Shells1NC Shell-CCSThe United States government should provide subsidies for carbon capture and sequestration technologies on a competitive basis.

These grants create momentum for the commercialization of future sequestration technologiesSchrag 2009 (Daniel [Steering Committee Member, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements]; Making Carbon Capture and Storage Work; Acting in Time on Energy Policy; p 39-55; kdf)Recommendation 1: Provide Federal Subsidies for Commercial-Scale CCS The U.S. government should provide federal subsidies for ten to twenty commercial- scale CCS projects. These should include different capture technologies (if appropriate) and different strategies for geological storage, and should be spread across different regions of the United States to have the biggest impact, both on knowledge gained and also on public perception. Although CCS should be profitable at some point given a sufficient price on carbon, government assistance is needed in the short term to demonstrate the technology at commercial scale. The price that would be imposed by any of the cap-and-trade legislation currently under discussion in Congress is still well below the level that would cover the cost of sequestration. This may not be a fatal obstacle as investors will anticipate higher prices in the future. But without an adequate price, it is likely that new plants would be built "capture ready" (that is, designed to capture CO2) but would not actually capture CO2 and store it in geological repositories. Another problem is that the price of CO2 could be volatile under a cap-and-trade regime, and this may discourage investment in large capital projects like CCS that depend on a high carbon price. It should be noted that in several parts of the country, including the Northeast, California, and even parts of the Midwest, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to obtain a permit to build a new coal-fired power plant, not because of a price on carbon but simply because local regulators are unlikely to allow any new power plant with high CO2 emissions. In these markets, a new coal-fired power plant with CCS may actually be profitable today, particularly in the regions dominated by natural gas-generated electricity that have very high prices. But even where CCS is commercially viable today, it is difficult to get investors to assume the technology risks, as well as the risks associated with legal and regulatory issues, including postinjection liability. A simple way around these concerns is to encourage ten to twenty CCS projects at commercial scales through a variety of government policies and programs. This would allow for demonstration of CCS at enough locations that we would learn whether leakage was a significant problem in certain places, determine which capture technologies were most efficient, and identify any unforeseen problems or challenges. To accomplish this, grants could be awarded on a competitive basis that would pay for some of the incremental capital costs of building a new power plant with CCS.A competitive bidding program might be an efficient way to distribute such subsidies as long as cost was only one of the factors considered when making awards. The Department of Energy, in its restructured FutureGen program, is essentially doing just that at a smaller scale, although sufficient funding has not yet been allocated to the program. It is essential that government support for commercial demonstration of CCS would also cover the costs of independent monitoring for these projects, at least during the first several years of operation, because knowledge of how the capture technologies operate and what happens to the CO2 after injection will be important in setting and revising CCS regulations in the future. Within these projects, it would be important to have a range of technologies and storage strategies included. Some of these grants should support retrofit of existing PC plants with postcombustion capture systems, which may require slightly greater funding. Because the intent of these government investments would be to launch true CCS projects and increase our understanding of how such systems would operate at commercial scales, projects that involve storing the CO2 through EOR should be ineligible for funding. The size of the grants would vary between regions because of differences in the local cost of electricity as well as the existence in some states of subsidy programs for low-carbon electricity that would apply to CCS. Grants would likely need to be higher in coal-intensive regions that currently have very low electricity prices. Awards would not necessarily have to cover the entire additional cost of CCS as these projects may have additional factors that make them more economical, such as accelerated permitting and state subsidies for low-carbon energy. Additional support could come in the form of tax credits that would depend on some minimum fraction of CO2 captured and stored (for example, 80 percent), or loan guarantees that would reduce the risk to investors in newer technologies including IGCC. All these forms of support could be tied to a carbon price so that the subsidies would diminish if a cap-and- trade bill were passed and these projects were able to benefit from a national carbon price.

Only the counterplan solves warmingCalderia 2013 (Ken [senior scientist in the department of global ecology @ Carnegie]; The Need for Climate Engineering Research; issues.org/27-1/caldeira/; kdf)Like it or not, a climate emergency is a possibility, and geoengineering could be the only affordable and fast-acting option to avoid a global catastrophe. Climate change triggered by the accumulation of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere has the potential of causing serious and lasting damage to human and natural systems. At todays atmospheric concentrations, the risk of catastrophic damage is slightthough not zero. The risk will probably rise in coming years if atmospheric concentrations continue to increase. Although not everyone agrees with this assessment, it is supported by the bulk of the scientific evidence. For the moment, the United States and other nations are trying to address this risk by controlling emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, with mixed success at best. The time may well come, however, when nations judge the risk of climate change to be sufficiently large and immediate that they must do something to prevent further warming. But since doing something will probably involve intervening in Earths climate system on a grand scale, the potential for doing harm is great. The United States needs to mount a coordinated research program to study various options for mitigating climate change in order to ensure that damaging options are not deployed in haste. The United Kingdom and Germany have initiated research programs on such climate intervention technologies, and many U.S. scientists are already engaged in this topic, funded by a hodgepodge of private funds and the redirection of federal research grants. Some senior managers at federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration would like to initiate research funding, but they cannot act without political cover, given the understandably controversial nature of the technology. Given the rapid pace at which the research debate about governance is moving in the United States and abroad, delay in establishing a federal program will make it progressively harder for the U.S. government to guide these efforts in the public interest. There is, therefore, a need to establish a coordinated program with deliberate speed. Making an objective analysis of the economics of CDR systems is one area where cross-cutting research is needed. Of course, it remains critically important that the United States and other nations continue efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Indeed, much deeper cuts are needed. Reducing emissions will require, first and foremost, the development and deployment of low-carbonemission energy systems. But even with improved technology, reducing emissions might not be enough to sufficiently reduce the risk of climate change. Scientists have identified a range of engineering options, collectively called geoengineering, to address the control of greenhouse gases and reduce the risks of climate change. One class of geoengineering strategies is carbon dioxide removal (CDR), which removes greenhouse gases from the atmosphere after they have already been released. This approach may involve the use of biological agents (such as land plants or aquatic algae) or industrial chemical processes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Some CDR operations may span large geographic areas, whereas other operations may take place at centralized facilities operating in a relatively small area. Another class of strategies is solar radiation management (SRM), which involves a variety of methods for deflecting sunlight away from Earth or otherwise reducing the levels of solar energy in the atmosphere.1NC Shell- Iron FertilizationThe United States federal government should fund pilot projects for geologic and ocean carbon capture and sequestration.

The ocean is the only practical location for sequestration Sheps et al 09. K.M. Sheps*, M.D. Max, J.P. Osegovic, S.R. Tatro, & L.A. Brazel, A case for deep-ocean CO2 sequestration Science Direct 2009. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610209009710 If the need to abate the flood of anthropogenic CO2 into the atmosphere to mediate the greenhouse requires immediate action, then pilot projects for both geologic and ocean sequestration, as well as other opportunities, should be undertaken at once. The political imperative is becoming strong enough so that it may become necessary to skip the years of research and impact assessment that normally would precede such projects. This means that a new paradigm of environmental monitoring and iterative chemical and physical modeling must accompany pilot sequestration projects so that industrial scale data sets can be established quickly that will guide decision- making for large-scale CCS sequestration. Among the sequestration methodologies considered in this paper, the only immediately available, technologically feasible, temporary solution having an inherently low cost is oceanic sequestration.

The counterplan is the silver bullet needed to solve climate changeJennie Dean 2009 (John Dean is an MEM candidate at Duke University) Iron Fertilization: A Scientific Review with International Policy Recommendations; http://environs.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/32/2/dean.pdf)Dr. John Martin catapulted the concept of using the biological pump to address climate change to the forefront of climate discussions by suggesting that a lack of iron was limiting phytoplankton growth in the ocean, and thus the addition of iron to the ocean could increase carbon drawdown from the atmosphere. To this end he famously claimed, "Give me half a tanker of iron and I'll give you the next Ice Age."20 What Martin referred to is the unmaximized use of the ocean sink. Certain areas of the ocean, namely the subarctic Pacific, the equatorial Pacific, and the Antarctic, 2' are high in nutrients but low in chlorophyll concentration 22 ("HNLC" regions). This elemental composition is anomalous because the lack of nutrients tends to be the factor limiting growth in most regions of the ocean. However, in the HNLC regions, phytoplankton growth is much lower than would normally be predicted. Several alternative hypotheses for this have been proposed including the effects of vertical mixing, grazing pressure, and exposure to sunlight. However, the iron 24 deficiency hypothesis has gained the most traction and the widest support. According to this hypothesis, as Martin suggested, if the amount of iron present in these HNLC areas could be increased, then the amount of phytoplankton growth would also increase, resulting in a greater drawdown of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Thus, if achievable on a large scale, iron fertilization of the 25 oceans could be a silver bullet for climate change.Neg ExtensionsCCS GoodSolves WarmingCO2 sequestration will minimize environmental impacts, and lead to favorable solutions. Howard J. Herzog 1999 a Senior Research Engineer in the MIT Energy Initiative OCEAN SEQUESTRATION OF CO2 AN OVERVIEW, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Energy Laboratory, Elsevier Science Ltd. http://web.mit.edu/energylab/www/pubs/overview.PDFEnvironmental impacts must be viewed at two different scales. On a global scale, direct injection of CO2 to the ocean can be considered environmentally beneficial compared to our present trajectory. Our current anthropogenic emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere will cause a gradual decline in average ocean pH of about 0.5 units over the next several centuries. Direct injection of CO2 to the ocean will only perturb the system by less than another 0.1 pH unit. However, the increased acidity due to the direct addition of CO2 will occur primarily in the deep ocean, while acidification of the more productive surface waters would actually be mitigated (Haugan and Drange, 1995). Furthermore, by lowering atmospheric peak concentrations and slowing their growth rates, direct injection of CO2 to the ocean will reduce the chance of catastrophic events, such as the shutting down of the oceans thermohaline circulation (Stocker and Schmittner, 1997; Broecker, 1997). On a local scale, the most significant environmental impact is derived from lowered pH as a result of the reaction of CO2 with seawater (Magnesen and Wahl, 1993; Kollek, 1993; Auerbach et al., 1997). Carbonate dissolved in seawater and in benthic sediments at shallow depths will provide a buffer, but depending on the method of release, pH can be expected to vary from as low as 4 very near the injection point, to its ambient value of about 8. Impacts would occur principally to non-swimming marine organisms (e.g., zooplankton, bacteria and benthos) residing at depths of about 1000 m or greater and their magnitude will depend on both the level of pH change and the duration of exposure (Auerbach et al., 1997). However, available data suggest that impacts associated with pH change can be completely avoided if the injection is properly designed to disperse the CO2 as it dissolves (Caulfield et al., 1997).

2NC- modelingUS KeySchrag 2009 (Daniel [Steering Committee Member, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements]; Making Carbon Capture and Storage Work; Acting in Time on Energy Policy; p 39-55; kdf)A final reason why CCS is so important for U.S. energy policy to achieve a dramatic reduction in global CO2 emissions is that CCS is likely to be extremely important in China, India, and Russia as they all have large coal reserves. Widespread adoption of CCS in the United States over the next few decades will make it more likely that similar systems will be deployed overseas, especially in the rapidly growing economies with high present and future CO2 emissions.

Capture keyCapturing carbon is key to reduce CO2Wang 10 (Chen Wang, Principal Investigator, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, 2011 WuXi PharmaTech Life Science and Chemistry Award. Connecting Carbon Capture with Oceanic Biomass Production. College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineerning, Peking University. Pg. 1, November 6, 2010.)Dimming the income sunlight by some geoengineering approaches currently seem ruinously expensive and technically difficult, and would not prevent the increase of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in atmosphere and ocean acidification, so capturing carbon to reduce the environmental concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) and promoting renewable energy development for the reduction of using fossil fuels are very necessary.CP popular

Plan popular and increases in popularity as time passes, seen as necessary to reduce C02Stephens 6 Jennie C. Stephens Environmental Science and Policy, Growing interest in carbon capture and storage (CCS) for climate change mitigation http://sspp.proquest.com/static_content/vol2iss2/0604-016.stephens-print.html, 6/24/14 MRMAs the current impacts and future risks of climate change become more apparent, and the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) continues to increase, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies provide a potentially valuable set of tools for achieving the magnitude of emissions reductions required for CO2stabilization as society gradually transitions to a non-fossil fuel energy system. Interest in CCS technologies has been growing rapidly in both the public and private sectors over the past five to ten years as governments, industry, and individuals grapple with reconciling increased energy demand with the need to reduce atmospheric CO2concentrations to mitigate climate change.

CP Solves RenewablesThe counterplan solves the need for renewables- dramatically reduces emissionsSchrag 2009 (Daniel [Steering Committee Member, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements]; Making Carbon Capture and Storage Work; Acting in Time on Energy Policy; p 39-55; kdf)Another reason why some have found CCS to be so compelling as part of a climate change strategy is that CCS, if cost effective, might allow the world to transition to a low-carbon economy without discarding capital investments that have been made in electricity infrastructure. In 2007 there were 2,211 power plants that emitted at least 1 million tons of CO2 a year: 1,068 were in Asia (559 in China), 567 in North America (520 in the United States), 375 in Europe, and 157in Africa.6 Together these power plants released 10billion tons of CO2, or one-third of global emissions. To the extent that some of these plants can be retrofitted with capture technology and that appropriate storage locations can be identified, CCS would allow the world to continue to use these facilities for many decades but dramatically reduce their environmental impact. Another consideration is the timescale over which it is possible to build new energy systems. Eliminating carbon emissions from electricity generation with new nuclear power plants, for example, would require building two large plants each week for the next 100 years. This rate of change seems improbable given current constraints on steel production, construction capacity, and education of operators, as well as many other practical considerations. Given the capital investment the world has already made in power generation, CCS appears to be one of the few ways to lower carbon emissions and still make use of those investments.Iron fertilization good2NC extensionOnly a 10 percent effectiveness is needed to solve warmingPowell 2008 (Hugh; Will Ocean Iron Fertilization Work?; Oceanus Magazine Vol. 46, No. 1, 2008; kdf)Early predictions from models of HNLC regions for iron fertilizations potential earned attention by suggesting the technique could remove around one billion tons of carbon per year from the atmosphere at a low cost. Other estimates are lower, but none considers the LNLC areas that may also be important. But realizing such a number would require major achievements: fertilizing the entire Southern Ocean and increasing the efficiency of transferring and sequestering carbon in the deep, according to Jorge Sarmiento of Princeton University (see Page 18). It also ignores the likely environmental problems from such a large-scale alteration of the oceans (see Page 14). As scientists and commercial outfits prepare to move ahead with experiments, questions about the realistic upper limit for carbon sequestration remain open. If iron fertilization achieves only 10 percent of the one-billion-ton-per-year potential for carbon removal, that would represent 1.4 percent of the worlds current annual carbon emissions perhaps still a large enough number to be of use in mitigating climate change. Whether such a project would also be profitable depends on improving techniques for creating blooms in the hostile Southern Ocean. At present, predictions about what will actually happen range over about two orders of magnitude, Boyd said. And thats [a difference of] six to 600 bucks, if you want to put it on a balance sheet.

Ocean Fertilization GoodOcean storage uniquely solvesSchrag 2009 (Daniel [Steering Committee Member, Harvard Project on Climate Agreements]; Making Carbon Capture and Storage Work; Acting in Time on Energy Policy; p 39-55; kdf)

Another approach to CO2 storage is injection offshore into marine sediments, which avoids the hazards of direct ocean injection, including impacts on ocean ecology.14 If the total depth (both water depth and depth below the sea floor) is greater than 800 meters, then the CO2 will be in a liquid state with density within 20 percent of seawater (greater than seawater at depths exceeding 3,000 meters). In this case, the mobility of CO2 would be greatly diminished, yielding essentially a leak-proof repository. This approach may be important for coastal locations, which are far from appropriate sedimentary basins, and may also reduce the extent of expensive monitoring efforts. In addition, offshore storage may be useful to avoid siting pipelines and storage facilities in heavily populated areas. In terms of capacity, the requirements are vast if most stationary sources will use CCS to reduce emissions. Conservative estimates of reservoir needs over the century are more than 1 trillion tons of CO2 and might exceed twice that amount. Fortunately, the capacity of deep saline aquifers and marine sediments is more than enough to handle centuries of world CO2 emissions from burning coal. Matching existing stationary sources of CO2 with appropriate storage facilities to avoid having to build long pipelines is premature, given that there still is not a single coal-fired power plant in the world that uses CCS technologies, and that the prospects for retrofitting existing plants remain uncertain. However, it appears that the main types of geological storage offer enough options to allow CCS to be deployed in most parts of the United States, either in sedimentary basins on land or in offshore reservoirs in coastal areas in a manner similar to the Sleipner project in the North Sea. Other forms of CO2 storage have been proposed, but none has yet shown the promise of simple injection into geological formations, either on land or offshore. Mineralization strategies that would convert CO2 into carbonate minerals appear to be very expensive relative to simple injection, and they have additional challenges associated with moving vast quantities of rock.15 However, continued research on these and other new approaches is important as CCS goals are likely to require a spectrum of storage strategies for different parts of the country with different geology, state and local regulatory regimes, and levels of public concern.

Iron bestIron fertilization is key to carbon sequestration and is seen as the best technique for doing soJennie Dean 2009 (John Dean is an MEM candidate at Duke University) Iron Fertilization: A Scientific Review with International Policy Recommendations http://environs.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/32/2/dean.pdf)Since iron does not occur naturally in quantities great enough to maximize the utilization of the nutrients of the HNLC regions, it has been suggested that artificial fertilization of these regions is the solution. This process is commonly known as iron fertilization and falls under the broader category of ecosystem or planetary engineering. 26 Typically the fertilization is executed through the gradual deposition of tons of particulate iron by an ocean tanker traveling in uniform transect lines. It is worth noting, however, that there are two other methods of ocean sequestration: deep-sea injection and geological storage. In the former, carbon dioxide is pumped several hundred metei's below the surface. In the latter, carbon dioxide is injected into natural, hollow formations in the ocean floor.27 However, a strong majority sees iron fertilization seen as the most promising venture for carbon sequestration in the oceans because it is the method that appears to be the most cost-effective and efficient.28 It is also the method that has seen the greatest volume of scientific research, and as such it will be the focus of the rest of this discussion.

CCS costs less as more plants are madeAl-Juaied and Whitmore 9 Al-Juaied, Mohammed A and Whitmore, Adam, Realistic Costs of Carbon Capture, July 2009, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 6/23/14 MRMThere is a growing interest in carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a means of reducing car- bon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, there are substantial uncertainties about the costs of CCS. Costs for pre-combustion capture with compression (i.e. excluding costs of transport and storage and any revenue from EOR associated with storage) are examined here for First-of-a-Kind (FOAK)3 plant and for more mature technologies (Nth-of-a-Kind plant (NOAK))4. For FOAK plant using solid fuels the levelised cost of electricity on a 2008 basis is approxi- mately 10/kWh higher with capture than for conventional plants (with a range of 8-12 /kWh). Costs of abatement are found typically to be approximately $150/tCO2 avoided (with a range of $120-180/tCO2 avoided). For NOAK plants, the additional cost of electricity with capture is ap- proximately 2-5/kWh, with costs of the range of $35-70/tCO2 avoided. Costs of abatement with carbon capture for other fuels and technologies are also estimated for NOAK plants. The costs of abatement are calculated with reference to conventional supercritical pulverized coal (SCPC) plant for both emissions and costs of electricity. Estimates for both FOAK and NOAK are mainly based on cost data from 2008, which was at the end of a period of sustained escalation in the costs of power generation plant and other large capital projects. There are now indications of costs falling from these levels. This may reduce the costs of abatement so costs presented here may be peak of the market estimates. If general cost levels return, for example, to those prevailing in 2005 to 2006 (by which time significant cost escalation had already occurred from previous levels), then costs of capture and compression for FOAK plants are expected to be $110/tCO2 avoided (with a range of $90- 135/tCO2 avoided). For NOAK plants, costs are expected to be $25-50/tCO2. Based on these considerations a likely representative range of costs of abatement for capture (and excluding transport and storage) appears to be $100-150/tCO2 for first-of-a- kind plants and plausibly $30-50/tCO2 for nth-of-a-kind plants.

Oceans key

Utilization of the ocean is key to solving CO2 emissions Jennie Dean 2009 (John Dean is an MEM candidate at Duke University) Iron Fertilization: A Scientific Review with International Policy Recommendations http://environs.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/32/2/dean.pdfCurrently, the oceans sequester one third of all of the planet's emissions 5 and approximately 80% of all atmospheric carbon will end up in the ocean in some period of its lifecycle 1 6 Accordingly, scientists and policy makers alike are interested in determining if the oceans could be a remedy for the global warming problem.

Areas such as the Mediterranean prevent carbon release back into the atmosphereSheps et al 09. K.M. Sheps*, M.D. Max, J.P. Osegovic, S.R. Tatro, & L.A. Brazel, A case for deep-ocean CO2 sequestration Science Direct 2009. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610209009710

There are areas of the worlds oceans where deep saline host sequestration may be more effective than others. Injection into areas where upwelling and mixing are at a minimum, and where deep waters are therefore characteristically older, will significantly lengthen the time span by which this sequestered CO2 can be kept from the atmosphere. In some areas of the ocean, this may extend beyond the time span of power generation from combustible materials. Some ocean areas or seas are also better because of their restricted nature. For instance, the Mediterranean Sea is a large enclosed basin with warm, poorly ventilated, high-salinity deep water with little propensity for upwelling that is near anoxic near the seafloor. The Mediterranean Sea is thus an excellent candidate for deep sequestration of CO2-rich saline water. Since virtually all countries bordering the Mediterranean are very water stressed, a new supply of inexpensive desalinated water that could be produced as a by-product of CO2 sequestration would thus be a welcome additional benefit.

Increases PhytoplanktonIron fertilization increases PhytoplanktonBarber, R. T., and M. R. Hiscock 06, A rising tide lifts all phytoplankton: Growth response of other phytoplankton taxa in diatom-dominated blooms, Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 20, GB4S03, doi:10.1029/2006GB002726.Phytoplankton biomass is further increased in this food web by adding more limiting nutrient, as was done during the Iron Ex II fertilization (Figure 4). The result was a >40-fold increase in the biomass of microphytoplankton (>20-pm size fraction), with a largely negligible effect on smaller cells [Landry et aL, 2001. Such observations define the order in which successively lamer phyto-plankton are added to the food web by 'overprinting' its relatively stable base of small cells [e.g. Chisholm, 1992; Lando, et aL, 19971." 3. Strategy and Methods [8] The analysis presented here is based on work in the equatorial Pacific in wind-driven equatorial upwelling, tropical instability waves and other processes involving frontal dynamics that often produce favorable conditions for the beginning of a diatom bloom. In the fall of 1992 during onset of a cool ENSO phase [Murray et aL, 1994], there were numerous manifestations of short-lived diatom blooms driven by equatorially trapped processes that upwelled nutrient-rich water [Lindley et at ,1995; Barber and Chaves, 1991; Bidigare and Ondrusek,1996; Landry et aL, 1996; Latasa et aL, 1997]. These equatorial waters are rich (>>Ka in nitrate and phosphate and have highly variable diatom abundance [Chaves et aL, 1990, 1996]. The limiting nutrients provided to the euphotic zone by these physical processes were likely iron [Coale et at, 1996b], silicic acid [Dugdale and Wilkerson, 1998], or both. Figure 2 shows the increase of primary productivity and diatom abundance at 214 on a meridional section across the equatorial waveguide at 140W. Productivity, diatom abun-dance, and particle flux through the 100-m-depth horizon analyzed the results of two iron addition experiments, IronEx-1 [Ala-sin et aL, 1994] and IronEx-2 [Coale a al., 1996a], where the time and place of the enrichment were controlled, making it possible to construct precise time series analyses. Lindley and Bather [1998] found that the ambient phytoplankton response in the naturally iron-rich island wake of the Galapagos Islands was virtually identical to the biological response in the trona experiments. On the basis of these observations we propose that the open-ocean iron experiments are good surrogates for natural enrichment transients.

Iron fertilization immediately stimulates phytoplankton growthBarber, R. T., and M. R. Hiscock 06, A rising tide lifts all phytoplankton: Growth response of other phytoplankton taxa in diatom-dominated blooms, Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 20, GB4S03, doi:10.1029/2006GB002726.

[n] When iron suddenly becomes available in saturating concentrations the two groups compete for available iron. Individual diatoms can take up iron that is present at saturating concentrations much faster than picophytoplankton, but initially there are so few diatoms (Figure 3) that, as a population, they take up only a trivial proportion of the total available iron. In contrast, the uptake systems of the picophytoplankton are saturated at their lower maximum uptake rates, yet most of the iron is initially partitioned into picophytoplankton because of their overwhelming biomass dominance. As shown previously, the iron-limited ambient picophytoplankton increased their photosynthetic efficiency within hours of iron addition (figure 5). With excess iron available and saturated uptake rates, the ambient assemblage of picophytoplankton shills up to a new, higher growth rate (0,-,) (equation (6)), but because of efficient micrograxing losses they cannot accumulate enough bio- mass to take up enough new iron to prevent the rapidly increasing diatoms from eventually taking up most of the iron. At the end of the bloom, in terms of photosynthetic efficiency, picophytoplankton are healthier than they were before iron addition, but over the course of the bloom their bulk impact on the newly available iron is small. The key issue is that as the bloom progresses, neither group out-competes the other: PicophytoplanIcton abundance is limited by micrograms, and diatoms compete with themselves. Picophytoplankton get all the iron they need to grow at maximal rates; still, diatoms monopolize most of the newly available iron. When diatom uptake drives down iron concentration to diatom rate limiting concentrations, pico-phytoplanktm, with lower lc, values, am able to drive iron concentration still lower. As the iron transient decays to background concentrations, ecological theory predicts that picophytoplankton with a lower requirement for iron veryPhytoplankton keyPhytoplankton are key to carbon sequestrationJennie Dean 2009 (John Dean is an MEM candidate at Duke University) Iron Fertilization: A Scientific Review with International Policy Recommendations http://environs.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/32/2/dean.pdfThe second mechanism through which the oceans absorb carbon dioxide is through the incorporation of atmospheric carbon by phytoplankton through photosynthesis. As a whole, phytoplankton are responsible for approximately half of all carbon fixation on the planet. 18 This fixation occurs as atmospheric carbon dioxide is drawn in and stored in the body material of these microscopic plants in the process of photosynthesis. Eventually, this stored carbon then makes its way to the deep ocean through one of two pathways. The phytoplankton can die and then sink to the bottom, carrying their carbon with them, or they can be eaten by zooplankton and then excreted in fecal pellets, which also sink to the bottom. These processes are collectively known as the biological or soft-tissue pump.9Diatom Blooms GoodDaitom blooms regulate CO2 Barber, R. T., and M. R. Hiscock 06, A rising tide lifts all phytoplankton: Growth response of other phytoplankton taxa in diatom-dominated blooms, Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 20, GB4S03, doi:10.1029/2006GB002726.[it] Diatom bloom initiation at onset of favorable aryl-ratmental conditiats is probably the most studied phenom-enon in oceanography [62arzler and Gran, 1927; Riley, 1414; Sverdrup, 1953; Ryther,1969;Dugdale and Wilkerson, 1998; Thwack et al., 2003; Sanhou et at, 2005]. It has commanded much attention became of the well-established relationship between diatom blooms and fish 'reduction [Iverson, 1990], which led Bostwick Ketchum to revise Isaiah 40:6 this way, "All fish is diatom? Together with the fish connection, diatom blooms are a major biological process for regulating the concentration of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere. Although it is prudent to say the preceding statement is a hypothesis that is controversial, few ocean-ographers would deny that the formation of massive diatom blooms and their termination by rapid sinking to the sea floor have the potential, over geological timescaks, to modify the partitioning of carbon in the atmosphere-ocean-sediment system. The sedimentary record indicates that massive episodic burial has taken place [Kemp and Baldauf, 1993].

Phytoplankton Can Solve CO2 EmissionsWang 10 (Chen Wang, Principal Investigator, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, 2011 WuXi PharmaTech Life Science and Chemistry Award. Connecting Carbon Capture with Oceanic Biomass Production. College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineerning, Peking University. Pg. 3, November 6, 2010.)The marine phytoplankton dubbed the oceans invisible forest is responsible for nearly half of all the biological absorption of CO2, and most of the carbon captured pass through the marine food web in the form of organisms and return to the atmosphere by respiration, but some will eventually sink to the ocean floor and remain there for many years. In Martins theory, fertilizing the high-nitrate, low-chlorophyll (HNLC) oceans such as north-east Pacific subarctic waters and the Southern Ocean around Antarctica with dissolved iron would facilitate phytoplankton blooming, and enhance the oceans biological pump to offset the continuing increase of atmospheric CO2. Experiments in HNLC oceans have revealed that it works to bloom phytoplanktonic algae by iron fertilization in weeks11-13.

Solves BioDIron fertilization key to promoting ocean Bio-DiversityEcofriend 2011 http://www.ecofriend.com/good-bad-ugly-ocean-iron-fertilization.htmlOcean iron fertilization has number of benefits. When iron particles are released in water they feed the algae, which blooms and absorb the harmfulcarbon dioxidefor carrying out photosynthesis. These tiny pieces of iron then sink in the ocean and lock away the hazardous gas for upcoming years. The estimated cost for implying this process of ocean seeding to cut on the carbon dioxide is much lower than the present cost of other sequestration mechanisms that are used commercially. The addition of iron will also benefit the marinefoodchain as iron is also required by other aquatic plants for their healthy growth. The process of ocean iron fertilization also known as carbon sinking will also enhance the marine biological productivity.

BioDBiodiversity influences world food production and healthWorld Health Organization 14(Biodiversity World Health Organization; Access: 6/24/14http://www.who.int/globalchange/ecosystems/biodiversity/en/)//ck

Nutritional impact of biodiversityBiodiversity plays a crucial role in human nutrition through its influence on world food production, as it ensures the sustainable productivity of soils and provides the genetic resources for all crops, livestock, and marine species harvested for food. Access to a sufficiency of a nutritious variety of food is a fundamental determinant of health. Nutrition and biodiversity are linked at many levels: the ecosystem, with food production as an ecosystem service; the species in the ecosystem and the genetic diversity within species. Nutritional composition between foods and among varieties/cultivars/breeds of the same food can differ dramatically, affecting micronutrient availability in the diet. Healthy local diets, with adequate average levels of nutrients intake, necessitates maintenance of high biodiversity levels. Intensified and enhanced food production through irrigation, use of fertilizer, plant protection (pesticides) or the introduction of crop varieties and cropping patterns affect biodiversity, and thus impact global nutritional status and human health. Habitat simplification, species loss and species succession often enhance communities vulnerabilities as a function of environmental receptivity to ill health.

Biodiversity is necessary for the health and treatment of human diseasesWorld Health Organization 14(Biodiversity World Health Organization; Access: 6/24/14http://www.who.int/globalchange/ecosystems/biodiversity/en/)//ck

Importance of biodiversity for health research and traditional medicineTraditional medicine continue to play an essential role in health care, especially in primary health care. Traditional medicines are estimated to be used by 60% of the worlds population and in some countries are extensively incorporated into the public health system. Medicinal plant use is the most common medication tool in traditional medicine and complementary medicine worldwide. Medicinal plants are supplied through collection from wild populations and cultivation. Many communities rely on natural products collected from ecosystems for medicinal and cultural purposes, in addition to food. Although synthetic medicines are available for many purposes, the global need and demand for natural products persists for use as medicinal products and biomedical research that relies on plants, animals and microbes to understand human physiology and to understand and treat human diseases.

Human disturbances alter biodiversity and lead to infectious diseaseWorld Health Organization 14(Biodiversity World Health Organization; Access: 6/24/14http://www.who.int/globalchange/ecosystems/biodiversity/en/)//ck

Infectious diseasesHuman activities are disturbing both the structure and functions of ecosystems and altering native biodiversity. Such disturbances reduce the abundance of some organisms, cause population growth in others, modify the interactions among organisms, and alter the interactions between organisms and their physical and chemical environments. Patterns of infectious diseases are sensitive to these disturbances. Major processes affecting infectious disease reservoirs and transmission include, deforestation; land-use change; water management e.g. through dam construction, irrigation, uncontrolled urbanization or urban sprawl; resistance to pesticide chemicals used to control certain disease vectors; climate variability and change; migration and international travel and trade; and the accidental or intentional human introduction of pathogens.

Negative effects on biodiversity limit the human use of the ecosystem and shifts plants, pathogens, animals, and human settlementsWorld Health Organization 14(Biodiversity World Health Organization; Access: 6/24/14http://www.who.int/globalchange/ecosystems/biodiversity/en/)//ck

Climate change, biodiversity and healthBiodiversity provides numerous ecosystem services that are crucial to human well-being at present and in the future. Climate is an integral part of ecosystem functioning and human health is impacted directly and indirectly by results of climatic conditions upon terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Marine biodiversity is affected by ocean acidification related to levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Terrestrial biodiversity is influenced by climate variability, such as extreme weather events (ie drought, flooding) that directly influence ecosystem health and the productivity and availability of ecosystem goods and services for human use. Longer term changes in climate affect the viability and health of ecosystems, influencing shifts in the distribution of plants, pathogens, animals, and even human settlements.

Fertilization legalIron fertilization is legal under international lawJennie Dean 2009 (John Dean is an MEM candidate at Duke University) Iron Fertilization: A Scientific Review with International Policy Recommendations http://environs.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/32/2/dean.pdfAssuming the international community was to accept iron's classification as "waste", there would still be challenges presented by the text of the Convention to ban its use in fertilization projects. Since. 1996, the Convention has adopted a reverse-list approach by prohibiting the dumping of all wastes except those listed in Annex 1. This list contains two categories of waste that could be interpreted to incorporate the iron dust used in fertilization projects. Annex 1(1.5) allows for the at-sea disposal of "inert, inorganic geologic material," which is precisely what the particulate iron used in fertilization experiments is. AT Dead ZonesAlt Cause: GHGs result in larger dead zones, which cause extinctionXinhua News 11 (May 17, Found at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/sci/2011-05/17/c_13878916.htm) GHGreenhouse gases may expand 'ocean dead zones' and could cause a mass extinction of marine life, Australian scientists warned on Tuesday. An Australian research team analyzed ocean rocks back from 85 million years ago from the Late Cretaceous Period, which experienced greenhouse conditions similar to those predicted in 2050. Within the ancient rocks, drilled from ocean beds off the western coast of Africa, the researchers found huge amounts of marine life buried within deoxygenated layers. According to Adelaide University Environmental Sciences Professor Martin Kennedy, his research looked at the rapid expansion of ocean dead zones created by rising temperatures in prehistoric times. "They are areas without oxygen in them and the marine animals within them are no longer capable of living there - they are responsible for major fish kills," the Australia Associated Press quoted Kennedy as saying on Tuesday. "What we see from going back to the past is what our future ocean will probably do in response to those conditions, he said. Alt Cause: Corn ethanol causes dead zonesPimentel 9 (David Pimentel, Ph.D., Cornell University, 1951, B.S. U. of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1948 on October 26, 2009. Found at http://hir.harvard.edu/agriculture/corn-ethanol-as-energy) GHThe environmental impacts of producing corn ethanol are enormous. First, corn production causes more soil erosion than any other crop grown in the United States. Average soil loss per hectare of corn grown is 17 times greater than the soil formation rateand it takes 500 years to replace 1 inch of eroded soil from cropland. Second, corn production uses more nitrogen fertilizer than any other crop grown. Nitrogen use is the prime cause of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and also contributes to greenhouse gas accumulation and global warming. Approximately 155 kilograms per hectare each year (kg/ha/yr) of nitrogen is applied to corn fields. In addition, nearly 80 kg/ha/yr of phosphorus and 85 kg/ha/yr of potassium is applied per corn growing season. Corn production also uses more total insecticides and total herbicides than any other crop. Each hectare of corn receives nearly 3 kg/yr of insecticides and is treated with slightly more than 6 kg/yr of herbicides. More than 1,7000 gallons of water is required to produce 1 gallon of ethanol from corn. This includes the water required to produce the corn crop, plus the water used in processing the corn to create the ethanol. In addition to the energy used to grow corn for ethanol, there are other significant environmental costs. For example, for every gallon of ethanol produced, there are 12 gallons of sewage effluent that must be discarded. Most of the sewage waste is processed in city sewage processing plants, producing enormous quantities of carbon dioxide. This results from 7,090 liters of oil equivalents of fossil energy used in the production of ethanol per hectare. The fermentation process and the tilling of the soil also release large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while the conversion of cropland for biofuel production further contributes to the release of greenhouse gases. All this carbon dioxide release, of course, contributes to the global warming process, all while ethanol continues to be touted as a clean fuel. And using that clean fuel even contributes to air pollution. Burning ethanol in automobiles emits several pollutants such as peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), acetaldehyde, alkyates, and nitrous oxide. These have significant negative human health effects, as well as negative impacts on other organisms and ecosystems.

Alt Cause: Corn fertilizer gets washed into the Mississippi every spring, producing an ever growing dead zoneGreiff 13 (James Greiff, editor for Bloomberg, on June 16, 2013. Found at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/gulf-of-mexico-s-extinction-by-ethanol.html) GHLess than a year after the summer drought of 2012 baked the U.S. grain belt, farmers in the region have been deluged by rain. Aside from the threat that weather might pose for a second year to the U.S. harvest, the heavy rains may help fulfill of a prediction by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: A swath of the northern Gulf of Mexico that each summer turns into a dead zone, drained of oxygen and devoid of life, will be larger than usual. The science behind this phenomenon is well understood. So are the remedies, the most practical of which would require changes in farming policy and practices. The dead zone starts innocently enough. Each year, when the snow melts and spring rains fall on Midwest farmland, millions of tons of nitrogen-based fertilizer that was applied to barren fields the previous autumn are washed into Mississippi River tributaries. In years when there is more rain, more nitrogen ends up in the water -- and vice versa. Last year's drought is considered the main reason the 2012 dead zone covered only 2,889 square miles in the Gulf, the smallest in several years, and down from 6,767 square miles in 2011. If conditions are right this year, the dead zone might occupy an area the size of New Jersey, or 7,800 square miles. Researchers usually take an official measurement in July. Because the Mississippi has been dredged, straightened and channelized to control flooding and accommodate shipping, the river flows faster than it once did. Excess nutrients, instead of being absorbed and filtered during a meandering journey, are blasted into the Gulf in a manner that some have likened to a fire hose. Once the Mississippi's waters reach the Gulf and the warming sun, the nutrients cause huge algal blooms. While the algae are blossoming, they suck oxygen from the water, and again after they die and fall to the bottom to decompose, where bacteria further deplete the water of oxygen. Fish either die or head farther from shore. A state-federal environmental task force in 2008 set a goal of reducing the amount of nutrients in the Mississippi by 45 percent by this year. By all accounts, little progress has been made. The culprits behind the dead zone are many, but one deserves special attention: corn. Unlike, say, soybeans, which can grow without fertilizer, corn can't grow without it. It takes 195 pounds of fertilizer to grow an acre of corn. Flooding creates dead zonesNY Times 11 (June 2, 2011. Found at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/science/earth/03runoff.html?pagewanted=all) GHAs the surging waters of the Mississippi pass downstream, they leave behind flooded towns and inundated lives and carry forward a brew of farm chemicals and waste that this year given record flooding is expected to result in the largest dead zone ever in the Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones have been occurring in the gulf since the 1970s, and studies show that the main culprits are nitrogen and phosphorus from crop fertilizers and animal manure in river runoff. They settle in at the mouth of the gulf and fertilize algae, which prospers and eventually starves other living things of oxygen. Government studies have traced a majority of those chemicals in the runoff to nine farming states, and yet today, decades after the dead zones began forming, there is still little political common ground on how to abate this perennial problem. Scientists who study dead zones predict that the affected area will increase significantly this year, breaking records for size and damage. For years, environmentalists and advocates for a cleaner gulf have been calling for federal action in the form of regulation. Since 1998, the Environmental Protection Agency has been encouraging all states to place hard and fast numerical limits on the amount of those chemicals allowed in local waterways. Yet of the nine key farm states that feed the dead zone, only two, Illinois and Indiana, have acted, and only to cover lakes, not the rivers or streams that merge into the Mississippi. The lack of formal action upstream has long been maddening to the downstream states most affected by the pollution, and the extreme flooding this year has only increased the tensions. Considering the current circumstances, it is extremely frustrating not seeing E.P.A. take more direct action, said Matt Rota, director of science and water policy for the Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental advocacy group in New Orleans that has renewed its calls for federally enforced targets. We have tried solely voluntary mechanisms to reduce this pollution for a decade and have only seen the dead zone get bigger. Environmental Protection Agency officials said they had no immediate plans to force the issue, but farmers in the Mississippi Basin are worried. That is because only six months ago, the agency stepped in at the Chesapeake Bay, another watershed with similar runoff issues, and set total maximum daily loads for those same pollutants in nearby waterways. If the states do not reduce enough pollution over time, the agency could penalize them in a variety of ways, including increasing federal oversight of state programs or denying new wastewater permitting rights, which could hamper development. The agency says it is too soon to evaluate their progress in reducing pollution. Don Parish, senior director of regulatory relations for the American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group, says behind that policy is the faulty assumption that farmers fertilize too much or too casually. Since 1980, he said, farmers have increased corn yields by 80 percent while at the same time reducing their nitrate use by 4 percent through precision farming. We are on the razors edge, Mr. Parish said. When you get to the point where you are taking more from the soil than you are putting in, then you have to worry about productivity. Dead zones are areas of the ocean where low oxygen levels can stress or kill bottom-dwelling organisms that cannot escape and cause fish to leave the area. Excess nutrients transported to the gulf each year during spring floods promote algal growth. As the algae die and decompose, oxygen is consumed, creating the dead zone. The largest dead zone was measured in 2002 at about 8,500 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey. Shrimp fishermen complain of being hurt the most by the dead zones as shrimp are less able to relocate but the precise impacts on species are still being studied. The United States Geological Survey has found that nine states along the Mississippi contribute 75 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus. The survey found that corn and soybean crops were the largest contributors to the nitrogen in the runoff, and manure was a large contributor to the amount of phosphorus.

Solves algae bloomsControlled study says that iron fertilization is different than geoengineering and solves algae bloomsCarrington 2012 (Damian; Dumping iron at sea can bury carbon for centuries, study shows; July 18; www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jul/18/iron-sea-carbon?newsfeed=true; kdf)Dumping iron into the sea can bury carbon dioxide for centuries, potentially helping reduce the impact of climate change, according to a major new study. The work shows for the first time that much of the algae that blooms when iron filings are added dies and falls into the deep ocean. Geoengineering technologies aimed at alleviating global warming are controversial, with critics warning of unintended environmental side effects or encouraging complacency in global deals to cut carbon emissions. But Prof Victor Smetacek, at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who led the new research, said: "The time has come to differentiate: some geoengineering techniques are more dangerous than others. Doing nothing is probably the worst option." Dave Reay, senior lecturer in carbon management at the University of Edinburgh, said: "This represents a whole new ball game in terms of iron fertilisation as a geoengineering technique. Maybe deliberate enhancement of carbon storage in the oceans has more legs than we thought but, as the scientists themselves acknowledge, it's still far too early to run with it." A 2009 report from the Royal Society, the UK's science academy, concluded that while cutting emissions is the first priority, careful research into geoengineering was required in case drastic measures such as trying to block sunlight by pumping sulphate into the atmosphere were one day needed. Prof John Shepherd, chair of the report, said on Wednesday: "It is important that we continue to research these technologies but governance of this research is vital to protect the oceans, wider environment and public interests." Smetacek's team added seven tonnes of iron sulphate to the ocean near Antarctica, where iron levels are extremely low. The addition of the missing nutrient prompted a massive bloom of phytoplankton to begin growing within a week. As the phytoplankton, mostly species of diatom, began to die after three weeks, they sank towards the ocean floor, taking the carbon they had incorporated with them. The scientists chose the experiment location carefully, within a 60km-wide self-enclosed eddy in the ocean that acted as a giant "test tube". This meant that it was possible to compare what happened within the eddy with control points outside the eddy. After a month of monitoring nutrient and plankton levels from the surface to the depths the team concluded at least half of the bloom had fallen to depths below 1,000m and that a "substantial portion was likely to have reached the sea floor" at 3,800m. The scientists conclude in the journal Nature that the carbon is therefore likely to be kept out of the atmosphere for many centuries or longer.Solves AcidificationCarbon Sequestration solves ocean acidificationThe Royal Society, 05The Royal Society.Ocean Acidification Due to Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide. London: Royal Society, 2005. June 2005. Web. 26 June 2014.Geographic pH variation for the global surface oceans (50 m) for the year 1994 is shown in Figure 4. The pH values are calculated using data from the Global Data Analysis Project (GLODAP). Surface values range from 7.9 to 8.25 with a mean value of 8.08 (Sabine personal communication). The lowest values are observed in upwelling regions (eg Equatorial Pacific, Arabian Sea) where subsurface waters with lower pH values are brought to the surface. The highest values are observed in regions of high biological production and export. In these regions DIC (carbon) is converted into organic carbon by phytoplankton and exported by the biological pump into the deeper oceans resulting in higher pH values in the surface waters.AT: TurnsNon-Unique: Fertilization happening nowNo Negative ImpactWaller 2012 (Rhian; Iron Fertilization: Savior to Climate Change or Ocean Dumping; Oct 18; newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/10/18/iron-fertilization-savior-to-climate-change-or-ocean-dumping/; kdf)Unbeknownst to most scientists until a few days ago, two hundred thousand pounds of iron sulphate were dumped into North Pacific Ocean in July, with the aim to trigger a large plankton bloom. This experiment was conducted by the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, under the direction of businessman Russ George. Why dump this dirty brown powder into the ocean and why to trigger a plankton bloom? All in the name of reversing man-made climate change. Phytoplankton is photosynthetic, needing sunlight and nutrients to grow, taking up carbon dioxide in the process and producing oxygen as a by-product. This phytoplankton then dies, falling to the bottom of the ocean, and taking that sequestered carbon dioxide with it, trapping it at the bottom of the ocean. One of the major nutrients phytoplankton needs to grow is iron, an insoluble nutrient and often found in limited quantities, inhibiting large plankton blooms from occurring. So by adding iron to the ocean, we can increase the numbers of phytoplankton photosynthesizing, using up more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and locking it up, deep in our oceans. Or at least thats the theory. Geoengineering is the term coined for deliberately modifying our environment to tackle man-made climatic changes on a global scale. It all sounds so simple an easy route to solving our carbon emission crisis. The controversy comes that we dont fully understand the consequences of manipulating our environment on a global scale, and we have to weigh up whether those consequences are better, or worse, than the problem we are trying to fix. Weve seen whats happened time after time when weve modified the food chain fisheries collapses, extinction of species we know well that connections that seem small can have drastic consequences we didnt even consider. In addition, as that large bloom dies, decay will use up oxygen, potentially creating large anoxic zones, smothering important bottom habitats in the deep ocean. The experiment that was executed by George and colleagues is primarily under fire because it was done undercover, without scientific peer review or process, and without international collaboration, yet can have global consequences. It is also the largest iron fertilization experiment to have occurred anywhere 200,000 pounds versus a few thousand pounds. Other smaller scale international experiments over the last fifteen-plus years have concluded that the sequestering efficiency is low (and sometimes no effect was seen) the amount of iron youd need to make even a slight dent in our carbon emissions is in the million tons per year, and even if you put in that amount, it may just not work. Unregulated iron fertilization on this scale could have dramatic consequences and goes against an international moratoria created by the UN to protect ocean environments. Far from being a savior, this experiment is being called a large scale dumping of waste into our oceans.

AffCCS BadThe plan is a last-ditch effort to save the coal industry, the aff is comparatively betterHsu 2011(Shi-Ling [Larson Professor Florida State University College of Law] The case for a carbon tax: Getting past our hang-up to effective climate policy; p 56-; kdf)

Both the United States and Canada appear headed down this treacherous path again. Another impending and potentially misguided government initiative is the subsidization of carbon capture and storage technology. Carbon capture refers to the capture of carbon dioxide emitted as a result of any combustion process, while storage refers to the permanent containment of the carbon dioxide, so that it does not enter the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. Carbon dioxide would typically be injected into underground pore spaces where it would be stored for, it is hoped, eternity. While the carbon capture and storage concept may be applied to all industrial combustion processes (and even for some noncombustion carbonemitting processes), most of the discussion and technological development has been for coal-fired power plants. The technology seems attractive, salvaging trillions of dollars of capital worldwide wrapped up in fuel combustion, and what enthusiastic policy wonks would call a potential game-changer. Some have likened the urgency of developing carbon capture and storage to the development of the atomic bomb. In a 2009 floor speech, US Senator Lamar Alexander said we should launch another mini-Manhattan Project and reserve a Nobel Prize for the scientist who can get rid of the carbon from existing coal plants, because coal provides half our energy. 63 But the lofty rhetoric seems misplaced for a technology that remains prohibitively expensive. As recently as 2008, demonstration costs remained in the range of 60 to 90 Euros per ton of CO 2 stored (approximately 88 to 131 US dollars per ton 64 ), but were expected to come down to about 30 to 45 Euros per ton by 2030 (approximately $45 to $62 per ton, using a 2010 currency conversion). 65 Even if this bears out, this would still be much more expensive than many dozens of other emissions abatement and reduction strategies, even notoriously expensive nuclear power. 66 Moreover, the physical challenge of capturing and storing even a modest amount of American carbon emissions is staggering. The United States currently emits around 1.5 billion tons per year of carbon from coal-fired power plants, 67 and the worlds largest sequestration project, at the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea, is sequestering 1 million tons a year of carbon dioxide, or about 0.06 percent of United States emissions. 68 If carbon capture and storage were to capture all of the carbon dioxide from US coal-fired power plants, the total weight that would need to be transported would equal three times the annual volume of natural gas transported in the United States by pipeline. Dr. Joan Brennecke, director of the Notre Dame Energy Center where researchers have been working on carbon capture and storage technology for years under DOE grants, laments that despite recent advances, economical carbon capture technology is still at least a decade away from commercial application, remarking that no matter what, it is going to be painful to do CO capture. 69 2 It is surely telling that an industry consortium formed to pursue and support a pilot carbon capture and storage project, FutureGen, lost two of its biggest industry backers, the two largest electricity providers in the United States: the American Electric Power Company and the Southern Company, in the face of the high costs of development. 70 Given these challenges and setbacks, it seems slightly overenthusiastic to call for another Manhattan project for such an expensive technique, and one that has been studied for decades with disappointing results. Once again, an expensive idea has emerged from the convergence of politics, rent-seeking, and the convenient illusion that government can provide (i.e., fund) a solution. Not all of the motivation is scandalous: the temptation for such an important problem is to see the greenhouse gas reduction effort as a war, in which carbon capture and sequestration can be a game-changer in much the same way that the atomic bomb was perceived to be the game-changer needed to stop the Axis powers. Wishful thinking creates a desire to find gamechangers. Recent technologies labeled as game-changers include: electric vehicle batteries, 71 electricity storage technology generally, 72 shale gas, 73 small nuclear reactors, 74 nuclear reactors that burn spent fuel, 75 underground coal combustion, 76 ocean thermal power, 77 a transmission line linkage, 78 and General Motors plug-in hybrid vehicle. 79 Some of these could actually be significant breakthroughs. But most often, politicians proposing technology subsidies for speculative technologies seems more like the behavior of the destitute and desperate, sadly spending their last dollars on lottery tickets instead of undertaking the hard work of change. Nothing insulates a polity from its governments appetite for waste and profligacy, not even carbon taxes. But at least spending money is not the point of a carbon tax, as it is with a government subsidy. Indeed, if the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then a policy instrument should draw on what government does well tax rather than on what it does poorly make strategic market decisions. With a worrying problem such as climate change, it is too easy and too dangerous to fall into the trap of thinking that governments can fix the problem directly, funding a potential home run or gamechanger. 80 It is harder to create the markets that will spur development of a solution, harder to trust markets, and hardest still to tell voters that they have to help pay for the solution through higher prices.

The plan is a move by politicians to take advantage of the cognitive dissonance of the publicHsu 2011(Shi-Ling [Larson Professor Florida State University College of Law] The case for a carbon tax: Getting past our hang-up to effective climate policy; p 179; kdf)People are conflicted about what to do about climate change. On the one hand, a solid majority of people, even Canadians and Americans, favor action on climate change. 61 Even though the public continues to trail scientists and probably even politicians in their understanding of climate change, they seem to have an intuitive understanding that catastrophic things could happen if greenhouse gases continue to increase, and that avoiding this risk would be good policy. 62 On the other hand, climate change is usually trumped by other issues, most prominently economic ones, when people are asked to rank them in importance. 63 So how does one reconcile these two somewhat contradictory public positions? The path of least cognitive dissonance is to be in favor of some grand-sounding, and yet not obviously painful measures to address climate change. Hence, there is appeal to launching a Manhattan Project to perfect carbon capture and storage, or the government launch of a hydrogen fuel cell automobile project, or a supposedly economy-wide cap-and-trade program that covers all polluters. These all sound grand enough to match the size of the climate change problem, and yet do not obviously cost the taxpayer, the consumer, or the voter anything. Politicians that stand to gain political support from proposing climate policy are happy to nurture these misperceptions, and public opinion polls unwittingly assist them by supplying survey results that perpetuate these misperceptions.

Geoengineering badGeoengineering fails- only allows for more warmingHsu 2011(Shi-Ling [Larson Professor Florida State University College of Law] The case for a carbon tax: Getting past our hang-up to effective climate policy; p14-15; kdf)

Finally, excluded from consideration in this book are adaptation and geo-engineering measures. Adaptation is the general term for a wide range of things that can be done by a country to prepare for and adjust to life in a climate-changed world, at least as it can best be foreseen. Adaptation could include, for example, relocation of populations away from areas vulnerable to tropical storms, or the genetic modification of seeds to yield more drought-resistant crops, or the construction of sea walls to protect a city from the intruding sea. Geo-engineering measures aim to directly reduce the heat-increasing effects of greenhouse gases, by either reducing atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases or by reducing the amount of solar radiation that is absorbed. Like adaptation, geo-engineering consciously does not address the sources of the greenhouse gases. Proposed geo-engineering measures have included the promotion of ocean algal growth (which would in theory capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere), the launching of tiny particlesized mirrors into the upper stratosphere so as to reflect sunlight and prevent it from reaching the Earth, and simply painting roofs white so as to reflect sunlight more effectively and increase the amount of heat that is radiated back out into space. As I have noted in my other work, adaptation and geo-engineering, despite their own significant risks, begin to look like more palatable options as international climate negotiations continue to founder. 2 The problem of international coordination among countries (which I argue in this book is best addressed by a carbon tax) currently seems challenging enough to warrant some diversification of approaches to climate change. While the international legal community balks at the unilateralism inherent in adaptation and geo-engineering as a climate strategy, options that do not require global and crosscultural politicking begin to look attractive. Moreover, the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change are such that a portfolio of policies is likely required. 3 All that said, it is most sensible from the perspective of greenhouse gas mitigation to cabin off these kinds of strategies from the question of how to reduce emissions. It is complicated enough to consider what mitigation policies should be pursued, without complicating the question by adding in analysis of adaptation and geo-engineering measures. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions, I consider four main options: (1) a carbon tax (2) traditional environmental regulation, sometimes referred to as command-and-control regulation, (3) cap-andtrade programs in which allowances to emit are allocated and freely traded, and (4) government subsidies targeted at low-carbon technologies and processes. Again, many other ideas and combinations of ideas are a part of the wide climate change discourse, but in order to focus in on the advantages and disadvantages of the carbon tax as a fundamental approach, this book frames the discussion in the context of the main alternative policy approaches.

Turn: Dead Zones

Phytoplankton Fertilization Makes Dead ZonesWang 10 (Chen Wang, Principal Investigator, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, 2011 WuXi PharmaTech Life Science and Chemistry Award. Connecting Carbon Capture with Oceanic Biomass Production. College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineerning, Peking University. Pg. 6, November 6, 2010.)Dead zones are the hypoxic systems in oceans caused by the decrease of dissolved oxygen in bottom waters, created as planktonic algae die and add to the flow of organic matter to the seabed to fuel microbial respiration, they have been reported from more than 400 systems, and have developed in many major fishery areas. Considering the serious impacts on marine harvests and ecosystems, coastal oceans are not fit for large-scale microalgae cultivation. Not only less sunlight and lower temperature, but also luxuriant marine species diversities and turbulent wind surface condition, such as the strong southern westerlies on the Southern Ocean, make polar and subarctic oceans are unbefitting to be exploited, too.Destruction of Marine Ecosystems leads to extinctionCraig 3 (Robin, Associate Professor of Law at Indiana, Winter, 34 McGeorge L. Review. 155) GHBiodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems, but these arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values - the most economically valuable ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide - coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other environmental fluctuations, services worth more than ten times the reefs value for food production. Waste treatment is another significant, non-extractive ecosystem function that intact coral reef ecosystems provide. More generally, ocean ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as other less abundant but necessary elements. In a very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the planets ability to support life. Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystems ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity, indicating that more diverse ecosystems are more stable. Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity. Most ecologists agree that the complexity of interactions and degree of interrelatedness among component species is higher on coral reefs than in any other marine environment. This implies that the ecosystem functioning that produces the most highly valued components is also complex and that many otherwise insignificant species have strong effects on sustaining the rest of the reef system. Thus, maintaining and restoring the biodiversity of marine ecosystems is critical to maintaining and restoring the ecosystem services that they provide. Non-use biodiversity values for marine ecosystems have been calculated in the wake of marine disasters, like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Similar calculations could derive preservation values for marine wilderness. However, economic value, or economic value equivalents, should not be the sole or even primary justification for conservation of ocean ecosystems. Ethical arguments also have considerable force and merit. At the forefront of such arguments should be a recognition of how little we know about the sea - and about the actual effect of human activities on marine ecosystems. The United States has traditionally failed to protect marine ecosystems because it was difficult to detect anthropogenic harm to the oceans, but we now know that such harm is occurring - even though we are not completely sure about causation or about how to fix every problem. Ecosystems like the NWHI coral reef ecosystem should inspire lawmakers and policymakers to admit that most of the time we really do not know what we are doing to the sea and hence should be preserving marine wilderness whenever we can - especially when the United States has within its territory relatively pristine marine ecosystems that may be unique in the world. We may not know much about the sea, but we do know this much: if we kill the ocean we kill ourselves, and we will take most of the biosphere with us. The Black Sea is almost dead, its once-complex and productive ecosystem almost entirely replaced by a monoculture of comb jellies, starving out fish and dolphins, emptying fishermens nets, and converting the web of life into brainless, wraith-like blobs of jelly. More importantly, the Black Sea is not necessarily unique. The Black Sea is a microcosm of what is happening to the ocean systems at large. The stresses piled up: overfishing, oil spills, industrial discharges, nutrient pollution, wetlands destruction, the introduction of an alien species. The sea weakened, slowly at first, then collapsed with shocking suddenness. The lessons of this tragedy should not be lost to the rest of us, because much of what happened here is being repeated all over the world. The ecological stresses imposed on the Black Sea were not unique to communism. Nor, sadly, was the failure of governments to respond to the emerging crisis. Oxygen-starved dead zones appear with increasing frequency off the coasts of major cities and major rivers, forcing marine animals to flee and killing all that cannot. Ethics as well as enlightened self-interest thus suggest that the United States should protect fully-functioning marine ecosystems wherever possible - even if a few fishers go out of business as a result

Causes acidificationIron fertilization causes ocean acidificationAumont, O. and Bopp, L.: 10 Professors at Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Professor at Kiel Institute for the World Economy at the Christian-Albrechts, Globalizing results from ocean in situ iron fertilization experiments, Global Biogeochem. Cy., 20, GB2017, doi:10.1029/2005GB002591, 2010.

To the extent that Ocean Iron Fertilization sequesters additional CO2 in the ocean, it will also amplify ocean acidification (Denman, 2008). This is most pronounced in areas where the se-questered CO2 is stored. In our model, OIF-induced acid-ification is largest in the upper few hundred meters of the Southern Ocean, where most of the exported carbon rem-ineralizes and thereby releases CO2. In this depth range, pH drops by another 0.15 units compared to the control run in year 2110 (Fig. 8) and the saturation state for calcium car-bonate, Skarn, drops by up to 0.4 units. The change in pH generally follows the OIF-induced change in DIC (Fig. 3b), although changes in nutrient concentrations (and, to a minor extent, simulated changes in calcium carbonate production and dissolution) have some impact on alkalinity and hence pH. Simulated surface pH decreases in the fertilized region by 0.006 pH units (Fig. 9), whereas it increases almost ev-erywhere outside the fertilized area. The OIF-induced globally avenged increase in surface pH by some 0.007 pH units slightly counteracts the much larger pH decrease by 0.34 pH units simulated by the unfertilized control experiment under the SRES A2 scenario by year 2110. Acidification induced by Southern Ocean large-scale iron fertilization is thus expected to be a specific problem in Southem Ocean near-surface waters, which are projected to become persistently undersaturated with respect to aragonite by mid-century already without OIF (Orr et al.. 2005). This development is also simulated by our model, which reveals that by 2110 about 20% of the ocean volume is undersaturated with respect to aragonite. Simulated Southern Ocean OIF leads to an acceleration of this process by a few decades (Fig. 10). However, once the Southem Ocean is undersatu-rated, the global volume of undersaturated waters increases at a slower rate in the continuous OIF experiment that sim- ulates slightly higher saturation states than the control run outside the fertilized region.

Dead zones badGulf Dead Zone spills over into Atlantic, devastating the marine ecosystemNASA, '04 (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Mississippi Dead Zone, September 14th,2004 http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/dead_zone.html)Mississippi Dead Zone: Sediment filled water meets the blue ocean. Recent reports indicate that the large region of low oxygen water often referred to as the 'Dead Zone' has spread across nearly 5,800 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico again in what appears to be an annual event. NASA satellites monitor the health of the oceans and spots the conditions that lead to a dead zone, Ships and Satellites Match Measurements. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ships measured low oxygen water in the same location as the highly turbid water in the satellite images. Most studies indicate that fertilizers and runoff from human sources is one of the major stresses impacting coastal ecosystems and possibly the Atlantic ecosystem as a whole. Summer rains wash nutrients, dissolved organic matter and sediment out of the mouths of rivers, into the sea, sparking large phytoplankton blooms. Enhanced phytoplankton blooms can create dead zones. Dead zones are areas of water so devoid of oxygen that sea life cannot live there. If phytoplankton productivity is enhanced by fertilizers or other nutrients, more organic matter is produced at the surface of the ocean. The organic matter sinks to the bottom, where bacteria break it down and release carbon dioxide. Bacteria thrive off excessive organic matter and absorb oxygen, the same oxygen that fish, crabs and other sea creatures rely on for life.

Dead zones cause extinction ExtinctionJohn Bachtell (National Secretary, U.S. Communist Party) 6/20/2002[Life in the balance: Capitalism at war with nature and humanity online @ http://www.cpusa.org/article/view/465/, loghry]

A large amount enters nature's chain through nitrogen based fertilizers. The use of nitrogen fertilizer has accelerated world wide to overcome the mineral depletion of soil. Little of it is absorbed by the soil and it turns to runoff. It further depletes the soil by leaching other essential nutrients. The amount of nitrogen in our rivers and streams has grown dramatically. Nitrogen content has doubled in the Mississippi River since 1965. Many scientists believe this is responsible for creating large scale ecological crises, particularly in the oceans. It causes Eutrophication, mass algae blooms, in estuaries and coastal areas, leading to creeping "dead zones." These are areas where the bottom water is devoid of oxygen. For example a huge dead zone many miles across has appeared at the mouth of the Mississippi River. Eutrophication is linked to the loss of oceanic biodiversity, destruction of the corral reefs, sea grasses and seaweeds. In the last few decades 35 million acres of corral reefs have been destroyed. This has reverberating effects all the way up the food chain. We are experiencing mass deforestation and desertification, particularly in Asia and Africa. Many tropical forests which contain the greatest concentrations of biodiversity are being destroyed. We have our own desertification crisis in Montana and some western states reminiscent of the Dust Bowl. Worldwide over 135 million people in 110 countries are affected, particularly in poor rural regions. Some 60 million people are expected to leave the Sahelian region of North Africa if desertification there is not halted. The shortage of water for human consumption is a world crisis. Water tables are dropping drastically, agricultural production is threatened over vast areas, and conflicts are brewing between countries over water resources. Public water supplies are threatened with privatization. There is a sharpening contradiction between the dominant mode of production and sustaining the Earth's ecology. The capitalist mode of production seeks infinite economic expansion and the consumption of finite non-renewable energy sources. Nature has limits. At some point the destruction and altering of nature's ecology reaches a qualitative stage where the destruction is irreversible making life unlivable. We are approaching that point.

Dead Zones prevent the oceans from production oxygen and food causes extinctionSimmons 10 (Amy Simmons, ABC News Digital Producer, University of Queensland, Brigidine College, on December 1, 2010. Found at http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-11-30/scientists-fear-mass-extinction-as-oceans-choke/2357322) GH"But the point is that our activities on land have a big influence on what goes on in the oceans and now we are starting to reap the harvest of those changes." He says the heart and lungs of the planet are being tampered with. "We are starting to see changes in the ocean's ability to produce oxygen and to produce food and produce all of the ecosystem's services that are so important to not only us, but all of the other organisms on the planet," he said. "It's mucking around with the heart and lungs of the planet - that's essentially what the oceans are, a huge respiratory system. "We damage them, the consequences could be very serious." Professor Hoegh-Guldberg says while the dead zones may only exist in pockets of ocean today, it will affect a far greater area in the future unless steps are taken to reduce the impact of human activities on the world's oceans and their life.Biodiversity resilience doesnt apply Dead zones slow species recovery Parry 11(Wynne Parry, LiveScience senior writer, on March 31, 2011. Found at http://www.livescience.com/13504-permian-mass-extinction-anoxic-volcanoes-carbon-dioxide.html) GH A flood of nutrients may have created an oxygen-starved ocean about 250 million years ago, preventing life from bouncing back for a few million years after a mass extinction wiped out 90 percent of marine species, a new study indicates. The enriched, yet oxygen-starved ocean would have been similar to today's dead zones that appear in the modern ocean often as a result of agricultural runoff, as in the Gulf of Mexico. The Permian-Triassic extinction, which hit about 250 million years ago, is believed to have been the result of widespread volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia, which poured carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Although the dates are inexact so far, it seems that life took an unusually long time to recover possibly as much as 5 million years. [Oceans in Peril: Primed for Mass Extinction?] Too much of a good thing Chemical evidence from limestone deposited on the ocean floor during this time indicates that too much of a particular kind of life tiny photosynthetic organisms, like certain bacteria and possibly algae may have kept other marine species from recovering and diversifying.Dead Zones are leading to extinction all 5 mass extinctions on earth proveDiscovery News 11 (June 21, 2011. Found at http://news.discovery.com/earth/oceans-distress-foreshadow-mass-extinction-110621.htm) GHThe global marine environment is getting warmer, more acidic, and low on oxygen and all are consequences of human activity. Ocean health has declined further and faster than dire forecasts only a few years ago. Pollution and global warming are pushing the world's oceans to the brink of a mass extinction of marine life unseen for tens of millions of years, a consortium of scientists warned Monday. Dying coral reefs, biodiversity ravaged by invasive species, expanding open-water "dead zones," toxic algae blooms, the massive depletion of big fish stocks -- all are accelerating, they said in a report compiled during an April meeting in Oxford of 27 of the world's top ocean experts. Sponsored by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), the review of recent science found that ocean health has declined further and faster than dire forecasts only a few years ago. These symptoms, moreover, could be the harbinger of wider disruptions in the interlocking web of biological and chemical interactions that scientists now call the Earth system. All five mass extinctions of life on the planet, reaching back more than 500 million years, were preceded by many of the same conditions now afflicted the ocean environment, they said. "The results are shocking," said Alex Rogers, an Oxford professor who heads IPSO and co-authored the report. "We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime." Three main drivers are sickening the global marine environment, and all are a direct consequence of human activity: global warming, acidification and a dwindling oxygen level, a condition known as hypoxia. Up to now, these and other impacts have been stu