WARMING NEG

1NC RESILIENT LIFE

Their political strategy further the liberal logic of resilient living ---- their
depictions of inevitable global catastrophes that results in unbound nihilism --- all
we can do is cope with our portable decision-making skills
Evans and Reid 15 [Brad Evans is a Senior Lecturer in International relations at the School of
Sociology, Politics & International Studies (SPAIS), University of Bristol, Julian has taught
International Politics and International Relations at the Universities of London where he has
occupied the Chair in International Relations since 2010, “Exhausted by resilience: response to
the commentaries,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, April 7, 2015]

For us, the political and philosophical stakes could not have been more pronounced. Beneath
the veneer of concern
with security from death , violence and everyday dangers, we argued lurks a deeply nihilistic
way of thinking about the very nature of what it is to live. Resilience has created an image of a world in
which the very phenomena of violence and insecurity are assumed as natural and incontestable .
All things are insecure by design. In a sense, then, resilience, in conceiving the world as such,
does immense violence to our very sensibilities concerning the possibility of ever achieving
meaningful peace and security .
The real tragedy for us is the way the doctrine forces us to become active participants in our
own de-politicisation . Resilience encourages us to learn from the violence of
catastrophic events so that we can become more responsive to further
catastrophes on the horizon . It promotes adaptability so that life may go on living despite
experiencing certain destruction. Indeed it even demands a certain exposure to the threat before
its occurrence so that we can be better prepared . Resilience as such appears to be a form of
immunisation .
We internalise the catastrophic to the creation of new epistemic communities that are more
aware of their vulnerabilities. What is more, setting aside any utopian vision of a promissory world
that may be conceived otherwise, resilience looks to the future as an endemic terrain of
catastrophe that is already populated by the ruins of the present . We argued that there was a
distinct lethal principle at work here, which is profoundly different to that of sovereignty . While
the lethality of sovereignty is invested in the ability to annihilate the other, resilience exposes the self
to a dose of lethality to stave off something altogether more terminal. In this regard, it proves to be a
form of selfannihilation insomuch as lethality is internalised to be a resource for knowledge
and understanding that may be drawn upon. What does not kill you only makes you stronger, providing of course
you are trained in the art of survival.
resilience now authenticates who we are as people . Adaptability in the
Our thesis has been that
face of crisis emphasises our resourcefulness , our abilities to thrive in times of risk and our life-
affirming qualities that refuse to surrender to all forms of endangerment . Such reasoning we
maintained is fully compatible with neoliberalism and its promotion of risk , along
with its private commitment to the care for the self . It is precisely through the
promotion of ontologies of vulnerability instead of ontologies of oppression that we learn to
accept that things are simply crises ridden and ultimately catastrophically fated . In
short, while globalisation comes to us in many forms, the forces that bring about change are
quite literally out of our hands .
This inevitably brings us to the question of bio-politics today. Students will appreciate that we have written extensively about the
bio-politics of security, war and violence. Further, as we argued in the book, the bio-politics of today is not the bio-politics of Michel
Foucault. Indeed, whilst we accept that resilience is a novel form of bio-political intervention that
suspends life in a system of temporal purgatory – catastrophically fated unto the end – if our
concern is to rid ourselves of the nihilism of contemporary liberalism, most purposefully
expressed in the logic of the bio-politics of resilience, we must look to develop new modes of
subjectivity beyond the bio-political reckoning .
This is not a call to ‘forget Foucault’ (whatever that may mean). Foucault is not read widely enough. We have never been convinced
by those who would reduce Foucault to the ‘question of truth’, without ever engaging with his evident courage to truth as aptly titled
in a recently transcribed lecture series. Nor have we been convinced by those who claim that bio-politics is a reified paradigm
divorced from the everyday operations of power. Power, as Foucault always maintained, is as multiple as the problem of life itself.
Our deployment of the bio-political analytic has always retained this methodological commitment to address the micro-physics of
power and how this builds up into universal claims to truth that are globally expansive in ambition. What is liberalism after
all if not some planetary vision for political order premised upon the need to foreground ‘life
itself’ as central to all political strategies ?
We are however tired of addressing the political failures of liberal modernity . Its claims
to improve and enrich human existence have proved to be unfounded . It betrays a terrible
deceit as deliverance of security, peace and justice echoes the continued calls for catastrophe, war and
profound suspicion on the nature of the subject. And to repeat, we are also exhausted by resilience . It
nihilism is devastating. Its political language enslaving . Its modes of subjectivity
lamenting . And its political imagination notably absent . That is why we have decided after this
volume to never write, publicly lecture or debate the problematic again. We will not engage with those who would have us brought
into some dialectical orbit in order to validate its reverence by making it some master signifier in order to prove its majoritarian
position. Yes, the doctrine of resilience at the level of policy and power is ubiquitous. And yet in terms of
emancipating the political, it is already dead .

Their prophecies of climate catastrophe are nothing but another Christian

invocation of the Final Judgment – you should refuse this reactive and despairing
attachment to global warming as a last lament of the human and instead poetically
tear at the seams of the alleged coherence of the liberal human subject as such,
poetically moving towards a becoming-inhuman with an openness towards the
political possibilities that catastrophe brings.
Evans and Reid 14. Brad Evans, professor of international relations at the University of
Lapland, Finland and Julian Reid, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of
Bristol, Resilient Life, 2014, pg. 162
The world we live in is a world of radical contingency , in which the future is uncertain
and impossible to calculate . Nevertheless, as human beings we are capable of investing
our futures with profound beliefs and senses of certainty as to what may and can
happen. Indeed what does climate science express other than a longing for a sense
of certainty ; claims to truth which can be said to be beyond doubt? The scientific
imaginary out of which the belief in the incontestable nature of climate change
emerged , the necessity and reality of its occurrence, the impossibility of arguing with or over
its reality, is an expression of that longing . Such a longing is for a realm of certainty
beyond the radical contingency of the world ; a radical contingency that many
branches of science itself now understand as the real . Climate science is constituted by
a subject who is dependent for its reproduction on the belief in the existence of, as well
as our abilities to see and speak of, such a world beyond the real . In other words, it is
structured by the very same ontology of time that structures Christian Science and
literature . And when we look at debates within climate science , and claims to
knowledge as to the coming of the ‘Sixth Extinction’ , we are looking at a world
populated by prophets that operate within regimes of truth deeply similar to those
occupied by the prophets of Christianity . Climate science is a religion .
Our intention here is not to contest the truth claims of climate science and the ideologues of
climate change on the basis of their non-approximation to reality . It is to point at the
conditions of possibility for such claims ; conditions of possibility that are structurally
similar to those that underpin prophesy in its Christian form . Further, our intent is to
point out that a political discourse which posits the possibility of welcoming the coming
of another world and another life beyond that which is diagnosed as at risk of
extinction in climate science, the world and life of catastrophe as we experience it today, may
have no less ‘truth’ to it . Climate scientists say that there is no way of escape from the
dreadful and fearful realities of climate change ; while economists say that there is no
alternative to the further extension of the market in mitigation of the catastrophic
effects of climate change. The Left meanwhile castigates humanity for not having recognized
and respected the ‘parametric conditions’ on which our existence depends. All such
claims reproduce a prophetic mode of truth-telling tied into a parrhesiastic mode
of truth- telling which predicts a future which is awful and diagnoses the faults
and crimes of human beings on account of which they must change their ways of
living.
What is precisely missing here is a different vocabulary
through which to articulate the necessity and reality of
climate change, while being able to welcome this
inevitable event as the process of passage to a new world
and new life beyond that which we have known up until
now . It is to welcome the departure of that which has conditioned our experience as
a form of species life to date. Who ultimately knows what the future for life is beyond the
Holocene? Not one of us. The Anthropocene is only just beginning. What we can know is that
life will take different forms . There will be, as there is always assumed to be in irreducible
thought, a division between present and future, and within that a division between life
forms. Not between the saved and the damned , but between the life forms that will die off
with the end of the Holocene and those that will emerge with whatever comes into
existence after that time. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of the ‘Grolar’ bear ;
the cross between a Polar and Grizzly bear born of the sexual encounter consequent upon the
‘catastrophe effects’ of climate change, specifically the breaking up of the Arctic sea ice. What is
it about a civilization or a culture that manages to turn the wondrous phenomenon of the
emergence of new forms of life , consequent upon these dramatic changes in a milieu, into
a problematic of insecurity and threat? A team of ecologists led by Brendan Kelly of the
National Marine Mammal Laboratory, in Alaska, argues that with this phenomenon of the
‘cross-breed’, so ‘endangered, native species’ such as the Polar Bear, from which the Grolar Bear
is emerging, will soon disappear. Furthermore ‘the speeding up of evo- lutionary pressures, the
forcing of animals into rapid adaptive modes, may not produce biologically favorable outcomes’.
Quoting Kelly, from an interview with Live Science: ‘This change is happening so rapidly that it
doesn’t bode well for adaptive responses’.32 This cult of mourning for the coming death of
existing species life, consequent upon the movement of the earth, and fear for the nature of the
new forms of life to come, expresses perfectly the ways in which the ancient fear for the coming
catastrophe is now coupled with a modern biopoliticized fear of the transformative effects of
life’s movement upon existing species. ‘Pure’ and ‘native’ forms thus become threatened by
the emergence of impure, foreign, maladapted ones.
Rather than simply accept the injunction to fear processes of imminent global ecological
catastrophe, as well as accept claims as to the moral culpability of humanity for this catastrophe,
there is a need to recognize the ways in which our understanding of this phenomenon
are shaped for us by prophetic and parrhesiastic modes of veridiction . From this more
or less ancient combination of modes of veridiction follows the injunction that the human
must change itself in order to save itself and its world . In these senses, the truths we tell
ourselves concerning the problematic of finitude remain embedded within modes of
veridiction as old and moralizing as Christianity itself . Submitting to the blackmail of
global ecological catastrophe is to submit to a combination of the very same modes of
veridiction that functioned in the Middle Ages to subject human beings to absurd ideas
such as the Kingdom of the Last Day and the Final Judgment . The modernity of
prophesy and parrhesia concerned with ‘global ecological catastrophe’ owes to the different ways
in which they pose the problem of finitude. While in the Middle Ages the legitimacy of theocratic
rule depended on an offer of security to humans from the costs of their finitude through the
promise of eternal life, peace and security in Heaven, today the offer is one of ‘successful
adaptation’ to the costs of our having failed to understand the full nature of the
problem of finitude , in mitigation of the reality that as humans we have only just come to
understand that we have no preordained right to the earth , no providential history , or
guarantee of security and development . The promise held out to us should we be willing
to submit to this new problematization of the truth of finitude, and accept the need to adapt, is
not one of eternal life, nor even necessarily better life, but simply a little more life for our species
and those that we exist interdependently with.
This is why, rather than submitting to the blackmail of the coming catastrophe , we
argue for the need to develop an alternative and more poetic vocabulary by which to
articulate a politics of the welcome in order for us to con- front the reality of what Paul Virilio
names rightly ‘the finitude of (human) progress’ .33 Why is it we fear that which is
fundamental to the course of the world as well as of ourselves? And what is to fear of an end?
Fighting the debasements of human potentiality , and moving beyond the impasses
which political Lefts and Rights have reached today, requires the development of a new
regime of truth (discursively, sensually, aesthetically and atmospherically) through which to
articulate the possibility of the coming catastrophe while being able to welcome this
event as the process of passage to a new world and life beyond that which we have
known up until now. A regime of truth that does not demand of us that we learn to fear more
the course of the world and its transformative effects, with a view to being able to sustain
ourselves for longer in the forms and ways that we have come to know and depend on, but which
instils in us the confidence and courage to encounter and desire of it the very
transformations it renders possible of ourselves .
How do we source the establishment of such a new regime of truth? Both prophesy and
parrhesia are practices open to contestation and reformulation such that they can be put to
different uses . In effect, this is what Foucault’s analytics of truth-telling were set up to
achieve, by demonstrating the complex intertwinements of different regimes of truth across
historical time, amid the multiple struggles over how to use them, and their indispensability for
politics and the conditions of the political subject. Rather than arguing for a wholesale
rejection of prophesy and parrhesia , we argue for their renewed use , and aim to show
how they are in effect already in use , in constitution and deployment of a more poetic
aesthetic , the dictum of which is that in seeing the end we do not fear it , that we live
out the end in full knowledge of it , while we renounce any call to organize with a
view to trying to survive the end in a game whose rules are written against us from
the start. In this sense, and in following that dictum, we establish the necessary
conditions for conflict with liberal governance underpinned as it is by its biopolitical
aesthetic, and rival dictum that we must change by adapting to the conditions of liberal
governance in order to save ourselves from catastrophic processes outside our control and
fundamental to our fears.

We must craft an affirmative conception of subjectivity in response to the Sixth

Extinction Event. What is obscured by scientific and economic responses to
climate change is that the metaphysical question of the human subject is a
necessary prerequisite to imagining sustainable futures.
Evans and Reid 14. Brad Evans, professor of international relations at the University of
Lapland, Finland and Julian Reid, senior lecturer in international relations at the University of
Bristol, Resilient Life, 2014, pg. 152

The concept of extinction as it is currently employed in claims concerning the already

occurring process of the Sixth Extinction within the discourse of global ecological catastrophe is
also non-equivocal . Of course, extinction can be a risk and possibility that one
might successfully avoid . But this is not the truth we are told of our times, which
in the end will result in extinction . We are told that we are already ‘in’ the Sixth
Extinction ; a moment in our life-world cycle that is already happening. Regardless of how
much time we may buy ourselves now by recognizing the truth of finitude, recovery of
biodiversity will not occur in any timeframe meaningful to people : evolution of new
species typically takes at least hundreds of thousands of years and recovery from mass
extinction episodes probably occurs on timescales encompassing millions of years .18 So,
despite our best efforts at adaption , we are merely enduring and living through the
conditions of the event of the Sixth Extinction, not overcoming or preventing its
occurrence . This to us seems to be a highly questionable deal once broached either
politically or philosophically. We seem to be in good company. For this problem was already
raised by Nietzsche, who once again proves his remarkable capacity to think in the most
untimely ways to challenge that which initially seems insurmountable and the source for lament:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into
numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented
knowing . That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history ,’ but
nevertheless, it was only a minute . After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled
and congealed , and the clever beasts had to die . One might invent such a fable, and yet
he [they] still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable , how shadowy
and transient , how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.
There were eternities during which it did not exist . And when it is all over with the
human intellect, nothing will have happened .19
This infamous passage from On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense has often been read to
further the charges of nihilism. Nothing will have happened, so what is the point to it all?
Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. A central question Nietzsche put in this
article was ‘What does man actually know about himself? ’ Which also may be put in a
more affirmative way to read ‘How can man live differently once he [they] accepts the “errors” of
his [their] ways?’. For Nietzsche, part of the genius of construc- tion lies in our abilities
to bring error into reason . We live, he maintained, by the error of our ways. And long may it
continue. We also live in a magnificent fabricating universe where the power of
fabulation produces different senses of perception that are no less true to the subject’s
existence. More than necessary for revealing the suffocating modes of being which are
continually authenticated in modern times, it was essential to its over-coming. It is a mistake ,
therefore, to read Nietzsche’s original provocation on the end of times as the
triumph of resentment and negation . On the contrary, he provides an acute warning as to
the dangers of living unto the end as if nothing will have happened . Or to put it another
way, to continue to live beneath the suffocating clouds of despair is sure testimony to
the fact that there is nothing to live of meaning : ‘The most extreme form of nihilism
would be the view that every belief , every holding-something-true is necessarily false
because there is no true world’ .20 For Nietzsche, the counter to this will-to-
nothingness could not be achieved by turning towards some conservative approximation of
truth that reveals some immutable ‘essence’. It demands a veritable courage to truth that
weathers the storm in order to emerge transformed: ‘When a real storm cloud thunders
above him [them], he [they] wraps himself [themselves] in his [their] cloak[s], and with slow
steps he [they] walks from beneath it’21.
This raises a number of significant questions for us: If we accept the truth and reality of the
global ecological catastrophe, then how else might we respond to it? If we accept, especially, our
responsibility as a species for the creation of this catastrophe, how does such an acceptance
affect our response? Ought we not to question the injunction to respond by merely
seeking to adapt in order to survive longer ? Given that it is the very ethics of species
survival and development that accounts, at base, for the existence of human responsibility for
the global ecological catastrophe, ought we not to be seeking alternative answers to the
question of how we want to live out this self-fulfilling endgame of human
existence? If there is such a thing indeed as a global ecological catastrophe , surely the
question becomes one that seeks to stake out a more affirmative choice ? How do we
desire to live out these end times of human existence so that our end might no longer be
conditioned by the fear of that end ? If it is an end, and if it is true that there is no turning
back from this tipping point of extinction time, why are we choosing to live out that end by
adapting to the conditions of our own demise, rather than with experimenting with other ways
of living less attached to preserving our life as such, and more attuned to the inevitability of
death and extinction as realities that can contribute to the intensity of our experience of worldly
living for the finite time that we are left with as a species already fated to extinction in the end?
These questions are profoundly philosophical. And rightly so! The assault we are
witnessing on the political today is so intellectually catastrophic that the only
solutions presented to us as viable propose changes so that everything ultimately
remains the same . For what are we really conserving when we offer vulnerability to
counter vulnerability and insecurity to counter insecurity ? This is the real mastery of
neoliberalism . For it has led us into a catastrophic quagmire that is fully in keeping with
its need to reproduce conditions that are insecure by design ; and yet it is managing to
repackage itself as the most enlightened way to navigate the uncertain waters , albeit
with a captainless crew , which ultimately accepts that the promised land will never be
shored. So surely without the ability to step back from the catastrophic injunction
with more consideration, and bring into question the framing of the debates which offer
various technocratic solutions to the effects brought about by ecological change, however
devastating, to begin questioning the philosophical and political stakes , how is it at all
possible to even think about setting a new course of direction with a confidence in our
abilities to live through these uncertain times , and view the troubled waters in a new,
more exhilarating and aesthetically enriching light of day?
 1NC CASE
Can’t solve warming – no political will in America – this also straight turns their
heuristics page
Loki 9/15 [Raynard, “How Republicans Made Climate Change America's Most Divisive Political
Issue,” AlterNet, 9/15/15, http://www.alternet.org/environment/climate-change-more-divisive-
abortion-blame-republicans]

Writing in the Altantic in May of last year, Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, laid the blame of the nation’s
current political dysfunction squarely in the GOP’s camp:
Republicans have become a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme, contemptuous of
the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political
opposition. The evidence of this asymmetry is overwhelming.
The Power of Denial
Even more alarming is the fact that the climate denial sown by the GOP machine is, to a certain extent, working.
According to a recent study led by University of Bristol cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky, the ceaseless public
debate over whether climate change is actually happening is making some climate scientists
understate their own findings , which unintentionally supports the climate deniers’ position
that it is too soon to take aggressive climate action.
“In response to constant , and sometimes toxic, public challenges, scientists have over-emphasized
scientific uncertainty , and have inadvertently allowed contrarian claims to affect how they themselves speak, and
perhaps even think, about their own research,” writes Lewandowsky in the journal Global Environmental Change. One of the
psychological mechanisms behind this, he argues, is pluralistic ignorance, a social phenomenon that occurs when “ a
minority
opinion is given disproportionate prominence in public debate , resulting in the
majority of people incorrectly assuming their opinion is marginalized .” So, while climate deniers may be in
the minority, the regular coverage of climate denial by Fox News and other conservative media, and perhaps even the lack of climate
change coverage by mainstream media, are contributing factors to scientists’ muted approach.
“A public discourse that asserts that the IPCC has exaggerated the threat of climate change ,”
Lewandoswky points out, “may cause scientists who disagree to think their views are in the minority, and they may therefore
feelinhibited from speaking out in public.” Furthermore, the researchers said when offering rebuttals to their critics, scientists often
do so “within a linguistic landscape created by denial and often in a manner that reinforces the contrarian claim.”
This assessment supports the UCS analysis of cable news coverage of climate change; specifically of how CNN, an ostensibly centrist
network (at least in comparison to Fox), readily offers a soapbox for the climate denial wing. “Most of CNN’s misleading coverage
stemmed from debates between guests who accepted established climate science and other guests who disputed it,” write the UCS
report’s authors. “This format suggests that established climate science is still widely debated among scientists, which it is not, and
also allows opponents of climate policy to convey inaccurate statements about climate science.”
With the media freely giving airtime to climate deniers, GOP presidential candidates feel no
inhibition about sharing their particular strain of climate denial with the world. They are joined
by growing ranks of Republican politicians of varying levels of anti-science denial, but who agree
in their opposition of any policy to combat climate change. “You don’t have to be an outright science denier to
try to prevent action on climate change,” said Brulle. “You’ve got gradation — it’s not real; it’s real but we are not sure how much
humans are contributing to it; ‘I am not a scientist‘ phrase as a way to avoid the issue while avoiding being labeled an outright
denier. There are all sorts of strategies.”
But how long will the Tea Party wield influence on the climate debate? Tea Partiers tend to be older than other Republicans (25
percent are 65 or older, compared with 19 percent of other GOP supporters). And since young people overwhelmingly believe that
climate change is happening (only 3 percent don’t), perhaps the Tea Party’s ability to shape the climate debate will diminish over
time. But by then, it may be too late to do anything about it.
GOP-Led Rift
While environmentalists have targeted climate change as a wedge issue that might influence the independent vote, the climate divide
is just one part of a larger trend in the United States. An expansive 2014 Pew political polarizaton survey of 10,000 adults
nationwide concluded that “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines — and
This deep animosity is
partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive — than at any point in the last two decades.”
extremely worrisome. Since 1994, the percentage of party-affiliated Americans who have a highly negative view of the
opposing party has doubled, with the majority of these fiercely partisan voters viewing the opposing party’s policies as “so misguided
that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”
Though both parties are fomenting an increasing hatred for each other, it’s the Republicans who
must bear the brunt of the blame — even as theirs is the party that more often plays the blame
game and harbors more distrust. According to Pew, more conservatives (72 percent) have a “very
unfavorable opinion” of Democrats, compared to 53 percent of liberals who share the same view of Republicans. In
addition, conservatives are more likely to say that Democratic party policies are a threat to the nation’s well-being.
The GOP has done an excellent job at sowing enough doubt to create a political rift that
threatens any U.S.-led action on climate change . Even GOP governors have lined up to
defy Obama’s new emissions rules. Jim Manzi, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Peter Wehner, a senior fellow
at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, offered an explanation of the GOP’s stance — and its predicament — in a recent National
Affairs essay:
The Republican position — either avowed ignorance or conspiracy theorizing  — is ultimately
unsustainable, but
some still cling to it because they believe that accepting the premise that some
climate change is occurring as a result of human action means accepting the conclusions of the
most rabid left-wing climate activists. They fear, at least implicitly, that the politics of climate change is
just a twisted road with a known destination: supporting new carbon taxes, a cap-and-trade system, or other statist
means of energy rationing, and in the process ceding yet another key economic sector to government control. Conservatives seem to
be on the horns of a dilemma: They will have to either continue to ignore real scientific findings or accept higher taxes, energy
rationing, and increased regulation.

The aff retains all the trappings of absolute power including absolute military,
technological and economic superiority and if the world seems to be getting better
it is only because we in the West have insulated ourselves from the violence of
colonialism
Douzinas ‘7 /Costas, Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, visiting fellow at Princeton University and at the
Cardozo School of Law, Human Rights and Empire The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism
New York: Routledge-Cavendish. pg. 288-290/
The withdrawal is precipitated and advertised by our recent wars, the war on
terrorism and the postmodern just wars . In modernity, the setting of ends, including the
ends of law, was the prerogative of the sovereign. War is the ultimate expression of the sovereign
end. The return of war indicates that sovereignty is not retreating but losing its ability to make
sense. The decision to go to war is the sovereign decision par excellence and beyond its
immediate aims, war’s end is to accomplish the sovereign’s essence. The nature of the enemy in
the ‘war on terror’ may help us understand this changing essence. The enemy is both
banalised as a mere criminal and absolutised as radical evil-doer and our wars
take the form of police action, of a war of law . As a criminal, the terrorist testifies to the
emergence of a common law and, as evil-doer of a universal lingua franca of ethics and semiotics
governing the entire world. The terrorist as criminal violates the one legal order and as evildoer
repudiates our common ethics. The creation of this symbolic space is infinitely more
important than toppling Saddam Hussein or catching a few Al Qaeda members. This is
the symbolic space of a global community organised according to the effectiveness of planetary
technology, world capitalism and a legal system given to the endless circulation of causes and
effects without end. But as we saw, no common law or ethics, no world constitution or
supranational right has or can emerge. War is called police action and economic
competition, violence has taken a lawful, humane, civilised form, nesting
everywhere and nowhere, linked to any number of ends but not to a supreme end.
Community without commonality, law without justice, terrifying sovereign action that has made
the exception permanent; these are the normative contours of the new world order. Finally,
law’s action veers between a sovereignty that has given up on determining its end and a
humanity that cannot determine ends. In this sense, war may be the return to
sovereignty, but of a bastard sovereignty without community, which acts without
end, except the end of endless aggrandisement . One can argue, therefore, that the
withdrawal of sovereignty, its alleged subjection to legal and moral rules, and its replacement by
humanity refers to the withdrawal of bare sovereignty, the sovereignty of autonomous
selfconstitution. Theological sovereignty on the other hand, withdraws from the
weak states and gets condensed in its quasi-imperial centre . It is a sovereignty of
absent value, a nihilistic theology that retains all the trappings of absolute power
including absolute military, technological and economic superiority, which has as
its end the endless circulation of exchange value . As bare sovereignty is the logical and
historical presupposition of all community including a world one, what withdraws is the space
that came between bare and theological sovereignty or between citizen and subject, in other
words politics. If sovereignty infused with value was predominantly that of blood and soil, the
sovereignty of the absence of value is the postmodern sovereignty of globalisation and empire.
The deconstruction of sovereignty , the destruction of the sense of the world leaves us
with a super-sovereignty for which violence has replaced value . The metaphysics of
humanity, of the human added to legal rights in the form of human rights cannot provide a
postmodern principle of justice because humanity like rights carries no intrinsic value .
Absent justice, the mythological principle of modernity, becomes infinitely relativised, it
abandons the remembrance or promise of absent value for absence simple. Its justice is what we
find when law and justice are collapsed into each other, justice becomes bare and nihilistic, the
productivity or efficiency of law regulating external, material, relative relations. At this point,
the symbolic space of a new world order opens. Cosmopolitan sovereignty, the only type of
global sovereignty on offer, claims the garments of value (freedom, dignity, emancipation) but is
realised in the ubiquitous violence of economic competition, war as police action and
empty but ever-present legality . Law as validity without significance is the main form of
the social bond. There can be no community at the global level . The jurisdiction of the
global hegemon, rather than expressing of autonomy and self-constitution of community marks
its heteronomy and decline. Because nihilism and value, solely as exchange value, cannot finish
community and subjectivity, the simulacra of value ( atrocious nationalism, nihilistic
terrorism, religious fundamentalism ) appear, no longer as the opposite and supplement
of nihilism but as its mirror and bastard progeny. Humanity cannot act as the a priori nihilistic
or mythological source of legal and moral rules. Let me repeat: humanity’s function lies not in a
philosophical essence but in its non-essence, in the endless process of redefinition and the
necessary but impossible attempt to escape external determination. Humanity has no
foundation and no ends, it is the definition of groundlessness . But if humanity has no
ends, it can never become a sovereign value and war fought in its name will always be fake. If
rights express the endless trajectory of a nihilistic and insatiable desire, humanity’s only sacred
aspect is its ability to endless sacrifice in order to resacralise the principle of sovereignty as
terrible and awe-inspiring or as its slightly ridiculous simulacrum. At this point, the new
sovereign will have achieved its end and could even gradually wither away as humanity will have
come to its final definition. But this would also be the withering away of humanity. The principle
of just war will have finally won, in the proclamation of a perpetual peace drowned in endless
violence.

Coop inevitable and it’s insulated – no spillover to the broader relationship

Devine 9/25 [Daniel, September 25, 2015, “China, U.S. announce joint cap-and-trade plan,”
http://www.worldmag.com/2015/09/china_u_s_announce_joint_cap_and_trade_plan]
The U nited S tates and China may be at odds over human rights, internet hacking, and island-
building in the S outh C hina S ea, but presidents Barack Obama and Xi Jinping appear to agree on at
least one thing: fighting global warming .
The two leaders on Friday jointly announced plans to reduce their national output of carbon dioxide ,
the primary greenhouse gas blamed for global warming. For the first time, China will implement a
national cap-and-trade program , requiring Chinese electric companies, iron and steel plants, and
manufacturers of paper, chemicals, and cement to trade emissions credits beginning in 2017. The
United States will make its own carbon cuts through existing or planned regulations .
The joint announcement comes amid Xi’s first diplomatic visit to the United States, and two months
ahead of a climate summit in Paris, where world leaders will press forward in their perennial
quest for an international agreement to reduce carbon emissions . That effort has long been
stymied by disputes over which countries should be allowed to emit, and which should make
major cuts.
“When the world’s two biggest economies , energy consumers and carbon emitters come together
like this, then there’s no reason for other countries, either developed or developing, to not do so
as well,” said Obama during a White House press conference with Xi today.
The agreement between China and the United States at least gives an appearance of a unified purpose going into the
Paris talks. According to the plan announced Friday, by 2030 China will reduce its carbon
intensity by as much 65 percent from 2005 levels. It agreed to expand the growth of forests, promote renewable power and
“green” buildings, implement stricter fuel efficiency standards, and cut the emission of hydrofluorocarbon pollutants. China also
committed to providing $3.1 billion to fund climate efforts in developing nations, matching a
similar $3 billion pledge from the United States .

Aff’s a useless distraction that facilitates widespread denial – any reform outside
of binding international emissions reductions will fail to make a dent in warming
– radical transformation key
Parr 13 [Adrian, PHD in philosophy from Monash University, professor in the Department of
Sociology and the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati,
2013, The wrath of capital: neoliberalism and climate change policies, Columbia University
Press: New York, NY, p. 2-4]

Fredric Jameson neatly summarizes the narrative condition of modernity as the dialectic
between the modality of rupture that inaugurates a new period and the definition of that new
period in turn by continuity.4 The ironical outcome, as I describe it in the pages that follow, is that despite the
narrative category driving change in the modern world, everything continues to stay the same -
perhaps because what this narrative produces is a virulent strain of amnesia. Every change or historical rupture contains within it
the dialectical narrative structure of modernity such that the New and the period it launches into existence are mere ritual . What
persists is the condition of violence embedded in neoliberal capitalism as it robs each and every
one of us (other species and ecosystems included) of a future. The narrative of modernity and the optimistic feeling of
newness it generates are merely a distraction. Distractions such as decarbonizing the free-market
economy, buying carbon offsets, handing out contraceptives to poor women in developing
countries, drinking tap water in place of bottled water, changing personal eating habits,
installing green roofs on city hall, and expressing moral outrage at British Petroleum (BP) for the oil spill in
the Gulf of Mexico, although well meaning, are merely symptomatic of the uselessness of free-market
"solutions" to environmental change . Indeed, such widespread distraction leads to
denial . With the proclamation of the twenty- first century to be the era of climate change, the Trojan horse of
neoliberal restructuring entered the political arena of climate change talks and policy , and a more
virulent strain of capital accumulation began . For this reason, delegates from the African nations, with the support of the Group of
77 (developing countries), walked out of the 2009 United Nations (UN) climate talks in Copenhagen, accusing rich countries of
dragging their heels on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and destroying the mechanism through which this reduction can
be achieved-the Kyoto Protocol. In the absence of an internationally binding agreement on
emissions reductions , all individual actions taken to reduce emissions-a flat global
carbon tax, recycling, hybrid cars, carbon offsets, a few solar panels here and there, and so on- are mere
theatrics . In this book, I argue that underpinning the massive environmental changes happening
around the world, of which climate change is an important factor, is an unchanging
socioeconomic condition (neoliberal capitalism), and the magnitude of this situation is that of a
political crisis. So, at the risk of extending my literary license too far, it is fair to say that the human race is currently
in the middle of an earth-shattering historical moment. Glaciers in the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and
Alps are receding. The social impact of environmental change is now acute, with the International Organization for Migration
predicting there will be approximately two hundred million environmental refugees by 2050, with estimates expecting as many as up
to one billion.5 We
are poised between needing to radically transform how we live and
becoming extinct . Modern (postindustrial) society inaugurated what geologists refer to as the
''Anthropocene age;' when human activities began to drive environmental change, replacing the Holocene, which for the
previous ten thousand years was the era when the earth regulated the environment. 6 Since then people have been pumping GHGs
into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can reabsorb them. If we remain on our current course of global
GHG emissions, the earth's average climate will rise 3°C by the end of the twenty-first century
(with a 2 to 4.5° probable range of uncertainty) . The warmer the world gets, the less effectively the earth's biological systems can
absorb carbon. The more the earth's climate heats up, the more carbon dioxide (C02) plants and soils will release; this feedback loop
will further increase climate heating. When carbon feedback is factored into the climate equation, climate
models predict that the rise in average climate temperature will be 6°C by 2100 (with a 4 to 8°C
probable range of uncertainty) .7 For this reason, even if emissions were reduced from now on by approximately 3
percent annually, there is only a fifty-fifty chance that we can stay within the 2°C benchmark set by the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. However, given that in 2010 the world's annual growth rate of
atmospheric carbon was the largest in a decade, bringing the world's C02 concentrations to 389.6 parts per million (ppm) and
pushing concentrations to 39 percent higher than what they were in 1750 at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
(approximately 278 ppm), and that there is no sign of growth slowing, then even the fiftyfifty window of opportunity not to exceed
2°C warming is quickly closing. If we continue at the current rate of GHG emissions growth, we will be
on course for a devastating scenario.8 We need to change course now .9

Currency alt-cause to relationship

Dollar 9/21- is a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development
@ Brookings
David, "Currency devaluation and U.S.-China relations," www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-
chaos/posts/2015/09/21-chinese-currency-devaluation-dollar?rssid=LatestFromBrookings
When President Xi Jinping and an entourage of Chinese officials come to Washington this week, one of the top
issues on the economic agenda will once again be the exchange rate. China’s exchange rate was under-valued for a long
time, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and academic economists. But in recent years, China has largely
corrected this. The yuan has appreciated about 25 percent against the dollar and even more against its average trading partner.
Between 2008 and 2011, China’s trade surplus declined by nearly half from $298 billion to $155 billion. The IMF has now declared
the currency “fairly valued,” and as of a few months ago, it was not much of an issue between the United States and China. But then
in August, China devalued its currency and that set off a market sell-off around the world that wiped out trillions of dollars of value
from global stock markets. To be fair, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) was trying to change the system for the daily fixing to make
it more market-oriented and to respond to IMF critiques. But the move was combined with a so-called “one-off devaluation” of 1.9
percent. The move came right after disappointing export numbers and without much explanation. Chinese officials were surprised
that the small move set off such powerful expectations of major currency devaluation. Ever since, the authorities have been in a
battle to stabilize the currency at a rate of about 6.4 yuan to the dollar. It is ironic that after years of keeping the currency low, China
is intervening now to keep its currency high. PBOC is right to think that there is no basis for a significant devaluation. After several
years of decline, China’s trade surplus is starting to increase again. This year, the real growth of China’s exports is slow, in line with
world trade. There is some decline in China’s export prices, so the headline monthly figures sound bad—exports down 8.3 percent in
July and 5.5 percent in August. But China is holding its share of global trade, so there is no evidence of declining competitiveness.
Meanwhile, China’s import prices for energy and minerals have dropped sharply, and import volumes are down as well because
imports are primarily used for investment, which is slowing. As a result, China will have its largest ever trade surplus this year.
Through August, the surplus was $367 billion, compared to $200 billion in the same period last year. In search of stability
Despite this large trade surplus, which would argue for further yuan appreciation, the small
devaluation has raised the possibility of further devaluati on, and this is spurring already large capital outflows
from China to new heights. China spent $94 billion in reserves defending its currency in August, and reserves are down about $400
billion from their peak a year ago. It is unusual to have downward pressure on a currency with such a large trade surplus, and it
reflects capital outflows even larger than the surplus. Some of this is Chinese savings that can no longer be invested productively at
home. But some is no doubt speculative flows betting on a devaluation. With its large reserve pile and sound fundamentals, China
may be able to convince the speculators that there will be no significant devaluation. But it is also possible that the speculative flows
will accelerate and that after a few months the central bank will have to give up defending the currency. A disorderly
devaluation would be a bad scenario for the world economy and for U.S.-China relations .
Many emerging markets have to devalue their currencies because their export earnings have dropped so much. So China can
anticipate that many currencies will need to stay out ahead of China in terms of devaluation.

TPP triggers perception of containment – aff can’t overwhelm

The Economist 2015
Don't treat trade as a weapon, Apr 25, www.economist.com/news/leaders/21649468-asian-
pacific-trade-deal-looks-within-reach-politicians-should-stop-seeing-it-way
Yet there are two big caveats. First, fast track, formally known as Trade Promotion Authority, may still fall foul of Congress. Second,
Japan may not make any serious cuts to tariffs that protect its farmers. Those outcomes are more likely because the Obama
administration and the Japanese government have made a similar mistake: both have been too
quick to cast the TPP as a weapon in the containment of China. Flanked by Japan and America, the TPP
would link countries which make up 40% of global GDP. It could boost world output by $220 billion a year by 2025. It is supposed to
reform difficult areas such as intellectual property, state-owned firms and environmental and labour standards. It would join
economies—from Vietnam to Australia—that lie at different ends of the spectrum of development.But the TPP will not happen
without fast track, which forces Congress into a yes/no vote on any pending trade deal and so avoids the risk that it will be amended
into oblivion. And the passage of fast track faces a lot of scepticism from Democrats (see article). Some are implacably opposed.
Others want America to have a bigger arsenal with which to fight against unfair traders. Driven by a conviction that
China artificially holds its currency down and destroys American jobs , Charles Schumer, a powerful
senator from New York, is determined that fast track should include a provision that would make sure
a trade deal included sanctions on currency manipulation .

Low threshold—2 degrees will cause their impacts

Harvey 11, environment reporter – the Guardian (Fiona,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-climate-
change)

Climate scientists estimate that global warming

of 2C above pre-industrial levels marks the limit of safety, beyond
which climate change becomes catastrophic and irreversible. Though such estimates are
necessarily imprecise, warming of as little as 1.5C could cause dangerous rises in sea
levels and a higher risk of extreme weather – the limit of 2C is now inscribed in international accords, including the
partial agreement signed at Copenhagen in 2009, by which the biggest developed and developing countries for the first time agreed
to curb their greenhouse gas output.

Warming locked in—current construction and no international deal means it will

be runaway
Harvey 11, environment reporter – the Guardian, 11/9/’11
(Fiona, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/nov/09/fossil-fuel-infrastructure-
climate-change)

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and
inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global
warming to safe levels , and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for
ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.
Anything built from now on that produces carbon will do so for decades, and this "lock-in"
effect will be the single factor most likely to produce irreversible climate change ,
the world's foremost authority on energy economics has found. If this is not rapidly changed within the next five
years, the results are likely to be disastrous.
"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very
The
worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety].
door will be closed forever."
If the world is to stay below 2C of warming, which scientists regard as the limit of safety, then emissions must be held
to no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; the level is currently around 390ppm. But the
world's existing infrastructure is already producing 80% of that "carbon budget", according to the IEA's
analysis, published on Wednesday. This gives an ever-narrowing gap in which to reform the global economy
on to a low-carbon footing.
If current trends continue, and we go on building high-carbon energy generation, then by 2015 at least 90% of
the available "carbon budget" will be swallowed up by our energy and industrial infrastructure. By 2017, there will be no
room for manoeuvre at all – the whole of the carbon budget will be spoken for, according to the IEA's calculations.
Birol's warning comes at a crucial moment in international negotiations on climate change, as governments gear up for the next fortnight of talks in
Durban, South Africa, from late November. " If
we do not have an international agreement , whose effect is put in
place by 2017 , then the door to [holding temperatures to 2C of warming] will be closed forever ," said Birol.
But world governments are preparing to postpone a speedy conclusion to the negotiations again. Originally, the aim
was to agree a successor to the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the only binding international agreement on emissions, after its current provisions expire in 2012.
But after years of setbacks, an
increasing number of countries – including the UK, Japan and Russia –
now favour postponing the talks for several years.
Both Russia and Japan have spoken in recent weeks of aiming for an agreement in 2018 or 2020 , and the UK has
supported this move. Greg Barker, the UK's climate change minister, told a meeting: "We need China, the US especially, the rest of the Basic countries
[Brazil, South Africa, India and China] to agree. If we can get this by 2015 we could have an agreement ready to click in by 2020." Birol said this would
clearly be too late. "I think it's very important to have a sense of urgency – our analysis shows [what happens] if you do not change investment patterns,
which can only happen as a result of an international agreement."
Nor is this a problem of the developing world, as some commentators have sought to frame it. In the UK, Europe
and the US, there are multiple plans for new fossil-fuelled power stations that would contribute significantly
to global emissions over the coming decades.
The Guardian revealed in May an
IEA analysis that found emissions had risen by a record amount in 2010,
despite the worst recession for 80 years. Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere from
burning fossil fuels, a rise of 1.6Gt on the previous year. At the time, Birol told the Guardian that constraining global warming to moderate levels would
be "only a nice utopia" unless drastic action was taken.
The new research adds to that finding, by showing in detail how current
choices on building new energy and industrial
infrastructure are likely to commit the world to much higher emissions for the next few
decades , blowing apart hopes of containing the problem to manageable levels. The IEA's
data is regarded as the gold standard in emissions and energy, and is widely regarded as one of the
most conservative in outlook – making the warning all the more stark. The central problem is that
most industrial infrastructure currently in existence – the fossil-fuelled power stations, the emissions-spewing factories,
the inefficient transport and buildings – is already contributing to the high level of emissions, and will
do so for decades. Carbon dioxide, once released, stays in the atmosphere and continues to have a warming effect for about a century, and
industrial infrastructure is built to have a useful life of several decades.
Yet, despite intensifying warnings from scientists over the past two decades, the new infrastructure even now being built is constructed along the same
lines as the old, which means that there is a "lock-in" effect – high-carbon infrastructure built today or in the next five years will contribute as much to
the stock of emissions in the atmosphere as previous generations.
The "lock-in" effect is the single most important factor increasing the danger of runaway
climate change, according to the IEA in its annual World Energy Outlook, published on Wednesday.

Feedbacks already triggered, developing countries outweigh, and methane thumps

the impact
Mims, science and technology correspondent – BBC and Grist, 3/26/’12
(Christopher, “Climate scientists: It’s basically too late to stop warming,”
http://grist.org/list/climate-scientists-its-basically-too-late-to-stop-warming/)

If you like cool weather and not having to club your neighbors as you battle for scarce resources,
now’s the time to move to Canada, because the story of the 21st century is almost written,
reports Reuters. Global warming is close to being irreversible, and in some cases that ship has
already sailed.
Scientists have been saying for a while that we have until between 2015 and 2020 to start
radically reducing our carbon emissions, and what do you know: That deadline’s almost past!
Crazy how these things sneak up on you while you’re squabbling about whether global warming
is a religion. Also, our science got better in the meantime, so now we know that no matter
what we do , we can say adios to the planet’s ice caps.
For ice sheets — huge refrigerators that slow down the warming of the planet — the tipping
point has probably already been passed, Steffen said. The West Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk
over the last decade and the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 200 cubic km (48 cubic miles)
a year since the 1990s.
Here’s what happens next: Natural climate feedbacks will take over and , on top of our
prodigious human-caused carbon emissions, send us over an irreversible tipping point.
By 2100, the planet will be hotter than it’s been since the time of the dinosaurs, and everyone
who lives in red states will pretty much get the apocalypse they’ve been hoping for. The
subtropics will expand northward, the bottom half of the U.S. will turn into an inhospitable
desert, and everyone who lives there will be drinking recycled pee and struggling to salvage
something from an economy wrecked by the destruction of agriculture, industry, and electrical
power production.
Water shortages, rapidly rising seas, superstorms swamping hundreds of billions of dollars’
worth of infrastructure: It’s all a-coming , and anyone who is aware of the political realities
knows that the odds are slim that our government will move in time to do anything to avert the
biggest and most avoidable disaster short of all-out nuclear war.
Even if our government did act , we can’t control the emissions of the developing world.
China is now the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet and its inherently unstable
autocratic political system demands growth at all costs. That means coal.
Meanwhile, engineers and petroleum geologists are hoping to solve the energy crisis by
harvesting and burning the nearly limitless supplies of natural gas frozen in methane hydrates at
the bottom of the ocean, a source of atmospheric carbon previously considered so exotic
that it didn’t even enter into existing climate models.