Capitalism K

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Fracking perpetuates a neoliberal discourse that allows for further exploitation of the environment in the interest of capitalist elites Finewood and Stroup, 2012 [Michael H. Finewood is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability at Chatham
Universitys School of Sustainability and the Environment in Pittsburgh; Laura J. Stroup is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at St. Michaels College in VT+, Fracking and the Neoliberalization of the Hydro-Social Cycle in Pennsylvanias Marcellus Shale Universities Council on Water resources Journal of Contemporary Water research & education, issue 147, pages 72-79, March 2012 Despite the fact that industrial natural

gas development is initiated at the national and global scales, land use decision-making and impacts are felt at the local scale where rural stakeholders (who often utilize diverse, resource-based livelihood strategies) must compete for the same land and water resources as fossil fuel developers. This brings into focus why oil and gas firms aggressively try to control the discourse about the hydro-social cycle. Importantly,
desires to expand local economic growth opportunities are ever-present, and landowners are often motivated to lease their property to extraction firms based on complex, multi-scalar arguments that center on this possibility. This

has created strong tensions between proponents and opponents, particularly because water is both abundant in northeastern PA and is argued to be just another economic input in the broader picture. This is in opposition to water as a multi-faceted, multi-value resource that can be readily degraded, perhaps irrevocably in the natural gas industrial production process. Harvey (2005) has broadly posited that neoliberal strategies are enacted to ensure the consolidation of capital into specific hands, and Bakker (2010) suggests that water is a final frontier for capitalism. While we agree, this does not sufficiently explain why the multi-scalar, pro-fracking arguments are effective. We
know, for example, that the arguments are intellectually weak: natural gas extraction is not green (Howarth et al. 2011); shale gas will not likely get the nation off of foreign oil (Tyndall Centre 2011); fracking poses serious risks to water quality and is in need of stronger regulations (Parfitt 2010; Jackson et al. 2011). Also the process is driven by specific interests (e.g., Americas Natural Gas Alliance). We suggest, then, the issue is less about the argument, and more about the way the hydro-social cycle is framed in support of fracking. Fletcher (2010) suggests that neoliberalism is a general strategy of governing human action (171), or a way of conducting conduct (Foucault 2008; Fletcher 2010, 173). In other words, neoliberalism

is not just an argument, but also a strategy for reworking societies non-human world (McCarthy and Prudham 2004; Heynen et al. 2007). Since, at the outset, environmental concerns are often seen in opposition to development, fracking proponents must co-opt, define, and control the meaning of environmental resources. This first means redefining the value of water as an economic input, so perception of, and
relationship to, the that its degradation makes sense in a broader benefit/cost framework. Thus the hydro-social cycle is less a relationship between people and water, but rather a commodity that can be monetized for global markets (Finewood and Porter 2010). One can observe the effectiveness of such a practice through the sacrifices that individuals are expected to make for their and the nations economic future. In other words, people must exchange their noneconomic resources for economic resources, as if they were simply interchangeable. In this scenario, firms are the legitimate source of knowledge and information. Neoliberal

approaches to environmental governance suggest rolling back environmental regulations (Peck and Tickell 2002), tacitly celebrating the knowledge and experience of private industry. In this case, with a lack of funding for regulatory agencies and a general disdain for environmental concerns when framed as opposing economic development, a knowledge vacuum is created for oil and gas firms to fill. Firms become the de facto expertise on the environmental impacts of fracking as well as the expert counterpoint to anti-fracking voices. In addition, as the fracking process happens up to a mile under the surface
of the ground, in largely inaccessible and rural areas, and often on private property, the full spatial and temporal impacts of the process occur largely outof-sight, leaving stakeholders very few alternatives but to seek information from oil and gas firms. Finally, as

neoliberalization of the hydrosocial cycle becomes taken-for-granted, or common up for water resources as a human/non-human right are increasingly marginalized. The refrain of environmentalists

the sense, those who speak

as anti-jobs, being out of touch with reality, and/or prioritizing nature over people has become relatively common trope in U.S. society. Even those who may not consider themselves environmentalists, but seek to advocate for regional environmental resources, are marginalized within the broader debate. Further, not only does this tactic set the discursive stage for a rational group of economically minded people versus irrational environmentalists (i.e., economy versus the environment), but it also uses environmental perception as an arena for political and economic projects (Heynen et al. 2007, 12). Thus the legitimacy of a neoliberal environment discourse is reinforced while delegitimizing alternatives.

Natural gas promotion is complicitous with a program of neoliberal capital Competitive Enterprise Institute, 1-27-12 [Resourceful Earth project blog,
http://resourcefulearth.org/2012/01/27/more-crony-capitalism-natural-gas-edition/

More Crony Capitalism:

Natural Gas Edition

Despite the overwhelming success of our domestic natural gas industries in recent years, President Obama doesnt seem content to

leave the market alone, as he is now touring the nation promoting subsidies for the natural gas industry :

Obama didnt mention Pickens or the Pickens Plan-inspired NAT GAS Act by name in his Las Vegas speech. But he
touted the creation of a natural gas corridor from Long Beach, Calif., to Salt Lake City that allows vehicles to fuel up along the highway and encourages companies to transition to a clean-energy fleet to transport goods. The experts believe it could support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade, Obama said, referring to natural gas. We, it turns out, are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. Weve got a lot of it. After Obamas speech, Pickens spiked the football, saying, My work here is done almost. Pickens says he has spent nearly $100 million over 3 years promoting his plan. Ive accomplished my goal of achieving legislation and proposed policies to help solve the OPEC oil crisis, Pickens said in a statement. The balls now in Washingtons court. What we need is leadership. Despite the political partisanship that divides Washington, I am hopeful and confident Congress will put Americas best energy future first. We need leadership to ignore the constant lobbying requests by hundreds of industries attempting to distort our nations economic activity and funnel money into their own industries. T.

Boone Pickens a gas man has been pushing this plan for years, the NAT GAS Act, which will vastly increase his wealth by making his stock holdings in natural gas companies (including companies he runs) worth much more. Now we see that he has almost unlimited access to the White House aside from the extensive lobbying of Democrats and Republicans.
Earlier this year, some conservative groups caused a stink by pointing out correctly that this is just a giant subsidy for Pickens and is completely unnecessary. Fortunately, it caused a number of sponsors of the T. Boondoggle Pickens bill to drop off. The natural gas industry is doing fine. Conservatives understand that its wrong to subsidize green energy projects, yet at times seem tempted to throw this logic out the window when it comes to fossil fuel development. Do not by the hype that Pickens is doing this for the good of the country. He may feel that way, but hes also going to be a much wealthier man if Obama successfully passes this legislation. Energy

subsidies are bad policy even when theyre for forms of energy

we like. A number of cities have already converted their buses and other forms of public transportation from oil to natural gas, because
natural gas is cheap and it saved them money. We dont need the government to get involved.

Capitalism causes war, environmental destruction, and genocide Everest 12 (Larry; correspondent for Revolution newspaper; 5/24/12; WAR AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM: Money for Jobs Not for War:
American Chauvinism and Reformist Illusions http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31024)
Money for Jobs and Education! Jobs and Education, Not War and Occupation! This slogan put forth by several US social movements is profoundly wrong and harmfulboth in terms of morality thats actually in the interests of humanity, and in terms of a scientific understanding of imperialism and war. Why should antiwar demands focus first and foremost on the wars impact on Americans and their livesand not on the victims of U.S. aggression: Pakistanis murdered in U.S. drone strikes, Iraqis rounded up and tortured by U.S. forces, Afghans seized and terrorized in night raids, and countless others? Arent their lives every bit as precious as the lives of those who happen to live in the U.S.? Money for jobs, not for war argues that American lives are more important than other peoples lives. This logic goes right along withand amplifiesthe mindset relentlessly fostered by the systems rulers and their media machine: that American lives come first. This is the very mindset the rulers count on to justify and build public support (or acquiescence) for their predatory wars of empire. The slogan also promotes the idea that the political powers-that-beif pressured by enough peoplecould scale back their military, stop attacking other countries, and instead use the money for jobs,

Wars, invasions, and occupations are not policies of one set of politicians or another, or arbitrary choices made by this or that president. At this stage in history, capitalism is a global system, with the U.S. the worlds most dominant capitalist-imperialist power, presiding over a worldwide empire of exploitation. This empire rests on the domination of the oppressed countries where the vast majority of humanity lives, and on control of labor, markets, and resources. This entails the violent suppression of the masses of people in the dominated areasand also entails fighting off challenges from other imperialists as well as rising forces in those countries that stand in the way. This requires a monstrously huge military that is deployed worldwide, with bases in over 100 countries, and wars when necessary. The wars for domination in the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere dont interfere with the functioning of U.S. capitaltheyre absolutely essential to it, and to the U.S.s overall global dominance. This is why the U.S. rulers are compelledand willing tospend trillions on the military, including during periods of severe economic and fiscal stress, no matter who happens to sit in the White House or Congress. This system of global capitalism-imperialism headed by the U.S. is the main source of the horrors that torment so many across the globefrom the ethnic cleansing and slow genocide of the
education, and other social welfare programs at home. But thats not how the system actually operates!

Palestinian people by the U.S. and Israel, to the mass incarceration and slow genocide of Black people in the U.S.; from the rape of the planet to the systematic degradation and violence against womenhere and around the world; from the extreme deprivation and starvation faced by billions across the planet to the growing poverty and desperation faced by millions in the U.S. The
rulers in these imperial metropoles distribute some of the spoils of empire to provide a higher standard of living than in the oppressed countries and buy social peace and loyalty at home (which Money for Jobs, Not For War encourages). People in the U.S. should reject that foul pact! The vast majority in the U.S. have a profound interest in making common cause with oppressed people worldwide, not in siding with their rulers. That means fostering a morality that declares: American lives are not more important than other peoples lives!not pandering to American chauvinism, which strengthens the system responsible for so much misery. It means people shouldnt appeal to those on the top to spend more on jobs, but to clearly and unequivocally demand a STOP to the horrors the U.S. is committing around the world. Through this process of actively opposing U.S. aggression and the America Number 1 mindset fostered to justify it, people can and must be won to increasingly see that this capitalist system and state is utterly un-reformable and that its going to take revolution to get rid of it, end its predatory wars once and for all, and bring into being a whole new system and state that is in the actual interests of the people in the U.S. and around the world.

Continued capitalist expansion risks extinction Zizek 11 (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, visiting professor at Columbia University,
Princeton, Living in the End Times, Pages 334. London: Verso, 2011. Print.)

The December 2009 Copenhagen talks between the top representatives of 20 great powers about how to fight global warming failed miserably the result was a vague compromise without any fixed deadlines or obligations, more a statement of intentions than a treaty. The lesson is bitter and clear: the state political elites serve capital, they are unable and/or unwilling to control and regulate capital even when the very survival of the human race is ultimately at stake . Fredric Jameson's old quip holds today more than ever: it is easier to imagine a total catastrophe which ends all life on earth than it is to imagine a real change in capitalist relationsas if, even after a global cataclysm, capitalism will somehow continue . . . One argument more for the fact that, when our natural commons are threatened, neither market nor state will save us, but only a properly communist mobilization. All one has to do here is to compare the reaction to the financial meltdown of September 2008 with the Copenhagen conference of 2009: save the planet from global warming
(alternatively: save the AIDS patients, save those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments and operations, save the starving children, and so on) all this can

wait a little bit, but the call "Save the banks!" is an unconditional imperative which demands and receives immediate action. The panic was here absolute, a trans-national, nonpartisan unity was immediately established, all grudges between world leaders momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe. We may worry as much as we want about global realities, but it is Capital which is the Real of our lives. Consequently, as suggested earlier, we should not say that capitalism is sustained by the egotistic greed of individual capitalists, since their greed is itself subordinated to the impersonal striving of the capital itself to reproduce; what we really need is more, not less, enlightened egotism.

The conflict between capitalism and ecology may appear to be a typical conflict between pathological egotistic-utilitarian interests and a properly ethical care for the common good of humanity . Upon a closer look, however, it immediately becomes clear that the situation is exactly the opposite: it is our ecological concerns which are grounded in a utilitarian sense of survival, and as such lack the properly ethical dimension, simply standing for enlightened self-interest, or, at its highest, for the interest of future generations (assuming,
of course, that we ignore the New Age spiritualist notion of the sacredness of life as such, of the right of the environment to preservation, etc.). The ethical dimension in this situation is rather to be found in capitalism's drive towards its own ever-expanding reproduction: a capitalist who dedicates himself unconditionally to

the capitalist drive is effectively ready to put

everything, including the survival of humanity, at stake , not for any "pathological" gain or goal, but simply for the sake of the reproduction of the system as an end-in-itselffiat profitus pereat mundus might be his motto. As an
ethical motto, this is of course weird, if not downright evilhowever, from a strict Kantian perspective, we should recognize that what makes it seem repulsive to us is our purely "pathological" survivalist reaction: a capitalist, insofar as he acts "in accordance with his notion," is someone who faithfully pursues a universal goal, without regard for any "pathological" obstacles.. .

Our alternative is to abandon our belief in capitalism. We must resist the urge to intervene if we are to avoid the crisis sparked by peak capitalism and succeed in radically reorganizing the economy Richard Wolff (Professor U of Mass Amherst) 3/28/09, Peak Oil and Peak Capitalism The Oil Drum,
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5245

The concept of peak oil may apply more generally than its friends and foes realize. As we descend into US capitalisms second major crash in 75 years (with another dozen or so business cycle downturns in the interval between crashes), some signs suggest we

are at peak capitalism too. Private capitalism (when productive assets are owned by private individuals and groups and when markets rather than state planning dominate the distribution of resources and products) has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to flare out into overproduction and/or asset inflation bubbles that burst with horrific social consequences. Endless reforms, restructurings, and regulations were all justified in the name not only of extricating us from a crisis but also finally preventing future crises
(as Obama repeated this week).

They all failed to do that. The tendency to crisis seems unstoppable, an inherent quality of capitalism. At best, flare outs were caught before they wreaked major havoc, although usually that only postponed and aggravated that havoc. One recent case in point: the stock market crash of early 2000 was limited in its damaging social
consequences (recession, etc.) by an historically unprecedented reduction of interest rates and money supply expansion by Alan Greenspans Federal Reserve. The resulting real estate bubble temporarily offset the effects of the stock markets bubble bursting, but when real estate crashed a few years later, what had been deferred hit catastrophically. Repeated failure to stop its inherent crisis tendency is beginning to tell on the system. The question increasingly insinuates itself even into discourses with a long history of denying its pertinence: has capitalism, qua system, outlived its usefulness? Repeated state interventions to rescue private capitalism from its self-destructive crises or from the political movements of its victims yielded longer or shorter periods of state capitalism (when productive assets are owned or significantly controlled or regulated by state officials and when state planning dominates markets as mechanisms of resource and product distribution). Yet state capitalisms have not solved the systems crisis tendencies either. That is why they have repeatedly given way to oscillations back to private capitalism (e.g. the Reagan revolution in the US, the end of the USSR, etc.) Moreover, the history of FDRs efforts to counteract the Great Depression teaches fundamental lessons about capitalism as a system that cannot forever be deferred. Since the New Deal reforms then all stopped short of transforming the structure of corporations, they left in place the corporate boards of directors and shareholders who had both the incentives and resources to evade, undermine and abolish those reforms. Evasion was their focus until the 1970s, and abolition since. Capitalism systematically organizes its key institutions of production the corporations such that their boards of directors, in properly performing their assigned tasks, produce crises, then undermine anti-crisis reforms, and thereby reproduce those crises Hence, attention is slowly shifting to question the one aspect of capitalism that was never effectively challenged, let alone changed, across the last century and more: the internal organization of corporations. Their decisions about what, where, and how to produce and how to utilize profits are all made not by the mass of workers (nor by the communities they impact) but rather by a board of directors. Composed typically of 15-20 individuals, corporate boards are tiny elites responsible to the only slightly larger elites comprising corporations major shareholders. Each corporate board is charged by its major shareholders with maximizing profit, market share, growth, or share price. The mass of workers has to live with the results of board decisions over which they exercise next to no control. This is a position they share with the communities surrounding and dependent on those same corporations. This

capitalist organization of the corporation consistently generates investment, production, financial, marketing, and employment decisions that produce systemic instability economic crises. Much as this bipolar system brought us to peak oil by its expansions, so its contractions have now brought us to peak capitalism. This systems profoundly undemocratic organization of production demands radical transformation . Suppose, as
one such transformation, that workers undertook to function as their own board of directors. All weekly job descriptions would henceforth specify four days of particular production tasks and one day participating in collective decisions about what, how and where to produce and what to do with profits. Having required political autocracy to give way to democratic mechanisms, workers would then have achieved the same in relation to the economic autocracy that structures capitalist corporations. The economy and society would then evolve very differently from the capitalist pattern. If

we are to redesign our interactions with nature taking account of peak oil, why not redesign our enterprise structures to take account of the history of failed efforts to contain capitalisms crisis-producing dysfunction. Might we consider a mutually beneficial alliance between critics of abusing our energy resources and critics of abusing our productive capabilities? How about an alliance focused on a radical, democratic, and therefore anti-capitalist reorganization of production?
The point would be to make citizens and workers those who must live with the results of what enterprises do conjoint decision-makers focused on meeting collective needs, both productive and environmental.

LinksFracking
Current fracking discourses perpetuate neoliberalism Finewood and Stroup, 2012 *Michael H. Finewood is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability at Chatham Universitys
School of Sustainability and the Environment in Pittsburgh; Laura J. Stroup is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at St. Michaels College in VT+, Fracking and the Neoliberalization of the Hydro-Social Cycle in Pennsylvanias Marcellus Shale Universities Council on Water resources Journal of Contemporary Water research & education, issue 147, pages 72-79, March 2012

neoliberal discourses do more than obfuscate comprehensive understandings of the a way of conducting conduct that normalizes the impacts fracking has on water resources. In this vein of thinking, Castree (2003) has asked, why should we care about the capitalization of nature? We contend that the socio-environmental risks of fracking are potentially high and it is largely rural communities who are vulnerable to these risks. At the same time,
Thus far we have argued that multi-scale impacts of fracking on water resources. They also create these communities must make land use decisions based on incomplete and competing forms of knowledge. One or our goals is to bring attention to the potential impacts of fracking and to develop a better understanding of the ways stakeholders perceive costs and benefits in order to make land use decisions. But more broadly, we are interested in contributing to a context-specific analysis of theways neoliberalism

is (re)defining the relationships between people and the non-human world. As market approaches to environmental regulation become a more accepted, and perhaps a dominant part of governance strategy (See Anderson and Leal 2001), places like northeastern PA are, written off for environmental destruction in the name of a higher purpose, such as the national interest (Scott 2010, 31). These sacrifice zones assume an ecological disconnect between people and their environment, normalizing environmental degradation in some places while protecting others, and also assume no alternative uses of land or energy resources. This can be viewed as a form of remote environmental exploitation and brutality where the scalar issues make these sacrifice zones almost invisible to the larger nation and world. We feel that these struggles to (re)define the nature/ society relationship is about the power to ensure capital flows into specific hands ,
which will likely result in greater costs to other people and their environments. Formally investigating and deconstructing pro-fracking discourses is part of an ongoing project to come to terms with the realities involved with the transformation of the hydrosocial cycle and with the water-energy nexus, and to strive for a more equitable future.

LinksEnergy
The affirmative perpetuates the commodification of energy, which only serves to fuel dependence on capitalist growth David Korowicz 11 [physicist and human systems ecologist. He is a member of Feastas executive committee and works as an
independent consultant+, On the cusp of collapse: complexity, energy, and the globalised economy, Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse April 2011, New Society Publishers, Online Edition, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/10/08/on-the-cusp-of-collapse-complexity-energy-and-the-globalised-economy/

Like human beings and life on earth, economies require flows of energy through them to function and maintain their structure. If we do not maintain flows of energy (directly, or by maintenance and replacement) through systems we depend upon, they decay. Humans get their energy when they transform the concentrated energy stores in food into metabolising, thinking and physical labour, and into the dispersed energy of heat and excreta. Our globalising economy is no less energy constrained, but with one crucial difference. When humans reach maturity they stop growing and their energy intake stabilises. Our economy has adapted to continual growth, and that means rising energy flows. The self-organisation and biodiversity of life on earth is maintained by the flows of low-entropy solar energy that irradiate our planet as it is transformed into high-entropy heat radiating into space. Our complex civilisation was formed by the transformation of the living bio-sphere and the fossil reserves of ancient solar energy into useful work, and the entropy of waste heat energy, greenhouse gases and pollution that are the necessary consequences of the fact that no process is perfectly efficient. The first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. But energy can be transformed. The second law of thermodynamics tells us how it is transformed. All processes are winding down from a more concentrated and organised state to a more disorganised one, or from low to higher entropy. We see this when our cup of hot coffee cools to the rooms ambient temperature, and when humans and their artefacts decay to dust. The second law defines the direction in which processes happen. In transforming energy from a low-entropy to a higher-entropy state, work can be done, but this process is never 100% efficient. Some heat will always be wasted and be unavailable for work. This work is what has built and maintains life on earth and our civilisation. So how is it that an island of locally concentrated and complex low-entropy civilisation can form out of the universal tendency to disorder? The answer is that more and more concentrated energy has to flow through it so as to keep the local system further and further away from the disorder to which it tends. The evolution and emergence of complex structures maximises the production of entropy in the universe (local system plus everywhere else) as a whole. Clearly, if growing and maintaining complexity costs energy, then energy supply is the master platform upon which all forms of complexity depends . [9] The operational fabric evolves with new levels of complexity. As integration and co-dependency rise, and economies of scale become established, higher and higher fixed costs are required to maintain the operational fabric. That cost is in energy and resource flows. Furthermore, as the infrastructure, plant and machinery that are required to maintain economic production at each level expand, they are open to greater depreciation costs or, in thermodynamic terms, entropic decay. The correlation between energy use and economic and social change should therefore come as no surprise . The major transitions in the evolution of human civilisation, from hunter-gatherers through the agricultural and industrial revolutions, have been predicated on revolutions in the quality and quantity of energy sources used. We can see this through an example. According to the 1911 Census of England and Wales, the

three largest occupational groups were domestic service, agriculture and coal mining. By 2008, the three largest groups were sales personnel, middle managers and teachers. [10] What we can first notice is 100 years ago much of the work done in the economy was direct human labour. And much of that labour was associated directly with harnessing energy in the form of food or fossil fuels. Today, the largest groups have little to do with production, but are more focused upon the management of complexity directly, or indirectly through providing the knowledge base required by people living in a world of more specialised and diverse occupational roles. What evolved in the intervening century was that human effort in direct energy production was replaced by fossil fuels. The energy content of a barrel of oil is equivalent to 12 years of adult labour at 40 hours a week. Even at $100 a barrel, oil is remarkably cheap compared with human labour! As fossil-fuel use increased, human effort in agriculture and energy extraction fell, as did the real price of food and fuel. These price falls freed up discretionary income, making people richer. And the freed-up workers could provide the more sophisticated skills required to build the complex modern economy which itself rested upon fossil-fuel inputs, other resources and innovation. In energy terms a number of things happened. Firstly, we were accessing large, highly concentrated energy stores in growing quantities. Secondly, fossil fuels required little energy to extract and process; that is, the net energy remaining after the energy cost of obtaining the energy was very high. Thirdly, the fuels used were high quality, especially oil, which was concentrated and easy to transport at room temperature; or the fuels could be converted to provide very versatile electricity. Finally, our dependencies co-evolved with fossil-fuel growth, so our road networks, supplychains, settlement patterns and consumer behaviour, for example, became adaptive to particular energy vectors and the assumption of their future availability. The growth and complexity of our civilisation, of which the growing GWP is a primary economic indicator, is by necessity a thermodynamic system and thus subject to fundamental laws. In neo-classical models of economic growth, energy is not considered a factor of production. It is assumed that energy is non-essential and will always substitute with capital. This assumption has been challenged by researchers who recognise that the laws of physics must apply to the economy and that substitution cannot continue indefinitely in a finite world. Such studies support a very close energy-growth relationship. They see rising energy flows as a necessary condition for economic growth, which they have demonstrated historically and in theory. [11] [12] [13] It has been noted that there has been some decoupling of GWP from total primary energy supply since 1979 but much of this perceived decoupling is removed when higher energy quality is allowed for. [14] It is sometimes suggested that energy intensity (energy/unit GDP) is stabilising, or declining a little in advanced economies, a sign to some that local decoupling can occur. This confuses what are local effects with the functioning of an increasingly integrated global economy. Advanced knowledge and service economies do not do as much of the energy-intensive raw materials production and manufacturing as before, but their economies are dependent upon the use of energy-intensive products manufactured elsewhere, and the prosperity of the manufacturers to whom they sell their services

LinksFossil Fuels
Increasing dependence on fossil fuels only serves to further capitalist growth and inequality Richard Douthwaite 11 [economist, journalist and author specialising in energy, climate and sustainability issues. He was a cofounder of Feasta and served on its executive committee +, Introduction: Where we went wrong Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse April 2011, New Society Publishers, Online Edition, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/04/05/introduction-where-we-went-wrong/

The use of fossil energy not only displaced sustainable manufacturing methods, it also made the economy dependent on economic growth. In a stable, stationary economy, there is no net investment and no net saving. Everything produced in the course of a year either gets consumed or goes to replace things that have worn out. The return on capital is so low somewhere between 2 and 3% that its only just worth using part of the sales income to maintain the buildings and equipment rather than the business owners spending it on themselves. In other words, the average rate of profit is just enough to balance the societys desire for income now against its desire for income in the future. Suppose a new technology steam power, perhaps is introduced to this stable economy which enables much higher profits to be made in a particular business sector. The firms in the sector will race to adopt it because those that get it first will be able to cut prices a little and drive the laggards out of business. The wouldbe leaders wont be content to wait until they have saved up enough of the money they would normally have spent on maintaining the old equipment until they can afford the new type. No, they will want to borrow the money they need to get ahead. But where is the money they wish to borrow to come from, since their society has no net savings and no spare resources? The answer is that the money and resources can only come from those that would have been spent on maintaining capital equipment in other sectors. The output from the other sectors will therefore shrink, shortages will develop and prices will rise, putting up the return on the remaining capital until it reaches the rate that the sector with the new technology is able to offer. The arrival of a new technology in one sector therefore increases the rate of return on capital in all sectors. Profits in excess of those needed to maintain production appear for the first time and workers get a reduced share of the amount the society produces. Moreover, the profits belong to the business owners. This creates a capitalist class with potential investment power. I say potential because what happens next depends on whether other innovations follow the first. If they dont, once the investment needs of the new technology are met, prices will fall and profits drop to the level set by peoples time preference, the 2 or 3%. If, on the other hand, there is a stream of innovations, profits could grow to become a substantial part of national income. This creates the problem noted by Major C. H. Douglas, the founder of the Social Credit movement, who realised that the wages paid to workers could not buy everything that they had produced and that if there was to be full employment, the profits firms produced had to be spent back into the system. It doesnt matter how it is spent, but people whose lifestyle is already satisfactory will probably either save it or use it for more investment. If they save it, someone else needs to borrow it and spend or invest it instead. The situation in a typical country today is that just over 20% of its income needs to be invested back each year as, if it was all saved, 20% of the workforce would find themselves without jobs. But the people doing the investing demand a satisfactory return and only if economic growth takes place and incomes increase will they be able to get one. If the broad mass of investors fails to get a return one year, they will not invest the next. Unemployment will increase and prices will fall, pulling profits down with them. The amount available for investment will be reduced and the economy will move along a low-growth or no-growth path until another series of innovations comes along. For

the past 200 years, however, a flow of innovations has brought about rapid growth. Many of these innovations have involved the substitution of fossil energy for energy from human, animal and solar sources because, if a workers efforts can be supplemented in this way, he or she can produce much, much more. An averagely fit man can apply about 75 watts to his work. If he is assisted by a onehorsepower motor, the sort you might find on a hobbyists circular saw, he can apply ten times more power to the task and consequently work much faster. A positive feedback develops, with the greater productivity leading to higher profits and incomes and additional investment and energy use. The income gap between those using fossil energy and those who dont gets wider and wider. In 1960, the average income in high-fossil-energy-using countries was 30 times that in low-energy countries. By 2001 it was almost 90 times larger. Moreover, the 20% of the world living in high-energy, high-income countries enjoyed 80% of world income, investment and trade. It is therefore reasonable to say that the use of fossil energy facilitated a greater division of income and wealth than was usual between worker and business owner in artisanal societies. It also led to industrial capitalism and the development of the banking system because, once some enterprise owners were making more profit than they needed to plough back into their own companies, a mechanism was required to take their savings and lend them out to people who did want to invest. A structure was also needed to handle the profit-sharing part of those investment funds the limited liability company. I need hardly say that, just as the use of fossil fuels drove people out of manufacturing, it also drove them off the land. The use of fertilisers, tractors and sprays made each farm worker much more productive so less labour was required. In 1790, at least 90% of the US labour force worked in agriculture. In the year 2000, less than 1.4% did while still, producing enough to meet home and export demand. The average American farmer produced 12 times more an hour in 2000 than his predecessor did in 1950 2. Again, these changes were irresistible. Food prices fell by about 90% in relation to average incomes between 1920 and 1990. This meant that farmers had to increase their output by at least 1,000% for their income to keep up with the rest of society. As this could only be done by using fossil energy and industrial sector inputs, their output had to increase further to pay for them.

ImpactsGeneral
Capitalism causes war, environmental destruction, and genocide Everest 12 (Larry; correspondent for Revolution newspaper; 5/24/12; WAR AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM: Money for Jobs Not for War:
American Chauvinism and Reformist Illusions http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31024)
Money for Jobs and Education! Jobs and Education, Not War and Occupation! This slogan put forth by several US social movements is profoundly wrong and harmfulboth in terms of morality thats actually in the interests of humanity, and in terms of a scientific understanding of imperialism and war. Why should antiwar demands focus first and foremost on the wars impact on Americans and their livesand not on the victims of U.S. aggression: Pakistanis murdered in U.S. drone strikes, Iraqis rounded up and tortured by U.S. forces, Afghans seized and terrorized in night raids, and countless others? Arent their lives every bit as precious as the lives of those who happen to live in the U.S.? Money for jobs, not for war argues that American lives are more important than other peoples lives. This logic goes right along withand amplifiesthe mindset relentlessly fostered by the systems rulers and their media machine: that American lives come first. This is the very mindset the rulers count on to justify and build public support (or acquiescence) for their predatory wars of empire. The slogan also promotes the idea that the political powers-that-beif pressured by enough peoplecould scale back their military, stop attacking other countries, and instead use the money for jobs,

Wars, invasions, and occupations are not policies of one set of politicians or another, or arbitrary choices made by this or that president. At this stage in history, capitalism is a global system, with the U.S. the worlds most dominant capitalist-imperialist power, presiding over a worldwide empire of exploitation. This empire rests on the domination of the oppressed countries where the vast majority of humanity lives, and on control of labor, markets, and resources. This entails the violent suppression of the masses of people in the dominated areasand also entails fighting off challenges from other imperialists as well as rising forces in those countries that stand in the way. This requires a monstrously huge military that is deployed worldwide, with bases in over 100 countries, and wars when necessary. The wars for domination in the Middle East, Central Asia, and elsewhere dont interfere with the functioning of U.S. capitaltheyre absolutely essential to it, and to the U.S.s overall global dominance. This is why the U.S. rulers are compelledand willing tospend trillions on the military, including during periods of severe economic and fiscal stress, no matter who happens to sit in the White House or Congress. This system of global capitalism-imperialism headed by the U.S. is the main source of the horrors that torment so many across the globefrom the ethnic cleansing and slow genocide of the Palestinian people by the U.S. and Israel, to the mass incarceration and slow genocide of Black people in the U.S.; from the rape of the planet to the systematic degradation and violence against womenhere and around the world; from the extreme deprivation and starvation faced by billions across the planet to the growing poverty and desperation faced by millions in the U.S. The
education, and other social welfare programs at home. But thats not how the system actually operates! rulers in these imperial metropoles distribute some of the spoils of empire to provide a higher standard of living than in the oppressed countries and buy social peace and loyalty at home (which Money for Jobs, Not For War encourages). People in the U.S. should reject that foul pact! The vast majority in the U.S. have a profound interest in making common cause with oppressed people worldwide, not in siding with their rulers. That means fostering a morality that declares: American lives are not more important than other peoples lives!not pandering to American chauvinism, which strengthens the system responsible for so much misery. It means people shouldnt appeal to those on the top to spend more on jobs, but to clearly and unequivocally demand a STOP to the horrors the U.S. is committing around the world. Through this process of actively opposing U.S. aggression and the America Number 1 mindset fostered to justify it, people can and must be won to increasingly see that this capitalist system and state is utterly un-reformable and that its going to take revolution to get rid of it, end its predatory wars once and for all, and bring into being a whole new system and state that is in the actual interests of the people in the U.S. and around the world.

Capitalism is badleads to environmental destruction, collapse of civilization David Korowicz 11 [physicist and human systems ecologist. He is a member of Feastas executive committee and works as an
independent consultant+, On the cusp of collapse: complexity, energy, and the globalised economy, Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse April 2011 New Society Publishers, Online Edition, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/10/08/on-the-cusp-of-collapse-complexity-energy-and-the-globalised-economy/

Complexity can be measured in several ways as the number of connections between people and institutions, the intensity of hierarchical networks, the number of distinct products produced and the extent of the supply-chain networks required to produce them, the number of specialised occupations, the amount of effort required to manage systems, the amount of information available and the energy flows required to maintain them. By all these measures, economic growth has been associated with increasing complexity. [4] As a species, we had to become problem solvers to meet our basic needs, deal with status anxiety and respond to the new challenges presented by a dynamic environment. The problem to be solved could be simple such as getting a bus or buying bread; or it could be complex, such as developing an economys energy infrastructure. We tend to exploit the easiest and least costly solutions first. We pick the lowest hanging
fruit or the easiest extractable oil first. As problems are solved new ones tend to require more effort and complex solutions. A solution is framed within a network of constraints. One of the system constraints is set by the operational fabric, comprising the given conditions at

any time and place which support system wide functionality. For modern developed economies this includes functioning markets, financing, monetary stability, operational supply-chains, transport, digital infrastructure, command and control, health services, research and development infrastructure, institutions of trust and socio-political stability. It is what we casually assume does and will exist, and which provides the structural foundation for any project we wish to develop. Our solutions are also limited by knowledge and culture, and by the available energetic, material, and economic resources available to us. The formation of solutions is also shaped by the interactions with the myriad other interacting agents such as people, businesses and institutions. These add to the dynamic complexity of the environment in which the solution is formed, and thus the growing complexity is likely to be reinforced as elements co-evolve together. As a result, the process of economic growth and complexity has been self-reinforcing. The growth in the size of the networks of exchange, the operational fabric and economic efficiencies all provided a basis for further growth. Growing

complexity provided the foundation for developing even more complex integration. In aggregate, as the operational fabric evolves in complexity it provides the basis to build more complex solutions. The net benefits of increasing complexity are subject to declining marginal returns in other words, the benefit of rising complexity is eventually outweighed by its cost. A major cost is environmental destruction and resource depletion. There is also the cost of complexity itself. We can see this in the
costs of managing more complex systems, and the increasing cost of the research and development process. [5] When increased complexity begins to have a net cost, then responding to new problems arising by further increasing complexity may be no longer viable. An economy becomes locked into established processes and infrastructures, but can no longer respond to shocks or adapt to change.

For the historian Joseph Tainter, this is the context in which earlier civilisations have collapsed . [6]

ImpactsWarming
Capitalism causes warmingends in extinction David Schwartzman 08, Professor, Department of Biology, Howard University, ECOSOCIALISM OR
ECOCATASTROPHE, 2-11-08, www.redandgreen.org/Documents/David/Ecosocialism/Ecosocialism%20or%20Ecocatast.htm, accessed 3-27-08. The practical struggle opening up a path to a socialist future is now compelled to confront the looming threat of ecocatastrophe from global warming. Confront, meaning a full recognition of the centrality of this challenge with its practice drawing from a truly ecosocialist theoretical foundation. This threat is no longer a potential contingent outcome in some indefinite future of the unsustainable mode of production and consumption of global capital reproduction, but now is highly probable in the near future unless radical changes in both political and physical economies are made in time. We face an unprecedented bifurcation in humanitys future. Never before has the technological creation of humankind has posed such a global threat. Recognition of the imminence of this threat is very recent, informed from the state of the art understanding of the global climate and anthropogenic greenhouse forcing. We may have only a decade left to avoid catastrophic climate change (C3), which would make the world even more dangerous and miserable than the living hell for hundreds of millions we now experience (1). The film Children of Men gave us a chilling glimpse of this future: a fascist regime confining refugees from the global South in concentration camps. Massive emigration is precisely the outcome of unchecked global warming from regions especially devastated from the combined effects of global sea level rise and agricultural collapse. The avoidance of C3 requires the end of oil and fossil fuel addiction, giving up the nuclear option and a rapid conversion to a high efficiency solar energy infrastructure. Since the major obstacle to this path is the nuclear military industrial fossil fuel complex (MIC for short), especially its U.S. component, this complex and its imperial agenda must be confronted, isolated, and finally eliminated as the biggest threat to human survival (2). More precisely, its material
infrastructure should be solarized, with containment of its huge legacy of chemical and nuclear waste. A solarized and demilitarized world, a formidable challenge to say the least! But

if the global and national peace and justice movements succeed in meeting it, a much more just, peaceful and sustainable society will be created for our worlds children and grandchildren (3). This outline of two likely and radically different scenarios of just a few decades into
the future of the 21st century is informed by an analysis of the cutting edge of climate science and the political economy of the present. I contend that the world even as soon as 2020 will not look like a near continuation of the present, rather it will much worse or much better with respect to the quality of human life. The outcome is contingent on the success of ecosocialist practice and theory.

AltGeneral
Doing nothing solvesintervention ensures failure Zizek 04 [Slavoj, Serbian Nationalist and Historical Revisionist, Revolution at the Gates, p. 169-171]
Indeed, since the normal functioning of capitalism involves some kind of disavowal of the basic principle of its functioning (todays model capitalist is someone who, after ruthlessly generating profit, then generously shares parts of it, giving large donations to churches, victims of ethnic or sexual abuse, etc., posing as a humanitarian), the ultimate act of

the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things {which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: What can we do against global capital?), but to question the hegemonic ideological co-ordinates. In short, our historical moment is still that of Adorno: to the Question What should we do? I can most often truly answer with I dont know. I can only try to analyse rigorously what there is. Here people reproach me: When you practice criticism, you are also obliged to say how one should make it better. To my mind, this is incontrovertibly a bourgeois prejudice. Many times in history it so happened that the very works which pursued purely theoretical goals transformed consciousness and thereby also social reality. If, today, we follow a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty spaceit will be an act within the hegemonic ideological cooridinates: those who really want to do something to help people
transgression is to assert this principle directly, depriving it of its humanitarian mask. I am therefore tempted to reverse Marxs Thesis 11: get involved in {undoubtedly honourable} exploits like Medecins sans frontiers, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly encroach on economic territory (for example, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions, or use child labour)

are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity? Of doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etcactivity fits the formula of Lets go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same! If standard cultural studies criticize capitalism, they do so in the coded way that exemplifies
they Hollywood liberal paranoia: the enemy is the system, the hidden organization, the anti-democratic conspiracy not simply capitalism and state apparatuses. The problem with this critical stance is not only that it replaces concrete social analysis with a struggle against abstract paranoic fantasies, but that in a typical paranoic gesture it unnecessarily redoubles social reality, as if there were a secret Organization behind the visible capitalist and state organs. What we should accept is that there is no need for a secret organization-within-an-organization: the conspiracy is already in the visible organization as such, in the capitalist system, in the way the political space and state apparatuses work.

We must resist the urge to actone of the biggest failures of current anti-capitalist struggles is the inability to sustain self-criticism Slavoj Zizek 09 (also, a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia,
and a professor at the European Graduate School). First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 2009. http://www.sok.bz/web/media/video/ZizekTragedie.pdf
There is a real possibility that the

main victim of the ongoing crisis will not be capitalism but the Left itself, insofar as its inability to offer a viable global alternative was again made visible to everyone. It was the Left which was effectively caught out. It is as if recent events were staged with a calculated risk in order to demonstrate that, even at a time of shattering crisis, there is no viable alternative to capitalism. "Thamzing" is a Tibetan word from the time of Cultural Revolution, with ominous reverberations for liberals: it means a "struggle session," a collective public hearing and criticism of an individual who is aggressively questioned in order to bring about his political re-education through the confession of his or her mistakes and sustained self-criticism. Perhaps today's Left needs one long "thamzing" session? Immanuel
Kant countered the conservative motto "Don't think, obey!" not with the injunction "Don't obey, think!" but rather "Obey, but think!" When we are transfixed by events such as the bail-out plan, we should bear in mind that since this is actually a form of blackmail we

must resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus wound ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting-out, we should control our fury and transform it into an icy determination to think things through in a really radical way and to ask what kind of a society it is that renders such blackmail possible.

We must resist the desire to normalize climate solutionsnonintervention allows non limitation JAMES BURGESS, 24 November 2009, Everyone's gone green, Cultural Capital, New Statesman *In 2011 Deputy Editor Jon
Bernstein was named Website Editor of the Year by the British Society of Magazine Editors.], http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2009/11/381-382-climate-crisis-global

So what is to be done? We

should not, iek thinks, set limits on development following the policy of "sustainable development," often used as an excuse for business as usual. One of his concerns is the arbitrariness of the limits imposed by politicians and scientists alike. iek commented that we can no more set a quantifiable limit on safe climate change than we can quantify what constitutes holocaust denial. Although the vast majority of scientists now agree that climate change poses a serious threat, the unknowns are too great to have a good degree of certainty as to the likely outcome. This is the difficulty for iek of free choice. Regardless of how predetermined our destinies are, we are condemned to live as if we are free. We have to choose, and yet the body of knowledge on which we draw is limited; the evidence available points to a range of catastrophic outcomes, but we cannot know for sure (until it is too late) which particular outcome will occur. Given this, iek insists that we cannot look on the bright side of climate change for new opportunities to adapt. He argues that we must resist the normalisation of climate change, whereby what is first experienced as impossible and unthinkable becomes real and is accepted as part of every day life (for example, the re-emergence of the far right in mainstream politics, or the normalisation of torture in
Guantanamo). In the case of the environment, damaging consequences of climate change have first been denied by governments and businesses, then accepted as part of business as usual.

Sustainability
Collapse will be fastintegration from globalization ensures it David Korowicz 2011 [physicist and human systems ecologist. He is a member of Feastas executive committee and works as an
independent consultant+, On the cusp of collapse: complexity, energy, and the globalised economy, Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse April 2011, New Society Publishers, Online Edition, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/10/08/on-the-cusp-of-collapse-complexity-energy-and-the-globalised-economy/

The integration and speed of processes (financial information, capital movement, supply-chains, component lifetimes, the globalised economy suggest that a collapse will be much faster than those that have gone before. Furthermore, the level of delocalisation and complexity upon which we depend, and our lack of localised fall-back systems and knowledge, suggests that the impacts may be very severe for the most advanced economies. No country or aspect of human welfare will escape significant impact. Our understanding and expectations of the world have been shaped by our experience of economic growth. The dynamic stability of that growth has habituated us to what is normal. That normal must soon shatter. Our species belle poque is passing and its future seems more uncertain than ever before.
etc.) within

Continued exploitation of fossil fuels ensures collapseends in extinction Fred Magdoff 10, Professor Emeritus, Plant and Soil Science, University of Vermont and John Bellamy
Foster, Professor, Sociology, University of Oregon, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism, MONTHLY REVIEW, 3-7-10, www.countercurrents.org/foster070310.htm, accessed 9-27-10.
It is beyond debate that the ecology of the earthand the very life support systems on which

humans as well as other species dependis under sustained and severe attack by human activities. It is also clear that the effects of continuing down the same path will be devastating. As James Hansen, director of NASAs Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the worlds most famous climatologist, has stated: Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril.The startling conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itselfand the timetable is shorter than we thought.17 Moreover, the problem does not begin and end with fossil fuels but extends to the entire human-economic interaction with the environment.

A2 Perm
Perm failsit only risks triggering your impacts by renormalizing them under the umbrella of capitalism Slavoj Zizek 09,the most dangerous philosopher in the West (also, a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School). First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 2009. http://www.sok.bz/web/media/video/ZizekTragedie.pdf

While crises do shake people out of their complacency, forcing them to question the fundamentals of their lives, the most spontaneous first reaction is panic, which leads to a "return to the basics": the basic premises of the ruling ideology, far from being put into doubt, are even more violently reasserted. The danger is thus that the ongoing meltdown will be used in a similar fashion to what Naomi Klein has called the "shock doctrine." There is, indeed, something surprising about the
predominantly hostile reactions to Klein's recent book: they are much more violent than one would expect; even benevolent left liberals who sympathize with some of her analyses deplore how "her ranting obscures her reasoning" (as Will Hutton put it in his review of the book in the Observer). Clearly, Klein has touched some very sensitive nerves with her key thesis:

The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms.7 This thesis is developed through a series of concrete analyses, central among them that of the Iraq War:
the US attack on Iraq was sustained by the idea that, following the "shock and awe" military strategy, the country could be organized as a free market paradise, its people being so traumatized that they would offer no opposition ... The

imposition of a full market economy is thus rendered much easier if the way to it is paved by some kind of trauma (natural, military, economic) which, as it were, forces people into shaking off their "old habits;' turning them into an ideological tabula rasa, survivors of their own symbolic death, ready to accept the new order now that all obstacles have been swept away. And one can be sure that Klein's shock doctrine holds
also for ecological issues: far from endangering capitalism, a widespread environmental catastrophe may well reinvigorate it, opening up new and hitherto unheard-of spaces for capitalist investment.

Perm FailsIt gets coopted Slavoj Zizek 11, For Egypt, this is the miracle of Tahrir Square, Guardian, February 10th, 2011
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/feb/10/egypt-miracle-tahrir-square)
So where are we now? When

an authoritarian regime approaches the final crisis, its dissolution tends to follow two steps. Before its actual collapse, a rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy; its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down
In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroads, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew; within hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over. Is something similar going on in Egypt? For a couple of days at the beginning, it looked like Mubarak was already in the situation of the proverbial cat. Then we saw a well-planned operation to kidnap the revolution. The obscenity of this was breathtaking: the new vicepresident, Omar Suleiman, a former secret police chief responsible for mass tortures, presented himself as the "human face" of the regime, the person to oversee the transition to democracy.

Egypt's struggle of endurance is not a conflict of visions, it is the conflict between a vision of freedom and a blind clinging to power that uses all means possible terror, lack of food, simple tiredness, bribery with raised salaries to squash the will to freedom.

When President Obama welcomed the uprising as a legitimate expression of opinion that needs to be acknowledged by the government, the confusion was total: the crowds in Cairo and Alexandria did not want their demands to be acknowledged by the government, they denied the very legitimacy of the government. They didn't want the Mubarak regime as a partner in a dialogue, they wanted Mubarak to go. They didn't simply want a new government that would listen to their opinion, they wanted to reshape the entire state. They don't have an opinion, they are the truth of the situation in Egypt.
Mubarak understands this much better than Obama: there is no room for compromise here, as there was none when the Communist regimes were challenged in the late 1980s. Either the entire Mubarak power edifice falls down, or the uprising is co-opted and betrayed. And what about the fear that, after the fall of Mubarak, the new government will be hostile towards Israel? If the new government is genuinely the expression of a people that proudly enjoys its freedom, then there is nothing to fear: antisemitism can only grow in conditions of despair and oppression. (A CNN report from an Egyptian province showed how the government is spreading rumours there that the organisers of the protests and foreign journalists were sent by the Jews to weaken Egypt so much for Mubarak as a friend of the Jews.)

One of the cruellest ironies of the current situation is the west's concern that the transition should proceed in a "lawful" way as if Egypt had the rule of law until now. Are we already forgetting that, for many long
years,Egypt was in a permanent state of emergency? Mubarak suspended the rule of law, keeping the entire country in a state of political immobility, stifling genuine political life. It makes sense that so many people on the streets of Cairo claim that they now

Whatever happens next, what is crucial is that this sense of "feeling alive" is not buried by cynical realpolitik.
feel alive for the first time in their lives.

A2 Turn: Environment
Capitalism destroys the environmentleads to extinction Joel Kovel 02, Alger Hiss Professor, Social Studies, Bard College, THE ENEMY OF NATURE: THE END OF
CAPITALISM OR THE END OF THE WORLD, 2002, p. 5. As the world, or to be more exact, the Western, industrial world, has leapt into a prosperity unimaginable to prior generations, it has prepared for itself a calamity far more unimaginable still. The present world system in effect has had three decades to limit its growth, and it has failed so abjectly that even the idea of limiting growth has been banished from official discourse. Further, it has been proved decisively that the internal logic of the present system translates growth into increasing wealth for the few and increasing misery for the many. We must begin our inquiry therefore, with the chilling fact that growth so conceived means the destruction of the natural foundation of civilization. If the world were a living organism, then any sensible observer would conclude that this growth is a cancer that, if not somehow treated, means the destruction of human society, and even raises the question of the extinction of our species. A simple extrapolation tells
us as much, once we learn that the growth is uncontrollable. The details are important and interesting, but less so than the chief

growth, and the evident fact that this growth destabilizes and breaks down the natural ground necessary for human existence, means, in the plainest terms, that we are doomed under the
conclusion

that irresistible

present social order, and that we had better change it as soon as possible if we are to survive.

A2 Turn: Transition Wars

A fast transition prevents extinction, which outweighs a risk of transition wars Lewis (Instructor, Sewall Academic Program @ CU Boulder) 02
*Chris H., On the Edge of Scarcity, Global Industrial Civilization: The Necessary Collapse, ed. M. Dobkowski & I. Wallimann, Syracuse U. Press]
In conclusion, the

only solution to the growing political and eco nomic chaos caused by the collapse of global industrial civilization is to encourage the uncoupling of nations and regions from the global industrial economy. Unfortunately, millions will die in the wars and economic and political conflicts created by the accelerating collapse of global industrial civilization. But we can be assured that, on the basis of the past history of the collapse of regional civilizations such as the Mayan and the Roman Empires, barring global nuclear war, human societies and civilizations will continue to exist and develop on a smaller, regional scale. Yes, such civilizations will be violent, corrupt, and often cruel, but, in the end, less so than our current global industrial civilization, which is abusing the entire planet and threatening the mass death and suffering of all its peoples and the living, biological fabric of life on Earth. The paradox of global economic development is that although it creates massive wealth and power for First World elites, it also creates massive poverty and suffering for Third World peoples and societies. The failure of global development to end this suffering and destruction will bring about us collapse. This collapse will cause millions of people to suffer and die throughout the world, but it should, paradoxically, ensure the survival of future human societies. Indeed, the collapse of global industrial civilization is necessary for the future, long-term survival of human beings. Although this future seems hopeless and heartless, it is not. We can learn a
ot from our present global crisis. What we learn will shape our future and the future of the complex, interconnected web of life on Earth.

A2 Turn: Space
New link space escapism reinforces capitalism Peter Dickens, Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge and James Ormrod 07, Lecturer, Sociology, University of Brighton, COSMIC SOCIETY: TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF THE UNIVERSE, 2007, p. 77-78.
Taken together, our two theoretical starting points lead us to argue first that the

humanization of outer space is a product of economic and social crisis and second that such humanization is a means of reasserting hegemonic authority. Capitalism expands into outer space as a result of its inherent contradictions, capital being drawn from the primary circuit and invested in more speculative projects that extend the system in time and space through the secondary and tertiary circuits. Property rights are central to this process as capitalism attempts a series of outer spatial fixes. That this should happen is generally considered common sense. Outer spatial fixes are part of a hegemonic solution to the worlds problems. Rather than try to figure alternative social relationships, the extension of the current socio-economic system into space is supported uncritically. Space technology itself plays a central role in disseminating a hegemonic Western culture in which a possessive individualism is promoted; something that prevents those alternative social relationships from forming. There is, however, always hope for resistance, and for the moment it is
to organic intellectuals within the Global Network and similar organizations that we must look for critical new visions of our relationship with the universe.

Causes extinction ENS 99, Ekaterina Chistyakova, journalist, Space Activity Endangers Biosphere, ENVIRONMENT NEWS SERVICE, April 21, 1999,
www.climateark.org/articles/1999/nearspac.html On April 12, 1999, it was 38 years since the first manned space flight took place. Today the space club of nations incorporates more than 20 countries, with 15 cosmodromes functioning. A few million people are engaged in space activity; the world market of space goods and services accounts for several hundred million US dollars and is growing at the rate of 5 percent a year. Russian Proton (Photos courtesy International [Proton] Launch Services/Lockheed Martin) At the same time, space activity has a negative side to which not enough attention is paid. The state-of-the-art astronautics is environmentally unfriendly. It is maintained at the expense of barbarian, free use of unrecoverable natural resources, has a harmful impact on human health. This is the subject of the world's first analytical review "Environmental Hazards of Space Activity," presented recently by the Center for Russian Environmental Policy. The authors are Professor Mikhail Vlasov and astronaut-tester Sergey Krichevsky, now a reserve lieutenant colonel. The main conclusion of the book is that the man's activity

in space has already led to disturbance of important natural characteristics of near space especially the energy balance and chemical composition of the upper atmosphere. If the current trend in developing space continues, in 20 to 30 years the existence of humankind and biosphere of the Earth will be endangered, Vlasov and Krichevsky warn. Information given in the book casts doubt on
the view that the ozone layer is destroyed due to industrial ejection of ozone-destructive substances alone. Instead, the authors conclude, the

major part of the depletion of the Earth's protective ozone shield is due to disturbance of near space as a result of space activity. Some of the global climatic changes observed in recent decades can be attributed to the impact of space activity as well. [Intelsat] Intelsat K Near space, the basic life shield from space radiation and an important link in the chain of forming climatic conditions on the Earth, is seriously suffering from the man's space activity. The authors say that use of material and power consuming space rockets for developing near space has already led to a persistent destruction of its energy balance and chemical composition. Launch vehicles such as the U.S.
space shuttle and the Russian Proton have an efficiency for carrying loads into space as low as one to three percent, while 97 to 99 percent of each vehicle's starting mass is hundreds of tons of waste, harmful exhaust. Pollution of the near space by space litter fragments of satellites and launch vehicles - is another sphere of unacceptably hazardous impact. By now there have been registered over 8,000 objects of more than 10 centimetres (4 inches) diameter and over 100 million smaller particles of which more than half are of Soviet/Russian origin. Taking into consideration the fact that the life time of space litter can be hundreds of years, present-day space exploration seriously restricts opportunities of generations to come for developing their space programs. Vlasov and Krichevsky say that

space activity has a negative impact on the Earth's surface and near surface atmosphere. Pollution of the surface of the Earth resulting from space activity is especially dramatic for Russia .
Two percent of Russian territory is dangerously polluted by detachable spaceship parts and heptyl rocket propellant, a very hazardous poisonous substance. One of the results is appearance of a "yellow children" phenomenon, children suffering from pathological jaundice, anemia and disorders of central nervous system. Presence

of nuclear power sources and radioactive materials on board some spacecraft is hazardous in terms of polluting Earth's surface and near surface atmosphere. Especially dangerous is the possibility of an accidental drop of space vehicles on potentially hazardous installations on Earth such as nuclear power plants.

A2 Turn: Technology
The internal link flows neg capitalism actually discourages good technological advances Norm Dixon, 07 Change the System Not the Climate! GREEN LEFT WEEKLY n. 696, 1-31-07,
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/696/36163 People are not consumers by nature. A multi-billion-dollar industry advertising constantly plays with our minds to convince us that happiness comes only through buying more and more. In 2003 alone, US big business spent more than US$54.5 billion on advertising to convince people to constantly consume more goods and services, compared to $76 billion spent on education. Many

argue that with the right mix of taxes, incentives and regulations everybody would win: big business
will have cheaper, more efficient production and therefore be more profitable, and consumers will have more environment-friendly

They argue that in a rational society, such innovations would lower the overall environmental impact. Unfortunately, we dont live in a rational society. Capitalism approaches technology in the production process and in the final product to be sold in the same way as everything else: what will generate the most profits? Whether it is efficient, clean, safe or environmentally benign has little to do with it.
products and energy sources.

Peak OilImpact Scenerio

Capitalism caused peak oilendless expansion Minqi Li 08, University of Utah, An Age of Transition: The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the
Demise of Neoliberalism, MONTHLY REVIEW, April 2008, www.monthlyreview.org/080401li.php If world oil production and the production of other fossil fuels reach their peak and start to decline in the coming years, then the global capitalist economy will face an unprecedented crisis that it will find difficult to overcome. The rapid depletion of fossil fuels is only one among many serious environmental problems the world is confronting
today. The capitalist economic system is based on production for profit and capital accumulation. In a global capitalist economy, the competition between individual capitalists, corporations, and capitalist states forces each of them constantly to pursue accumulation of capital on increasingly larger scales. Therefore, under

capitalism, there is a tendency for material production and consumption to expand incessantly. After centuries of relentless accumulation, the worlds nonrenewable resources are being rapidly depleted and the earths ecological system is now on the verge of collapse. The survival of the human civilization is at stake.6 Some argue that because of technological progress, the advanced capitalist countries
have become dematerialized (decreasing the throughput of materials and energy per unit of output) as economic growth relies more upon services than traditional industrial sectors, thus making economic growth less detrimental to the environment. In fact,

many of the modern services sectors (such as transportation and telecommunication) are highly energy and resource intensive.

This causes extinctionlaundry list Richard Heinberg 04, Post-Carbon Institute, Book Excerpt: Powerdown: Options and Actions for a
Post-Carbon World, ENERGY BULLETIN, 92604, http://www.energybulletin.net/node/2291
Last One Standing The path of competition for remaining resources. If the leadership of the US continues with current policies, the next decades will be filled with war, economic

Resource depletion and population pressure are about to catch up with us, and no one is prepared. The political elites, especially in the US, are incapable of dealing with the situation. Their preferred solution is simply to commandeer other nations resources, using military force. The worst-case scenario would be the general destruction of human civilization and most of the ecological life-support system of the planet. That is, of course, a breathtakingly alarming prospect. As such, we
crises, and environmental catastrophe. might prefer not to contemplate it except for the fact that considerable evidence attests to its likelihood. The notion that resource scarcity often leads to increased competition is certainly well founded. This is general true among non-human animals, among which competition for diminishing resources typically leads to aggressive behaviour. Iraq is actually the nexus of several different kinds of conflict between consuming nations (e.g., France and the US); between western industrial nations and terrorist groups; and most obviously between a powerful consuming nation and a weaker, troublesome, producing nation. Politicians may find it easier to persuade their constituents to fight a common enemy than to conserve and share. War is always grim,

weaponry becomes more sophisticated and widely dispersed, that the case during the past century. By far the greatest concern for the future of warfare must be the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The US is conducting research into new types of nuclear weaponsbunker

but as resources become more scarce and valuable, as societies become more centralized and therefore more vulnerable, and as warfare could become even more destructive

US administrations have enunciated a policy of nuclear first-strike. Chemical and biological weapons are of secondary concern, although new genetic engineering techniques may enable the creation of highly infectious and antibiotic-resistant supergerms cable of singling out specific ethnic groups. Additionally, the US has announced
busters, small earth-penetrators, etc. Recent its intention to maintain clear military superiority to any potential rival (full-spectrum dominance), and is actively developing space-based weapons and supersonic drone aircraft capable of destroying targets anywhere on the planet at a moments notice. It is also developing an entirely new class of gamma-ray weapons that blur the critical distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons.

This proves need to completely reject oilneed a system not based on fossil fuels Richard Douthwaite 11 [economist, journalist and author specialising in energy, climate and sustainability issues. He was a cofounder of Feasta and served on its executive committee +, Introduction: Where we went wrong Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse April 2011, New Society Publishers, Online Edition, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/04/05/introduction-where-we-went-wrong/

In May 2005, however, this period of rapid income growth for some and the displacement and poverty for others came to an end when world oil production ceased to increase. Indeed world energy supplies, and the supplies of other commodities, had been struggling to keep up with growing demand for two years previously and their prices had begun to rise. In dollar terms, the price of oil had risen to five or six times its 2003 level by 2008, while there was, on average, a tenfold rise in the price of other commodities over the same period. To give two examples, the price of copper quadrupled between 2003 and 2006, while the lead price peaked in 2007 at eight times its 2003 value. These price rises caused the international financial crisis, as I explain in a later chapter. They were a signal that we should stop doing our Pompeii-style repairs and move away from the present system by devoting all our resources to building a civilisation on a different basis, just as we would
in a military emergency.

Peak OilEmpirically True

Peak oil is trueempirically David Korowicz 11 *physicist and human systems ecologist. He is a member of Feastas executive committee and works as an
independent consultant+, On the cusp of collapse: complexity, energy, and the globalised economy, Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse April 2011, New Society Publishers, Online Edition, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/10/08/on-the-cusp-of-collapse-complexity-energy-and-the-globalised-economy/

The phenomenon of peaking be it in oil, natural gas, minerals or even fishing is an expression of the following dynamics. With a finite resource such as oil, we find in general that which is easiest to exploit is used first. As

demand for oil increases, and can be ramped up. New and cheap oil encourages new oil-based products, markets and revenues, which in turn provide revenue for investments in production. For a while this is a self-reinforcing process but eventually the reinforcement is weakened because the energy, material and financial costs of finding and exploiting new production start to rise. These costs rise because, as time goes on, new fields become more costly to discover and exploit as they are found in
knowledge and technology associated with exploration and exploitation progress, production smaller deposits, in deeper water and in more technically demanding geological conditions. In some cases, such as tar sands, the oil requires very advanced processing and high energy and water expenditures to be rendered useful. This process is another example of declining marginal returns. The production from an individual well will peak and decline. Production from an entire oilfield, a country and the whole world will rise and fall. Two-thirds

of oil-producing countries have already passed their individual peaks. For example, the United States peaked in 1970 and the United Kingdom in 1999. The decline has continued in both cases. It should be noted that both countries are home to the worlds best universities, most dynamic
financial markets, most technologically able exploration and production companies, and stable, pro-business political environments.

As large old fields producing cheap oil decline, more and more effort must be made to maintain production with the discovery and production from smaller and more expensive fields. In financial terms, adding each new barrel of production (the marginal barrel) becomes more expensive.
Nevertheless, in neither case has decline been halted. Sadad al-Huseini said in 2007 that the technical floor (the basic cost of producing oil) was about $70 per barrel on the margin, and that this would rise by $12 per annum (assuming demand was maintained by economic growth). [15] This rapid escalation in the marginal cost of producing oil is recent. In early 2002, the marginal cost of a barrel was $20. It is sometimes argued that there is a huge amount of oil in deposits such as the Canadian tar sands. The questions this claim raises are When will it be on-stream?, At what rate can oil be made available?, What is the net energy return? and Can society afford the cost of extraction? If less available net energy from oil were to make us very much poorer, we could afford to pay even less. Eventually, production

would no longer be viable as economies could no longer afford the marginal cost of a barrel. In a similar vein, our seas contain
huge reserves of gold but it is so dispersed that the energetic and financial cost of refining it would far outweigh any benefits (Irish territorial waters contain about 30 tons).

Peak oil is truedecline curve models fail David Korowicz 11 [physicist and human systems ecologist. He is a member of Feastas executive committee and works as an
independent consultant+, On the cusp of collapse: complexity, energy, and the globalised economy, Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse April 2011, New Society Publishers, Online Edition, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/10/08/on-the-cusp-of-collapse-complexity-energy-and-the-globalised-economy/

The now familiar image of a modelled global oil production curve showing a decline in production of 2-3% per annum (EGross), has led commentators to assume that this is what will be available in future to the global economy. Intuitively this might seem an almost manageable constraint. The assumption on which this curve is based, the decline curve assumption, is incorrect for three reasons. Firstly, it does not account for the increasing energy cost of extracting oil; the net energy (ENet) available to society will decline at a faster rate than the modelled decline. Secondly, oil exporters, for the moment at least, are growing consumers of oil, and will favour domestic consumption over exports. This will reduce the volume of internationally traded oil. Energy supply too small to permit economic growth The third reason lies at the heart of why we must take a whole-systems approach to peak oil. The decline curve assumption assumes there is no strong

feedback between declining production, the economy, and oil production. The modelled assumptions for
the declining production, even accounting for declining net energy and producer consumption, assume a stable economy and infrastructure. In most of the modelling, the production curve (EGross) is derived from proven reserves or proven plus probable ones. Proven reserves imply we can afford to pay current real prices and deploy existing technology, while proven plus probable reserves are estimated on the basis of assumptions about the growth in technology and the idea that increasing wealth might allow us to pay higher prices more comfortably. In other words, at a minimum, the future production curve assumes that current technology and real prices would allow new oil to be brought on-stream to counter some of the effects of declining established production, without which the so-called natural decline rate could be greater than 7% per annum. [16] A decline in oil production undermines economic production, thus reducing societys ability to pay for oil. A decline also, as we shall see, undermines the operational fabric, which in turn constrains the ability of society to produce, trade, and use oil (and other energy carriers) in a reinforcing feedback loop. Energy

flows through the economy are likely to be unpredictable, erratic and prone to sudden and severe collapse. The implication is that much of the oil (and other energy carriers) that are assumed to be available to the global economy will remain in the ground as the real purchasing power, productive demand, energy infrastructure and economic and financial systems will not be available to extract and use it.

Aff Section

Perm
Perm do both: Perm solvesthe plans approach to the current energy crisis presents a unique opportunity to reform capitalism Michael A Peters 2012, [Michael A. Peters is professor of education at the University of Waikato in New Zealand and
professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. +10 June 2012, Greening the Knowledge Economy: A Critique of Neoliberalism, Truthout, http://truth-out.org/news/item/9642-greening-the-knowledge-economy-a-critique-ofneoliberalism

Ecopolitics must come to terms with the scramble for resources that increasingly dominates the competitive motivations and long-range resource planning of the major industrial world powers. There are a myriad of new threats to the environment that have been successfully spelled out by eco-philosophers and that have already begun to impact upon the world in all their facets. First, there is the depletion of non-renewable resources - in particular, oil, gas, timber and minerals. Second, and in related fashion, is the crisis of energy itself, upon which the rapidly industrializing countries and the developed world depend. Third, the rise of China and India, with their prodigious appetites, which will match the United States within a few decades in rapacious demand for more of everything that triggers resource scrambles and the heavy investment in resource-rich regions such as Africa. Fourth, global climate change will have the greatest impact upon the world's poorest countries, multiplying the risk of conflict and resource wars. With these trends and possible scenarios, only a better understanding of the environment can save us and the planet. A better understanding of the earth's environmental system is essential if scientists working in concert with communities, ecology groups across the board, green politicians, policymakers and business leaders are to promote green exchange and to ascertain whether green capitalism strategies that aim at long-term sustainability are possible. The energy crisis may be a blessing in disguise for the United
States. Jeremy Rifkin (2002) envisions a new economy powered by hydrogen that will fundamentally change the nature of our market, political and social institutions as we approach the end of the fossil-fuel era, with inescapable consequences for industrial society. New hydrogen fuelcells are now being pioneered - which, together with the design principles of smart information technologies, can provide new distributed forms of energy use. While Thomas Friedman (2008) has also argued the crisis can lead to reinvestment in infrastructure and alternative energy sources in the cause of nation-building, his work and intentions have been called into question.[2] Education has

a fundamental role to play in the new energy economy, both in terms of changing worldviews and the promotion of a green economy, and also in terms of research and development's contribution to energy efficiency,
battery storage and new forms of renewable energy

Must work within the system to reform it Jones & Spicer 09 Campbell, Senior Lecturer in the School of Management at U of Leicester, Andre, Associate Professor in the Dept
of Industrial Relations @ Warwick Business School U of Warwick, Unmasking the Entrepreneur, pgs. 22-23 The third strand in our proposed critical

theory of entrepreneurship involves questions of the 'extra-discursive' factors that structure the context in which these discourses appear. The result of privileging language often results in losing sight of political and economic relations, and for this reason, a turn to language and a
concomitant disavowal of things extra-discursive have been roundly criticised (Ackroyd and Fleetwood, 2000; Armstrong, 2001; Reed, 1998,2000,2009). An

analysis of discourse cannot alone account for the enduring social structures such as the state or capitalism. Mike Reed has argued that a discursive approach to power relations effectively blinds critical theorists to issues of social structures: Foucauldian discourse analysis is largely restricted to a tactical and localised view of power, as constituted and expressed through situational-specific 'negotiated orders', which seriously underestimates the structural reality of more permanent and hierarchal power relations. It finds it difficult, if not impossible, to deal with institutionalised stabilities and continuities in power relations because it cannot get at the higher levels of social organisation

in which micro-level processes and practices are embedded. (Reed, 2000: 526-7) These

institutional stabilities may include market relations, the power of the state, relations like colonialism, kinship and patriarchy. These are the 'generative properties'
that Reed (1998: 210) understands as 'mak(ing) social practices and forms - such as discursive formations - what they are and equip(ing) them with what they do'. Equally Thompson and Ackroyd also argue that in discourse analysis 'workers are not disciplined by the market, or sanctions actually or potentially invoked by capital, but their own subjectivities' (1995: 627). The inability to examine structures such as capitalism means that some basic forms of power are thus uninvestigated. Focusing solely on entrepreneurship discourse within organisations and the workplace would lead to a situation where pertinent relations that do not enter into discourse are taken to not exist. Such oversights in discursive analyses are that often structural relations such as class and the state have become so reified in social and mental worlds that they disappear. An ironic outcome indeed. Even when this structural context is considered, it is often examined in broad, oversimplified, and underspecified manners. This attention to social structure can be an important part of developing a critical theory of entrepreneurship, as we remember that the existing structural arrangements at any point are not inevitable, but can be subjected to criticism and change. In

order to deal with these problems, we need to revive the concept of social structure. Thus we are arguing that 'there exist in the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myths, etc.) objective structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representations' (Bourdieu, 1990: 122). Objective still means socially constructed, but social constructions that have become solidified as structures external to individual subjects. Examples of these structures may include basic 'organising principals' which are relatively stable and spatially and historically situated such as capitalism, kinship, patriarchy and the state. Some entrepreneurship researchers, particularly those
drawing on sociology and political science, have shown the importance of social structure for understanding entrepreneurship (see for example Swedberg,

Sustainability
Despite crises, capitalism is sustainable Buchan 10 (James, April 26, British novelist and journalist who graduated from Oxford University, Correspondent for the Financial Times, The Enigma of Capital and
the Crises of Capitalism, NewStatesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/04/harvey-capital-class-nothing)
Harvey's Marxian language is as antiquated as heraldry, and there are such heraldic beasts here as "capital accumulation", "state-finance nexus" and "activity spheres". His chief interest, as one might expect from an urban geographer, is in cities. He argues that capital, in its relentless need to invest its surpluses, gave us such forms of habitation as the Paris of Haussmann, the US suburbs of the 1950s and the vertical cities of the Pearl

His main argument is that capital, with its imperative requirement for a 3 per cent annual return (which is the return over the long run), exports itself and its crises all over the world, turning limits thought to be ultimate by our forefathers into riding-school jumps. In a vivid passage, Harvey sees capital swirling over ocean, plain and mountain like weather systems seen from space. Having suppressed wages in the west, capital was confronted with a failure of demand, and so supplied it with securitised sub-prime credit to the poorest people, who, from 2007 on, defaulted in droves. Fortunately for the "Party of Wall Street" (it has long infiltrated government, so that the two are now indistinguishable), the capital destroyed was made good by the public, and so the whole process will continue until at least the next crisis. Now that the societies of both east and west are driven by consumer fashion, such crises are ever more frequent. While an industrial behemoth such as US Steel can decline for more than a century, Bebo is worth $850m at bedtime and nothing at
River Delta. "Is the urbanisation of China," he asks somewhat unnecessarily, "the primary stabiliser of global capitalism?" breakfast. What I missed, and not just in this book, is a philosophy of fashion. Kate Moss's "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" only goes so far. Like many modern Marxists, Harvey is so anxious not to underestimate

We are invited to admire the flexibility of capital, its mobility and wide horizons, its miraculous power to increase population and sustain it. He asks: "Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political and geopolitical and environmental difficulties? Again, the answer is a resounding 'Yes it can.'"
his adversary that he ends up writing panegyric.

Its not too latecollapse would be systemic, wed have time to adapt David Korowicz 11 *physicist and human systems ecologist. He is a member of Feastas executive committee and works as an
independent consultant+, On the cusp of collapse: complexity, energy, and the globalised economy, Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse April 2011, New Society Publishers, Online Edition, http://fleeingvesuvius.org/2011/10/08/on-the-cusp-of-collapse-complexity-energy-and-the-globalised-economy/

One of the great virtues of the global economy is that while factories may fail and links in a supply-chain break, the economy can quickly adapt by fulfilling its needs elsewhere or finding substitutes. This is a measure of the resilience within the globalised economy and is a natural feature of a delocalised and networked complex adaptive system. But it is true only within a certain context. There are common
platforms or hub infrastructure that maintain the operation of the global economy and the operational fabric as a whole, and the collapse of such hubs is likely to induce systemic failure. Principal among these are the monetary and financial system, accessible energy flows, transport infrastructure, economies of scale and the integrated infrastructures of information technology and electricity.

Impact TurnsUniqueness
We control uniqueness free market growth solves global poverty and inequality Frieden 10 Jeffrey, Professor of Government at Harvard; researches international monetary and
financial relations [Mar 6, http://www.hceronline.com/?q=node/48] global inequality is that it has been declining. The world today is a substantially less unequal place than it was 25 years ago. The Gini coefficient is the most widely used, comprehensive measure of income inequality, and the global Gini coefficient has clearly gone down since 1980. The proportion of the worlds population living in abject poverty has also declined. Most international organizations use an international absolute poverty line equivalent to earning about $1.50 a day per person in todays dollars, taking into account differences in price levels (i.e. at Purchasing Power Parity). By this measure, while more than 40 percent of the developing worlds population lived in absolute poverty in 1980, today the proportion is about 20 percent. This is a dramatic improvement, and cause for optimism. The global reduction in both inequality and absolute poverty are in large part the result of successful development in China and India. These two countries have grown very rapidly in the past 25
The good news about yearsChina more rapidly than Indiaand the result has been a dramatic increase in their income per person, and a dramatic reduction in their poverty rates. In 1981, 64 percent of Chinas people lived in absolute poverty; today, the percentage is about 15 percent; in India the decline was a less remarkable, but still impressive drop from 55 to 35 percent. Given that these two countries account for nearly 2.5 billion peoplealmost half the developing

East Asia and South Asia as a whole have also done quite well. This demonstrates that, speaking globally, the most important remedy to poverty and inequality is economic growth. While growth does not translate directly into poverty reduction, it is the principal contributor to improvement in living standards; per capita GDP is a very powerful predictor of such other social indicators as infant mortality and female literacy. And relatively small disparities in growth rates can make an enormous difference when compounded over decades. To take a simple example, Thailand is currently a country at the middle ranges of world income (about $7500 per capita), comparable to Turkey, Costa Rica, or Tunisia. With a growth rate of just over 3 percent a
worlds total, this explains most of the progress. year since 1950, it is neither a major developmental success story nor a massive failure. However, if Thailands rate of growth had been two percent slower over those fifty years, that is 1.3 percent a year instead of 3.3 percent a year, it would now have a per capita income two-thirds lower, about $2500 a yearmaking it poorer than Bolivia or Papua New Guinea. By the same token, with a two percent faster rate of growth, Thai per capita income would now be roughly equivalent to that of Greece. A couple of percentage points a year, over the course of several decades, can make the difference between living in Bolivia, on the one hand, and living in Costa Rica or Thailand, on the

if this economic growth continues, so too will global income continue to become less unequally distributed. BAD NEWS There is also bad news about
otheror between Thailand and Greece. So global inequality has been declining, as a result of successful economic growth in some of the worlds largest poor countries. And global inequality. Apart from the disturbing extent to which the worlds wealth and income are now unequally distributed, there have been two disconcerting trends over time. The first trend is that within many countries, even successful countries, income seems to have become more unequal. It is not surprising that countries that are developmental failures, such as Nigeria, have become more unequal. It is perhaps also not surprising that regions that have experienced modest overall growth but periodic crisesagainst which the poor tend to be less protected than the richhave also gotten more unequal, as is the case for most of Latin America. But it is worrisome that even countries that have grown rapidly, such as China, have become more unequal. This parallels, of course, the increased inequality in many developed countries, notably the United States; but the impact is starker in poor countries where inequality is associated with abject poverty. Probably the more important, and more troubling, trend is that, while much of Asia has grown rapidly, reducing the gap between itself and the rich world, most other developing

Countries that grow little, stagnate, or decline economically can hardly reduce the gap between themselves and the rich world, and also are unlikely to make much progress in reducing domestic poverty. The most striking, and most disconcerting, example is one very large region, sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past 25 years, this continent has gotten poorer both absolutely
regions have experienced at best modest growth. and relatively. Inevitably, this has led to a further impoverishment of its people: in 1981, 42 percent of Africans lived in absolute poverty, while today the share is above 46 percent. Africa is the most salient case of developmental failure, but there are other stagnant or declining countries in the developing world. These countries, and whole regions, have lagged further and further behind. WHAT CAN BE DONE? societies

Economic growth in poor

is the best way to reduce international inequality. And, without over-simplifying matters, we have a pretty good sense of some of the sources of economic we can identify a broad set of policies that have typically contributed to general economic growth. These include: General economic openness. By this I do not mean to endorse the dogmatic argument that free trade is a prerequisite for development, for the evidence hardly warrants this view. However, extreme forms of economic nationalism, from high protectionist barriers to the exclusion of foreign capital and technology, clearly have slowed economic progress. Not only do they impede growth, they almost certainly worsen income distribution by channeling money to those powerful enough to obtain government protection. Participation in the world economy allows countries to make better use of
growth. This is not to say that we know how to turn a Sudanese catastrophe into a Chinese miracle; but their human, natural, and physical resources; to obtain technical expertise, capital, and other inputs into the production process; and, generally, to take advantage of broad and deep global markets for goods, capital, and technology.

Impact TurnsEnvironment
Capitalism the only way to save the environment from ecological disastertechnology drives efficiency Taylor 12, Christopher. "Green Capitalism." Breaking Washington DC News, Maryland News, Virginia
News, US Politics News and Analysis. N.p., 16 Mar. 2012. http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/141806.
James Watt, secretary of the Interior for Ronald Reagan is quoted as saying "After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back," as a reason for not worrying about the environment. Watt never said this, it was simply attributed to him by an author in Grist magazine, and later retracted. Still, many

believe that conservatives and capitalists think that its okay to rape and destroy the planet

in the name of riches and God. In reality, capitalism

whales from extinction after all. Looking

is one of the best hopes for our environment. The oil age did arguably save find a direct correlation between poverty and ecological disaster. Where people are poorest, the pollution and economic destruction are far worse than in more wealthy areas. Places where many poor people live in close quarters such as Calcutta, Beijing, and Mexico City are even worse. The main reason that poorer areas are such ecological disasters is because of the poverty. Economic stress causes people to stop being so fussy about how they find their next meal, or shelter, or clothing. When resources are limited, people begin choosing more critical needs over less, and picking up the trash stops being a priority, as does cleaning up waste, planting trees, and so on. It is also no coincidence that the poorer and less ecologically sound places in the world tend to be less capitalist. One of the most shocking things to academics and
around the world, you can
leftists when the Soviet Union collapsed is what an incredibly horrendous wasteland much of Russia had become under their rule. One infamous example is Lake Karachay, which the Soviet government used as a dumping ground for radioactive materials from their nuclear power plants. There is a company which specializes in finding radioactive materials scattered around the nation, including inside Moscow. China is the worlds leading producer of carbon dioxide and general pollution. Instead of resulting in better care for the environment, countries under totalitarian rule tend to have significantly worse care. The more collectivist the government, the worse their environmental care

Capitalism gives incentive to taking care of your environment because it is costly and less attractive to customers and investors. If your company is destroying the land around it, that tends to annoy and upset customers. Further, capitalism provides not just opportunity, but pressure for poor to get out of poverty and thus away from the desperation that creates environmental stress. Capitalism helps people achieve more and opens the
tends to be, for a few simple reasons. A significant reason is economic. way for anyone to become whatever they have the ability and will to become. Other, collectivist systems such as socialism and communism stifle and discourage this economic growth. However, the main reason is technological; capitalism tends to encourage and benefit people who innovate, invent, and create. Other systems with top-down control tend to stifle this, encouraging the status quo and simply obeying the rules to get a check. Theres no incentive to try harder, invent, or find a new way because you get paid the same either way. Technology results in less damage to the environment for better results. In the 1960s Paul Ehrlich believed farming and food production techniques could not and would not get any better, so wed become overpopulated and starve. In reality, food technology exploded in the end of the 20th century, resulting in massive increases in production while using fewer resources. Similarly,

technology, driven by free-market capitalism, has resulted in a more energy-efficient world. Air

conditioners and heaters are far more efficient today than they were even ten years ago. Computers, televisions, and other entertainment media use far less energy, often through simple innovations such as flat-screen LCD technology. These innovations come about because of the freedom and rewards which a free market affords, providing the tools for a cleaner planet. Companies realize that its cheaper in the long run to pollute less (and clean up

Capitalism can be destructive to the environment, but the free market inevitably over time provides counters and solutions to that, with advances to technology and pressures in the market. Collectivist systems tend to suppress both, resulting in stagnation and less benefit to the environment.
less in the future) and they can advertise themselves as being good for the environment, which is popular with buyers.

Impact TurnsTransition Wars

Rejecting capitalism will spark transition wars, re-entrenching cycles of exploitation Gubrud 1997 *Mark Avrum (Center for Superconductivity Research); Nanotechnology and International Security; Foresight
Nanotechnology Institute; http://www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT05/Papers/Gubrud/ With molecular manufacturing, international trade in both raw materials and finished goods can be replaced by decentralized production for local consumption, using locally available materials. The decline of international trade will undermine a powerful source of common interest. Further, artificial intelligence will displace skilled as well as unskilled labor. A world system based on wage labor, transnational capitalism and global markets will necessarily give way. We imagine that a golden age is possible, but we don't know how to organize one. As

global

capitalism retreats, it will leave behind a world dominated by politics, and possibly feudal concentrations of wealth and power. Economic insecurity, and fears for the material and moral future of humankind may lead to the rise of demagogic and intemperate national leaders. With almost two hundred sovereign nations, each struggling to create a new economic and social order, perhaps the most predictable outcome is chaos: shifting alignments, displaced populations, power struggles, ethnic conflicts inflamed by demagogues, class conflicts, land disputes, etc. Small and underdeveloped nations will be more than ever dependent on the major powers for access to technology, and more than ever vulnerable to sophisticated forms of control or subversion, or to outright domination. Competition among the leading technological powers for the political loyalty of clients
might imply reversion to some form of nationalistic imperialism.

Impact TurnsSpace
Cap key to space only way to prevent terminal extinction Wasser 10 Alan, premier legal authority on Space Property Rights, former broadcast journalist
[May 9, http://spacebusinessblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/space-property-rights-interview-with.html]cn

now that the President has made it official, the space activist community will finally face up to the truth. On April 15th, at the Kennedy Space Center, The President said: "Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We've been there before. Buzz has been there." That makes it official that, as some of us predicted long ago, the Government is NOT going to pay for a Lunar Settlement. In fact, the Government isn't even going to pay for another flags and footsteps mission to the Moon. Maybe, someday, a flags and footsteps mission to Mars, - maybe - someday, - but the taxpayers are certainly not going to let the government pay for a settlement there either. So, if you believe, as I do, that the settlement of space is vital for the human species, you've got an unpleasant choice to make: Option 1: You can stay in a state of denial - insisting that, someday, somehow, Apollo will return, or a pure philanthropist godmother will magically give space to you - or Option 2: You can face the fact that the only way to make the settlement of space happen is to get the for-profit entrepreneurs interested. Profit. The profit motivation. Capitalism. The love of money is the root of all evil. Racing to open the frontier so the winner can get even more filthy rich. Ugh! Disgusting. What will people think of us for suggesting such a thing? We could only consider that as the absolute last resort. Yup! That's what we're down to. A lot of space activists will cling to Option 1 at first, but eventually many will accept that "for profit" really is the only way the human habitat can be expanded out beyond the Earth. We're down to our absolute last choice - or nothing. If
I'm just hoping that, Obama could have funded Constellation, he would have. The President's choice to speak on April 15th, income tax day, tells you why he couldn't. National prestige once required the US to have the world's tallest building. But,

the public stopped measuring national prestige the old way. Government space programs, like the world's tallest buildings, have become prestige items for second and third rate powers. Apollo turns out to have been a one-shot event, specific to its era, not the template for space development. Ever since, space supporters have been trying - and failing - over and over again, to convince US taxpayers they need a robust national government space program for spin-offs, incentives for engineering education, jobs, NEO warnings, etc. etc. etc. Instead, the voters chose more tax cuts! So it is up to free enterprise to open the space frontier, but that can happen only when there's a potential profit from it large enough to justify the huge risks and long lead time the project requires. [He continues] Question: Is the idea of celestial land claim recognition gaining momentum? Alan: Definitely! One of the best examples is Eric Rice, CEO of Orbitec, a true commercial space company, who realized how logical this idea was several years ago and has done a great job of promoting it ever since. Earlier this year, he got a generous NASA Steckler grant to study the idea. Rice also served as a past President of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Space Colonization Technical Committee, and he led six AIAA SCTC members on a Congressional lobbying effort in March 2010 that's led to a web discussion forum on the subject that includes a dozen key legislative space aides already.
eventually

Impact TurnsTechnology
Capitalism key to technological innovationhelps the environment Barker, 00 electrical engineer, and manager of corporate communications for the Electric Power
Research Institute and former industrial economist and staff author at SRI International and as a commercial research analyst at USX Corporation (Brent, Technology and the Quest for Sustainability. EPRI Journal, Summer) The rate of innovation is especially critical to sustainability. The roadmap participants have concluded that a "2% solution" is needed to support a sustainable future. By this, they mean that productivity improvements in a range of areas-including global industrial processes, energy intensity, resource utilization, agricultural yield, emissions reduction, and water consumption--have to occur at a pace of 2% or more per year over the next century. If the advances are distributed on a global basis, this pace should be sufficient to keep the world ahead of growing social and environmental threats. It will also generate the global wealth necessary to
progressively eliminate the root cause of these threats and will provide the means to cope with the inevitable surprises that will arise. For example, a 2% annual increase in global electricity supply, if made broadly available in developing countries, would meet the goal of providing 1000 kWh per year to every person in the world in 2050. This means extending the benefits of electricity to 100 million new users every year. Maintaining a 2% pace in productivity improvements for a century will be formidable. It is in line with the cumulative advancement in the United States during the twentieth century, but at least twice the world average over that period. The disparity has been particularly great in the past 25 years, as population growth has outstripped economic development in many parts of the world. The result has been massive borrowing to maintain or enhance short-term standards of living. Staying ahead of population-related challenges is now in the enlightened selfinterest of all the world's peoples, and the 2% solution offers a benchmark for success. Sustaining

efficiency gains of 2% per year throughout the twenty-first century would allow essential global economic development to continue while sparing the planet. This pace, for example, should help stabilize world population (to the
extent that wealth is a primary determinant of population growth), limit atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases to below agreed-upon strat egic limits, provide

sufficient food for the bulk of the world's people (as well as the wherewithal to buy it), and return significant amounts of land and water to their natural states. Roadmap participants envision technology and the spread of liberal capitalism as powerful agents for the 2% solution in that they can stimulate global development and foster worldwide participation in market economies. However, the
participants have also expressed some concern and caution about unbridled globalization overrunning local cultures and societies and creating instability, unrest, and conflict. At its worst, globalization could lock weaker nations into commodity-production dependencies, leading to a survival-of-the-fittest global economy in which the rich get richer and most of the poor stay poor. Establishing greater dialogue and cooperation among developed and developing nations is therefore considered critical to ensuring that globalization delivers on its promise to be a vehicle of worldwide progress that honors the diversity of nations and peoples. Targets of sustainability There is no single measure of sustainability; rather, it will require continued progress in a wide variety of areas that reflect the growing efficiency of resource utilization, broad improvements in the quality of life for today's impoverished people, and acceleration of the historical shift away from resource-intensive economic activity. The roadmap's sustainability R&D targets provide a first-order approximation of what will be required. In many cases, the targets represent a significant stretch beyond today's levels, but they are all technologically achievable. The roadmap sets an optimistic course, certain that with accelerated R&D and a much stronger technological foundation in hand by 2025, the world could be well on a path to economic and environmental sustainability by midcentury. The goals for sustainability are simply too far-reaching to be achieved solely through governmental directives or policy. Rather, they will be reached most readily via a healthy, robust global economy in which accelerated te chnological innovation in the private sector is strongly encouraged and supported by public policy. The challenges of bringing the world to a state of economic and environmental sustainability in the coming century are immense but not insurmountable. Technology

is on the threshold of profound change, quite likely to be broader, faster, and more dramatic in its impact than that which we experienced in the twentieth century. Fortunately, the impact appears to be heading in the right direction.
Much of the leading-edge technology is environmentally friendly and, from today's vantage point, is likely to lead to a global economy that is cleaner, leaner, lighter, and drier; many times more efficient, productive, and abundant; and altogether less invasive and less destructive of the natural world. History

teaches us that technology can be a liberating force for humanity, allowing us to break through our own self-made limits as well as those posed by the natural world. The next steps will be to extend the benefits of innovation to the billions of people without access and, in the words of Jesse
Ausubel, to begin "liberating the environment itself." This entails meeting our needs with far fewer resources by developing a "hydrogen economy, landless agriculture, and industrial ecosystems in which waste virtually disappears....and by broadening our notions of democracy, as well as our view of the ethical standing of trees, owls, and mountains." In many ways, the material abundance and extended human capabilities generated through hundreds of years of technology development have led us to a new understanding and heightened respect for the

underlying "technologies of life." Offering four billion years of experience, nature will become one of our best teachers in the new century; we are likely to see new technology progressively taking on the character and attributes of living systems. Technology may even begin to disappear into the landscape as microminiaturization and biological design ensue. Still, though technology is heading in the right direction, what

remains principally in question is whether the pace of innovation is adequate to stay ahead of the curve of global problems and whether new advances in technology can be quickly brought down in cost and readily distributed throughout the world. Can we achieve the 2% solution of progressive improvement in
economic productivity, land and water use, recycling, emissions reduction, and agricultural yield, year after year, decade after decade, in nation after nation? It's a formidable challenge, but with better tools we just might be able to pull it off, If so, the key to success will not be found in one small corner of the world. The challenge will be met by making the basic building blocks of innovation--education, R&D, infrastructure, and law--available in full measure to future generations everywhere in the world. That future begins now.

Alt FailsGeneral
Doing nothing failsit cedes power to capitalist elites. We should combine criticism with action Hardy 10
(Simon, Slavoj iek, an idealist Trojan horse, League for the Fifth international, http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/slavoj-zizek-idealist-trojan-horse) One of iek's better arguments concerns the current dominant discourse in international relations concerning humanitarian intervention. He rightly attacks this as a post political excuse for imperialism. He positions the argument over humanitarianism as being one of urgency, that is, the demand that we have to act, and act quickly to prevent genocide, human rights violations etc. This closes down the space for debate and discussion, allowing the status quo (imperialism) to set the agenda and neutralise opposition. Whilst all this is true, his solution exposes the radical weakness of his entire project, from an emancipatory point of view. Maybe it is designed in typical iekian way to shock, but what he proposes is precisely to do nothing. This allows time to think, to consider reflectively alternative courses of action. iek himself cannot propose anything, since he has not genuine concept of the revolutionary working class of a genuine political subjectivity to counter act imperialism. As socialists we oppose imperialist intervention, and call for the arming of those affected by potential genocide (Darfur for instance) to defend themselves. iek in another work argues that I
am therefore tempted to reverse Marx's theses 11: the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act... but to question the hegemonic ideological co-ordinates." But for

those of us who have already questioned the hegemonic ideological co-ordinates and already, developed a strategy for action, should we wait? A notion of revolutionary 'Act'ion, but with no proletariat to speak of leads one down the road of revolutionary terrorism, or as iek himself once called for Linksfaschismus (Left fascism) (if this radical choice is decried by bleeding heart liberals then
so be it!), that is the violence inflicted on society by another, some kind of authoritarian who dared to Act. This follows from Sharpe's criticism of iek, that, following in the footsteps of Marcuse, iek connects

the current depoliticisation (post politics) with a structurally overpowering ideology which can lead either towards cynicism or voluntarist ultra leftism. A good example comes from Revolution at the Gates, his edited book of Lenins writings of 1917 iek, argues that a truly shocking act on a demonstration when faced with the police is for the individuals to start beating each other up. Thanks for the advice comrade! Conclusion Certainly iek is a a very interesting thinker when it
comes to cinematic and cultural analysis, and in this terrain he is certainly worth reading and thinking about. Some of the concepts that he employs, for instance in his Perverts Guide to cinema are extraordinarily perceptive, and allow for radical readings of films which provide entirely new insights. However when he steps out of this realm he adds not so much insight, as confusion and offers a dangerous path for those who wish to follow him uncritically. It is

a testimony to the general weakness of Marxist theory today, especially when it comes to philosophy, that someone like iek can be feted as such a great inspiration and a step forward. Instead of a return to the idealistic Hegel as a source for inspiration, socialists need to be focussing on putting the case positively for the actuality of the revolution in the here and now, for the centrality of the working class as the subject-object of revolutionary struggle against all existing social conditions.
Post war Marxism was a bitter retreat from the gains of 1902-1922, away from revolutionary programme and concepts into a swamp of eclecticism, structuralism and eventually nearly fatally wounded by post-modernism. It was both a product of and a contribution towards the general political decline of the left, confusion of the left intelligentsia and subsequently a retreat from strategic questions of revolutionary politics. iek claims to contribute to a revival of communism and a renewed debate on these issues. Certainly he provokes debate, but he is in fact a Trojan horse, smuggling in idealist and anti revolutionary concepts into the left.

Zizeks politics fail 1) theyre authoritarian 2) they prevent coalition building 3) they preclude concrete action necessary to challenge the ideology of capitalism Robinson 03

Andrew Robinson, Postgraduate student, School of Politics, University of Nottingham, and Simon Tormey, Senior Lecturer in Politics and Critical Theory, University of Nottingham, 2003, online: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeknotradical.pdf, accessed October 22, 2004 Zizeks politics are not merely impossible, but potentially despotic, and also (between support for a Master, acceptance of pain and alienation, militarism and the restoration of order) tendentially conservative. They serve only to discredit the left and further alienate those it seeks to mobilise. Instead, a transformative politics should be a process of transformation, an alinear, rhizomatic, multiform plurality of resistances, initiatives, and, indeed, acts, which are sometimes spectacular and carnivalesque, sometimes prefigurative, sometimes subterranean, sometimes rooted in institutional change and reform, sometimes directly revolutionary. Zizeks model of the pledged group, bound together by the One who Acts, is entirely irrelevant to the contemporary world and would be a step backwards from the decentred character of current leftradical politics. Nor need this decentring be seen as a weakness as Zizek insists. It can be a strength, protecting radical politics from self-appointed elites, transformism, infiltration, defeat through the neutralisation of leaders, and the threat of a repeat of the Stalinist betrayal. In contrast with Zizeks stress on subordination, exclusivity, hierarchy and violence, the tendency of anti-capitalists and others to adopt anti-authoritarian, heterogeneous, inclusive and multiform types of activity offer a better chance of effectively overcoming the homogenising logic of capitalism and of winning support among wider circles of those dissatisfied with it. Similarly, the emphasis on direct action - which can include ludic, carnivalesque and non-violent actions as well as more overtly confrontational ones - generates the possibility of empowerment through involvement in and support for the myriad causes which make up the anticapitalist resistance. This resistance stands in stark contrast to the desert of heroic isolation advocated by Zizek, which, as Laclau puts it, is a prescription for political quietism and sterility.154 Zizek is right that we should aim to overcome the impossibilities of capitalism, but this overcoming should involve the active prefiguration and construction in actuality of alternative social forms, not a simple (and actually impossible) break with everything which exists of the kind imagined by Zizek. It is important
that radicals invoke utopias, but in an active way, in the forms of organisation, disorganisation, and activity we adopt, in the spaces we create for resistance, and in the prefiguration of alternative economic, political and social forms. Utopian imaginaries express what is at stake in left radicalism: that what exists does not exist of necessity, and that the contingency of social institutions and practices makes possible the overthrow of existing institutions and the construction or creation of different practices, social relations, and conceptions of the world. The

most Zizek allows to radicals is the ability to glimpse utopia while enacting the reconstruction of oppression. Radicals should go further, and bring this imagined other place into actual existence. Through enacting utopia, we have the
ability to bring the no-where into the now-here.

Alt failscant change everyones minds Mead 09 - Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (Walter Russell, The
New Republic, Only Makes You Stronger, 2/4/09)
But, in many other countries where capitalism rubs people the wrong way, this is not the case. On either side of the Atlantic, for example, the Latin world is often drawn to anti-capitalist movements and rulers on both the right and the left. Russia, too, has never really taken to capitalism and liberal society--whether during the time of the czars, the commissars, or the post-cold war leaders who so signally failed to build a stable, open system of liberal democratic capitalism even as many former Warsaw Pact nations were making rapid transitions. Partly as a result of these internal cultural pressures, and partly because, in much of the world, capitalism has appeared as an unwelcome interloper, imposed by foreign forces and shaped to fit foreign rather than domestic interests and preferences, many countries are only half-heartedly capitalist.

When crisis strikes, they are quick to decide that

capitalism is a failure and look for alternatives. So far, such half-hearted experiments not only have failed to work; they have left the societies that have tried them in a progressively worse position, farther behind the front-runners as time goes by. Argentina has lost
ground to Chile; Russian development has fallen farther behind that of the Baltic states and Central Europe. Frequently, the crisis has weakened the power of the merchants, industrialists,

Crisis can also strengthen the hand of religious extremists, populist radicals, or authoritarian traditionalists who are determined to resist liberal capitalist society for a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, the companies and banks based in these societies are often less
financiers, and professionals who want to develop a liberal capitalist society integrated into the world.

established and more vulnerable to the consequences of a financial crisis than more established firms in wealthier societies. As a result, developing countries and countries where capitalism has relatively recent and shallow roots tend to suffer greater economic and political damage when crisis strikes--as, inevitably, it does. And, consequently, financial crises often reinforce rather than challenge the global distribution of power and wealth. This may be happening yet again. None of which means that we can just sit back and enjoy the recession. History may suggest that financial crises actually help capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has other, less reassuring messages as well. If
financial crises have been a normal part of life during the 300-year rise of the liberal capitalist system under the Anglophone powers, so has war. The wars of the League of Augsburg and the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the American Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; the two World Wars; the cold war: The list of wars is almost as long as the list of financial crises.

Peak OilFalse
Peak oil is a false theorywe can empirically revitalize old wells JAD MOUAWAD 2007, Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/business/05oil1.html?_r=1&ei=5087%0A&em=&en=115684c949 c827ab&ex=1173243600&pagewanted=all The Kern River oil field, discovered in 1899, was revived when Chevron engineers here started injecting high-pressured steam to pump out more oil. The field, whose production had slumped to 10,000 barrels a day in the 1960s, now has a daily output of 85,000 barrels. In Indonesia, Chevron has applied the same technology to the giant Duri oil field, discovered in 1941, boosting production there to more than 200,000 barrels a day, up from 65,000 barrels in the mid-1980s. And in Texas, Exxon Mobil expects to double the amount of oil it extracts from its Means field, which dates back to the 1930s. Exxon, like Chevron, will use three-dimensional imaging of the underground field and the injection of a gas in this case, carbon dioxide to flush out the oil. Within the last decade, technology advances have made it possible to unlock more oil from old fields, and, at the same time, higher oil prices have made it economical for companies to go after reserves that are harder to reach. With plenty of oil still left in familiar locations, forecasts that the worlds reserves are drying out have given way to predictions that more oil can be found than ever before. In a wide-ranging study published in 2000, the U.S.
Geological Survey estimated that ultimately recoverable resources of conventional oil totaled about 3.3 trillion barrels, of which a third has already been produced. More recently, Cambridge

Energy Research Associates, an energy consultant, estimated that the total base of recoverable oil was 4.8 trillion barrels. That higher estimate which Cambridge Energy says is likely to grow reflects how new technology can tap into more resources. Its the fifth time to my count that weve gone through a period when it seemed the end of oil was near and people were talking about the exhaustion of resources, said Daniel Yergin, the chairman of Cambridge Energy and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil, who cited similar concerns in the 1880s, after both world wars and in the 1970s. Back then we were going to fly off the oil mountain. Instead we had a boom and oil went to $10 instead of $100. There is still a minority view, held largely by a small band of retired petroleum geologists and some members of Congress, that oil production has peaked, but the theory has been fading. Equally
contentious for the oil companies is the growing voice of environmentalists, who do not think that pumping and consuming an everincreasing amount of fossil fuel is in any way desirable.