Cap K1. Sustainable energy is only an extension of green capitalism. Even if it solves the environment in the short term, it still fails to address the historic contradiction between labor and capital. Jerry Harris 10, Professor of History at DeVry University, Author of The Dialectics of Globalization: economic and political conflict in a transnational world, national secretary of the Global Studies Association of North America, Going Green to Stay in the Black: Transnational Capitalism and Renewable Energy, Network for the Critical Studies of Global Capitalism, http://netglobalcapitalism.wordpress.com/articles/going-green-to-stay-in-the-black-transnational-capitalism-and-renewable-energy/.Abstract: Sustainable energy use is rapidly developing, often with state support and patriotic political rhetoric. But the solar and wind energy industries are highly transnationalized and already inserted into global patterns of accumulation. While possibly solving some of the most pressing problems between capitalism and environmental sustainability, green capitalism still fails to address the contradiction between labor and capital. Therefore, any progressive strategy for social transformation must link the fair treatment of nature and labor together. Is the future of capitalism green? And will the country that leads in green technology dominate the global economy? That is certainly the outlook of important sectors of the capitalist class, both among long established corporations as well as new entrepreneurs. But the green economy, particularly the energy sector, is already taking a globalized path of development under the control of the transnational capitalist class (TCC). While innovative corporations may emerge as dominant players, it will be as transnational corporations (TNS), not as national champions of nation-states. In the U.S. the green revolution is promoted as the way to maintain world economic supremacy. In President Obamas state of the union speech he said, the nation that leads the clean-energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy, and America must be that nation. (1) Environmentalist Hunter Lovins calls on the U.S. to lead the world in green innovation because theyll rule the world, economically, politically, and probably militarily. (2) Thomas Friedman wraps green technology in red, white and blue calling it the new currency of power. Its all about national powerwhat could be more patriotic, capitalistic and geostrategic than that? (3). But these dreams of national greatest are already outdated. Green energy can indeed extend the life of capitalism, but not within the confines of nation-centric logic and power. Major wind and solar corporations already operate on a global scale, with innovations and research ongoing in Europe, India, Japan, China and the U.S. Furthermore, the scale of the environmental crisis is beyond any one country to solve. It calls for a global response and advanced sectors of the TCC understand these world dimensions. The environmental crisis actually offers an opportunity for capitalism to begin a new cycle of accumulation. A way to end the repeating failures of financial speculation with a renewal of productive capital. As Muller and Passadakis explain, the point about the ecological crisisis that it is neither solved nor ignored in a green capitalist regime, but rather placed at the heart of its growth strategy.(4) By creating new systems of energy, transportation, architectural design and reengineering productive processes, capitalism can greatly reduce its abuse of the environment. This would free capital from environmentally harmful industries for new areas of investment and create profitable opportunities in dynamic new markets. Such a strategic shift will not only solve the current crisis but legitimize a new political regime and lay the foundation for a hegemonic bloc with a global social base. Nonetheless, this transformation will not solve the contradiction between capital and labor, and the TCC may lack the political resolve to move fast and far enough to avoid major environmental disasters. But if the transformation does occur over the coming decades, it may solve the most pressing problems between finite environmental resources and the need of capitalism to grow and profit. With global warming widely accepted as an existential crisis capitalists have seized upon alternative and sustainable energy as a major transformative technology. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has called for a worldwide Green New Deal that would be a wholesale reconfiguration of global industry. (5) A study published by Scientific American argues for a $100 trillion dollar program, projecting that 100 percent of the worlds energy, for all purposes, could be supplied by wind, water and solar resources by 2030. (6) That is a fair amount of money, but Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency points out that, Each year without an international agreement adds $500 billion to the costs estimated at $10 trillion annually of cleaning up the power sector to help keep temperatures within a range that would avoid unstoppable climate changes. (7) Given the scale of the problem $100 trillion over 20 years sounds feasible. But dedicating $5 trillion a year from a world GDP of $54 trillion (2007) seems impossible without a political revolution. Although still a very small part of energy consumption, wind and solar power are rapidly expanding and total clean energy investments in 2008 were $155 billion and $145 billion in 2009. (8) Eventually renewable energy may play an economic role similar to the digital, computer and telecommunications revolution of the past 30 years. These technologies laid the basis for globalization and vastly expanded access to knowledge and information. (9) Economically there was innovation, dynamic emerging corporations and new cycles of accumulation. The technologies were also used by progressive activists across the world for organizing and education. Just as the digital revolution spearheaded a new era of capitalist globalization, so too can green technology open the door to the next era of growth while promoting important progressive changes. While these possibilities exist, they will develop within historic capitalist patterns that continually reassert themselves. Digital technologies became centralized into a handful of transnational corporations, both old and new, that today dominate the market and consume innovations through constant buy-outs. That pattern is already appearing in the green energy field, except there will be no singular leading location such as Silicon Valley. Solar and wind technologies are global and being consolidated by a small number of competitive TNCs. This does not necessarily undercut their environmental benefits. But it does undercut the democratic possibilities for a decentralized system of energy, and fails to solve the problems between capital and labor. By examining the major wind and solar TNCs below, we can begin to uncover the character of the new green economy.

2. Capitalism constantly exploits the environment inevitably leads to biodiversity collapse, warming, and the commodification of life Darder, Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Illinois, 2010 (Professor Antonia Darder, Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Preface in Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, & Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement by Richard V. Kahn, 2010, pp. x-xiii) GENDER MODIFIEDIt is fitting to begin my words about Richard Kahns Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement with a poem. The direct and succinct message of The Great Mother Wails cuts through our theorizing and opens us up to the very heart of the books messageto ignite a fire that speaks to the ecological crisis at hand; a crisis orchestrated by the inhumane greed and economic brutality of the wealthy. Nevertheless, as is clearly apparent, none of us is absolved from complicity with the devastating destruction of the earth. As members of the global community, we are all implicated in this destruction by the very manner in which we define ourselves, each other, and all living beings with whom we reside on the earth. Everywhere we look there are glaring signs of political systems and social structures that propel us toward unsustainability and extinction. In this historical moment, the planet faces some of the most horrendous forms of [hu]man-made devastation ever known to humankind. Cataclysmic natural disasters in the last decade have sung the environmental hymns of planetary imbalance and reckless environmental disregard. A striking feature of this ecological crisis, both locally and globally, is the overwhelming concentration of wealth held by the ruling elite and their agents of capital. This environmental malaise is characterized by the staggering loss of livelihood among working people everywhere; gross inequalities in educational opportunities; an absence of health care for millions; an unprecedented number of people living behind bars; and trillions spent on fabricated wars fundamentally tied to the control and domination of the planets resources. The Western ethos of mastery and supremacy over nature has accompanied, to our detriment, the unrelenting expansion of capitalism and its unparalleled domination over all aspects of human life. This hegemonic worldview has been unmercifully imparted through a host of public policies and practices that conveniently gloss over gross inequalities as commonsensical necessities for democracy to bloom. As a consequence, the liberal democratic rhetoric of we are all created equal hardly begins to touch the international pervasiveness of racism, patriarchy, technocracy, and economic piracy by the West, all which have fostered the erosion of civil rights and the unprecedented ecological exploitation of societies, creating conditions that now threaten our peril, if we do not reverse directions. Cataclysmic disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, are unfortunate testimonies to the danger of ignoring the warnings of the natural world, especially when coupled with egregious governmental neglect of impoverished people. Equally disturbing, is the manner in which ecological crisis is vulgarly exploited by unscrupulous and ruthless capitalists who see no problem with turning a profit off the backs of ailing and mourning oppressed populations of every specieswhether they be victims of weather disasters, catastrophic illnesses, industrial pollution, or inhumane practices of incarceration. Ultimately, these constitute ecological calamities that speak to the inhumanity and tyranny of material profiteering, at the expense of precious life. The arrogance and exploitation of neoliberal values of consumption dishonor the contemporary suffering of poor and marginalized populations around the globe. Neoliberalism denies or simply mocks (Drill baby drill!) the interrelationship and delicate balance that exists between all living beings, including the body earth. In its stead, values of individualism, competition, privatization, and the free market systematically debase the ancient ecological knowledge of indigenous populations, who have, implicitly or explicitly, rejected the fabricated ethos of progress and democracy propagated by the West. In its consuming frenzy to gobble up the natural resources of the planet for its own hyperbolic quest for material domination, the exploitative nature of capitalism and its burgeoning technocracy has dangerously deepened the structures of social exclusion, through the destruction of the very biodiversity that has been key to our global survival for millennia. Kahn insists that this devastation of all species and the planet must be fully recognized and soberly critiqued. But he does not stop there. Alongside, he rightly argues for political principles of engagement for the construction of a critical ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy that is founded on economic redistribution, cultural and linguistic democracy, indigenous sovereignty, universal human rights, and a fundamental respect for all life. As such, Kahn seeks to bring us all back to a formidable relationship with the earth, one that is unquestionably rooted in an integral order of knowledge, imbued with physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual wisdom. Within the context of such an ecologically grounded epistemology, Kahn uncompromisingly argues that our organic relationship with the earth is also intimately tied to our struggles for cultural self-determination, environmental sustainability, social and material justice, and global peace. Through a carefully framed analysis of past disasters and current ecological crisis, Kahn issues an urgent call for a critical ecopedagogy that makes central explicit articulations of the ways in which societies construct ideological, political, and cultural systems, based on social structures and practices that can serve to promote ecological sustainability and biodiversity or, conversely, lead us down a disastrous path of unsustainability and extinction. In making his case, Kahn provides a grounded examination of the manner in which consuming capitalism manifests its repressive force throughout the globe, disrupting the very ecological order of knowledge essential to the planets sustainability. He offers an understanding of critical ecopedagogy and ecoliteracy that inherently critiques the history of Western civilization and the anthropomorphic assumptions that sustain patriarchy and the subjugation of all subordinated living beingsassumptions that continue to inform traditional education discourses around the world. Kahn incisively demonstrates how a theory of multiple technoliteracies can be used to effectively critique the ecological corruption and destruction behind mainstream uses of technology and the media in the interest of the neoliberal marketplace. As such, his work points to the manner in which the sustainability rhetoric of mainstream environmentalism actually camouflages wretched neoliberal policies and practices that left unchecked hasten the annihilation of the globes ecosystem. True to its promise, the book cautions that any anti-hegemonic resistance movement that claims social justice, universal human rights, or global peace must contend forthrightly with the deteriorating ecological crisis at hand, as well as consider possible strategies and relationships that rupture the status quo and transform environmental conditions that threaten disaster. A failure to integrate ecological sustainability at the core of our political and pedagogical struggles for liberation, Kahn argues, is to blindly and misguidedly adhere to an anthropocentric worldview in which emancipatory dreams are deemed solely about human interests, without attention either to the health of the planet or to the well-being of all species with whom we walk the earth. 3. Our alternative is to the economic decision-making power in the hands of the working class and rid the government of capitalist controlSocialist Labor Party of America, 1998, The Socialist Labor Party of America tries to point out the horrors of capitalism, Who Are the Polluters? Capitalism Is Destroying the Earth! http://www.slp.org/res_state_htm/whopollute.htmlAmong the most serious problems facing society today is that of pollution and its environmentally destructive effects. Air pollution, acid rain, toxic landfills, tainted and toxic drinking water, industrial pollutants in our rivers and oceans, toxic or cancer-producing pesticides on the produce we eat, poisons in the fish we eat, unhealthy hormones and antibiotics in meat and dairy products, nuclear waste and accidents, radiation testing by the government on unsuspecting thousands, ozone depletion and global warmingthe list of bad news on the environment is seemingly unending. Each of these environmental problems represents a serious menace in its own right. Take, for example, the problem of global warming. Global Warming Carbon dioxide, water vapor and other atmospheric gases trap the suns heat and warm the Earth. Without this greenhouse effect, life on Earth would be impossible. But the greenhouse effect is being intensified by modern capitalist society. The buildup of carbon dioxide is primarily the result of burning oil, gas, coal, wood and other fuels to provide energy for capitalist industry. The profit-motivated destruction of forests the world over has also played a role because trees, like other green plants, consume carbon dioxide. Studies have confirmed the trend toward global warming time and time again over the past two decades and shown that the trend is accelerating. Capitalists and capitalist government, however, have spent more time attacking the studies than attempting to control pollutionnot surprisingly, since controlling pollution and switching to cleaner, alternative energy sources would reduce capitalist profits. Studies Ignored In 1989, NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies prepared written testimony for Congress, which cited computer projections showing that the greenhouse effect would cause substantial temperature increases, widespread droughts, flooding of coastal plains and other calamities; that global warming from the greenhouse effect was already under way and that enough was already known about the human intensification of the greenhouse effect to begin taking strong international action against air pollution. But powerful elements of the ruling capitalist class didn't want to be pushed into taking action against air pollutionthe owners of major polluting firms and others worried about the drain on profits generally if government pollution-control regulations were to be seriously stiffened and enforced, or if spending on pollution controls were to be greatly increased. Bureaucrats sympathetic to those concerns in the Office of Management and Budget decided that, since the facts of NASAs report didn't suit them, they would have to change the facts before publishing the report. At issue in the dispute were the computer models used to predict climatic change. The OMB discounted the models, completely undercutting the reports conclusion that the environmental dangers were so certain that they warranted immediate action against air pollution. Despite a 1992 international agreement among major capitalist nations that recognized the problem and promised to negotiate reductions in greenhouse gases, history seems to be repeating itself. In September 1994, The New York Times reported a new assessment of the problem by a United Nations panel that corroborated the conclusions of the 1989 NASA report and earlier reports. The Earth, the Times said, has entered a period of climatic change that is likely to cause widespread economic, social and environmental dislocation over the next century if emissions of heat-trapping gases are not reduced, according to experts advising the worlds governments. The new feature of the assessment, the Times continued, is that the experts are now more confident than before that global climate change is indeed in progress and that at least some of the warming is due to human action.... Despite the more widespread agreement among scientists, the Times noted, skeptics continue to assert that the models [used in the predictions] fail to simulate the present climate realistically and hence are an unsure guide to future climates. The report will no doubt have little effect on the present efforts of the U.S. Congress to undercut even the inadequate and infrequently enforced provisions of the Clean Air Act. Heads in the Sand In short, the worlds polluters and their allies remain so stubbornly defensive of capitalist profits that they would rather bury their heads in the sand than face up to the fact that theyand all societywill bear far greater costs in the future, as global warming continues. Their attitude is sheer madness, especially in view of the combined effects of the plethora of environmental disasters facing the world today. Taken together, they add up to one frightful, catastrophic process. This ongoing and worsening process of environmental degradation will be difficult to reverse. The longer it continues, the greater the disastrous consequences for present and future generations, and the greater the likelihood that the damage will be irreparable. Firm and decisive action against all forms of pollution is long overdue. Over the last 25 years or so, millions of people have protested against one form of pollution or another. They have demanded firm action to protect the environment and have repeatedly elected politicians who have promised firm action. But the crisis continues. Laws Subverted The laws that have been enacted and regulatory agencies that have been established have at every turn been subverted by the very corporations and firms responsible for the pollution, and by the class of capitalists that owns them. The regulations themselves have been watered down; agencies aren't funded adequately to act on them and are frequently corrupted by corporate interests; enforcement of even inadequate regulations has been poor, raising the question of whether the laws and regulations were ever in-tended to be anything more than window dressing. To understand why regulation hasn't worked and what kind of action will work to end this worsening environ-mental nightmare, it must be understood that the environmental crisis is fundamentally an economic and class issue. Its cause lies in the nature of the capitalist economic system. Cause of Pollution Pollution is not an inevitable byproduct of modern industry. Methods exist or can readily be developed to safely neutralize, recycle or contain most industrial wastes. Less polluting forms of transportation and energy can be built. Adequate supplies of food can be grown without deadly pesticides. The problem is that, under capitalism, the majority of people have no power to make these kinds of decisions about production. Under the capitalist system, production decisions are made by the small, wealthy minority that owns and controls the industries and servicesthe capitalist class. And the capitalists who make up that class make their decisions to serve, first and foremost, one goalthat of maximizing profit for themselves. That is where the environmental crisis begins. From the capitalist point of view, it is generally less costly to dump pollutants into the environment than to invest in pollution-control equipment or pollution-free processes. It is more profitable to continue energy production as it is rather than invest more heavily in solar, wind or other alternative energy sources. Likewise with every other aspect of the environmental crisis: Socially harmful decisions are made because, in one way or another, they serve the profit interests of the capitalist class. Capitalist-class rule over the economy also explains why government regulation is so ineffective: under capitalism, government itself is essentially a tool of the capitalist class. Politicians may be elected democratically, but because they are financed, supported and decisively influenced by the economic power of the capitalist class, democratic forms are reduced to a farce. The capitalist class and its government will never be able to solve the environmental crisis. They and their system are the problem. It is up to the working class, the majority of people who actually produce societys goods and services and daily operate its industries, to end this crisis. The Socialist Solution The action workers must take is to realize their latent economic and political power as operators of the industries and services by building industrywide unions integrated into one movement with the goal of building a new society with completely different motives for productionhuman needs and wants instead of profitand to organize their own political party to challenge the political power of the capitalists, express their mandate for change at the ballot box and dismantle the state altogether. The new society they must aim for must be one in which society itself, not a wealthy few, would own the industries and services, and the workers themselves would control them democratically through their own organizations based in the workplaces. In such a society, the workers themselves would make decisions governing the economy, electing representatives to industrial councils and to a workers congress representing all the industries that would administer the economy. Such a societya socialist industrial democracyis what is needed to solve the environmental crisis. By placing the economic decision-making power of the nation in the hands of the workers, by eliminating capitalist control and the profit motive in favor of a system in which workers produce to meet their own needs and wants, the necessary resources and labor could be devoted to stop pollution at its source and clean up the damage already done.4. Framework: a. Deontological principles of rights should be considered first other interpretations are assigned no moral value if conflicting with the principles of rights because viewing the debate from a deontological perspective is the only way to guarantee freedomFreeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)The priority of right asserts then that the reasons supplied by moral motives-principles of right and their institutional requirements-have absolute precedence over all other considerations. As such, moral motives must occupy a separate dimension in practical reasoning. Suppose then a supplementary stage of practical reasoning, where the interests and pursuits that figure into ordinary deliberation and which define our conception of the good are checked against principles of right and justice. At this stage of reasoning, any ends that directly conflict with these moral principles (e.g., racist ends or the wish to dominate others), or whose pursuit would undermine the efficacy of principles of right (e.g., desires for unlimited accumulation of wealth whatever the consequences for others), are assigned no moral value, no matter how intensely felt or important they may otherwise be. Being without moral value, they count for nothing in deliberation. Consequently, their pursuit is prohibited or curtailed by the priority given to principles of right. The priority of right then describes the hierarchical subordination in practical deliberation of the desires, interests, and plans that define a person's rational good, to the substantive demands of principles of right.32 Purposes and pursuits that are incompatible with these principles must be abandoned or revised. The same idea carries through to social and political deliberations on the general good. In political deliberative procedures, the priority of right means that desires and interests of individuals or groups that conflict with the institutional requirements of principles of right and justice have no legitimate claim to satisfaction, no matter how intense peoples' feelings or how large the majority sharing these aims. Constitutional restrictions on majority rule exhibit the priority of right. In democratic procedures, majorities cannot violate constitutional rights and procedures to promote, say, the Christian religion, or any other aspect of their good that undermines others' basic rights and opportunities. Similarly, the institutional requirements of Rawls's difference principle limit, for example, property owners' desires for tax exemptions for capital gains, and the just savings principle limits current majorities' wishes to deplete natural resources. These desires are curtailed in political contexts, no matter how intense or widely held, because of the priority of principles of right over individual and general good.33 The priority of right enables Rawls to define a notion of admissible conceptions of the good: of those desires, interests and plans of life that may legitimately be pursued for political purposes. Only admissible conceptions of the good establish a basis for legitimate claims in political procedures (cf. TJ, p. 449). That certain desires and pursuits are permissible, and political claims based on them are legitimate, while others are not, presupposes antecedently established principles of right and justice. Racist conceptions of the good are not politically admissible; actions done in their pursuit are either prohibited or discouraged by a just social scheme, and they provide no basis for legitimate claims in political procedures. Excellences such as knowledge, creativity, and aesthetic contemplation are permissible ends for individuals so long as they are pursued in accordance with the constraints of principles of right. Suppose these perfectionist principles state intrinsic values that it is the duty of everyone to pursue. (Rawls leaves this question open. cf. TJ, p. 328.) Still, they cannot supply a basis for legitimate political claims and expectations; they cannot be appealed to in political contexts to justify limiting others' freedom, or even the coercive redistribution of income and wealth (cf. TJ, pp. 331-32). This is because of the priority of right over the good. Now return to Kymlicka's argument. Kymlicka says both Rawls and utilitarians agree on the premise of giving equal consideration to everyone's interests, and that because utilitarians afford equal consideration, "they must recognize, rather than deny, that individuals are distinct persons with their own rightful claims. That is, in Rawls's classification, a position that affirms the priority of the right over the good" (LCC, p. 26). Since "Rawls treats the right as a spelling-out of the requirement that each person's good be given equal consideration," there is no debate between Rawls and utilitarians over the priority of the right or the good (LCC, p. 40).

b. Utilitarianism disregards respect for the individual and perpetuates societal inequality by evaluating utility as a wholeFreeman 94 Avalon Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. Harvard University, J.D. University of North Carolina (Samuel, Utilitarianism, Deontology, and the Priority of Right, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 4, Autumn, pp. 313-349, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2265463)The inclusion of all sentient beings in the calculation of interests severely undermines the force of any claim that utilitarianism is an "egalitarian" doctrine, based in some notion of equal concern and respect for persons. But let us assume Kymlicka can restore his thesis by insisting that it concerns, not utilitarianism as a general moral doctrine, but as a more limited thesis about political morality. (Here I pass over the fact that none of the utilitarians he relies on to support his egalitarian interpretation construe the doctrine as purely political. The drift of modern utilitarian theory is just the other way: utilitarianism is not seen as a political doctrine, to be appealed to by legislators and citizens, but a nonpublic criterion of right that is indirectly applied [by whom is a separate issue] to assess the nonutilitarian public political conception of justice.) Still, let us assume it is as a doctrine of political morality that utilitarianism treats persons, and only persons, as equals. Even in this form it cannot be that maximizing utility is "not a goal" but a "by-product," "entirely derived from the prior requirement to treat people with equal consideration" (CPP, p. 31) Kymlicka says, "If utilitarianism is best seen as an egalitarian doctrine, then there is no independent commitment to the idea of maximizing welfare" (CPP, p. 35, emphases added). But how can this be? (i) What is there about the formal principle of equal consideration (or for that matter occupying a universal point of view) which would imply that we maximize the aggregate of individuals' welfare? Why not assume, for example, that equal consideration requires maximizing the division of welfare (strict equality, or however equal division is to be construed); or, at least maximize the multiple (which would result in more equitable distributions than the aggregate)? Or, why not suppose equal consideration requires equal proportionate satisfaction of each person's interests (by for example, determining our resources and then satisfying some set percentage of each person's desires) . Or finally we might rely on some Paretian principle: equal consideration means adopting measures making no one worse off. For reasons I shall soon discuss, each of these rules is a better explication of equal consideration of each person's interests than is the utilitarian aggregative method, which in effect collapses distinctions among persons. (2) Moreover, rather than construing individuals' "interests" as their actual (or rational) desires, and then putting them all on a par and measuring according to intensity, why not construe their interests lexically, in terms of a hierarchy of wants, where certain interests are, to use Scanlon's terms, more "urgent" than others, insofar as they are more basic needs? Equal consideration would then rule out satisfying less urgent interests of the majority of people until all means have been taken to satisfy everyone's more basic needs. (3) Finally, what is there about equal consideration, by itself, that requires maximizing anything? Why does it not require, as in David Gauthier's view, optimizing constraints on individual utility maximization? Or why does it not require sharing a distribution? The point is just that, to say we ought to give equal consideration to everyone's interests does not, by itself, imply much of anything about how we ought to proceed or what we ought to do. It is a purely formal principle, which requires certain added, independent assumptions, to yield any substantive conclusions. That (i) utilitarian procedures maximize is not a "by-product" of equal consideration. It stems from a particular conception of rationality that is explicitly incorporated into the procedure. That (2) individuals' interests are construed in terms of their (rational) desires or preferences, all of which are put on a par, stems from a conception of individual welfare or the human good: a person's good is defined subjectively, as what he wants or would want after due reflection. Finally (3), aggregation stems from the fact that, on the classical view, a single individual takes up everyone's desires as if they were his own, sympathetically identifies with them, and chooses to maximize his "individual" utility. Hare, for one, explicitly makes this move. Just as Rawls says of the classical view, Hare "extend[s] to society the principle of choice for one man, and then, to make this extension work, conflat[es] all persons into one through the imaginative acts of the impartial sympathetic spectator" (TJ, p. 27). If these are independent premises incorporated into the justification of utilitarianism and its decision procedure, then maximizing aggregate utility cannot be a "by-product" of a procedure that gives equal consideration to everyone's interests. Instead, it defines what that procedure is. If anything is a by-product here, it is the appeal to equal consideration. Utilitarians appeal to impartiality in order to extend a method of individual practical rationality so that it may be applied to society as a whole (cf. TJ, pp. 26-27). Impartiality, combined with sympathetic identification, allows a hypothetical observer to experience the desires of others as if they were his own, and compare alternative courses of action according to their conduciveness to a single maximand, made possible by equal consideration and sympathy. The significant fact is that, in this procedure, appeals to equal consideration have nothing to do with impartiality between persons. What is really being given equal consideration are desires or experiences of the same magnitude. That these are the desires or experiences of separate persons (or, for that matter, of some other sentient being) is simply an incidental fact that has no substantive effect on utilitarian calculations. This becomes apparent from the fact that we can more accurately describe the utilitarian principle in terms of giving, not equal consideration to each person's interests, but instead equal consideration to equally intense interests, no matter where they occur. Nothing is lost in this redescription, and a great deal of clarity is gained. It is in this sense that persons enter into utilitarian calculations only incidentally. Any mention of them can be dropped without loss of the crucial information one needs to learn how to apply utilitarian procedures. This indicates what is wrong with the common claim that utilitarians emphasize procedural equality and fairness among persons, not substantive equality and fairness in results. On the contrary, utilitarianism, rightly construed, emphasizes neither procedural nor substantive equality among persons. Desires and experiences, not persons, are the proper objects of equal concern in utilitarian procedures. Having in effect read persons out of the picture at the procedural end, before decisions on distributions even get underway, it is little wonder that utilitarianism can result in such substantive inequalities. What follows is that utilitarian appeals to democracy and the democratic value of equality are misleading. In no sense do utilitarians seek to give persons equal concern and respect.

CaseEnergy

US economy high now consumer confidence Glinski 7/10 Columbia University grad and reporter at Bloomberg (Nina, Consumer View of U.S. Economy Highest Since Early 2008, 10 July 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-10/consumer-view-of-u-s-economy-highest-since-early-2008.html//AL) Consumer sentiment improved last week as Americans were more upbeat about the U.S. economy than at any time in the past six years. The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index rose to 37.6 in the week ended July 6, the third-strongest reading since the start of 2008, from 36.4 in the prior period. The gauge measuring views of the economy, which has surged 7.1 points since a mid-May low, reached the highest point since January 2008. More hiring and fewer firings this year have helped firm sentiment, setting the stage for a pickup in consumer spending that will probably bolster the economy. Middle-income and wealthier households were among those turning more optimistic last week as stocks rose to a record and gasoline prices stabilized. Improving labor and stock markets have bolstered middle-income opinion about the state of the economy and their own personal financial situations, said Joseph Brusuelas a senior economist at Bloomberg LP in New York. Job creation exceeded economists expectations in June, climbing 288,000 after a 224,000 gain, while the unemployment rate fell to a near six-year low, Labor Department figures showed last week. Companies are also limiting dismissals. A report today showed fewer Americans than forecast filed applications for unemployment benefits last week. Jobless claims declined by 11,000 to 304,000 in the week ended July 5, the fewest in more than a month, according to the Labor Department. The median forecast of 45 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for 315,000 claims.

Cant solve oil dependence requires unsustainable amounts of energy, water, and fertilizer Rampton and Zabarenko 12 environmental correspondents for Reuters (Roberta and Deborah, Algae biofuel not sustainable now-U.S. research council, Reuters, 10-24-12, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/us-usa-biofuels-algae-idUSBRE89N1Q820121024)//KGBiofuels made from algae, promoted by President Barack Obama as a possible way to help wean Americans off foreign oil, cannot be made now on a large scale without using unsustainable amounts of energy, water and fertilizer, the U.S. National Research Council reported on Wednesday. "Faced with today's technology, to scale up any more is going to put really big demands on ... not only energy input, but water, land and the nutrients you need, like carbon dioxide, nitrate and phosphate," said Jennie Hunter-Cevera, a microbial physiologist who headed the committee that wrote the report. Hunter-Cevera stressed that this is not a definitive rejection of algal biofuels, but a recognition that they may not be ready to supply even 5 percent, or approximately 10.3 billion gallons (39 billion liters), of U.S. transportation fuel needs. "Algal biofuels is still a teenager that needs to be developed and nurtured," she said by telephone. The National Research Council is part of the National Academies, a group of private nonprofit institutions that advise government on science, technology and health policy. Its sustainability assessment was requested by the Department of Energy, which has invested heavily in projects to develop the alternative fuel.

Oil price shocks wont devastate the economy anymore Ro 6/30 - Sam is editor of Money Game. He has been published on Forbes, DealBreaker, and The Fiscal Times. He was the senior equity analyst for the Forbes Special Situation Survey and Forbes Growth Investor equity newsletters. Sam has also held positions at James F. Reda & Associates, Brown Brothers Harriman, and Paul Weiss. He holds a BA in Religion from Boston University, and he is a CFA Charterholder (Sam, Oil Price Shocks Aren't As Harmful As They Used To Be, 30 June 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/impact-of-oil-price-shock-2014-6//AL) Recent turmoil in Iraq has sent oil prices much higher. But economists aren't ready to freak out just yet. "Over time, however, those shocks to the relative price of oil have spurred innovations that have led to a more efficient use of energy inputs," continued Zentner. "Alongside growing use of other energy inputs, those innovations have reduced the world economys dependence on oil." Zentner presented this chart showing how a decreasing amount of energy has been needed to generated a dollar's worth of GDP in the world. It may not be immediately intuitive how this could be. Zentner offers a more micro level example that anyone who's been in a car can appreciate. US households have also adjusted consumption patterns over time. When gasoline prices rise, drivers tend to reduce mileage in response and/or seek out more fuel efficient vehicles. This altered behavior, coupled with shifting demographic factors and a slow labor market recovery since the financial crisis, has weighed on vehicle miles driven and lessens the aggregate impact of price increases at the pump. In the 12 months ended May 2014, average vehicle miles driven remained below the previous peak (reached in November 2007) for a 76th straight month. In 1990, consumers devoted 3.8% of total consumption to motor fuels. By 2013, that share had fallen to 2.3% (Exhibit 3). Here's her chart. It shares a similar downward slope as the chart above. It's certainly worth noting that innovation isn't just about fuel efficiency. Technological developments have enabled U.S. oil drillers to extract fossil fuels from shale in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Texas and elsewhere using unconventional methods. Indeed, thanks to the shale boom, we might not even see Middle East-triggered oil price spikes we've seen in past.

No impact to econ declineBazzi and Blattman 11 -- Bazzi is a grad student at the Department of Economics at University of California San Diego and Christopher Blattman is an assistant professor of political science and economics at Yale (Samuel and Christopher, November 2011 Economic Shocks and Conflict: The (Absence of?) Evidence from Commodity Prices http://www.chrisblattman.com/documents/research/2011.EconomicShocksAndConflict.pdf?9d7bd4)//AA VI. Discussion and conclusions A. Implications for our theories of political instability and conflict The state is not a prize?Warlord politics and the state prize logic lie at the center of the most influential models of conflict, state development, and political transitions in economics and political science. Yet we see no evidence for this idea in economic shocks, even when looking at the friendliest cases: fragile and unconstrained states dominated by extractive commodity revenues. Indeed, we see the opposite correlation: if anything, higher rents from commodity prices weakly 22 lower the risk and length of conflict. Perhaps shocks are the wrong test. Stocks of resources could matter more than price shocks (especially if shocks are transitory). But combined with emerging evidence that war onset is no more likely even with rapid increases in known oil reserves (Humphreys 2005; Cotet and Tsui 2010) we regard the state prize logic of war with skepticism.17 Our main political economy models may need a new engine. Naturally, an absence of evidence cannot be taken for evidence of absence. Many of our conflict onset and ending results include sizeable positive and negative effects.18 Even so, commodity price shocks are highly influential in income and should provide a rich source of identifiable variation in instability. It is difficult to find a better-measured, more abundant, and plausibly exogenous independent variable than price volatility. Moreover, other time-varying variables, like rainfall and foreign aid, exhibit robust correlations with conflict in spite of suffering similar empirical drawbacks and generally smaller sample sizes (Miguel et al. 2004; Nielsen et al. 2011). Thus we take the absence of evidence seriously. Do resource revenues drive state capacity?State prize models assume that rising revenues raise the value of the capturing the state, but have ignored or downplayed the effect of revenues on self-defense. We saw that a growing empirical political science literature takes just such a revenue-centered approach, illustrating that resource boom times permit both payoffs and repression, and that stocks of lootable or extractive resources can bring political order and stability. This countervailing effect is most likely with transitory shocks, as current revenues are affected while long term value is not. Our findings are partly consistent with this state capacity effect. For example, conflict intensity is most sensitive to changes in the extractive commodities rather than the annual agricultural crops that affect household incomes more directly. The relationship only holds for conflict intensity, however, and is somewhat fragile. We do not see a large, consistent or robust decline in conflict or coup risk when prices fall. A reasonable interpretation is that the state prize and state capacity effects are either small or tend to cancel one another out. Opportunity cost: Victory by default?Finally, the inverse relationship between prices and war intensity is consistent with opportunity cost accounts, but not exclusively so. As we noted above, the relationship between intensity and extractive commodity prices is more consistent with the state capacity view. Moreover, we shouldnt mistake an inverse relation between individual aggression and incomes as evidence for the opportunity cost mechanism. The same correlation is consistent with psychological theories of stress and aggression (Berkowitz 1993) and sociological and political theories of relative deprivation and anomie (Merton 1938; Gurr 1971). Microempirical work will be needed to distinguish between these mechanisms. Other reasons for a null result.Ultimately, however, the fact that commodity price shocks have no discernible effect on new conflict onsets, but some effect on ongoing conflict, suggests that political stability might be less sensitive to income or temporary shocks than generally believed. One possibility is that successfully mounting an insurgency is no easy task. It comes with considerable risk, costs, and coordination challenges. Another possibility is that the counterfactual is still conflict onset. In poor and fragile nations, income shocks of one type or another are ubiquitous. If a nation is so fragile that a change in prices could lead to war, then other shocks may trigger war even in the absence of a price shock. The same argument has been made in debunking the myth that price shocks led to fiscal collapse and low growth in developing nations in the 1980s.19 B. A general problem of publication bias? More generally, these findings should heighten our concern with publication bias in the conflict literature. Our results run against a number of published results on commodity shocks and conflict, mainly because of select samples, misspecification, and sensitivity to model assumptions, and, most importantly, alternative measures of instability. Across the social and hard sciences, there is a concern that the majority of published research findings are false (e.g. Gerber et al. 2001). Ioannidis (2005) demonstrates that a published finding is less likely to be true when there is a greater number and lesser pre-selection of tested relationships; there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and models; and when more teams are involved in the chase of statistical significance. The cross-national study of conflict is an extreme case of all these. Most worryingly, almost no paper looks at alternative dependent variables or publishes systematic robustness checks. Hegre and Sambanis (2006) have shown that the majority of published conflict results are fragile, though they focus on timeinvariant regressors and not the time-varying shocks that have grown in popularity. We are also concerned there is a file drawer problem (Rosenthal 1979). Consider this decision rule: scholars that discover robust results that fit a theoretical intuition pursue the results; but if results are not robust the scholar (or referees) worry about problems with the data or empirical strategy, and identify additional work to be done. If further analysis produces a robust result, it is published. If not, back to the file drawer. In the aggregate, the consequences are dire: a lower threshold of evidence for initially significant results than ambiguous ones.20EnvironmentApocalyptic Ecological collapse scenarios create apathy and tank solvency. Reject the aff, the only real solutions to resolve these impacts are through appealing to the community through discussionsBrian Tokar - M.A., biophysics, Harvard University, and is the current director for the Institute for Social Ecology; April 11, 2013; Apocalypse, Not? by Brian Tokar; Institute for Social Ecology; http://www.social-ecology.org/2013/04/apocalypse-not-by-brian-tokar/Eddie Yuen, editor of two essential volumes that analyzed the emergence of anticapitalist movements in conjunction with the Seattle WTO protests, focuses his chapter on the prevalence of apocalyptic thinking in the environmental movement. While there is no question that we are in a genuinely catastrophic moment in human history, the litanies of calamity often emphasized by environmentalists have led to a catastrophe fatigue that ultimately pacifies rather than energizes most people. Yuen invokes the familiar figures of Thomas Malthus and Al Gore to bookend his analysis of how catastrophic predictions often fail to usher in positive social outcomes. (Gore, it is rarely acknowledged, was among the first to predict that an inadequate response to climate change would likely lead to increased political repression.) Further, false predictions of catastrophe, from the population bomb to the Y2K frenzy fueled in part by Helen Caldicott and many environmentalists often serve to discredit environmental predictions in the eyes of much of the public. Apocalyptic scenarios, in Yuens words, serve as a kind of substitutionism, in which a miraculous event transforms consciousness, wipes the slate clean and abruptly changes the world [without] the need for difficult organizing and conflictive politics. For Yuen, todays popular forecasters of ecological collapse are more likely to fuel right wing fanaticism, e.g. calls to seal the borders to immigrants, than to facilitate a progressive awakening. Real solutions must be prefigurative and practical as well as visionary and participatory, appealing to community and solidarity rather than austerity and discipline, but unfortunately the book offers few suggestions for how to actualize this. Radical disaster relief efforts, from Common Ground in New Orleans to Occupy Sandy, offer one inspiring model of how to help further utopian expectations in apocalyptic times, and the analysis here could have been strengthened by a discussion of such examples, among others.

Cant solve warming may even cause more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels Rampton and Zabarenko 12 environmental correspondents for Reuters (Roberta and Deborah, Algae biofuel not sustainable now-U.S. research council, Reuters, 10-24-12, http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/24/us-usa-biofuels-algae-idUSBRE89N1Q820121024)//KGGREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS It said a main reason to use alternative fuels for transportation is to cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions created by burning fossil fuel. But estimates of greenhouse emissions from algal biofuels cover a wide range, with some suggesting that over their life cycle, the fuels release more climate-warming gas than petroleum, it said. The product now made in small quantities by Sapphire uses algae, sunlight and carbon dioxide as feedstocks to make fuel that is not dependent on food crops or farmland. The company calls it "green crude." Tim Zenk, a Sapphire vice president, said the company has worked for five years on the sustainability issues examined in the report. "The NRC has acknowledged something that the industry has known about in its infancy and began to address immediately," he said. He said Sapphire recycles water and uses land that is not suitable for agriculture at its New Mexico site, where it hopes to make 100 barrels of algal biofuel a day by 2014. The U.S. Navy used algal biofuel along with fuel made from cooking oil waste as part of its "Green Fleet" military exercises demonstration this summer, drawing fire from Republican lawmakers for its nearly $27 per gallon cost. The council study also said it was unclear whether producing that much biofuel from algae would actually lead to reduced greenhouse gas emissions. The report shows the strategy is too risky, said Friends of the Earth, an environmental group. "Algae production poses a double-edged threat to our water resources, already strained by the drought," Michal Rosenoer, a biofuels campaigner with the group, said in a statement.The plan hurts the environment limits access to foraging areas, creates entanglement and drowning hazards, and contributes to plastic pollution in the ocean Hughes 5/20 Moss Landing Marine Laboratories (Stephanie N, Interactions of marine mammals and birds with offshore membrane enclosures for growing algae (OMEGA), 20 May 2014, http://www.aquaticbiosystems.org/content/10/1/3#B20//AL) In general, animal interactions with the experimental PBRs floating in Moss Landing harbor in fall and winter were brief (usually