think of anything at all concerning the elementary conditions of social metabolic reproduction which is not lethally threatened by the way in which capital relates to them—the only way in which it can. This is true not only of humanity’s energy requirements, or of the management of the planet’s mineral resources and chemical potentials, but of every facet of the global agriculture, including the devastation caused by large scale de-forestation, and even the most irresponsible way of dealing with the element without which no human being can survive: water itself….In the absence of miraculous solutions, capital’s arbitrarily self-asserting attitude to the objective determinations of causality and time in the end inevitably brings a bitter harvest, at the expense of humanity [and nature itself].46 An analysis of the oceanic crisis confirms the destructive qualities of private for-profit operations. Dire conditions are being generated as the resiliency of marine ecosystems in general is being undermined. To make matters worse, sewage from feedlots and fertilizer runoff from farms are transported by rivers to gulfs and bays, overloading marine ecosystems with excess nutrients, which contribute to an expansion of algal production. This leads to oxygen-poor water and the formation of hypoxic zones—otherwise known as “dead zones” because crabs and fishes suffocate within these areas. It also compromises natural processes that remove nutrients from the waterways. Around 150 dead zones have been identified around the world. A dead zone is the end result of unsustainable practices of food production on land. At the same time, it contributes to the loss of marine life in the seas, furthering the ecological crisis of

the world ocean. Coupled with industrialized capitalist fisheries and aquaculture, the oceans are experiencing ecological degradation and constant pressures of extraction that are severely depleting the populations of fishes and other marine life. The severity of the situation is that if current practices and rates of fish capture continue marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world could collapse by the year 2050.47 To advert turning the seas into a watery grave, what is needed is nothing less than a worldwide revolution in our relation to nature, and thus of global society itself.

Oil/Offshore Drilling/Fossil FuelsOil drilling is the fuel for further capitalist exploitation, leads to more ecological degradation, economic collapse, which culminates in extinctionKlaas 2014 [Staff Writer. “Capitalism, Peak Oil, and Endless Crisis. 1/17/14

http://anti-imperialism.com/2014/01/17/capitalism-peak-oil-and-endless-crisis]

Because of the abundance of oil in certain areas of the world, accompanied by a peculiar profitability of capital, the world oil sector presents a very high level of geographical centralization and concentration of capital, with approximately 100 fields producing 50% of the global supply, 25 producing 25% of it and a single field, the Ghawar field of Saudi Arabia, producing around 7%. Most of these fields are old and well past their peak, with the others likely to enter decline within the next decade.¶ Miller argued that conditions are such that, despite volatility, prices can never return to pre-2004 levels, saying “it is highly likely that when the US pays more than 4% of its GDP for oil, or more than 10% of GDP for primary energy, the economy declines as money is sucked into buying fuel instead of other goods and service”.¶ What can a Marxist conclude from this open admission of capitalist contradiction and desperation?¶ This is the most important realization: capitalist crisis is now necessarily endless. There is a crossroad in front of humanity as a whole and its interest in survival: either end the capitalist mode of production, or accept the inevitability of a Malthusian nightmare of more hunger, more wars over resources, increasingly social Darwinist methods of population control, and whatever will be needed to maintain the rule of capital at the expense of everyone else.¶ Without a steady and cheap supply of oil, there is no capitalism; oil is its blood. Capital accumulation requires an energy sources which tendentially increases its potential supply; no such energy source exists, and even if one was found, every part of the technological infrastructure of capitalist society, running on oil, would take a long time to be retooled or dismantled to give way to new infrastructure running on this new energy source. This kind of transition would never be feasible in a world where the rule is exploitation of man by man, and of nation by nation.¶ There can be no painless solution to an ecological crisis that jeopardizes the future of humanity while world politics revolves around defending the profits of monopoly capital, and not the general interests of human survival. The whole point of capitalist production, production for the most immediate profit, stands in contradiction to the well being of humanity and the production of the conditions required by human life. On top of its own internal limit of capitalism, capital itself and its over-accumulative tendencies, capitalist production in the era of imperialism has entered into a conflict with an external limit, something never before seen for a mode of production on this scale: capitalism is exhausting non-reproducible resources. It is now necessary for every individual to take up the struggle to put production and distribution under social control.

Expansion of oil drilling subjects the world to corporate control of resources and places profit above all at the expense of the workerEley, 10 – Tom is a contributor for World Socialist Website (Tom, WSWS, “The BP oil spill and American capitalism”, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/pers-m08.html, May 8th) //jk

These decisions led directly to the deaths of 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon and the environmental catastrophe in the Gulf. The workers killed in the BP explosion are only the latest casualties. According to data from the International

Regulators Forum, from 2004 through 2009 offshore oil workers on US rigs were four times more likely to be killed in industrial accidents and 23 percent more likely to be injured than oil workers in European waters . While there were 5 “loss of well control” disasters on US drill rigs in 2007 and 2008, in five other major offshore drilling nations—the UK,

Norway, Australia, and Canada—there were none. Since 2001 there have been 69 deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires or explosions on oil rigs operating in the Gulf of Mexico alone , according to the International Association of Drilling Contractors. The incestuous ties between the MMS and the oil industry have not been severed with the election of Obama. Obama was in fact the top recipient of BP “employee donations” in the 2008 election cycle, and the company has mobilized tens of

millions in a massive lobbying campaign that has brought on board such powerful Washington insiders as Democratic Party kingmaker John Podesta, former Democratic House majority leader Thomas Daschle and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (a key member of Obama’s bipartisan budget committee). Current CIA director Leon Panetta has also served on BP’s “external advisory

council.”Only weeks before the Gulf disaster, in an open sop to the oil companies, Obama declared his intention to make large regions of the US coastline available for oil drilling.The Deepwater Horizon explosion is the result of decades of

“deregulation,” which proclaimed that the “free market” could best regulate its elf. Beginning in the late 1970s, the US government , under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has worked to systematically eliminate all constraints on corporate profit-making. The result has been disastrous for the population of the US and the world. Corporations controlling vast social resources make decisions affecting millions of people on the basis of profit . Working hand in glove with “regulators,” little more than wholly owned subsidiaries

of industry, the corporate elite targets for elimination any outlay that diminishes profit returns to the top executives and shareholders, whether it be environmental protection, product safety, or workers’ safety —as a spate of recent deadly workplace accidents has revealed. In industry after industry the story is the same—

mining, auto production, transportation, telecommunications and, of course, the finance industry. Indeed, the eruption of toxic oil from the bottom of the sea has its parallel in the eruption of toxic assets that set off a financial crisis in 2008. Led by the Obama administraiton, national governments responded to this disaster by bailing out those responsible—the financial elite—and leaving the working class to foot the bill. In this sense, the crisis in the Gulf and the crisis in Greece are connected by a common social and economic system. The assets of BP, Transocean, Halliburton and their executives—hundreds of billions of dollars—must be appropriated and used to make the people of the Gulf whole and to put in place a massive environmental cleanup program. The executives and regulators whose policies caused the disaster should be

criminally prosecuted. The stranglehold of the corporate and financial elite over society and its resources must be broken . This requires the implementation of a socialist program for energy production. The big energy corporations must be seized and converted into public utilities, democratically run by the working class in the interest of social need.

Oil is the lifeblood of capitalism- a disruption of cheap oil would collapse the entire systemKnight, 09 – master’s degree in Political Science from Lehigh University (Alex, End of Capitalism, “Why is it breaking down?”, http://endofcapitalism.com/about/3-why-is-it-collapsing/) //jk

Oil is the lifeblood of capitalism; there is literally nothing on this earth that can replace it as the dominant fuel for the engine of global capitalism . It’s not just that 40% of energy comes from oil, making it the world’s #1 energy source, the key point is that the particular applications of oil are vital to the entire economic structure. For example, 99% of the world’s pesticides are chemically produced from oil (and almost all industrial fertilizers derive from natural gas), which means the entire industrial mode of agriculture that has taken dominance over the world’s farmland depends upon abundant cheap

petroleum. In fact, including tractors, chemicals, packaging, distribution, and cooking, every single calorie of food in the United States requires at least 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to bring that food to the plate. The pharmaceutical industry, chemical, plastics, and military are equally dependent. In addition to being found in just about everything we consume, petroleum is now also necessary for fueling the extraction, production, packaging, and distribution of all other resources . Most crucially, oil now powers 95% of all transportation, in the form of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. By definition the global economy depends on the rapid transport of people and resources on a global scale, which means burning oil and dumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, causing global warming and destabilizing the Earth’s climate. Meanwhile, because oil is such a powerful resource, states necessarily view it as a strategic imperative to maintain access to supplies. The quest for cheap and available oil therefore becomes a prime motive for military action and warfare, as we’ve seen in the actions of the US in the Middle

East, where66% of the world’s remaining oil lies. Warfare and climate chaos stand out as particularly devastating

consequences of the massive rate of oil consumption, but the reality is that the entire global assault on human justice and natural ecosystems would in many ways not be possible without being fueled by cheap and abundant oil. Luckily, oil as a resource is limited in supply (imagine the destruction if it weren’t), and in fact according to a growing chorus of

geologists, the worldwide supply of oil is now reaching its ultimate maximum level and will soon enter decline. The evidence shows that the global peak oil production is here today. This historic event is occurring approximately 40 years after

the peak discovery of oil, in the mid-1960s. Since that time, less and less oil has been found worldwide, while demand has

skyrocketed. This isn’t the place for a full explanation of Peak Oil, but it serves to point out that at least 54 countries have already reached their domestic peak oil, including the United States. Data indicates that the immense run-up of prices in 2007-2008 can best be explained as a result of global oil shortage, which certainly added stress to the financial markets and likely helped trigger the current crisis. Can This Continue? The deepening oil shortage will affect the United States and its imperialist project in a unique way. Having risen

to power on a sea of oil in the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. reached its peak oil in 1970 and now imports over 2/3 of its consumption. Still by far the largest consumer of oil , using over 25% of global supply, the country is being forced into deeper and deeper debt to pay for it. This enormous trade deficit is only counteracted by the willingness of foreign countries from whom the United States purchases most of its stuff (Saudi

Arabia for its oil, China for its consumer goods), to recycle their dollars back into the US by purchasing Treasury Bonds, stocks, real estate and other dollar-denominated assets. As U.S. financial markets crumble, how long until these foreign countries decide their investments are safer elsewhere, and pull the rug out from under the Empire?

Oil leases are capitalist to their core- they risk human life in pursuit of profitSiegmund, 11 – Contributor for DailyKos (Fred, Daily Kos, “Oil Spills and Capitalism”, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/05/952978/-Oil-Spills-and-Capitalism#, March 5th)//jk

The BP oil spill started so long ago it is hard to remember the details. It began with the explosion and death of 11 employees, followed by a fire and the sinking of the drilling platform . T he pictures of the flaming platform and the billowing smoke diverted our attention from the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The early reports down played the spill. We

know the spill is much bigger than the early BP reports when we read about a dead battery in the blow out equipment and one failed containment effort after another. To top that off we had to listen to company CEO’s blame each other in Congressional testimony. I list some of the failures of BP because I have not heard politicians question capitalism or whether it is best way to explore and drill for oil. Nor have I heard media commentary or anyone in Congress question leasing drilling rights to

private companies. Capitalists complain government is wasteful, inefficient and bureaucratic when private firms have the incentive to minimize costs to compete with other firms . Minimizing costs also means ignoring the environmental safety precautions that Congress and the public wants in the leases , and also working to reduce enforcement. Oil leases are usually discussed as an example of capitalism, but the continental shelf is the public domain as much as the Washington Monument and Yellowstone Park. Capitalism requires private ownership with transactions exclusively between private parties, not the government. When the government contracts with firms in the

construction industry to build roads or drill oil, the buyer side of the transaction is the government. Leasing the drilling rights on the continental shelf is just one way to recover the oil if Congress and the country decide to take the risk of a spill. Another way is to form a public corporation like Conrail, Amtrak, the Tennessee Valley Authority or the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Increased Fossil fuel use, especially offshore drilling will lead to the environment being exploited by big oil companies. Smith 13(Yves Smith, Yves has been in and around finance for over 30 years as an investment banker, management consultant to financial institutions across a large

range of wholesale banking and trading markets businesses, and a corporate finance advisor, October 16 2013, “Michael Klare: Fossil Fuel Euphoria, Hallelujah, Oil and Gas Forever!”, Naked Capitalism, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/10/michael-klare-fossil-fuel-euphoria-hallelujah-oil-and-gas-forever.html, accessed July 8th 2014) This movement from gloom about our energy future to what can only be called fossil-fuel euphoria may prove to be the hallmark of our peculiar moment. In a speech this September, for instance, Barry Smitherman, chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission (that state’s energy regulatory agency), claimed that the Earth possesses a “relatively

boundless supply” of oil and natural gas. Not only that — and you can practically hear the chorus of cheering in Houston and other oil

centers — but many of the most exploitable new deposits are located in the U.S. and Canada. As a result — add a roll of

drums and a blaring of trumpets — the expected boost in energy is predicted to provide the United States with a cornucopia of economic and political rewards, including industrial expansion at home and enhanced geopolitical clout abroad. The country, exulted Karen Moreau of the New York State Petroleum Council, another industry cheerleader, is now in a position “to become a global superpower on energy.”¶ ¶ There are good reasons to be deeply skeptical of such claims, but that hardly matters when they are gaining traction in Washington and on Wall Street. What we’re seeing is a sea change in elite thinking on the future availability and attractiveness of fossil fuels. Senior government officials, including President Obama, have already become infected with this euphoria, as have top Wall Street investors — which means it will have a powerful and longlasting, though largely pernicious, effect on the country’s energy policy, industrial development, and foreign relations.¶ ¶ The speed and magnitude of this shift in thinking has been little short of astonishing. Just a few years ago, we were girding for the imminent prospect of “peak oil,” the point at which daily worldwide output would reach its maximum and begin an irreversible decline. This, experts assumed, would result in a global energy crisis, sky-high oil prices, and severe disruptions to the world economy.¶ ¶ Today, peak oil seems a distant will-o’-the-wisp. Experts at the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) confidently project that global oil output will reach 115 million barrels per day by 2040 — a stunning 34% increase above the current level of 86 million barrels. Natural gas production is expected to soar as well, leaping from 113 trillion cubic feet in 2010 to a projected 185 trillion in 2040.¶ ¶ These rosy assessments rest to a surprising extent on a single key assumption: that the United States, until

recently a declining energy producer, will experience a sharp increase in output through the exploitation of shale oil and natural gas reserves through hydro-fracking and other technological innovations. “In a matter of a few years, the trends have reversed,” Moreau declared last February. “There is a new energy reality of vast domestic resources of

oil and natural gas brought about by advancing technology… For the first time in generations, we are able to see that our energy supply is no longer limited, foreign, and finite; it is American and abundant.”¶ ¶ The boost in domestic oil and gas output, it is further claimed, will fuel an industrial renaissance in the United States — with new plants and factories being built to take advantage of abundant local low-cost energy supplies. “The economic

consequences of this supply-and-demand revolution are potentially extraordinary,” asserted Ed Morse, the head of global commodities research at Citigroup in New York. America’s gross domestic product, he claimed, will grow by 2% to 3% over the next seven years as a result of the energy revolution alone, adding as much as $624 billion to the national economy. Even greater gains can be made, Morse and others claim, if the U.S. becomes a significant exporter of fossil fuels, particularly in the form of liquefied natural

gas (LNG).¶ ¶ Not only will these developments result in added jobs — as many as three million, claims energy analyst Daniel Yergin — but they will also enhance America’s economic status vis-à-vis its competitors. “U.S. natural gas is abundant and prices are low — a third of their level in Europe and a quarter of that in Japan,” Yergin wrote recently. “This is

boost_ing energy-intensive manufacturing in the U.S., much to the dismay of competitors in both Europe and Asia . ”¶ ¶ This fossil fuel euphoria has even surfaced in statements by President Obama. For all his talk of climate change perils and the need to invest in renewables, he has also gloated over the jump in domestic energy production and promised to facilitate further increases. “Last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003,” he affirmed in March 2011. “And for the first time in more than a decade, oil we imported accounted for less than half of the liquid fuel we consumed. So that was a good trend. To keep reducing that reliance on imports, my administration is encouraging offshore oil exploration and production.”¶ ¶ Money Pouring into Fossil Fuels¶ ¶ This burst of

euphoria about fossil fuels and America’s energy future is guaranteed to have a disastrous impact on the planet. In the long term, it will make Earth a hotter, far more extreme place to live by vastly increasing carbon emissions and diverting investment funds from renewables and green energy

to new fossil fuel projects. For all the excitement these endeavors may be generating, it hardly takes a genius to see that they mean ever more carbon dioxide heading into the atmosphere and an ever less hospitable planet.¶ ¶ The preference for fossil fuel investments is easy to spot in the industry’s trade journals, as well as in recent statistical data and

anecdotal reports of all sorts. According to the reliable International Energy Agency (IEA), private and public investment in fossil fuel projects over the next quarter century will outpace investment in renewable energy by

a ratio of three to one. In other words, for every dollar spent on new wind farms, solar arrays, and tidal power research, three dollars will go into the development of new oil fields, shale gas operations, and coal mines.¶ ¶ From industry sources it’s clear that

big-money investors are rushing to take advantage of the current boom in unconventional energy output in the U.S. — the climate be damned. “The dollars needed [to develop such projects] have never been larger,” commented Maynard Holt, co-president of Houston-based investment bank Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Company. “But the

money is truly out there. The global energy capital river is flowing our way.”¶ ¶ In the either/or equation that seems to be our energy future, the capital river is rushing into the exploitation of unconventional fossil fuels, while it’s slowing to a trickle in the world of the true unconventionals — the energy sources that don’t add carbon to the atmosphere. This, indeed, was the conclusion reached by the IEA, which in 2012 warned that the

seemingly inexorable growth in greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide is likely to eliminate all prospect of averting the worst effects of climate change.¶ ¶ Petro Machismo¶ ¶ The new energy euphoria is also fueling a growing sense that the American superpower, whose influence has recently seemed to be on the wane, may soon acquire

fresh geopolitical clout through its mastery of the latest energy technologies. “America’s new energy posture allows us to engage from a position of greater strength,” crowed National Security Adviser Tom Donilon in an April address at Columbia University. Increased domestic energy output, he explained, will help reduce U.S. vulnerability to global supply

disruptions and price hikes. “It also affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals.”¶ A new elite consensus is forming around the strategic advantages of expanded oil and gas production. In

particular, this outlook holds that the U.S. is benefiting from substantially reduced oil imports from the Middle East by eliminating a dependency that has led to several disastrous interventions in [the Middle East] that region and exposed the country to periodic disruptions in oil deliveries, starting with the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. “The shift in oil sources means the global supply system will become more resilient, our energy supplies will become more secure, and the nation will have more flexibility in dealing with crises,” Yergin wrote in the Wall Street Journal.¶ ¶ This turnaround, he and other experts claim, is what allowed Washington to adopt a tougher stance with Tehran in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear enrichment

program. With the U.S. less dependent on Middle Eastern oil, so goes the argument, American leaders need not fear Iranian threats to disrupt the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf to international markets. “The substantial increase in oil production in the United States,” Donilon declared in

April, is what allowed Washington to impose tough sanctions on Iranian oil “while minimizing the burdens on the rest of the world.” ¶ ¶ A stance of what could be called petro machismo is growing in Washington, underlying such initiatives as the president’s widely ballyhooed policy announcement of a “pivot” from the Middle East to Asia (still largely

words backed by only the most modest of actions) and efforts to constrain Russia’s international influence. ¶ ¶ Ever since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency of that country,

Moscow has sought to sway the behavior of its former Warsaw Pact allies and the former republics of the Soviet Union by exploiting its dominant energy role in the region. It offered cheap natural gas to governments willing to follow its policy dictates, while threatening to cut off supplies to those that weren’t. Now,

some American strategists hope to reduce Russia’s clout by helping friendly nations like Poland and the

Baltic states develop their own shale gas reserves and build LNG terminals. These would allow them to import gas from “friendly” states, including the U.S. (once its LNG export capacities are expanded). “If we can export some natural gas to Europe and to Japan and other Asian nations,” Karen Moreau suggested in

February, “we strengthen our relationships and influence in those places — and perhaps reduce the influence of other producers such as Russia.”¶ ¶ The crucial issue is this: if American elites continue to believe that increased oil and gas production will provide the U.S. with a strategic advantage, Washington will be tempted to exercise a “stronger hand” when pursuing its “international security goals.” The result will undoubtedly be heightened international friction and discord . ¶ ¶ Is the Euphoria Justified?¶ ¶ There is no doubt that the present fossil fuel euphoria will lead in troubling directions, even if the rosy predictions of rising energy output are, in the long run, likely to prove both unreliable and unrealistic. The petro machismo types make several interconnected claims:¶ ¶ * The world’s fossil fuel reserves are vast, especially when “unconventional” sources of fuel — Canadian tar sands, shale gas, and the like — are included.¶ ¶ * The utilization of advanced technologies, especially fracking, will permit the effective exploitation of a significant share of these untapped reserves (assuming that governments don’t restrict fracking and other controversial drilling activities).¶ ¶ * Fossil fuels will continue to supply an enormous share of global energy requirements for the foreseeable future, even given rising world temperatures, growing public opposition, and other challenges.¶ ¶ Each of these assertions is packed with unacknowledged questions

and improbabilities that are impossible to explore thoroughly in an article of this length. But here are some major areas of doubt. ¶ ¶ To begin with, those virtually “boundless” untapped oil reserves have yet to be explored, meaning that it’s impossible to know if they do, in fact, contain

commercially significant reserves of oil and gas. To offer an apt example, the U.S. Geological Survey, in one of the most widely cited estimates of untapped energy reserves, has reported that approximately 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves and 30% percent of its natural gas lie above the

Arctic Circle. But this assessment is based on geological analyses of rock samples, not exploratory drilling. Whether the area actually holds such large reserves will not be known until widespread drilling has occurred. So far, initial Arctic drilling operations, like those off Greenland, have generally proved disappointing.¶ ¶ Similarly, the Energy Information Administration has reported that China possesses vast shale formations that could harbor substantial reserves of oil and gas. According to a 2013 EIA survey, that country’s technically recoverable shale gas reserves are estimated at 1,275 trillion cubic feet, more than twice the

figure for the United States. Once again, however, the real extent of those reserves won’t be known without extensive drilling, which is only in its beginning stages.¶ ¶ To say, then, that global reserves are “boundless” is to disguise all the hypotheticals lurking within that description. Reality may fall far short of industry claims.¶ ¶ The effectiveness of new technologies in exploiting such problematic reserves is also open to question. True, fracking and other unconventional technologies have already substantially increased the production of hard-to-exploit fuels, including tar sands, shale gas, and deep-sea reserves. Many experts predict that such gains are likely to be repeated in the future. The EIA, for example, suggests that U.S. output of shale oil via fracking will jump by 221% over the next 15 years, and natural gas by 164%. The big question, however, is whether these projected increases will actually come to fruition. While early gains are likely, the odds are that future growth will come at a far slower pace.¶ ¶ As a start, the most lucrative U.S. shale formations in Arkansas, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and Texas have already experienced substantial exploration and many of the most attractive drilling sites (or “plays”) are now fully developed. More fracking, no doubt, will release additional oil and gas, but the record shows that fossil-fuel output tends to decline once the earliest, most promising reservoirs are exploited. In fact, notes energy analyst Art Berman, “several of the more

mature shale gas plays are either in decline or appear to be approaching peak production.”¶ ¶ Doubts are also multiplying over the potential for exploiting shale reserves in other parts of the world. Preliminary drilling suggests that many of the shale formations in Europe and China possess fewer hydrocarbons and will be harder to develop than those now being exploited in this country. In Poland, for example, efforts to extract domestic shale reserves have been stymied by disappointing drilling efforts and the subsequent departure of major foreign firms, including Exxon Mobil and Marathon Oil.¶ ¶ Finally, there

is a crucial but difficult to assess factor in the future energy equation: the degree to which energy companies and energy states will run into resistance when

exploiting ever more remote (and environmentally sensitive) resource zones. No one yet knows how much energy industry efforts may be constrained by the growing opposition of local residents, scientists, environmentalists, and others who worry about the environmental degradation caused by unconventional energy extraction and the climate consequences of rising fossil fuel combustion. Despite industry claims that fracking, tar sands production, and Arctic drilling can be performed without endangering local residents, harming the environment, or wrecking the planet, ever more people are coming to the opposite conclusion — and beginning to take steps to protect their perceived

interests.¶ ¶ In New York State, for example, a fervent anti-fracking oppositional movement has prevented government officials from allowing such activities to begin in the rich Marcellus shale formation, one of the largest in the world. Although Albany may, in time, allow limited fracking operations there, it is unlikely to permit large-scale drilling throughout the state. Similarly, an impressive opposition in British Columbia to the proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, especially by the native peoples of the region, has put that project on indefinite hold. And growing popular opposition to fracking in Europe is making itself felt across the region. The European Parliament, for example, recently imposed tough environmental constraints on the practice.¶ ¶ As heat waves and extreme storm activity increase, so will concern over climate change and opposition to wholesale fossil fuel extraction. The IEA warned of this possibility in the 2012 edition of its World Energy Outlook. Shale gas and other unconventional forms of natural gas are predicted to provide nearly half the net gain in world gas output over the next 25 years, the report noted. “There are,” it added, “also concerns about the environmental impact of producing unconventional gas that, if not properly addressed, could halt the unconventional gas revolution in its tracks.”¶ ¶ Reaction to that IEA report

last November was revealing. Its release prompted a mini-wave of ecstatic commentary in the American media about its prediction that, thanks to

the explosion in unconventional energy output, this country would soon overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s

leading oil producer. In fact, the fossil fuel craze can be said to have started with this claim. None of the hundreds of articles and editorials written on the subject, however, bothered to discuss the caveats the report offered or its warnings of planetary catastrophe. ¶ ¶ As is so often the case with mass delusions, those caught up in fossil fuel mania have not bothered to think through the grim realities involved. While industry bigwigs may continue to remain on an energy high, the rest of us will not be so lucky. The accelerated production and combustion of fossil fuels can have only one outcome: a severely imperiled planet. Fracking empirically sacrifices communities to the capitalist drive for Oil resources

Cole et al, 11-11-2013 (Penny Cole, Matt Woresdale, Gerry Gold, Fracking Capitalism: Action Plans for the Eco-social Crisis

Communities are regarded as obstacles to be swept aside. In October 2013, an editorial in The Economist urged ministers to forget about using tax breaks or spending money to encourage people to remain, or

businesses to invest, in cities and towns like Hull and Burnley. This only diverted them away from areas where “they would be more successful”. Governments should not try to rescue failing towns, but rather encourage the people

who live in them to escape, said the business magazine.¶ In a debate on fracking in the House of Lords, Lord Howell (George Osborne’s father-in-law) let the cat out of the bag about how the ruling élite see Britain’s poorest areas. He started off by saying that whilst fracking might not be acceptable in the “beautiful” south-east (he meant Balcombe) it would be fine for the “desolate North East”. Then he made it even worse in¶ his so-called apology by saying he

actually meant the “unloved North West”. Capitalism’s view of the future is that former industrial zones are not for people but for fracking.¶ The accelerating crisis we are living through today has its origins in the rapid growth from the late 1970s onwards. A collapse of the post-war system of fixed

currencies, capital controls, tariffs and tough regulations had shown that the forces of capitalism could not be contained within national boundaries. The old order was destroyed and replaced by corporate- driven globalisation. An entirely new global economy emerged, alongside a financial system that

traded 24 hours a day and paid no heed to national borders or governments.

The aff's search for new forms of oil is an attempt to revive the dying capitalist system - they're the continuation of a 500 year process of violent exploitationTom Keefer, 1-21-2009, (The Commoner, " Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, And Class Struggle", http://www.commoner.org.uk/N13/01-Keefer.pdf)

The development of the vast non-conventional tar sands in Alberta, Canada are a last-ditch attempt to find a source of fossil fuel energy capable of maintaining and expanding capitalist economic growth in an era when supplies of conventional oil—the energy source which powered 20th-century industrialism

—are peaking and entering an irreversible period of decline. Despite massive investments in new technologies of oil discovery and recovery, conventional oil production and non-OPEC countries has been steadily falling for the past decade or more while the large OPEC producers have been unable in recent

years to significantly boost their own production. The shift to non- conventional "alternatives" such as the

Alberta tar sands bring with them a host of problems—including dramatically increased greenhouse gas emissions, the poisoning of the water and the destruction of the land, the dispossession of indigenous peoples, and the exploitation of the vast and ever-growing pool of domestic and foreign labor—all of which sharpen the contradictions of class struggle and fossil fuel use in 21st-

century capitalism. ¶ This article will seek to put the development of the tar sands in a much larger historical

context—that of the process of capitalist growth and development over the past 500 years. I will suggest

that in order for us to truly understand and successfully oppose the growth of the tar sands into what has

been dubbed the largest industrial project in the history of humanity, we need to develop theoretical perspectives which address the weaknesses at the core of the divide between most environmental and class struggle politics today. Our ecological framework has to gain a class analysis of the historically specificdynamics of capitalism and its reliance on energy sources, and

our class struggle politics has to integrate an analysis of the importance of the flow of energy and materials to continued capitalist growth and development.¶ This paper will argue that over the course of its history, capitalism has faced a number of potentially terminal crises that have arisen from the consequences of ecological disequilibrium, the resistance of the exploited and dispossessed, and the way in which

particular energy regimes have constrained or enabled capitalist expansion. I am going to suggest that today the global capitalist system stands on the threshold of another such moment of crisis, one which is intersected by the fault lines of ecological collapse, thermodynamic limits and the intensification of class struggle caused by these conditions.

Fossil fuels are the largest internal link to capitalism - only they provide the resources that enable global expansionTom Keefer, 1-21-2009, (The Commoner, " Fossil Fuels, Capitalism, And Class Struggle", http://www.commoner.org.uk/N13/01-Keefer.pdf)

The capturing and unlocking of fossil fuel energy made it possiblefor capitalism to go beyond the limitations of “biotic energies”dependent upon solar flows of energy. This in turn made possible the development of capitalist globalization by unifying national economies and enabling the projection of economic and military power on a global scale. As Elmar Altvater argued: As long as as ‘the societal relationship with nature’ was based on biotic energies, on the soil and the fruit it bore, onthe speed and range of an ox or horse drawn cart, on thetonnage, maneuverability and speed of a sailing vessel andon the art of navigation, the material possibility of overcoming these limits of space and time was slight and the capacity of creating a world order remained restricted.”3 Altvater suggests that this appropriation of fossil fuel energy made possible for the first time a true “world order” in which “the‘metabolism’ of humankind, society and nature reached a globalscale.”4 Altvater goes so far as to argue that “without fossil energiesneither the process of capitalist production and accumulation nor the modern monetary world market could exist.”

Offshore production is underpinned by a capitalist logic of commodification that cannot reconcile or account for environmental degradation—the result is systemic destruction of ocean spaceMartens ’11 (Emily, Masters’ Thesis paper at the University of Miami for a Master’s Degree in Geography and Regional Studies, overseen by Mazen Labban, Ph.D. and professor of Geography, Terri A. Scandura, Ph.D, Dean of the Graduate School, Jan Nijman, Ph.D. Professor of Geography, and Anna Zalik, Ph.D.,Professor of Environmental Sciences, York University, Toronto, “THE DISCOURSES OF ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY IN THE DEBATE OVER OFFSHORE OIL DRILLING POLICY IN FLORIDA,” http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1253&context=oa_theses)

The fusion of energy security and environmental protection concerns has since the energy and environmental crises of the 1970s

forged a policy aimed at creating environmentally safe extraction and production processes. The emphasis on cheap energy resources, however, has come into contradiction with requirements of costly regulation and oversight practices that are thought to better ensure environmental security. The attempt to reconcile offshore drilling with concerns about environmental protection during the Nixon and Carter years was torn asunder by the hostility

to regulation during the Reagan and Clinton years. As a result, a heated debate developed between proponents of offshore oil drilling who argue that (unregulated) offshore oil drilling — and expanded domestic oil production in general — ensures energy security by making the United States energy independent

and opponents of offshore oil drilling who do not contest the goal of energy independence but who argue that this should not be at the expense of the protection of marine ecosystems and coastal economies from the destructive effects of offshore drilling, regulated or not. The debate, in other words, developed into a debate between a dominant discourse of energy security and a counter discourse of environmental security — at the core of it were questions of regulation as well as competing commercial interests. Though there are various actors and interests within each of these discourses, the primary tension between proponents and opponents of offshore oil drilling tends to reproduce the tensions embodied in the larger discourses of energy security and environmental security at different geographical scales. One of the main arguments of this thesis is that the credence given to either one of these two security discourses at any given time is the result of broader socio-political forces and the changing ideologies within which they operate.

Underlying both seemingly opposed discourses , however, is a common logic that informs the path they take and the language they use to establish legitimacy — the logic of the commodity — an abstract

representation of space that supports this logic. This space, as Lefebvre (2007: 53) points out, “includes the ‘world of commodities’, its ‘logic’ and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state”. As will be shown in the following chapters, each of these competing discourses has organized its

arguments around the logics of capitalism to gain public support and federal and local state protections. This is not an arbitrary

association but rather the result of specific political developments in the US that have shaped environmental concerns, and the environment, according to free market principles . Prior to the injection of neoliberal policies of deregulation and privatization into the environment and discourses on the environment under the Reagan Administration, the Nixon and Carter Administrations were caught between an environmental movement, which attempted to create a new perspective from which human activity could be viewed in light of its often negative impacts on the environment – especially offshore oil drilling as a result of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill – and the volatility of the international oil market which threatened oil imports. The Nixon and Carter strategies attempted to balance the two agendas through the expansion of domestic oil production in tandem with regulations and oversight that would monitor the offshore oil industry’s compliance with environmental standards. This was thought and presented as a temporary measure. Ultimately the aim was to create alternative fuels in the not too distant future to replace oil, in light of evidence and concern that both the production and consumption of oil were proving to be detrimental to the environment

which humans depended on for their own survival. Neoliberal restructuring under the Reagan Administration , however, promoted a market-based discourse of energy security above, or more precisely against the

discourse of environmental security, advocating reduction of state oversights and reliance on market signals instead as the more efficient means to regulate offshore drilling. Environmental security, in the form of government oversight, became a threat to the accumulation of wealth — a source of

insecurity. Instead, environmental security could be entrusted to the multiple interests operating in the free market. The argument rested on the neoliberal mantra that the government was not as efficient as private owners

and the market in managing and protecting the environment. As a result , offshore oil drilling activity has since

enjoyed lax regulatory oversight, while day-to-day oil pollution continues to disrupt various ecological and economic activities that share ocean space.

The affirmative engages in the third-worldification of North America, a process of complete environmental destruction and ceding political power to the oil industry Klare 4/2 Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, “A New Energy Third World in North America?”, Truthout, April 2nd, 2012, http://truth-out.org/news/item/8244-a-new-energy-third-world-in-north-america

The “curse” of oil wealth is a well-known phenomenon in Third World petro-states where millions of lives are wasted in poverty and

the environment is ravaged, while tiny elites rake in the energy dollars and corruption rules the land. Recently, North America has been repeatedly hailed as the planet’s twenty-first-century “new Saudi Arabia” for “tough energy” -- deep-sea oil, Canadian tar sands, and fracked oil and natural gas. But here’s a question no one considers: Will the oil curse become as

familiar on this continent in the wake of a new American energy rush as it is in Africa and elsewhere? Will North America,

that is, become not just the next boom continent for energy bonanzas, but a new energy Third World? Once upon a time, the giant U.S. oil companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- got their start in North America, launching an oil boom that lasted a century and made the U.S. the planet’s dominant energy producer. But most of those companies have long since turned elsewhere for new sources of oil. Eager to escape ever-stronger environmental restrictions and dying oil fields at home, the energy giants were naturally drawn to the economically and environmentally wide-open producing areas of the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America -- the Third World -- where oil deposits were plentiful, governments compliant, and environmental regulations few or nonexistent. Here, then, is the energy surprise of the twenty-first century: with operating conditions growing increasingly

difficult in the global South, the major firms are now flocking back to North America. To exploit previously neglected reserves on this continent, however, Big Oil will have to overcome a host of regulatory and

environmental obstacles. It will, in other words, have to use its version of deep-pocket persuasion to convert the United States into the functional equivalent of a Third World petro-state. Knowledgeable observers

are already noting the first telltale signs of the oil industry’s “Third-Worldification” of the United States. Wilderness areas from which the oil companies were once barred are being opened to energy exploitation and other restraints on invasive drilling operations are being dismantled. Expectations are that, in the wake of the 2012 election season, environmental regulations will be rolled back even further and other protected areas made available for development. In the process, as has so often been the case with Third World petro-states, the rights and wellbeing of local citizens will be trampled underfoot. Welcome to the Third World of Energy Up until 1950, the United States was the world’s leading oil producer, the Saudi Arabia of its day. In that year, the U.S. produced approximately 270 million metric tons of oil, or about 55% of the world’s entire output. But with a postwar recovery then in full swing, the world needed a lot more energy while America’s most accessible oil fields -- though still capable of growth -- were approaching their maximum sustainable production levels. Net U.S. crude oil output reached a peak of about 9.2 million barrels per day in 1970 and then went into decline (until very recently). This prompted the giant oil firms, which had already developed significant footholds in Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, to scour the global South in search of new reserves to exploit -- a saga told with great gusto in Daniel Yergin’s epic history of the oil industry, The Prize. Particular attention was devoted to the Persian Gulf region, where in 1948 a consortium of American companies -- Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco -- discovered the world’s largest oil field, Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia. By 1975, Third World countries were producing 58% of the world’s oil supply, while the U.S. share had dropped to 18%. Environmental concerns also drove this search for new reserves in the global South. On January 28, 1969, a blowout at Platform A of a Union Oil Company offshore field in California’s Santa Barbara Channel produced a massive oil leak that covered much of the area and laid waste to local

wildlife. Coming at a time of growing environmental consciousness, the spill provoked an outpouring of public outrage, helping to inspire the establishment of Earth Day, first observed one year later. Equally important, it helped spur passage of various legislative restraints on drilling activities, including the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. In addition, Congress banned new drilling in waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida. During these years, Washington also expanded areas designated as wilderness or wildlife preserves, protecting them from resource extraction. In 1952, for example, President Eisenhower established the Arctic National Wildlife Rangeand, in 1980, this remote area of northeastern Alaska was redesignated by Congress as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Ever since the discovery of oil in the adjacent Prudhoe Bay area, energy firms have been clamoring for the right to drill in ANWR, only to be blocked by one or another president or house of Congress. For the most part, production in Third World countries posed no such complications. The Nigerian government, for example, has long welcomed foreign investment in its onshore and offshore oil fields, while showing little concern over the despoliation of its southern coastline, where oil company operations have produced a massive environmental disaster. As Adam Nossiter of the New York Times described the resulting situation, “The Niger Delta, where the [petroleum] wealth underground is out of all proportion with the poverty on the surface, has endured the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez spill every year for 50 years by some estimates.” As vividly laid out by Peter Maass in Crude World, a similar pattern is evident in many other Third World petro-states where anything goes as compliant government officials -- often the recipients of hefty bribes or other oil-company favors -- regularly look the other way. The companies, in turn, don’t trouble themselves over the human rights abuses perpetrated by their foreign government “partners” -- many of them dictators, warlords, or feudal potentates. But times change. The Third World increasingly isn’t what it used to be. Many countries in the global South are becoming more protective of their environments, ever more inclined to take ever larger cuts of the oil wealth of their own countries, and ever more inclined to punish foreign companies that abuse their laws. In February 2011, for example, a judge in the Ecuadorean Amazon town of Lago Agrioordered Chevron to pay $9 billion in damages for environmental harm caused to the region in the 1970s by Texaco (which the company later acquired). Although the Ecuadorians are unlikely to collect a single dollar from Chevron, the case is indicative of the tougher regulatory climate now facing these companies in the developing world. More recently, in a case resulting from an oil spill at an offshore field, a judge in Brazil has seized the passports of 17 employees of Chevron and U.S. drilling-rig operator Transocean, preventing them from leaving the country. In addition, production is on the decline in some developing countries like Indonesia and Gabon, while others have nationalized their oil fields or narrowed the space in which private international firms can operate. During Hugo Chávez’s presidency, for example, Venezuela has forced all foreign firms to award a majority stake in their operations to the state oil company,Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. Similarly, the Brazilian government, under former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, instituted a rule that all drilling operations in the new “pre-salt” fields in the Atlantic Ocean -- widely believed to be the biggest oil discovery of the twenty-first century -- be managed by the state-controlled firm, Petróleo de Brasil (Petrobras). Fracking Our Way to a Toxic Planet Such pressures in the Third World have forced the major U.S. and European firms -- BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Total of France -- to look elsewhere for new sources of oil and natural gas. Unfortunately for them, there aren’t many places left in the world that possess promising

hydrocarbon reserves and also welcome investment by private energy giants. That’s why some of the most attractive new energy markets now lie in Canada and the United States, or in the waters off their shores. As a result, both are

experiencing a remarkable uptick in fresh investment from the major international firms. Both countries still possess substantial oil and gas deposits, but not of the “easy” variety (deposits close to the surface, close to shore, or

easily accessible for extraction). All that remains are “tough” energy reserves (deep underground, far offshore, hard

to extract and process). To exploit these, the energy companies must deploy aggressive technologies likely to cause extensive damage to the environment and in many cases human health as well. They must also find ways to gain government approval to enter environmentally protected areas now off limits. The formula for

making Canada and the U.S. the “Saudi Arabia” of the twenty-first century is grim but relatively simple: environmental protections will have to be eviscerated and those who stand in the way of intensified drilling, from

landowners to local environmental protection groups, bulldozed out of the way. Put another way, North America will have to be Third-Worldified. Consider the extraction of shale oil and gas, widely considered the most crucial aspect of Big Oil’s current push back into the North American market. Shale formations in Canada and the U.S. are believed to house massive

quantities of oil and natural gas, and their accelerated extraction is already helping reduce the region’s reliance on imported

petroleum. Both energy sources, however, can only be extracted through a process known as hydraulic fracturing (“hydro-fracking,” or just plain “fracking”) that uses powerful jets of water in massive quantities to shatter underground shale formations, creating fissures through which the hydrocarbons can escape. In addition, to widen these fissures

and ease the escape of the oil and gas they hold, the fracking water has to be mixed with a variety of often poisonous solvents and acids. This technique produces massive quantities of toxic wastewater, which can neither be returned to the environment without endangering drinking water supplies nor easily stored and decontaminated. The rapid expansion of hydro-fracking would be problematic under the best of

circumstances, which these aren’t. Many of the richest sources of shale oil and gas, for instance, are located in populated areas of Texas, Arkansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. In fact, one of the most promising sites, the Marcellus formation, abuts New

York City’s upstate watershed area. Under such circumstances, concern over the safety of drinking water should be paramount, and federal legislation, especially the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, should theoretically give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the power to oversee (and potentially ban) any procedures that endanger water supplies.

However, oil companies seeking to increase profits by maximizing the utilization of hydro-fracking banded together, put pressure on Congress, and managed to get itself exempted from the 1974 law’s provisions. In 2005,

under heavy lobbying from then Vice President Dick Cheney -- formerly the CEO of oil services contractor Halliburton -- Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, which prohibited the EPA from regulating hydro-fracking via the Safe Drinking Water Act, thereby eliminating a significant impediment to wider use of the technique. Third Worldification Since then, there has been a virtual stampede to the shale regions by the major oil companies, which have in many cases devoured smaller firms that pioneered the development of hydro-fracking. (In 2009, for example, ExxonMobil paid $31 billion to acquire XTO Energy, one of the leading producers of shale gas.) As the extraction of shale oil and gas has accelerated, the industry has faced

other problems. To successfully exploit promising shale formations, for instance, energy firms must insert many wells, since each fracking operation can only extend several hundred feet in any direction, requiring the establishment of noisy, polluting, and potentially hazardous drilling operations in well-populated rural and suburban areas. While drilling has been welcomed by some of these communities as a source of added income, many have vigorously opposed the invasion, seeing it as an assault on neighborhood peace, health, and safety. In an effort to protect their quality of life, some Pennsylvania communities, for example, have adopted zoning laws that ban fracking in their midst. Viewing this as yet another intolerable obstacle, the industry has put intense pressure on friendly members of the state legislature to adopt a law

depriving most local jurisdictions of the right to exclude fracking operations. “We have been sold out to the gas industry, plain and simple,” said Todd Miller, a town commissioner in South Fayette Township who opposed the legislation. If the energy industry has its way in North America, there will be many more Todd Millers complaining about the way their lives and

worlds have been “sold out” to the energy barons. Similar battles are already being fought elsewhere in North America, as energy firms seek to overcome resistance to expanded drilling in areas once protected from such activity. In Alaska, for example, the industry is fighting in the courts and in Congress to allow drilling in coastal areas, despite opposition from Native American communities which worry that vulnerable marine animals and their traditional way of life will be put at risk. This summer, Royal Dutch Shell is expected to begin test drilling in the Chukchi Sea, an area important to several such communities. And

this is just the beginning. To gain access to additional stores of oil and gas, the industry is seeking to eliminate virtually all environmental restraints imposed since the 1960s and open vast tracts of coastal and wilderness areas, including ANWR, to intensive drilling. It also seeks the construction of the much disputed Keystone XL pipeline, which is to transport synthetic crude oil made from Canadian tar sands -- a particularly “dirty” and environmentally devastating form of energy which has attracted substantial U.S. investment -- to Texas and Louisiana for further processing.

According to Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute (API), the preferred U.S. energy strategy “would include greater access to areas that are currently off limits, a regulatory and permitting process that supported reasonable timelines for development, and immediate approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.” To achieve these objectives, the API, which claims to represent more than 490 oil and natural gas companies, has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to sway the 2012 elections, dubbed “Vote 4 Energy.” While describing itself as nonpartisan, the API-financed campaign seeks to discredit and marginalize any candidate, including President Obama, who opposes even the mildest version of its drill-anywhere agenda. “There [are] two paths that we can take” on energy policy, the Vote 4 Energy Web site proclaims. “One path leads to more jobs, higher government revenues and greater U.S. energy security -- which can be achieved by increasing oil and natural gas development right here at home. The other path would put jobs, revenues and our energy security at risk.” This message will be broadcast with increasing frequency as Election Day nears. According to the energy industry, we are at a fork in the road and can either chose a path leading to greater energy independence or to ever more perilous energy insecurity. But

there is another way to characterize that “choice”: on one path, the United States will increasingly come to resemble a Third World petro-state, with compliant government leaders, an increasingly money-ridden and corrupt political system, and negligible environmental and health safeguards; on the other, which would also involve far greater investment in the development of renewable alternative energies, it would remain a First World nation with strong health and environmental regulations and robust democratic institutions. How we characterize our energy predicament in the coming decades and what path we ultimately select will in large measure determine the fate of this nation.

Warming/Bio-d/Climate ChangeCentering on climate change trades off with a focus on the neoliberal social forces driving it – this displaces non-warming environmental crises and makes warming inevitable. Crist, professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech, 2006

(Eileen, “Beyond the Climate Crisis: a Critique of Climate Change Discourse,” Telos, Winter, pg. 29- 55, Online)

Yet the deepening realization of the threat of climate change, virtually in the wake of stratospheric ozone

depletion, also suggests that dealing with global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the planet’s predicament. Just as the risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be naïve not to anticipate another (perhaps even entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe

arising after the (hoped-for) resolution of the above two. Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological shifts and innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of production , trade, extraction, land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth, would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of the Earth. Industrial-consumer civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the entire planet.19 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change discourse , with its single-minded quest for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate crisis—among numerous other catastrophes—climate-change literature often focuses on how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes over what technological means can save it from impending tipping points.21 The dominant frame of climate change funnels cognitive and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while muting a host of equally monumental issues . Climate change looms so huge on the environmental and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other facets of the ecological crisis : mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing, continued old-growth deforestation, topsoil losses and desertification, endocrine disruption, incessant development, and so on, are made to appear secondary and more forgiving by comparison with “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system. In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages the continued marginalization of the biodiversity crisis—a crisis that has been soberly described as a holocaust,22 and which despite decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society, the mass media, and humanistic and other academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by no means all) extensively examine the consequences of global warming for

biodiversity, 23 but rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by decades, centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a technological resolution of global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate species and ecosystem losses—indeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate change may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the climate quandary will not put an end to—will barely address— the ongoing destruction of life on Earth .

Empirics show that the elite loop out of effective climate change actions in order to continue their growing efforts Daniel Tanuro, a certified agriculturalist and eco-socialist environmentalist, writes for “La gauche”, (the monthly of the LCR-SAP,

Belgian section of the Fourth International) Sunday 28 March 2010, Mobilization for the climate and anti-capitalist strategy C L I M AT E C H A N G E / 1 6 T H W O R L D C O N G R E S S

This is enough to understand and to make people understand that humanity is facing a gigantic challenge. A challenge of a completely new nature, which will dominate the twenty-first century. A challenge which contributes to determining the

conditions of intervention of revolutionary Marxists and of the workers’ movement in general.¶ Capitalism cannot rise to this double challenge. Neither on the social level, nor on the environmental level. More exactly: it cannot rise to it in a way

that is acceptable for humanity (I will come back later on this). The reason for this incapacity is the same on the two

levels: the purpose of capitalism is not the production of use values for the satisfaction of finite human needs, but the potentially infinite production of value by many and competing capitals, organised around rival states.¶ A capitalism without growth is a contradiction in terms, says Schumpeter. The relative dematerialization

of production is certainly a reality, but it is more than compensated for by the increase in the mass of goods produced. This accumulation dynamic constitutes the fundamental reason for which “green capitalism” is an illusion, in the same way as is “social capitalism”. There are green capitals, without any doubt, there are even more and more, and they generate

considerable surplus value. But they do not replace dirty capitals: they are added to them, and the latter, because they dominate, determine the rhythms, the technological choices and the modalities of introduction of the former.¶ The recent past does not leave any doubt on this subject. Look at Barack Obama: at the

time of the presidential campaign, he promised to make the polluters pay, in order to massively support green energies (150

billion dollars in 10 years) and to help the most underprivileged layers in society to handle the increase in the price of

energy. This policy was supposed to create five million jobs. But along came the subprime crisis and of all these

intentions, there remains nothing. In the USA as in the EU, the polluters will receive rights to pollute for nothing, sell them at a profit and pass on the price to the consumers.¶ Capitalist climate policy reinforces

the capitalists who are destroying the climate. Thus we can see in action the power of the fossil energy lobbies and the sectors which are linked to them, such as cars, shipbuilding, aeronautics, petrochemicals and others. This confirms the Marxist analysis according to which monopolies have the power to slow down the equalization of rates of profit. In the case of fossil

fuels, this power is all the stronger in that it is anchored in the ownership of deposits, mines etc, therefore in ground rent.

The result is laid out before our eyes: in all countries, climate plans do not represent even half of what would be necessary in terms of reduction of greenhouse gases emissions. Moreover, these plans are deepening social inequality and are accompanied by a headlong flight into dangerous technologies: nuclear energy, the massive production of biofuels and the capture and geological sequestration of CO2 (supposed to make coal “clean”)

Focusing on the endpoint of the ecological crisis precludes understanding of its underlying capitalist causes – makes repeated environmental destruction inevitable.Swyngedouw 6 (Erik, Department of Geography @ Manchester, Urban and Landscape Perspectives 9, 2, p.185-205, September)

The inability to take ‘natures’ seriously is dramatically illustrated by the controversy over the degree to which disturbing environmental change is actually taking place and the risks or dangers associated with it. Lomborg’s The Sceptical Environmentalist captures one side of this controversy in all its phantasmagorical perversity (Lomborg, 1998), while climate change doomsday pundits represent the other. Both sides of the debate argue from an imaginary position of the presumed existence of a dynamic balance and equilibrium, the point of ‘good’ nature, but one side claims that the world is veering off the correct path, while the other side (Lomborg and other sceptics)

argues that we are still pretty much on nature’s course. With our gaze firmly fixed on capturing an imaginary ‘idealised’ Nature, the controversy further solidifies our conviction of the possibility of a harmonious, balanced, and fundamentally benign ONE Nature if we would just get our interaction with it right , an argument blindly (and stubbornly) fixed on the question of where Nature’s rightful point of benign existence resides. This futile debate, circling around an assumedly centred, known, and singular Nature, certainly permits -- in fact invites -- imagining ecological catastrophe at

some distant point (global burning (or freezing) through climate change, resource depletion, death by overpopulation).

Indeed, imagining catastrophe and fantasising about the final ecological Armageddon seems considerably easier for most environmentalists than envisaging relatively small changes in the socio-political and cultural-economic organisation of local and global life here and now. Or put differently, the world’s premature ending in a climatic Armageddon seems easier to imagine (and sell to the public) than a transformation of (or end to) the neo-liberal capitalist order that keeps on practicing expanding energy use and widening and deepening its ecological footprint.

Massive change is needed to solve climate change – only an end to capitalism can solveFoster et al (professor of sociology at the University of Oregon; assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University; associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon) 9(Foster, J. B., Clark, B. and York, R. (2009), The Midas Effect: A Critique of Climate Change Economics. Development and Change, 40: 1085–1097)

Some argue today that the speed and intensity of the ecological threat leaves us with no choice but to stick with the existing system and embrace its limited and myopic solutions to environmental problems: such strategies as ‘cap and trade’ carbon markets and market-driven technological silver bullets. The fantastic nature of these strategies reflects the fact that they conform to the Midas Effect of mainstream economics: environmental change must conform to the ‘bottom line’ of capital accumulation. In fact, where adopted, carbon markets have accomplished little to reduce carbon emissions. This has to

do with numerous factors, not least of all provisions for nations to buy out of the actual reductions in various ways. The idea that technology can solve the global environmental problem, as a kind of deus ex machine without changes

in social relations, belongs to the area of fantasy and science fiction.  Thomas Friedman  (2008: 186–7) provides a vision of green industrial revolution in hisHot, Flat, and Crowded  in which he repeatedly tells his readers that if given ‘abundant, clean, reliable, and cheap electrons’, we could move the world and end all ecological problems. Gregg Easterbrook (1995: 687–8), in what he calls environmental ‘realism’, argues that even if we destroy this biosphere we can ‘terraform’ Mars — so humanity's existence is not necessarily impaired by environmental destruction. The very desperation of such establishment arguments, which seek to address the present-day environmental problem without confronting the reality of capitalism, highlights the need for more radical measures in relation to climate change and the ecological crisis as a whole. Especially noteworthy in this respect is Hansen's carbon tax proposal, and global contraction-conversion strategies. In place of carbon markets, which invariably include various ways to buy out of emissions reductions (registering reductions while actually increasing emissions), Hansen (2008a) proposes a carbon tax for the United States to be imposed at well-head and point of entry, aimed at bringing carbon dioxide emissions down to near zero, with 100 per cent of the revenue from the tax being deposited as monthly dividends directly into the bank accounts of the public on a per person basis (with children receiving half shares). Not all carbon taxes of course are radical measures. But Hansen's emergency strategy, with its monthly dividends, is designed to keep carbon in the ground and at the same time to appeal to the general public. It explicitly circumvents both the market and state power, in order to block those who desire to subvert the process. In this, the hope is to establish a mass popular constituency for combating climate change by promoting social redistribution of wealth toward those with smaller carbon footprints (the larger part of the population). Hansen insists that any serious attempt to protect the climate means going against Big Coal. An important step would be to declare a moratorium on new coal-fired power stations, which he describes as ‘death factories’ since the carbon emissions they produce contribute to escalating extinction rates (as well as polluting regional environments and directly impairing human health) (Hansen, 2009). He argues that we need to leave as much coal as possible in the ground and to close existing coal-fired power stations if we are to prevent catastrophic environmental change. From a global standpoint, ecological degradation is influenced by the structure and dynamics of a world system hierarchically divided into numerous nation states, competing with each other both directly and via their corporations. In an attempt to counter carbon imperialism, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (1991) propose that carbon

emissions of nations should be determined on an equal per capita basis, rooted in what is allowable within the shared atmosphere. The global North, with its relatively smaller population in contrast to the South, has used a disproportionate amount of the atmospheric commons, given its immense carbon emissions. Thus Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer (2002) and other climate justice activists propose a process of contraction and convergence. The rich nations of the North would be required to reduce (contract) their emissions of greenhouse gases to appropriate levels as determined by the atmospheric carbon target. Given global inequalities, the nations of the South would be allowed to increase their emissions gradually to a limited extent — but only if a nation had a per capita carbon emission rate below the acceptable level established by the target. This would create a world converging toward ‘equal and low, per capita allotments’ (Athanasiou and Baer, 2002: 84). Today contraction and convergence would necessarily aim at stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide at 350 ppm, in conformity with scientific

indications. Such a proposal would mean that the rich nations would have to reduce their carbon emissions very rapidly by levels approaching 100 per cent, while a massive global effort would be needed to help countries in the global South move toward emissions stabilization as well, while not jeopardizing sustainable human development. Such a process of contraction and convergence would require that the global North pay the ecological debt that it has accrued through using up the bulk of the atmospheric

commons, by carrying the main cost of mitigation globally and aiding nations of the South in adapting to negative climate effects. In reality, the radical proposals discussed above, although ostensibly transition strategies, present the issue of revolutionary change. Their implementation would require a popular revolt against the system itself. A movement (or movements) powerful enough to implement such changes on the necessary scale might well be powerful enough to implement a full-scale social-ecological revolution. In fact, humanity cannot expect to reach 350 ppm and avoid planetary climatic disaster except through a major global social transformation, in line with the greatest social revolutions in human history. This would require not simply a change in productive forces but also in productive relations, necessitating a green cultural revolution. The answer to today's social and environmental crisis, as Lewis Mumford  argued inThe Condition of Man  (1973: 419–23), lies in the creation of the ‘organic person’, or a system of sustainable human development. This means the creation of cultural forms that present the opportunity for balance in the human personality. Rather than promoting the asocial traits of humanity, the emphasis would be on nurturing the social and collective characteristics. Each human being would be ‘in dynamic interaction with every part of his environment’.

Biodiversity is a construct of biotechnological capitalism, organisms are the workhorses of the oceanStefan Helmreich 07, Anthropology Professor at MIT, 2007, “Blue-green Capital, Biotechnological¶ Circulation and an Oceanic Imaginary:¶ A Critique of Biopolitical Economy,” BioSocieties Journal, http://web.mit.edu/anthropology/pdf/articles/helmreich/helmreich_blue-green_capital.pdf.

But the primary biotic substrate imagined for biotech capital accumulation, at least in the formal proceedings of the conference, was ‘biodiversity’, described by Eric Mathur, from the San Diego-based biotech firm Diversa, as ‘the basic building block for biotechnology’. Because the ocean constitutes the majority of Earth’s biosphere, marine biotechnologists imagine marine biodiversity to be immense—and largely undiscovered. Marine biologist William Fenical, from Scripps Oceanographic Institute, articulated this view in an interview in Discover. A full-page photo showing Fenical holding a sea fan against his aloha shirt has him declaring, ‘The ocean’s right there, It’s diverse as hell, and it’s waiting for us’ (Mestel,1999: 75).This enthusiasm for diversity is a key sentiment animating biotech capitalism. Since its coinage, biodiversity has become infectiously polyvalent. Cori Hayden lists meanings it has accreted: ‘an ecological workhorse, essential raw material for evolution, a sustainable economic resource, the source of aesthetic and ecological value, of option and existence value, a global heritage, genetic capital, the key to the survival of life itself’ (2003: 52).For marine biotechnologists in America, marine biodiversity represents a frontier form of biodiversity: healing waters writ large, full of new genes awaiting amplification, delivering what marine microbiologist Rita Colwell (director of NSF 1998–2004) early on called‘ entirely new ‘‘harvests’’ from the sea’ (1984: 3). Insofar as humans make use of this new nature by capitalizing it, the prevailing sentiment goes, they must do so ‘sustainably’ by pro-tecting ‘diversity’, understood as a positive value. No wonder a biotech company named itself Diversa. Biological oceanographer Paul Falkowski from Rutgers University, in his conference lecture, was impatient with such views. Marine biotechnology, he said, ‘is fundamentally idea-limited. We don’t think in terms of an array of products and this is because most of us are in academia.’ More, marine biologists ‘always want to work with their favorite organisms, because they’ve learned to sentimentalize nature, especially the sea’. We have to look closely, he said, at microbes, ‘the workhorses of the ocean’. Academia and industry must

work together; practitioners must recognize that—Falkowski underscored the point by shouting it—‘Markets are not sentimental!

Creating a consensus over warming using the idea that there is a threat reinforces the squo and promotes capitalismPeter Berglez and Ulrika Olausson, Professors of Social Sciences at Orebro University, October 15, 2013, “The Post-political Condition of Climate Change: An Ideology Approach,” Taylor and Francis //RXThe belief in climate science and its general conclusion that climate change is real and human-caused is a necessary component of establishing the consensual understanding of a “climate threat.” It is empirically demonstrated below how this consent also builds on ideological naturalizations. When the scientific theories, arguments, and conclusions become naturalized, they turn into something beyond rational questioning that does not seem to need further evidence. This belief in the anthropogenic factor appears in the focus groups in scientifically informed and enlightened discussions; but also figures in the uncritical and less reflective conversations which mostly refer to “what the experts say.” The most obvious kind of naturalization of climate change is to defend and confirm its anthropogenic character without any clear references to science. . It’s a matter of our having destroyed our planet. And that it’s gotten to where it can’t be stopped. We can’t get rid of all the cars and... factories... . factories and all that... I: So are we the ones who have caused this climate change? . Definitely. (Two women, group B) POST-POLITICAL CONDITION OF CLIMATE CHANGE 61 I: What do you think are the causes of climate change? . Well, it’s all the emissions and it’s... well, it’s everything that’s spewed out into the air. Because it’s crazy, really, if you start thinking about it... how much one single truck pumps out in one day. And so, if you count how many trucks we have in this city, and how many cities and so on, it’s not a little... . So it’s clear that it’s us, human beings, who’ve ruined everything. Completely clear... (Woman, group B) Science is always characterized by an element of uncertainty—this is built into its very rationale. However, in the naturalization of climate change, elements of scientific uncertainty have been washed away, and the scientific hypotheses become univocal and consensual truths: it is “completely clear” (Woman, group B); “the changes... are only human-created” (Woman, group H); it has “never ever happened so rapidly” (Woman, group H). A scientific conclusion such as the one about human-induced climate change has reached the ideological level when its sources and origins no longer have to be concretized but operate as an abstract authoritative voice. . It hasn’t been confirmed whether it’s... how should I put it... whether it’s our fault or not. There are probably many large corporations that say that it isn’t caused by our carbon dioxide emissions. But I still think it probably is, because when it comes to the greenhouse effect, there’s evidence that it functions in such a way as to cause warming. That makes it hard to deny, I think. (Woman, group D) . So I believe in natural causes. . It’s a bit... for the moment it could be people, you know? But in the long run it’s probably... . ...nature. . But there are quite a lot of emissions from mainly airplanes, from what I’ve heard. This must have some effect, right? (Three men, group F) In the excerpts above, some objections are raised to the dominant idea about the causes of climate change, but the reasoning still leads to articulations such as “there’s evidence” and “this must have some effect.” Arguments about, and evidence of, the anthropogenic character of climate change have abandoned their scientific origins and become deeply embedded—naturalized—in everyday cognition and discourse; they have become common sense. Another empirical sign of climate consensus arising through ideological processes is the development of private beliefs based on extra-scientific or semi-scientific reasoning, mixed with the very feeling or idea that climate

change is human-made. It seems as if one decides and/or chooses to believe in it in the same sense that one might believe in, for instance, the nation, monarchy, or God. . I believe that it’s we humans. . It’s humans, I believe. . It’s us. And all our needs. . Our welfare. . Mm. I think so too, actually. (Four women, group G) . Well, I believe that because we human beings are the ones who have been having an effect, that climate change is due to the consequences of our behavior... It doesn’t feel like it’s something natural. (Woman, group I) These kinds of utterances and standpoints might perhaps be seen as important prerequisites for radical climate action. However, in our empirical material, which does not include radical environmentalists, there is no visible correlation between belief in climate science and a more radical political view of how the “climate threat” ought to be mitigated. We would argue that the proliferation of naturalizations of climate science among the majority of the population also leads to a neutralization of climate change as a radical political issue. Along with the mainstreaming of climate science in society in terms of consensual “climate belief,” the climate issue moves beyond the purview of radical ecology. When climate science becomes the headache and concern of society as a whole, it also expands into a more diverse field where different interests are supposed to interact and get along, compromises are to be established, and, as a consequence, the radical conflictual dimension of climate change is neutralized. Thus, the more climate science is embraced by all of society, by rightists and leftists, by the young and the elderly, the more diluted its political dimension becomes. Here, it is important to pay attention to the emphasis on the particular causes of climate change, such as “trucks,” “cars,” “factories,” “airplanes,” noted above, and how this emphasis simultaneously represses the singular Cause, i.e., the totality of capitalism. Thus, what tends to precede the political neutralization process is political fragmentation and particularization. Climate discourse is permeated by a post-political rationale that allows us to connect our climate scientific belief to a pluralistic smorgasbord of concerns—the specific CO2 emissions emanating from cars and trucks, food, tourism, construction, agriculture, travel, etc.—and thereby also to postpone our engagement in the universal cause (the prevailing totality), which is a much more disconcerting and demanding kind of political commitment.

Climate change apocalyptic rhetoric results in serial policy failure and masks capitalism, which is the root cause of environmental depletionAlso an externalization daCap linkNuclear power link

Erik Swyngedouw, University of Manchester professor of Environment and Development, 2010, “Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change,” Sagepub //RXEnvironmental politics and debates over ‘sustainable’ futures in the face of pending environmental catastrophe signal a range of populist maneuvers that infuse the post-political post-democratic condition. In this part, we shall chart the characteristics of populism (see, among others, Canovan, 1999; 2005; Laclau, 2005; Mudde, 2004; Zizek, 2006a) as they are expressed in mainstream climate concerns. In other words, to the extent that consensual climate change imaginaries, arguments and policies reflect processes of de- politicization, the former are sustained by a series of decidedly populist gestures. Here, I shall summarize the particular ways in which climate change expresses some of the classic tenets of populism. First, the climate change conundrum is not only portrayed as global, but is constituted as a universal humanitarian threat. We are all potential victims. ‘THE’ Environment and ‘THE’ People,

Humanity as a whole in a material and philosophical manner, are invoked and called into being. Humanity (as well as large parts of the non-human world) is under threat from climatic catastrophes. However, the ‘people’ here are not constituted as heterogeneous political subjects, but as universal victims, suffering from processes beyond their control. As such, populism cuts across the idiosyn- crasies of different, heterogeneously constituted, differentially acting, and often antagonistic human and non-human ‘natures’; it silences ideological and other constitutive social differences and disavows conflicts of interests by distilling a common threat or challenge to both Nature and Humanity. As Zizek puts it: . . . populism occurs when a series of particular ‘democratic’ demands [in this case, a good environment, a retro-fitted climate, a series of socio-environmen- tally mitigating actions] is enchained in a series of equivalences, and this enchainment produces ‘people’ as the universal political subject . . . and all different particular struggles and antagonisms appear as part of a global antagonistic struggle between ‘us’ (people) and ‘them’ [in this case ‘it’, i.e. CO2]. (Zizek, 2006a: 553) Second, this universalizing claim of the pending catastrophe is socially homogenizing. Although geographical and social differences in terms of effects are clearly recognized and detailed, these differences are generally mobilized to further reinforce the global threat that faces the whole of humankind (see Hulme, 2008). It is this sort of argumentation that led the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to infer that the poor will be hit first and hardest by climate change (IPCC, 2009), which is of course a correct assertion – the poor are by definition ill- equipped to deal with any sort of change beyond their control – but the report continues that, therefore, in the name of the poor, climate change has to be tackled urgently. A third characteristic of environmental apocalyptic thought is that it reinforces the nature–society dichotomy and the causal power of nature to derail civilizations. It is this process that Neil Smith refers to as ‘nature- washing’: Nature-washing is a process by which social transformations of nature are well enough acknowledged, but in which that socially changed nature becomes a new super determinant of our social fate. It might well be society’s fault for changing nature, but it is the consequent power of that nature that brings on the apocalypse. The causal power of nature is not compromised but would seem to be augmented by social injections into that nature. (2008: 245) While the part-anthropogenic process of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is readily acknowledged, the related ecological problems are externalized as are the solutions. CO2 becomes the fethishized stand-in for the totality of climate change calamities and, therefore, it suffices to reverse atmospheric CO2 build-up to a negotiated idealized point in history, to return to climatic status quo ex-ante. An extraordinary techno- managerial apparatus is under way, ranging from new eco-technologies of a variety of kinds to unruly complex managerial and institutional configura- tions, with a view to producing a socio-ecological fix to make sure nothing really changes. Stabilizing the climate seems to be a condition for capital- ist life as we know it to continue. Moreover, the mobilized mechanisms to arrive at this allegedly more benign (past) condition are actually those that produced the problem in the first place (commodification of nature – in this case CO2), thereby radically disavowing the social relations and processes through which this hybrid socio-natural quasi-object (Latour, 1993; Swyngedouw, 2006) came into its problematic being. Populist discourse ‘displaces social antagonism and constructs the enemy. In populism, the enemy is externalized or reified into a positive ontological entity [excessive CO2] (even if this entity is spectral) whose annihilation would restore balance and justice’ (Zizek, 2006a: 555). The enemy is always externalized and objectified. Populism’s fundamental fantasy, for Zizek, is that of ‘intrud- ers’ who have corrupted the system. CO2 stands here as the classic example of a fetishized and externalized foe that requires dealing with if sustainable climate futures are to be attained. Problems therefore are not the result of the ‘system’, of

unevenly distributed power relations, of the networks of control and influence, of rampant injustices, or of a fatal flaw inscribed in the system, but are blamed on an outsider (Zizek, 2006a: 555). That is why the solution can be found in dealing with the ‘pathological’ phenomenon, the resolution for which resides in the system itself. It is not the system that is the problem, but its pathological syndrome (for which the cure is internal), that is posited as ‘excess’. While CO2 is externalized as the socio-climatic enemy, a potential cure in the guise of the Kyoto principles is generated from within the market functioning of the system itself. The ‘enemy’ is, therefore, always vague, ambiguous, socially empty or vacuous (like ‘CO2’); the ‘enemy’ is a mere thing, not socially embodied, named and counted. While a proper analysis and politics would endorse the view that CO2- as-crisis stands as the pathological symptom of the normal, one that expresses the excesses inscribed in the very normal functioning of the system (i.e. capitalism), the policy architecture around climate change insists that this ‘excessive’ state is not inscribed in the functioning of the system itself, but is an aberration that can be ‘cured’ by mobilizing the very inner dynamics and logic of the system (privatization of CO2, commodifica- tion and market exchange via carbon and carbon-offset trading). Fourth, populism is based on a politics of ‘the people know best’ (although the latter category remains often empty, unnamed), supported by a scientific technocracy assumed to be neutral, and advocates a direct relationship between people and political participation. It is assumed that this will lead to a good, if not optimal, solution, a view strangely at odds with the presumed radical openness, uncertainty and undecidability of the excessive risks associated with Beck’s or Giddens’ second modernity. The architecture of populist governing takes the form of stakeholder partici- pation or forms of participatory governance that operates beyond the state and permits a form of self-management, self-organization and controlled self-disciplining (see Dean, 1999; Lemke, 1999), under the aegis of a non-disputed liberal-capitalist order. Fifth, populist tactics do not identify a privileged subject of change (like the proletariat for Marxists, women for feminists or the ‘creative class’ for competitive capitalism), but instead invoke a common condition or predicament, the need for common humanity-wide action, mutual collabo- ration and cooperation. There are no internal social tensions or internal generative conflicts; the ‘people’, in this case global humanity, are called into being as political subject, thereby disavowing the radical heterogene- ity and antagonisms that cut through ‘the people’. It is exactly this consti- tutive split of the people, the recognition of radically differentiated if not opposed social, political or ecological desires, that calls the proper democratic political into being. Sixth, populist demands are always addressed to the elites. Populism as a project addresses demands to the ruling elites (getting rid of immi- grants, saving the climate . . .); it is not about replacing the elites, but calling on the elites to undertake action. The ecological problem is no exception. It does not invite a transformation of the existing socio-ecological order but calls on the elites to undertake action such that nothing really has to change, so that life can basically go on as before. In this sense, environmental populism is inherently reactionary, a key ideological support structure for securing the socio-political status quo. It is inherently non-political and non-partisan. A Gramscian ‘passive revolution’ has taken place over the past few years, whereby the elites have not only acknowledged the climate conundrum and, thereby, answered the call of the ‘people’ to take the climate seriously, but are moving rapidly to convince the world that, indeed, capi- talism can not only solve the climate riddle but also that capitalism can make a new climate by unmaking the one it has co-produced over the past few hundred years through a series of extraordinary techno-natural and eco- managerial fixes. Not only do the elites take these particular demands of the people seriously, it also mobilizes them in ways that serve their purposes. Seventh, no proper names are assigned to a post-political populist politics (Badiou, 2005). Post-political populism is associated with a politics of

not naming, in the sense of giving a definite or proper name to its domain or field of action. Only ‘empty’ signifiers like ‘climate change policy’, ‘bio- diversity policy’ or a vacuous ‘sustainable policy’ replace the proper names of politics. These proper names, according to Ranciere (1998; see also Badiou, 2005), are what constitute a genuine democracy, that is, a space where the unnamed, the uncounted and, consequently, unsymbolized become named and counted. Consider, for example, how class struggle in the 19th and 20th century was exactly about naming the proletariat, its counting, symbolization, narration and consequent entry into the techno- machinery of the state. In the 20th century, feminist politics became named through the narration, activism and symbolization of ‘woman’ as a political category. And, for capitalism, the ‘creative class’ is the revolutionary subject that sustains its creatively destructive transformations. Climate change has no positively embodied name or signifier; it does not call a political subject into being that stands in for the universality of egalitarian democratic demands. In other words, the future of a globally warmer world has no proper name. In contrast to other signifiers that signal a positively embodied content with respect to the future (like socialism, communism, liberalism), an ecologically and climatologically different future world is only captured in its negativity; a pure negativity without promises of redemption, without a positive injunction that ‘transcends’/sublimates negativity and without proper subject. The realization of this apocalyptic promise is forever post- poned, the never-land of tomorrow’s unfulfilled and unfulfillable promises. Yet the gaze on tomorrow permits recasting social, political and other pressing issues today as future conditions that can be retroactively re- scripted as a techno-managerial issue. The final characteristic of populism takes this absence of a positively embodied signifier further. As particular demands are expressed (get rid of immigrants, reduce CO2) that remain particular, populism forecloses univer- salization as a positive socio-environmental injunction or project. In other words, the environmental problem does not posit a positive and named socio-environmental situation, an embodied vision, a desire that awaits realization, a fiction to be realized. In that sense, populism does not solve problems, it moves them elsewhere. Consider, for example, the current argument over how the nuclear option is again portrayed as a possible and realistic option to secure a sustainable energy future and as an alternative to deal both with CO2 emissions and peak-oil. The redemption of our CO2 quagmire is found in replacing the socio-ecologically excessive presence of CO2 with another socio-natural object, U235/238, and the inevitable production of all manner of socio-natural transuranic elements. The nuclear ‘fix’ is now increasingly staged (and will undoubtedly be implemented) as one of the possible remedies to save both climate and capital. It hardly arouses expectations for a better and ecologically sound society.

Apocalyptic imaginations depoliticizes climate change and reinforces capitalismErik Swyngedouw, University of Manchester professor of Environment and Development, 2010, “Apocalypse Forever?: Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change,” Sagepub //RXIn this consensual setting, environmental problems are generally staged as universally threatening to the survival of humankind, announcing the premature termination of civilization as we know it and sustained by what Mike Davis (1999) aptly called ‘ecologies of fear’. The discursive matrix through which the contemporary meaning of the environmental condition is woven is one quilted systematically by the continuous invoca- tion of fear and danger, the spectre of ecological annihilation or at least seriously distressed socio-ecological conditions for many people in the near future. ‘Fear’ is indeed the crucial node through which much of the current environmental narrative is woven, and continues to feed the concern with

‘sustainability’. This cultivation of ‘ecologies of fear’, in turn, is sustained in part by a particular set of phantasmagorical imaginaries (Katz, 1995). The apocalyptic imaginary of a world without water, or at least with endemic water shortages, ravaged by hurricanes whose intensity is amplified by climate change; pictures of scorched land as global warming shifts the geo- pluvial regime and the spatial variability of droughts and floods; icebergs that disintegrate around the poles as ice melts into the sea, causing the sea level to rise; alarming reductions in biodiversity as species disappear or are threatened by extinction; post-apocalyptic images of waste lands reminis- cent of the silent ecologies of the region around Chernobyl; the threat of peak-oil that, without proper management and technologically innovative foresight, would return society to a Stone Age existence; the devastation of wildfires, tsunamis, diseases like SARS, avian flu, Ebola or HIV, all these imaginaries of a Nature out of synch, destabilized, threatening and out of control are paralleled by equally disturbing images of a society that contin- ues piling up waste, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, deforesting the earth, etc. This is a process that Neil Smith appropriately refers to as ‘nature-washing’ (2008: 245). In sum, our ecological predicament is sutured by millennial fears, sustained by an apocalyptic rhetoric and representa- tional tactics, and by a series of performative gestures signalling an over- whelming, mind-boggling danger, one that threatens to undermine the very coordinates of our everyday lives and routines, and may shake up the foundations of all we took and take for granted. Table 1 exemplifies some of the imaginaries that are continuously invoked. Of course, apocalyptic imaginaries have been around for a long time as an integral part of Western thought, first of Christianity and later emerging as the underbelly of fast-forwarding technological modernization and its associated doomsday thinkers. However, present-day millennialism preaches an apocalypse without the promise of redemption. Saint John’s biblical apocalypse, for example, found its redemption in God’s infinite love. The proliferation of modern apocalyptic imaginaries also held up the promise of redemption: the horsemen of the apocalypse, whether riding under the name of the proletariat, technology or capitalism, could be tamed with appropriate political and social revolutions. As Martin Jay argued, while traditional apocalyptic versions still held out the hope for redemption, for a ‘second coming’, for the promise of a ‘new dawn’, environmental apocalyptic imaginaries are ‘leaving behind any hope of rebirth or renewal . . . in favour of an unquenchable fascination with being on the verge of an end that never comes’ (1994: 33). The emergence of new The forms of millennialism around the environmental nexus is of a particular kind that promises neither redemption nor realization. As Klaus Scherpe (1987) insists, this is not simply apocalypse now, but apocalypse forever. It is a vision that does not suggest, prefigure or expect the necessity of an event that will alter history. Derrida (referring to the nuclear threat in the 1980s) sums this up most succinctly: . . . here, precisely, is announced – as promise or as threat – an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without vision, without truth, without revelation . . . without message and without destination, without sender and without decidable addressee ... an apocalypse beyond good and evil. (1992: 66) The environmentally apocalyptic future, forever postponed, neither promises redemption nor does it possess a name; it is pure negativity. The attractions of such an apocalyptic imaginary are related to a series of characteristics. In contrast to standard left arguments about the apocalyptic dynamics of unbridled capitalism (Mike Davis is a great exemplar of this; see Davis, 1999, 2002), I would argue that sustaining and nurturing apocalyptic imaginaries is an integral and vital part of the new cultural politics of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) for which the management of fear is a central leitmotif (Badiou, 2007). At the symbolic level, apocalyptic imaginaries are extraordinarily powerful in disavowing or displacing social conflict and antagonisms. As such, apoca- lyptic imaginations are decidedly populist and foreclose a proper political framing. Or, in other words, the presentation of climate change as a global

humanitarian cause produces a thoroughly depoliticized imaginary, one that does not revolve around choosing one trajectory rather than another, one that is not articulated with specific political programs or socio-ecological project or revolutions. It is this sort of mobilization without political issue that led Alain Badiou to state that ‘ecology is the new opium for the masses’, whereby the nurturing of the promise of a more benign retrofitted climate exhausts the horizon of our aspirations and imaginations (Badiou, 2008; Zizek, 2008). We have to make sure that radical techno-managerial and socio-cultural transformations, organized within the horizons of a capitalist order that is beyond dispute, are initiated that retrofit the climate (Swyngedouw, forthcoming). In other words, we have to change radically, but within the contours of the existing state of the situation – ‘the parti- tion of the sensible’ in Ranciere’s (1998) words, so that nothing really has to change.

Incentives/Tax CreditsTax credits disempower community wind in favor of capitalist corporations – turns case in the long termFarrell ’12 [John, directs the Energy Self-Reliant States and Communities program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Phase-Out of the Federal Wind Tax Credit a Good Thing?, http://www.ilsr.org/phase-out-federal-wind-tax-credit-good-thing/]

4. Could an Expiring/Phasing Out Credit Be a Good Thing? In the short term, it will be bad for the industry, as illustrated

by history in the adjacent chart from AWEA. But in the long run wind power will get cheaper and natural gas – a finite resource – will not. And one of the big logjams for renewable energy projects right now is an inability to actually use the federal tax

incentive. That’s because a lot of developers don’t carry the tax liability necessary to offset their power generation, and the list of big corporations that do is relatively short, giving them a lot of market power. In fact, in exchange for partnerships with wind projects to access the federal tax credits, these companies routinely get rates of return from

10% up to 49%. (I discuss this issue in more detail here). The short supply of tax equity partners lets them charge high prices, increasing the cost to wind power developers of using the tax credits and perversely increasing the cost of electricity from wind power. The tax credit has also created an environment where community-based wind power, with its multiplier to jobs and economic benefits (and political benefits), has an uphill struggle to compete. (There’s a great counter-example of a wind farm in South Dakota with 600 local owners made possible by the cash grant in lieu of the tax credit. I’ve also discussed how low-cost financing could allow solar developers to opt out of the federal tax credit and still lower the cost

of solar energy by 25%). If there’s no tax credit, however, there’s no high-priced tax equity market or artificial barrier to local ownership. And both of these changes may benefit the industry in the long run.

Financial incentives are an example of fad capitalism- ensures collapse of the systemHildyard 2012 [Nicholas Hildyard, Larry Lohmann and Sarah Sexton. ¶ February 2012 “Energy Security For What? For Whom?” Published by The Corner House in collaboration with Hnuti DUHA–¶ Friends of the Earth Czech Republic, CEE Bankwatch¶ Network, Les Amis de la Terre-Friends of the Earth France,¶ Campagna per la riforma della Banca Mondiale and urgewald e.V. http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/sites/thecornerhouse.org.uk/files/Energy%20Security%20For%20Whom%20For%20What.pdf]

The investment that has taken place in energy systems is itself disciplined by the logic of financialisation , particularly the demands of investors for “above market” profits . As the financing of power generation ¶ plants, transmission systems, gas liquefaction systems and other infrastructure has shifted from the public to the private sector, companies ¶ have funded such projects (and their own expansion) by raising debt ¶ and equity – borrowing money and issuing shares. But the

mechanisms¶ through which they do so are rapidly changing.¶ Private equity funds are an important new source of finance in North¶ and South.¶ 119¶ Such funds are pooled investment vehicles that buy majority shares in companies, take over their management, increase their ¶ profitability (often by stripping their

assets) and then sell their shares at ¶ a profit after a few years. The contributors to the fund, the “Limited ¶ Partners”, are generally High Net Worth Individuals , pension funds,¶ insurance companies,

endowment funds and sovereign wealth funds. ¶ These sources of money do not invest so as to provide public goods such as energy supply, but to make well above-market returns ,¶ 120¶ generally 30 per cent a year¶ 121¶ (although infrastructure investment is more¶ in the region of 10-20 per cent).¶ 122¶ To avert catastrophic climate change,¶

however, sustained, predictable and ensured streams of finance are¶ needed to pay for the transition away from fossil fuels. Until

recently, ¶ clean tech funds that invest in renewable energies such as wind and ¶ solar were enjoying a boom , accounting for some 10 per cent of private ¶ equity energy investment. But the surge began to falter in 2009,¶ 123¶ with¶ investment declining by 30 per cent in the third quarter of 2010.¶ 124¶ In a ¶ predictable pattern of “fad” finance , ¶ 125 ¶ many predict that the clean ¶ tech bubble will soon burst as the financing moves to another sector in ¶ the hope that it will be more profitable. ¶ The logic of financialisation acts still further against secure , long-term ¶ funding for a transition by necessitating the use of ever riskier financial ¶ instruments to leverage capital, enhance profits and off-load risk onto ¶ others. ¶ 126 ¶ When things go wrong, state funded programmes that could ¶ assist a transition have repeatedly been cut to pay for taxpayer bailouts. ¶ The “nationalisations” of UK retail banks in 2008 and the austerity¶ measures being imposed across the eurozone are only the latest examples. In Spain, a government-subsidised feed-in tariff scheme for solar¶ photovoltaic panels was slashed as part of the cuts imposed by the¶ financial crisis.¶ 12

Relying on incentives structures makes environmental destruction and market competition inevitableAdaman and Madra (Bogazici University, Department of Economics) 12

(Fikret & Yahya M., Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology, http://www.econ.boun.edu.tr/public_html/RePEc/pdf/201204.pdf)

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, governments and international finance organizations began to call for and take regulatory measures in order to prevent similar breakdowns in the future, causing some commentators to quickly pronounce neoliberalism dead. Consider, for instance, a most recent example: while writing this chapter, a special report in the January 21-27, 2012, issue of The Economist—embellished with a red and black portrait of Lenin on the cover, triumphantly holding a cigar with a dollar sign on it—lamented the “emerging world’s new model” would be “the rise of state capitalism.” Yet, this line of argument is based on a rather simplified and narrow reading of neoliberalism, as a purer laissezfaire regime where spontaneous markets reign free with minimal role for governments. A closer look at the brief history of neoliberalism challenges this reading of neoliberalism as a project/process of marketization on both the practical and the ideational levels. Practically speaking, governments have always played an active role in designing, instituting and facilitating the operation of markets, not only before but also under neoliberalism. In other words, the historical track record of three decades of neoliberal hegemony at a global scale demonstrates that the much invoked dichotomy between state and private capitalism fails to do justice to the intensity and the depth of dirigiste and technocratic bureaucratic state involvement in implementing neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005; Peck, 2010). In fact, if we were to follow the directions proposed back in the end of the 1970s by Michel Foucault (2008) in his prescient genealogy of neoliberal reason, at the ideational level, neoliberal “turn” in economic thinking, quite distinct from the earlier, late 18 th -century classical liberalism which aimed at protecting the markets from the arbitrary interventions of the state, represents a particular epistemic shift in the way the governments relate to and regulate the entire ensemble of social relations through a governmental matrix which is organized around the assumption that all social agents (be they individuals, groups, enterprises, or states) are calculatively rational and calculably responsive towards (pecuniary or otherwise) incentives. In other words, if neoliberalism is not (only) a drive towards marketization, but rather more broadly a drive towards the economization of the ensemble of social relations (viz. the economic, the cultural, the political, and the ecological) through governmental

dispositifs, then it would be misleading to deduce the death of neoliberalism from the increasing visibility of state involvement in the economy and society at large without asking how that involvement is epistemically organized and whether or not it successfully transforms social ontology in the direction of economization (Madra and Adaman, 2010). If one were to subscribe to this reading of neoliberalism as a drive towards economization of the economic, political, social, and ecological spheres, one could plausibly argue in our current conjuncture that, despite the fact that the economic recession is still going strong in North America and Europe, leading to political crises in Southern Europe (Greece, Spain, and Italy) and potentially to the dissolution of the Euro-zone, neoliberalism remains hegemonic. In response to this persistent crisis, governments are electing not to return to a Keynesian-style demand-management policy through deficit- or, better yet, progressive taxation-based spending policy (as advocated by the likes of Joseph Stiglitz [2010]), and continue to advocate and actually implement austerity programs despite widespread popular unrest and opposition. But more importantly, while only a small fraction within the neoliberal field still defend the market panacea paradigm unequivocally, there is very little questioning of the economizing and calculative ideologies of the neoliberal social ontological project. In this chapter, our aim is to shed some light on how the neoliberal project reproduces itself theoretically and practically in the context of the government of the ecology. Given the everdeepening dual crises of environmental pollution and the over-use of natural resources (including the exhaustion of non-renewable energy and material sources), unveiling the relationship between neoliberalism and ecological degradation—at both theoretical and policy levels—is crucial. Currently, the privatization of natural resources (viz. natural parks, forests) is being promoted; financial markets are finding their way into environmental policy and conservation (viz. payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity derivatives, species banking and carbon trade); and incentive schemes are being designed to provide the right signal to agents in their relationship with ecology (viz. the price-per-bag policy for household waste). Critically engaging with these numerous policies and their ideological sources will be possible only if one subscribes to the understanding of neoliberalism as a project of economization as outlined above. This constitutes the essence of this chapter. More specifically, the chapter argues that the global spread of neoliberalism as a set of ideas, interpretative grids, governmental interfaces, and institutional dispositifs in relation to ecology is premised on the conceptualization of human behavior from a certain perspective, according to which the capacity of agents in understanding and responding to economic incentives is taken as a postulate, and every human decision is assumed reducible to a mere cost-benefit analysis. The chapter reads the widespread and resilient hold of the neoliberal epistemic grid within theory and policy-making by situating it, or “embedding” it, within the historical context of intellectual continuities between neoliberal policies towards the use of ecology and the general postwar intellectual legacy of neoliberalism within the mainstream of the discipline of economics. For this purpose, it traces the historical genealogy of neoliberal reasoning back to the establishment of the Mont-Pelerin Society in order to defend the idea of free market against the post-Great Depression hegemony of the Keynesian welfare state capitalism (the Beveridge Plan in the UK, New Deal in the USA, developmentalism in the Third World), by discussing the links, affinities, and differences among not only the usually-recognized Austrian, Chicago, and Virginia Schools, but also, and perhaps more controversially, the left-leaning and egalitarian post-Walrasian, or better-known as “mechanism-design,” approach. Indeed, the latter set of approaches, because they highlight the limits and failures of markets (arising mainly due to informational asymmetries) and advocate for the regulation of markets and the design and institution of “incentive-compatible” mechanisms that would substitute for markets, tend to be read as alternatives to the neoliberal creed. Nevertheless, what appears as an

alternative from the neoliberalism-qua-marketization perspective, can be considered only as a variant from the perspective of our understanding of neoliberalism as a project/process of economization. The common thread that has held these diverse groups of intellectual networks together, the chapter argues, is the ultimate belief that relying on economic incentives would indeed produce a prosperous and harmonious society. In sum, this chapter invites the reader to understand neoliberalism as a governmental epistemic grid that aims to performatively bring to existence a particular calculative and calculable organization of the entire social field, including the ecology—as a governmental logic, while undoubtedly including marketization and privatization among its policy options, exhaustively entailing the economization of the political, the cultural and the natural, and performatively promoting calculative (and therefore calculable) behavior across all fields.

Incentive structures force individuals into a neoliberal subjectivityRead (University of Southern Maine) 9(Jason, The University of Southern Maine, A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity, Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009)

In order to frame Foucault’s analysis it is useful to begin with how he sees the distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. For Foucault, this difference has to do

with the different ways in which they each focus on economic activity. Classical liberalism focused on exchange, on what

Adam Smith called mankind’s tendency to “barter, truck, and exchange.” It naturalized the market as a system with its own rationality, its own interest, and its own specific efficiency, arguing ultimately for its superior efficiency as a distributor of goods and services. The market became a space of autonomy that had to be carved out of the state through the unconditional right of private property. What Foucault stresses in his understanding, is the way in which the market becomes more than just a specific institution or practice to the point where it has become the basis for a reinterpretation and thus a critique of state power. Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. It establishes a homology: just as relations in the

marketplace can be understood as an exchange of certain freedoms for a set of rights and liberties.4 Neoliberalism, according to Foucault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and political relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition.5 What the two forms of liberalism, the

“classical” and “neo” share, according to Foucault, is a general idea of “homo economicus,” that is, the way in which they place a particular “anthropology” of man as an economic subject at the basis of politics. What changes is the

emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition. The shift from exchange to competition has profound effects: while exchange was considered to be natural, competition is understood by the neo-liberals of the

twentieth century to be an artificial relation that must be protected against the tendency for markets to form monopolies and interventions by the state. Competition necessitates a constant intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the market.6 What is more important for us is the way in which this shift in “anthropology” from “homo economicus” as an exchanging creature to a competitive creature, or rather as a creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered, entails a general shift in the way in which human beings make themselves and are made subjects. First,

neoliberalism entails a massive expansion of the field and scope of economics. Foucault cites Gary

Becker on this point: “Economics is the science which studies human behavior as relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternate uses.” 7 Everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from marriage, to crime, to

expenditures on children, can be understood “economically” according to a particular calculation of cost for benefit. Secondly, this entails a massive redefinition of “labor” and the “worker.” The worker has become “human capital”. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment, an investment in one’s skills or abilities. Any activity that increases the

capacity to earn income, to achieve satisfaction, even migration, the crossing of borders from one country to another, is an investment in human capital. Of course a large portion of “human capital,” one’s body, brains, and genetic material, not to mention race or class, is simply given and cannot be improved. Foucault argues that this natural limit is something that exists to be overcome through technologies; from plastic surgery to possible genetic engineering that

make it possible to transform one’s initial investment. As Foucault writes summarizing this point of view: “Homo economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself . ”8 Foucault’s object in his analysis is not to bemoan this as a victory for capitalist ideology, the point at which the “ruling ideas” have truly become the ideas of the “ruling class,” so much so that everyone from a minimum wage employee to a C.E.O. considers themselves to be entrepreneurs. Nor is his task to critique the fundamental increase of the scope of economic rationality in neo-liberal economics: the assertion that economics is coextensive with all of society, all of rationality,

and that it is economics “all the way down.” Rather, Foucault takes the neo-liberal ideal to be a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects: homo economicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different

motivations and governed by different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal subject of the state. Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of “governmentality,” a manner, or a mentality, in which people are governed and govern themselves. The operative terms of this governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment and competition. Whereas rights exist to be exchanged, and are some sense constituted

through the original exchange of the social contract, interest is irreducible and inalienable, it cannot be exchanged. The state channels flows of interest and desire by making desirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact that subjects calculate their interests. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism would seem paradoxically to govern without governing; that is, in order to function its subjects must have a great deal of freedom to act—to choose between competing strategies. The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of government

consumes freedom. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of the imperative: “be free,” with the immediate contradiction that this imperative may contain...[T]he liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etcetera.9 These freedoms, the freedoms of the market, are not the outside of politics, of governmentality, as its limit, but

rather are an integral element of its strategy. As a mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and aspirations rather than through rights and obligations; it does not directly mark the body, as sovereign power, or even curtail actions, as disciplinary power; rather, it acts on the conditions of actions. Thus, neoliberal governmentality follows a general trajectory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental paradox; as power becomes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the field of actions, and possible actions. 10 Foucault limits his discussion of neoliberalism to its major theoretical texts and paradigms, following its initial formulation in post-war Germany through to its most comprehensive version in the Chicago School. Whereas Foucault’s early analyses are often remembered for their analysis of practical documents, the description of the panopticon or the practice of the confessional, the lectures on “neoliberalism” predominantly follow the major theoretical discussions. This is in some sense a limitation of the lecture course format, or at least a reflection that this material was never developed into a full study. Any analysis that is faithful to the spirit and not just the letter of Foucault’s text would focus on its existence as a practice and not just a theory diffused throughout the economy, state, and society. As Thomas Lemke argues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality

that it suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while fostering those same relations.11 The contemporary trend away from long term labor contracts, towards temporary and part-time labor, is not only an effective economic strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the expensive commitments of health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification as well. It encourages workers to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who have something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as “companies of one.” They become individuals for whom every action, from taking courses on a new computer software application to having their teeth whitened,

can be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher write: “Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role in this to the extent that it turns the workers’ desire for independence...into a ‘business spirit’ that meets capital’s

growing need for satellites.”12 Neoliberalism is not simply an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term, or a belief that one

could elect to have or not have, but is itself produced by strategies, tactics, and policies that create subjects of interest, locked in competition. Because Foucault brackets what could be considered the “ideological” dimension of neoliberalism, its connection with the global hegemony of not only capitalism, but specifically a new regime of capitalist accumulation, his lectures have little to say about its historical conditions. Foucault links the original articulation of neoliberalism to a particular reaction to Nazi Germany. As Foucault argues, the original neo-liberals, the “Ordo-liberals,” considered Nazi Germany not to be an effect of capitalism. But the most extreme version of what is opposed to capitalism and the market—planning. While Foucault’s analysis captures the particular “fear of the state” that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention against competition, is tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its dominance as a particular “technology of the self,” a particular mode of subjection. At the same time, Foucault offers the possibility of a different understanding of the history of neoliberalism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economicus, or homo entrepreneur, emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill the same void, the same gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very

different results.13 Marx and neo-liberals agree that although classical economic theory examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the “hidden abode of production” examining how capital is produced. Of course the agreement ends there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is fundamentally

different: for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation while for the neo-liberals, as we have seen, labor is no sooner introduced as a problem than the difference between labor and capital is effaced through the theory of “human capital.”14 Neoliberalism scrambles and exchanges the terms of opposition between “worker” and “capitalist.” To quote Etienne Balibar, “The capitalist is defined as worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.”15 Labor is no longer limited to the specific sites of the factory or the workplace, but is any activity that works towards desired ends. The terms “labor” and “human capital” intersect, overcoming in terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its

history. From this intersection the discourse of the economy becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action--crime, marriage, higher education and so on--can be charted according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an investment. Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through a generalization of the idea of the “entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond the realm of finance

capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of exploitation. Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of

“capitalism without capitalism,” a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing distribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the antagonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending capitalism,

at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society. The opposition between capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of production, a new organization of the production and distribution of wealth, but by the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. Thus,

neoliberalism entails a very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued, because everything rests on an economic base (at least in the last instance) that the effects of the economy are extended across of all of society, rather it is an economic perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society. As Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure of the economy that is extended across society but the subject of economic thinking, its implicit anthropology.16

Relying on market mechanisms to facilitate the energy transition make warming, international competition, structural violence and war inevitableAbramsky (visiting fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Science, Technology and Society; fmr. coordinator of the Danish-based World Wind Energy Institute) 10(Koyla, Racing to "Save" the Economy and the Planet: Capitalist or Post capitalist Transition to a Post-petrol World?, in Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution, ed. Koyla Abramsky, pg. 26-7)

The fact that coal and oil are finite resources means that there is a long-term tendency in the direction of their phase-out, regardless of what intentional short-term interventions are carried out or not. Many proponents of renewable energy simply advocate leaving this phase-6ut

process to the market. It is hoped that rising oil and coal prices will make these fuels increasingly less attractive. Efforts are focused on developing a renewable energy sector that is able to compete, rather than directly confronting, suppressing, and ultimately dismantling the coal and oil industries. However, leaving the phase-out of oil and coal to the market has at least three crucial implications. First, such a phase-out is likely to actually prolong the use of fossil fuels. As long as these energy sources are profitable to extract and to use, they will be. Down to the last remaining drops of oil or lumps of coal. Although resources are finite, they are still relatively abundant Even those analysts who give the most pessimistic (though realistic) perspectives on resource availability, such as those included in this book, do not predict a complete exhaustion of resources in the very near future. And, from the perspective of climate change, a prolongation of fossil fuel use is the exact

opposite of what needs to happen, phase-out must be sped up, not prolonged. Linked to this, the second consequence of a market - based phase - out of oil and coal will mean that the remaining oil and coal resources are frittered away for immediate profit rather than to build the infrastructure for a transition process. Given that building a new energy system will require massive amounts of energy inputs in a very concentrated period of time, this is a recipe for disaster. The third important consequence is that leaving the transition process to the market is likely to be increasingly coercive and conductive if competition is left

to determine who controls the last of these resources and for what purposes they are used. This means competition between workers globally, competition between firnis, and competition between states. This translates to massive inequalities, hierarchies, and austerity measures being imposed on labor (both in and outside the energy sectan); massive bankruptcies of smaller firms and concentration and centralization of capital; and last, but not least, military conflicts between states. Accepting a market - based phase out of oil and coal is accepting in advance that the rising price of energy and a transition away from coal and oil is paid by labor and not capital , when in actual fact the question of who pays still remains to be determined. The answer will only come through a process of collective global struggle, which occurs along class lines within the world-economy. It is important to correctly identify these lines of struggle at the outset, otherwise it will be a struggle lost before the fight even

begins. Collectively planning energy use and fossil fuel phase - out is proving to be an enormously difficult social process, but it is likely to be far less socially regressive if based on cooperation, solidarity, and collectively - defined social needs, rather than if it is based around competition and profit.

Incentives structures reenforce biopolitical neoliberalismAdaman and Madra (Bogazici University, Department of Economics) 12(Fikret & Yahya M., Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology, http://www.econ.boun.edu.tr/public_html/RePEc/pdf/201204.pdf)Michel Foucault’s close reading of some of the key texts of neoliberal thought at his 1979 lectures at the College de France (Foucault, 2008; see also Tribe, 2009) moves beyond the popular representations of neoliberalism that reduce it to a set of marketization policies. According to Foucault, neoliberalism is a response to the historical unfolding of a constitutive tension of liberal governmental reason: how might one extend the realm of freedom without inadvertently delimiting it with governmental interventions that are necessary for the extension of the realm of freedom? In contrast to classical liberalism that tried to limit government control over markets, neoliberalism answers this question by aiming

at nothing less than modeling “the overall exercise of political power” on the competitive logic of markets (Foucault, 2008: 131). The emergence of neoliberalism, according to Foucault, heralds the birth of a new art of government, a “biopolitical mode of governmentality,” where the state ceases to relate to its subjects as citizen-subjects with social rights, and begins to conduct its functions under the presumption that subjects will respond (predictably) to economic incentives in all aspects

of their lives. In short, neoliberalism, as a combination of an ideological discourse and practices, entails a push towards a de-politicization of the social through its economization—viz. imposing a logic of cost-benefit analysis to all aspects of life under the assumption that everything is commodifiable (see also Fine and Milonakis, 2009).

This is the MO of neoliberalismAdaman and Madra (Bogazici University, Department of Economics) 12(Fikret & Yahya M., Understanding Neoliberalism as Economization: The Case of the Ecology, http://www.econ.boun.edu.tr/public_html/RePEc/pdf/201204.pdf)

Neoliberal reason is therefore not simply about market expansion and the withdrawal of the welfare state, but more broadly about reconfiguring the state and its functions so that the state governs its subjects through a filter of economic incentives rather than direct coercion. In other words, supposed subjects of the neoliberal state are not citizen-subjects with political and social rights, but rather economic subjects who are supposed to comprehend (hence, calculative) and respond predictably (hence, calculable) to economic incentives (and disincentives). There are mainly two ways in which states under the sway of neoliberal reason aim to manipulate the conduct of their subjects. The first is through markets, or market-like

incentive-compatible institutional mechanisms that economic experts design based on the behaviorist assumption that economic agents respond predictably to economic (but not necessarily pecuniary) incentives, to achieve certain discrete objectives. The second involves a revision of the way the bureaucracy functions. Here, the neoliberal reason functions as an internal critique of the way bureaucratic dispositifs organize themselves: The typical modus operandi of this critique is to submit the bureaucracy to efficiency audits and subsequently advocate the subcontracting of various functions of the state to the private sector either by fullblown privatization or by public-private partnerships.