1AC

1AC
 1AC---Dam Collapse ADV
Advantage 1 is Dam Collapse:
Nationwide collapse is coming -- repair would take 50 years and cost billions.
Wei-Haas 20, PhD in environmental chemistry from Ohio State University (MAY 27, 2020, MAYA
WEI-HAAS, “The problem America has neglected for too long: deteriorating dams; Aging, poorly
maintained structures put thousands at risk—and climate change is only making things worse,”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/problem-america-neglected-too-long-deteriorating-
dams, JMP)
Aging and undermaintained infrastructure in the United States, combined with changing climate over the
coming decades, is setting the stage for more dam disasters like the one that struck Midland, Michigan, last
week.

More than 91,000 dams dot the nation—and roughly 15,500 of them could cause fatalities if they failed,
according to the National Inventory of Dams. Most of these dams were built many decades ago. By 2025, 70 percent of them will be more
than a half century old, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.

This means many

U.S. dams were built with now-outdated standards and methods, as well as for different
climate trends. What’s more, dams need continual maintenance to keep operating safely over the decades.
Valves break. Metal rusts. Concrete crumbles.
Combine this aging and outdated infrastructure with the more frequent, heavy rains that climate
change likely will generate, and the nation will face a “perfect storm” for more catastrophes, says Anne
Jefferson, a hydrogeologist at Kent State University in Ohio .
This latest dam failure came after a deluge dumped nearly five inches of water on central Michigan in just 48 hours. As the waters rose, the nearly century-old
Edenville dam collapsed and sent a torrent downstream that overflowed the Sanford dam. Water surged across roads and into homes and businesses. By Wednesday
evening, the flood had almost completely drained one lake upstream of the dams, leaving a vast muddy expanse in its wake.

For years, concerns had swirled about the condition of Edenville dam, which is privately owned and operated. In 2018, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
(FERC) revoked the Edenville dam’s license to generate hydroelectricity, citing concerns that it could only withstand about 50 percent of the Probable Maximum
Flood, an estimate of the largest flood that could sweep the region. For more than 14 years before that license was pulled, the dam’s owner had failed to make the
requested improvements.

At many dams across the nation, investment hasn’t kept up with the repairs and upgrades needed to
keep these systems standing strong. On the American Society of Civil Engineers report card for U.S.
infrastructure, dams earned a "D" letter grade.
Exactly how many U.S. dams are at risk of failing is uncertain. The National Inventory of Dams lists condition information for nearly 80 percent of high-hazard
potential dams, meaning that their failure would result in at least one death. More than 2,330 of these high-hazard dams need repairs, some 15 percent of all dams in
this hazard category. But data remain spottier for dams of other hazard potentials, such as significant or low hazard.

Information about the condition ratings of specific dams is not available to the public. A recent investigation by the Associated Press uncovered and mapped out 1,688
of the high-hazard dams that were in poor or unsatisfactory condition. The true number is likely higher, according to the AP report.

Repairing and upgrading dams across the United States would cost upwards of $70 billion, based on estimates from the
Association of State Dam Safety Officials. To address issues for the roughly 700 dams owned by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers alone would cost more than $25 billion, by the Corps’ estimates, and would take more than 50 years to
complete based on the current level of funding.
Dam ownership and operation is divided among private enterprises—about 63 percent of the U.S. total—and state, local, and federal governments. The regulation and
oversight of private and other non-federal dams are largely on a state-by-state basis, says Martin McCann, director of Stanford University’s National Performance of
Dams Program. But that oversight varies widely: For instance, Alabama has no dam safety regulatory program, while California has a relatively well-funded program
with a technically strong staff, McCann says. Many
state dam safety programs lack resources or the regulatory
authority to effectively manage the dams, according to ASCE.

But even California’s well-funded program isn’t invincible . In 2017, the Oroville dam on California’s Feather River
failed, sparked by the crumbling of parts of the concrete spillways where excess water flows downstream. The dam holds more than a trillion gallons of water;
the collapse forced nearly 200,000 people to evacuate the area. The report from the independent forensics investigation concluded that
the incident was due to a “long-term systemic failure” of not only the California Department of Water
Resources, but also general industry-wide practices for identifying and addressing problems .
The Edenville dam in Michigan was rated as poor on its last inspection in August of 2018 and Sanford dam rated as fair. After years of conflict between owner Boyce
Hydro and the surrounding communities, the situation seemed to be heading toward resolution. Midland and Gladwin counties set up a group to purchase the pair of
dams and their associated lakes with the intention of repairing the systems and overseeing continued maintenance—but the rain swept through and the region flooded
before the process was complete.

The problems with compromised dams will likely grow more severe in the years ahead. “The dawning reality is
that the dam, levee, and other infrastructure failures will be more likely to occur as global warming intensifies,” says
Shana Udvardy, a climate resilience analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists .

As air temperatures increase, so does the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold; that means more frequent and intense rain and flooding, Udvardy says. That
effect may be particularly pronounced in the Midwest, where climate models suggest that winter and spring rains could increase by up to 30 percent by the end of the
century, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment. The last few decades have already seen more heavy downpours across the nation. The Michigan
catastrophe follows exceptional flooding across large swaths of the U.S. in 2019, which was the wettest year on record for Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South
Dakota, and Wisconsin.

Many of the nation's dams weren't designed with these modern or future trends in mind. “We’ve sort of built
ourselves and locked ourselves into a past climate,” Jefferson says.

For centuries, humans have strived to harness the environment to suit our needs. Dams are part of this precarious legacy. We’ve enjoyed benefits from these systems,
and now must deal with their risks. “We’re seeing again and again,” Udvardy says, “it’s not whether they’re going to fail; it’s a matter
of when they’re going to fail.”

Despite escalating risk, few have been removed.

 Dam owners filing bankruptcy and taxpayers will be forced to pay

Mertens 20 (September 8, 2020, Richard Mertens, “One solution to America’s dam-safety problem:
Remove them,” https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2020/0908/One-solution-to-America-s-dam-
safety-problem-Remove-them, JMP)
Jim Sperling was less than a mile downstream when the dam gave way. First came a siren’s wail, then the water, rising quickly as he fled with his wife, Marge. It
swept away their pontoon boat, destroyed a shed, and filled their house, all in a muddy debris-filled surge that, in Mr. Sperling’s words, “ripped out everything” –
trees, bridges, docks, even houses.

“It was one big wave,” Mr. Sperling says. “A massive wave.”

The collapse of Michigan’s Edenville Dam May 19 sent 21.5 billion gallons of water down the
Tittabawassee River in less than two hours. The flood overwhelmed the Sanford Dam downstream and
forced the evacuation of 10,000 people in three counties. It also left communities flooded, 2,500 houses damaged or destroyed, and, at
Edenville, a shallow, sandy basin where a lake once lay.

The dam’s failure, coming after more than two days of record rainfall, also drew new attention to the poor condition of dams, not just in Michigan but across the
country. TheAmerican Society of Civil Engineers, which periodically rates the condition of U.S. infrastructure, gave dams a “D” in
its last report, and among them are more than 15,000 whose failure would threaten lives. Indeed, federal
authorities two years before its collapse had deemed the Edenville Dam, an earthen berm built for
hydropower in 1924, inadequate to handle heavy rains and in need of upgrade. Little had been done.
“We see the problem getting worse and worse,” says Larry Larson, adviser to the Association of State
Floodplain Managers, a nonprofit that he co-founded. “The dams are getting older, we’re seeing more intense rainfall
events, and people are building more in failure areas.”
Less remarked upon was an
option for ailing dams that’s quietly gaining acceptance across the country: removal. Last
year, 90 dams were taken out in 26 states, the latest in a growing movement aimed at improving public safety and restoring rivers to their natural
state. That’s a small percentage of the country’s more than 90,000 dams, but dam owners are increasingly choosing removal as an
alternative to upgrade and maintenance, especially for dams that have outlived their usefulness.

“We’ve seen a lot more,” says Mark Ogden, a technical expert at the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. “Dam owners are more aware of their liability and the
potential cost of repairs.”

A wave of removals
More than 1,700 dams have been taken out in the U.S. since 1912, according to American Rivers, an environmental organization that has done more than any other to
promote and facilitate dam removal. Most were removed after the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine, was taken out in 1999, marking the
beginning of the modern removal effort. Last year, dams were removed in 26 states, the largest number of states that has ever had dams removed in a single year.

“You see a lot of variation state by state,” says Lisa Hollingsworth-Segedy, director of river restoration for American Rivers. “A lot of states are fairly new to dam
removal. A lot of states have been doing it a long time.”

Most dams removed are small. A typical example is the Burton Lake Dam in Burton, Ohio. In 2014, heavy late-winter rains flooded the ice and sent
water pouring over the dam. No one was hurt, but the combination of flooding and the threat to houses downstream brought the dam to the attention of state and local
authorities.

“We knew we needed to do something with it,” says Gerry Morgan, a Geauga County official. A study concluded that current standards required the dam to be raised
and an emergency spillway constructed. The work would have cost an estimated $3.5 million.

The county looked in vain for help. “There were a lot of people that were more likely to give money to remove it than to upgrade it,” Mr. Morgan says.

Local homeowners blamed the county for neglecting the dam over the years; others worried that the loss of the impoundment, a shallow lake of about 30 acres, would
hurt their property values. But they declined to pay for the upgrades themselves. Finally, in 2019 the county spent $100,000, Mr. Morgan says, to have a contractor
with heavy equipment dig a notch in the dam and spread the dirt nearby. The old lake is now a wetland.

Restore or remove?

Some removals happen more quickly. In Pennsylvania, Ms. Hollingsworth-Segedy has helped to dismantle some 125 dams over a dozen years. She recalls many of
them in vivid detail, including a dam she and colleagues visited one March day in 2009 on Snare Run, a mountain creek that had been dammed to supply water to a
local town. When they reached the dam they saw what looked like a frozen waterfall. They soon figured out that the water wasn’t running over the dam, but seeping
through it.

“It got really quiet,” she recalls. “You could hear tink, tink, tink. We realized those were rocks falling out of the dam.”

The dam was 22 feet high, and there were houses downstream. It took the state less than a week, she says, to take it out.

Experts say several

factors combine to imperil U.S. dams. One is age: the average dam is 57 years old. Often, too, new
development downstream has made failure far more dangerous than when the dams were built. Finally,
climate change is producing more frequent and intense rain storms of the kind that doomed the Edenville
Dam.
“I think the likelihood that we see the events that cause dams to fail is increasing,” says Mr. Ogden. “It’s clear
we need to invest in the upgrade and repair of dams – or removal.”
A powerful argument in favor of removal is money. Taking
a dam out costs far less than fixing it up. Plus, dam owners who
agree to removal can sometimes get financial help in the name of habitat improvement .
Otherwise, the cost is high. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates that rehabilitating
all the non-federal dams in the U.S.
– most dams are privately owned – would
cost more than $65 billion. Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency started a
grant program for substandard dams, but it hands out just $10 million a year. “It’s something but not much
compared to the need,” says Mr. Ogden.
In Michigan, Jim Sperling and many others are focused on rebuilding their homes, and their lives. There’s been little talk of removing the Edenville Dam but much
about rebuilding that, too. Thousands of people own property around the impoundment and three others in the region, and they support reconstruction and
rehabilitation.

If it happens, it’s likely to take many years. The

owner of the dams, Boyce Hydro, has filed for bankruptcy, and lawsuits
abound. An organization of property owners proposes that the local counties take ownership of the dams
and that they, the property owners, shoulder the cost of rebuilding. That’s estimated to be as much as
$400 million, most of it for the Edenville Dam.
“I don’t know how they can raise that,” Mr. Sperling says, raising the biggest question hanging over this or any
old dam’s future. “If they put it on taxpayers, a lot of people are going to be unhappy.”
Dam failure devastates nuclear power plants.
Palmer 15 (21 March 2015, Andrew Palmer, “Possible threat to US Nuclear Plants from Boone Dam
Failure,” https://www.theworldincrisis.com/possible-threat-to-us-nuclear-plants-from-boone-dam-failure/,
JMP)
There have been recent reports of problems at the Boone Dam in Tennessee, which is upstream of seven
nuclear reactors. Although the indications are that the problems will be solved, the seepage at the dam means that the potential
failure of such dams, and associated threats to nuclear facilities, should be reexamined. The problems include the
fact that dams can fail, and that seepage can be evidence of potential failure , that excessive flooding may result
from dam failure, and that downstream nuclear plants may not be resilient in the face of such an event.
There is also recent evidence, from the Mineral, Virginia earthquake, that the Eastern United States is more vulnerable to earthquakes than
has previously been considered and that the effects of earthquakes in the region can travel for very long distances from the
epicentre. The US has a large number of inland nuclear plants, some of which are around 40 years old .
There is continuing argument as to the safety of the design of older US reactors in the light of the failure
at Fukushima Daiichi. In this article I have tried to present some of the issues for consideration, without making judgement.
The American Society of Civil Engineers has stated that, “The
average age of the 84,000 dams in the country [USA] is 52 years old. The
nation’s dams are aging and the number of high-hazard dams is on the rise. Many of these dams were built as low-
hazard dams protecting undeveloped agricultural land. However, with an increasing population and greater development below dams, the overall number of
high-hazard dams continues to increase, to nearly 14,000 in 2012. The number of deficient dams is estimated at more than 4,000,
which includes 2,000 deficient high-hazard dams. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates that it will require an
investment of $21 billion to repair these aging, yet critical, high-hazard dams.”

A Press statement by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) stated that “On October 30, 2014, at 1100 EDT, TVA conducted a briefing for government
officials and other stakeholders regarding the decision to accelerate the Boone Reservoir annual drawdown after discovery of a sink hole near the base of the
embankment and a small amount of water and sediment found seeping from the river below the dam. TVA is continuously monitoring the dam and conducting an
investigation to determine the source of the water seepage. The dam is located upstream of all three TVA nuclear sites. There are currently no nuclear plant operability
or safety issues, and TVA is assessing the impacts on the plant licensing bases.”

On the 30th October 2014 The Johnson City Press had reported: “When an Oct. 20 inspection of the dam revealed a sink hole — a common occurrence — TVA
workers repaired it quickly. Six days later, an uncommon occurrence happened when seepage was found near the location of the sink hole at the base of the dam.”
Boone Dam is near the border with Virginia, where a M5.9 earthquake occurred in 2011. This earthquake was important because the USGS found that, the farthest
landslide from the 2011 Virginia earthquake was 245 km (150 miles) from the epicenter. The USGS stated that: “This is by far the greatest landslide distance recorded
from any other earthquake of similar magnitude. Previous studies of worldwide earthquakes indicated that landslides occurred no farther than 60 km (36 miles) from
the epicenter of a magnitude 5.8 earthquake.” Jibson and Harp stated that “The 23 August 2011 Mineral, Virginia, earthquake (Mw 5.8) was the largest to strike the
eastern U.S. since 1897 and was felt over an extraordinarily large area.”

Randall Jibson, USGS scientist and lead author of a study published in the December 2012 issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, said, “What
makes this new study so unique is that it provides direct observational evidence from the largest earthquake to occur in more than 100 years in the eastern U.S. Now
that we know more about the power of East Coast earthquakes, equations that predict ground shaking might need to be revised.” The USGS said that. “It is estimated
that approximately one-third of the U.S. population could have felt last year’s earthquake in Virginia, more than any earthquake in U.S. history. About 148,000 people
reported their ground-shaking experiences caused by the earthquake on the USGS “Did You Feel It?” website. Shaking reports came from southeastern Canada to
Florida and as far west as Texas.” They added that, “In addition to the great landslide distances recorded, the landslides from the 2011 Virginia earthquake occurred in
an area 20 times larger than expected from studies of worldwide earthquakes. Scientists plotted the landslide locations that were farthest out and then calculated the
area enclosed by those landslides. The observed landslides from last year’s Virginia earthquake enclose an area of about 33,400 km2, while previous studies indicated
an expected area of about 1,500 km2 from an earthquake of similar magnitude.” Edwin Harp, USGS scientist and co-author of the study said, “The landslide distances
from last year’s Virginia earthquake are remarkable compared to historical landslides across the world and represent the largest distance limit ever recorded. There are
limitations to our research, but the bottom line is that we now have a better understanding of the power of East Coast earthquakes and potential damage scenarios.”
According to the USGS, “The difference between seismic shaking in the East versus the West is due in part to the geologic structure and rock properties that allow
seismic waves to travel farther without weakening.”

Boone Dam was well outside the area affected by the Mineral, Virginia earthquake, it is 436 km, or 271
miles from Mineral, but the USGS report and 2012 study indicates that the risk factors associated with
East Coast earthquakes are higher than normally planned for. The concerns associated with the Boone
Dam are the possible consequences of any failure of the dam to the seven nuclear plants down-stream of
the dam.
In September 2012 Tom Zeller, Jr., writing in The Huffington Press, reported
that, “Richard H. Perkins, a reliability and risk
engineer with the agency’s division of risk analysis, alleged that NRC officials falsely invoked security
concerns in redacting large portions of a report detailing the agency’s preliminary investigation into the
potential for dangerous and damaging flooding at U.S. nuclear power plants due to upstream dam failure .
Perkins, along with at least one other employee inside NRC, also an engineer, suggested that the real motive for redacting certain
information was to prevent the public from learning the full extent of these vulnerabilities, and to obscure
just how much the NRC has known about the problem, and for how long. “What I’ve seen,” Perkins said in a phone call, “is that the NRC is really struggling to come
up with logic that allows this information to be withheld.” Another engineer, interviewed by Zeller, added real concerns about the Oconee nuclear plant. “Among the
redacted findings in the July 2011 report — and what has been known at the NRC for years, the engineer said — is that the
Oconee facility, which is
operated by Duke Energy, would suffer almost certain core damage if the Jocassee dam were to fail. And
the odds of it failing sometime over the next 20 years , the engineer said, are far greater than the odds of a freak
tsunami taking out the defenses of a nuclear plant in Japan .”
There are currently 61 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 99 nuclear reactors in 30 states
in the United States. Thirty-five of these plants have two or more reactors. The majority of US nuclear reactors
are dependent on rivers for cooling. In the light of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster there have been growing
concerns about nuclear safety, especially for older reactors , some reactors, like Oyster Creek in New Jersey, are over forty years old.
Accordingly, it is reasonable that the possible impacts of earthquakes and floods are better understood, as the
risk of catastrophic failure of
nuclear plants is one of the most serious threats our societies face today. It is also important to understand that dams can
fail, and as Patrick J. Regan said in Hydro Review (1st June 2010), “Dam safety professionals must be ever vigilant in their efforts to assure the safety of dams and
other water retention or control structures under their charge; whether owner, regulator or consultant, none can be complacent when it comes to dam safety. And yet,
all too often complacency creeps in when a dam has had a lengthy history of apparent successful
operation. How many times have we heard, or used the words, ‘The dam’s been OK for 50 years. Why are you worried about it now?’ During many Potential
Failure Mode Analysis sessions conducted by the [US] Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, this reasoning came up as a way to lower the categorization of a
potential failure mode. We
seem to forget that dams are subject to many of the affects of aging and exposure that
we are all subject to.” Regan added, “Seepage related incidents are the most common modes of failure in the
early years of a dam’s life and continue to be an important potential failure mode over the longterm.”
Which brings us back to the seepage problems at Tennessee’s Boone Dam. There have also been growing concerns about the poor state of repair of key infrastructure
elements in the United States, with the failure of bridges, the poor state of repair of highways, railways with speed restrictions, very poor airports and so on. See
http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org

Meltdowns trigger extinction.

Christopher Allen Slocum 15, VP @ AO&G, “A Theory for Human Extinction: Mass Coronal Ejection
and Hemispherical Nuclear Meltdown,” 07/21/15, The Hidden Costs of Alternative Energy Series,
http://azoilgas.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Theory-for-Human-Extinction-Slocum-20151003.pdf
With our intelligence we have littered the planet with massive spent nuclearfuel pools, emitting lethal radiation in over-crowded
conditions, with
circulation requirements of electricity, water-supply, and neutron absorbent chemicals. The
failure of any of these conditions for any calculable or incalculable reason, will release all of a pool’s cesium into the
atmosphere, causing 188 square miles to be contaminated, 28,000 cancer deaths and $59 billion in damage. As of 2003, 49,000 tons of SNF
was stored at 131 sites with an additional 2,000-2,400 metric tons produced annually. The NRC has issued permits, and the nuclear industry has
amassed unfathomable waste on the premise that a deep geological storage facility would be available to remediate the waste. The current
chances for a deep geological storage facility look grim. The NAS has required geologic stability for 1,000,000 years. It is impossible to calculate
any certainty 1,000,000 years into the future. Humanity could not even predict the mechanical failures at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, nor
could it predict the size of the tsunami that triggered three criticality events at Fukushima Daiichi. These irremediable crises span just over
70 years of human history.

How can the continued production and maintenance of SNF in pools be anything but a precedent to an unprecedented human
cataclysm? The Department of Energy’s outreach website explains nuclear fission for power production, providing a timeline of the industry.
The timeline ends, as does most of the world’s reactor construction projects in the 1990s, with the removal of the FCMs from Three Mile Island.
One would think the timeline would press into the current decade, however the timeline terminates with the question, “How can we minimize the
risk? What do we do with the waste?” (The History of Nuclear Energy 12). Nearly fifteen years into the future, these questions are no closer to an
answer. The reactors at Fukushima Daiichi are still emitting radioisotopes into the atmosphere, and their condition is unstable. TEPCO has
estimated it could take forty years to recover all of the fuel material, and there are doubts as to whether the decontamination effort can withstand
that much time (Schneider 72). A detailed analysis of Chernobyl has demonstrated that nuclear
fall-out, whether from thermonuclear
explosions, spent fuel pool fires, or reactor core criticality events are
deleterious to the food-chain. Cesium and strontium are
taken into the roots of plants and food crops, causing direct human and animal contamination from
ingestion, causing cancer, teratogenicity, mutagenesis and death. Vegetation suffers mutagenesis,
reproductive loss, and death. Radioactive fields and forest floors decimate invertebrate and rodent
variability and number necessary to supply nature’s food-chain and life cycles. The flesh and bones of
freshwater and oceanic biota contribute significantly to the total radiation dose in the food-chain. Fresh
water lakes, rivers and streams become radioactive. Potable aquafers directly underlying SNFs and FCMs are
penetrated by downward migration of radioisotopes. Humans must eat to live. Humans must have
water. No human can survive 5 Sv of exposure to ionizing radiation, many cannot survive exposure to 1 Sv.
Realizing the irremediable devastation caused by one thermonuclear warhead, by one Chernobyl, by one Fukushima Daiichi, it remains to be said
that the earth can handle as many simultaneous loss of coolant failures as nature can create . Humanity
cannot. It is not good enough to lead by relegating probable human wide extinction phenomena to an appeal to lack of evidence. Policy
cannot indefinitely ignore responsibility by requiring further study. Nor can leadership idle into cataclysm by relying on the largest
known natural phenomena of the last 200 years. Permitting construction and continued operation of malefic machinery, based on 200 years of
cataclysmic experience is a protocol for calamity. Of coronal mass ejections, Hapgood warns, that we need to prepare for a once-in-1000-year
event, not just simulate infrastructure safeties by the measure of what we have seen in the past. The same is true for all natural phenomena. The
future of humanity is too precious to operate with such insouciance. The engineering is not good enough. It never will be. Nature is too
unpredictable, and nuclear power is too dangerous.

The plan develops necessary tech to decommission dams.

Pearce 21 --- freelance author and journalist based in the U.K. He is a contributing writer for Yale
Environment 360 and is the author of numerous books, including The Land Grabbers, Earth Then and
Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World, and The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About
Global Warming (FEBRUARY 3, 2021, Fred Pearce, “Water Warning: The Looming Threat of the
World’s Aging Dams; Tens of thousands of large dams across the globe are reaching the end of their
expected lifespans, leading to a dramatic rise in failures and collapses, a new UN study finds. These
deteriorating structures pose a serious threat to hundreds of millions of people living downstream,”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/water-warning-the-looming-threat-of-the-worlds-aging-dams, JMP)
Who would want to live downstream of the 125-year-old Mullaperiyar Dam, nestled in a seismic zone of
the Western Ghats mountains in India? The 176-foot-high relic of British imperial engineering cracked during minor earthquakes in 1979 and
2011. According to a 2009 study by seismic engineers at the Indian Institute of Technology, it might not withstand a strong earthquake
larger than 6.5 on the Richter scale.
Three million people live downriver of the dam. But their demands for it to be emptied are held up by a long-running legal case in the nation’s
Supreme Court between Kerala, the state under threat, and Tamil Nadu, the state upstream that operates the dam to obtain irrigation water and hydropower.

Or how about living below the Kariba Dam, built by the British on the Zambezi River in Southern Africa 62 years ago?
Back then, it was seen as Africa’s equivalent of the Hoover Dam. But in 2015, engineers found that water released through its floodgates had gouged a
hole more than 260 feet deep in the river bed, causing cracks and threatening to topple the concrete dam, which is 420 feet high and
holds back the world’s largest artificial lake.
Downstream are some 3.5 million people, as well as another giant dam, the Cahora Bassa in Mozambique, that engineers fear
would probably break if hit by floodwater from a Kariba failure . Despite the urgency, the $300-million repair work won’t be
finished until 2023 at the earliest.

Both dams exemplify the potentially dangerous mix of structural decay, escalating risk, and bureaucratic
inertia highlighted in a pioneering new study into the growing risks from the world’s aging dams, published in
January by the United Nations University (UNU), the academic and research arm of the UN. It warns that a
growing legacy of crumbling dams
past their design lives is causing a dramatic increase in dam failures, leaks, and emergency water releases
that threaten hundreds of millions of people living downstream. Meanwhile, safety inspectors cannot keep up with the workload.
The 20th century was a boom time for dam builders. The peak, particularly in Asia, was from the mid-1950s to mid-1980s, when dams
were in vogue to generate hydroelectricity and store water to irrigate crops and keep taps flowing, as well as to smooth out river flow to prevent flooding and improve
navigation.

But the boom is over. “A few decades ago, a thousand large dams were being built each year; now it is down to a hundred or so,” report co-author Vladimir
Smakhtin of the UNU’s Institute of Water, Environment, and Health in Hamilton, Canada told Yale Environment 360. Most sites sought by dam engineers, such as in
narrow valleys, have been plugged. Dams now barricade the majority of the world’s rivers , and can store the equivalent of a sixth of
their total annual flow. Meanwhile, environmental and social concerns about flooding land and wrecking river ecosystems have grown, and there are many alternatives
for generating low-carbon energy, says Smakhtin.

So the world’s stock of large dams, defined as those higher than 15 meters (49 feet), is aging fast. The World Bank estimated last year that
there are already 19,000 large dams more than 50 years old , which the UNU study concludes is the typical lifespan
before it needs major repairs or removal .
Britain and Japan have the oldest dams, averaging 106 and 111 years old respectively. U.S. dams average 65 years. But China and India, the epicenters of the mid-
20th century dam-building craze, are not so far behind, with average ages of their 28,000 large dams now 46 and 42 years respectively. “By 2050, most of humanity
will live downstream of large dams built in the 20th century” that are “at increasing risk of failure,” the UNU report says.

This burgeoning legacy of aging dams poses ever-growing safety risks, as their structures become more
fragile and climate change increases stresses on them by increasing extreme river flows, says Smakhtin. The report
finds a steep increase in the rate of dam failures since 2005 . There is no global database, says co-author Duminda Perera, also of UNU.
But he found reports of more than 170 failures between 2015 and 2019, whereas prior to 2005 the average was
below four per year.
Just last month, Zambia’s Kandesha Dam, built in the 1950s, collapsed in heavy rains, displacing thousands of people. Last June, a 55-year-old irrigation dam in
China’s Guangxi region gave way, after its 492-foot wall was swamped in heavy rain. A month earlier, two old dams in Michigan collapsed during heavy rain — the
96-year-old Edenville Dam on the River Tittabawassee unleashed a flood that demolished the 94-year-old Sanford Dam downstream.

In August 2019, one of Britain’s oldest dams almost failed. Around 1,500 inhabitants of the town of Whaley Bridge were ordered out of their homes after the flood
spillway on the 188-year-old Toddbrook Dam, built to supply water to a canal, collapsed in heavy rains, spilling water that began to eat away at the dam itself, raising
fears that the structure would collapse and engulf the town.

In 2017, a spillway collapsed at the 50-year-old Oroville Dam in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills. It caused the evacuation of around 180,000 people. The 770-foot
dam is the highest in the U.S. and, after repairs to the spillway, remains critical to the state’s water supply.

Dam engineers say thegreatest threats for the coming decades are probably in China and India. Both countries
have in the past suffered dam failures that killed tens of thousands. In 1979, the disintegration of the Machchhu Dam in Gujarat,
India, during a flood, killed as many as 25,000 people.

Four years before, the

Banqiao Dam in Henan, China, burst, sending a wave of water 7 miles wide and 20 feet high downriver at 30 miles per
hour. It killed an estimated 26,000 people directly , including the entire population of the town of Daowencheng. As many as
170,000 more died during an ensuing famine and epidemics. The disaster has been called the deadliest structural failure in
history. It was kept a state secret for many years.

Both these disasters involved young dams, aged 20 and 23 years respectively. Still, their demise suggests there may be many more ticking timebombs from that era.

China has around 24,000 large dams. Many date from the days of the Cultural Revolution, when Maoist ideology trumped engineering prowess in the dash for
economic development. A third of the country’s dams were “considered to be of high-level risk because of structural obsolescence and/or lack of proper
maintenance,” a 2011 analysis by Meng Yang, now of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, found.

In India, the director of the Central Water Commission, Jade Harsha, warned in 2019 that the country would have more than 4,000 large dams above the age of 50 by
2050. More than 600 are already half a century old. Dams that India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954 called “the temples of India, where I worship,”
are now aging edifices whose safety Harsha now sees as “blind spots in India’s water policies.”

The World Bank agrees. Last December, it announced a $250-million loan to India for an ongoing project to “strengthen dam safety,” with better inspections and
management of the country’s large dams, which hold back 240 million acre-feet of water — starting with 120 of the country’s aging dam fleet.

Martin Wieland, chair of the committee on seismic aspects of dam design at the Paris-based International Commission on Large Dams, the leading body of dam
professionals, told Yale e360 that “many dams could last much longer than 50 or 100 years if well designed, well-constructed, and well-maintained and monitored.
The oldest concrete dam in Europe, the Maigrauge Dam [in Switzerland] was completed in 1872 and is expected to reach 200 years.” But, he said, “the safety of a
dam may deteriorate very fast.” He suggested a large part of the growing risk was “not aging, but the increased number of people downstream.”
Dams are mostly made of earth, masonry, or concrete. They can fail because of decaying concrete,
cracking, seepage, hidden fissures in surrounding rocks, or buckling under their own weight. They can
suffer lining failures, earthquakes, sabotage, or being washed away when floods breach their crests. Regular
inspections are vital, says Wieland.

But there
is growing concern worldwide about a lack of inspectors capable of assessing the risk from aging
dams, leading to backlogs of inspections and hazards that are missed. An investigation after the failure of the Oroville Dam in
the United States found that past inspections had failed to spot structural flaws. As Wieland puts it: “Not everything is visible or measurable.”

Many old dams are now being abandoned as their reservoirs fill with sediment dropped by the rivers they barricade. An international study in 2014 headed by G.
Mathias Kondolf of the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that more than a quarter of the total sediment flow of the world’s rivers is being trapped behind
dams.

On the Yellow River in China, the world’s siltiest river, the Sanmenxia Dam filled in just two years. India’s reservoirs are losing almost 1.6 million acre-feet of water-
storage capacity each year due to sediment build-up, according to officials.

The accumulation of sediment makes dams less useful, but sometimes also makes them more dangerous. This is because with less reservoir space, the dams are at
greater risk of being overwhelmed during heavy rains. To save their structures, operators are more likely to make abrupt emergency releases down spillways at the
height of floods.

After Hurricane Mitch ripped through Central America in 1998, several hundred people died in their beds in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa when a “wall of
water” rushed through the city’s poor riverside communities. Investigators from the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that the “wall” appeared when operators of the
city’s two main dams made emergency releases at the height of the flood. The two dams were built only in the 1970s, but had lost much of their capacity to siltation.

Meanwhile, climate change, which is bringing more extreme floods to many places, and aging dams threaten to be a lethal combination. “Old dams were designed and
built on the basis of hydrological records in a pre-climate change era,” says Smakhtin. “Now things are different, and this is worrying.”

What should be done? Some aging dams remain safe, but all will require much more rigorous inspection as they grow older, experts say, often followed by expensive
repairs. Many more will need to be reengineered to cope with extreme river flows different from those envisaged when they were first built.

But the UNU report points to a

growing legacy of dams that cease to serve much purpose — either because of
siltation or because there are alternative sources of electricity — and are retained mostly because
removing them is expensive and technically difficult. This is both a safety threat and a tragedy for river
ecosystems that could be restored by their removal.
The U.S. is the world leader in decommissioning dams, with more than a thousand removed over the past
30 years. But even so, its dams removed to date have mostly been small, usually less than 16 feet in
height. An exception was the 87-year-old Glines Canyon Dam in Olympic Park, Washington, removed in 2014. At 210 feet, the dam was the largest ever taken
down. The task took two decades to plan and execute. But thousands more such removals are likely to be necessary to prevent an upsurge of dam disasters, says
Smakhtin.

“Some dams are so big it is difficult to imagine how to approach the problem,” he says. “Look at the
Kariba dam. It is absolutely huge, and by mid-
century, it will be a hundred years old. Hopefully there will by then be technology to decommission it. But right now we
don’t know how to do it.”

Chinese dam collapse would kill millions AND upend China’s entire economic
system, spiraling into destabilization and war with the US.
Auslin 20 --- Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at Stanford
University’s Hoover Institution (July 24, 2020 4:57 PM, Michael Auslin, “The Risks of China’s Three
Gorges Dam’s Flooding,” https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-risks-of-chinas-three-gorges-dams-
flooding/, JMP)
China has been suffering through record rains the past weeks, leading to the worst flooding in the country in decades. There is little relief in sight, and the Yangtze
River is now above flood level, according to China’s Ministry of Water Resources. A few days ago, officials
admitted that certain “peripheral”
structures of the massive Three Gorges Dam deformed due to the building water pressure. Stunning
pictures of water being released to relieve pressure are raising the specter of whether the entire dam could fail (some good
photos here). Some online satellite photos purporting to show the buckling of the dam, however, should be viewed with skepticism.
Still, the damage that has already occurred from the record deluge is significant, with numerous cities upriver from the dam already flooded. According to the Wall
Street Journal:

Some 40 million people in more than two dozen provinces have been affected by the flooding as of July
12, causing more than 80 billion yuan ($11.5 billion) of direct damage to the economy, according to China’s
Ministry of Emergency Management. Around 28,000 homes have collapsed, while millions have been displaced and at least 141 people have been
declared dead or missing in the floods.

All that would be dwarfed if the Three Gorges Dam failed. The dam was built from 1994 to 2006, at a cost of $31 billion and
displacing 1.4 million people for its construction, precisely to lessen the risk of devastating flooding along the Yangtze, a perennial problem in China since ancient
times. The river’s basin accounts for nearly half of China’s agricultural output, and it runs through major
cities, such as Wuhan, with 10 million people.
Chinese authorities have already evacuated 38 million people downriver. The dam can hold back waters to a level of 175 meters above sea level; according to the
Bureau of Hydrology of the Chanjiang (Yangtze) Water Resources Commission, the latest (Friday) height at the dam was 158.85 meters, down from 164 meters on
Tuesday. Yet more rain is predicted, and if
smaller, older dams upriver from Three Gorges overflow or fail, then the
pressure on the main dam could quickly overwhelm either its capacity or even its structural integrity.
While an outright failure of the dam may not be the primary danger, nonetheless its
geopolitical consequences are staggering to
contemplate. It would be a black swan of epic proportions, China’s Chernobyl moment. A tsunami-
like wave from a breach in the Three Gorges Dam could wipe out millions of acres of farmland right
before the autumn harvest, possibly leading to famine-like conditions. As it is also the world’s largest
hydroelectric power station, a failure would lead to huge power outages. Low-lying cities of millions along the Yangtze’s
banks cities could become uninhabitable and the death toll could be staggering.
China’s heartland manufacturing and inland shipping along the Yangtze, which empties out into the East China Sea at
Shanghai, would be significantly affected by downriver flooding, potentially leading to major economic
disruption inside China and around the world. The political impact could be enough to destabilize the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), in the same way that Chernobyl was the nail in the coffin of the Soviet Communist Party. Public anger, already stoked by the
draconian state response to the coronavirus pandemic that started in Wuhan, could boil over, even if many understand that the rains are an act of nature.

Given the social and political implications of the current flooding, and the specter of a Three Gorges breach, it may not be a complete coincidence that Beijing last
week announced its second-largest purchase of U.S. corn ever, to the tune of 1.365 million tons, along with 320,000 tons of winter and spring wheat. From
a
political perspective, the dam’s failure would be the gravest crisis faced by CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, comparable
to the Katrina hurricane that so tarnished George W. Bush’s reputation. Unlike the weakened post-Chernobyl USSR , however, a
destabilized CCP could well become a more dangerous one, looking to divert public anger towards
“enemies” such as Taiwan, Japan, and the United States.
That Xi has not visited the dam or seemingly made it a public priority may mean that he’s been assured by Chinese engineers and hydrologists that the dam can
withstand the current deluge. A long-overdue rebalancing in U.S.–China relations is taking place, and a hard-edged policy of reciprocity is entirely proper in dealing
with Beijing’s endemic predatory and abusive behavior. However, for
humanitarian, economic, and geopolitical reasons, the
world should obviously hope the Three Gorges Dam holds. 2020 has already been enough of an annus terribilis.

Chinese economic collapse AND lashout cause extinction.

Tepperman 18 [Jonathan; 10/15/18; editor at large at Foreign Policy; "China’s Great Leap
Backward," https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/15/chinas-great-leap-backward-xi-jinping/]
Such predictions should worry everyone. China is the world’s largest economy by some measures, so if it melts
down, the entire planet will pay the price. But the history of other autocracies, such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Kim’s North
Korea, suggests that Xi’s relentless power play could produce even worse consequences. Since taking power, Xi has
charted a far more aggressive foreign policy than his predecessors, alienating virtually every neighbor
and the United States by pushing China’s claims in the South China Sea, threatening Taiwan, and using the
military to assert Beijing’s claims to disputed islands.
Should China’s economic problems worsen, Xi
could try to ratchet up tensions on any of these fronts in order to
distract his citizens from the crisis at home. That temptation will prove especially strong if U.S. President Donald Trump keeps
poking China by intensifying the trade war and publicly denouncing it.

And things could get scarier still, Pei warns, if China’s economic problems spin out of control completely. In that
case, the Chinese state could collapse—a typical occurrence among typical dictatorships when faced
with economic shocks, external threats (especially a defeat in war), or popular unrest—but one that, given
China’s size, could have cataclysmic consequences if it happened there.

The plan creates an umbrella policy -- developing tech AND skills which eliminates
dams globally.
Workman 7 --- adviser and consultant on water and natural resources issues to governmental and
nongovernmental organizations, including the World Commission on Dams (FALL 2007, JAMES G.
WORKMAN, “How to Fix Our Dam Problems; Thousands of aging dams should be repaired or
destroyed, at a cost of billions. A cap-and-trade policy could speed the process and help pay the bills,”
https://issues.org/workman-water-crisis-drought-fix-dams/, JMP)
Another effect would be an innovation revolution in the kinds of tools and technologies that are already in
the works but that have lacked a national incentive to really flourish. These include new kinds of fish
passages, dredging techniques, low-flush toilets, and timed-drip irrigation, along with a more aggressive
use of groundwater that pumps reservoir water underground as soon as it is trapped. The range of tools would also
include financial instruments; in the West, they might accelerate the trading in water rights between agricultural, industrial, urban, and environmental users that has
begun in Oregon, Montana, Washington, and California.

This brings us to afinal advantage of a cap-and-trade policy for existing dams: global competitiveness. Seventy years ago, the
United States set off a macho global race to build the biggest dams on Earth , starting with Hoover. It’s not clear which country
won the top-down competition, which displaced 80 million people and amputated most of Earth’s rivers. But a new horizontal policy can lead to
a competitive advantage. Whether scaled to tributaries or based on federal standards, the United States gains
through dam consolidation, efficiencies, and innovation. Flexibility and incentives in a coast-to-coast
market lower the transaction costs of repair or removal. Economies of scale would spur a substantial
new dam removal and mitigation industry akin to the clean-air industry of scrubbers, software, and
innovative technology sparked by the Clean Air Act or the Kyoto Protocol cap-and-trade policy. These don’t just
bring down the costs of such policies in the United States; they create conditions for a competitive advantage for the United
States. Exporting technology and skills will be in high demand beyond our borders, especially in China,
Russia, and India, where most dams lie and where sedimentation and evaporation rates are high and dam safety and construction
standards are low.
What is keeping this policy from emerging? Mostly it is because the competing governmental and
nongovernmental organizations engaged in water think of dams as solitary entities locked within
sectoral and jurisdictional cubicles. They fail to recognize that all dams have a national impact, positive
and negative, on the life and livelihoods of communities throughout the United States.

We regard as distinct each dam operated by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers,
Tennessee Valley Authority, or Bonneville Power Administration. Together those public projects total
half of the nation’s hydropower generation, but each is often seen as outside the laws that govern
private hydropower authorized under the Federal Power Act . In turn, the 2,000 hydro dams overseen by the
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission fall into one category and the 77,000 nonhydro (but federally registered)
dams into another. We see 39,000 public dams as different from 40,000 private dams. We regulate
irrigation dams differently from navigation dams and assign water rights to dams in western states but apply common law in eastern states,
even when dams share the same river. Two dams on the same stream owned by the same company are subject to different environmental laws. We
put 2.5
million small dams in a different category from 79,000 larger dams. The predictable mess is arbitrary and
absurd and cries out for an overarching national policy.

Taking note of seemingly contradictory trends around dam construction and destruction worldwide, one might ask, “How far will the current trends go? How
many old dams are we talking about repairing or removing? Hundreds? Thousands? A few big ones? A million
little ones? Do we need more dams or fewer?”
Such questions largely miss the point of the policy envisioned here. We don’t need a specific number of dams, but
rather we need healthier rivers, safer societies, and a more efficient and disciplined water-development
infrastructure. How we get there is beyond the capacity of a single person to decide; only through a flexible horizontal market can
we answer, together. A government policy can be the catalyst for and guide the direction of this market
because it removes personal, political, ideological, and geographic biases from the equation. Nothing
environmental and safety activists say or do can prevent new dam construction, and nothing dam supporters say or do can prevent old dams from coming down. But
if the nation’s anti-dam and pro-dam interests were gathered collectively under the same fixed national
ceiling and left to their own devices, Adam Smith’s “human propensity to truck, barter and exchange” could
unite with the spirit of Thoreau’s civil “wildness.” A cap-and-trade dam policy’s embedded incentives would encourage the market’s
invisible hand while ensuring its green thumb.

The United States once led the world in the construction of dams, but over time, many have deteriorated. Now, under a cap-
and-trade policy, it can bring horizontal discipline to that vertical stockpile of fixed liabilities, reducing
risks while improving the health and safety of living communities. The United States can once again show the
way forward on river development. Through such a cap-and-trade policy it can help dams smoothly and efficiently evolve with the river
economies to which they belong.

Developing tech and experience helps other countries remove their dams.
Perera 21 --- MA and Phd in Urban and Environmental Engineering from Kyushu University, Japan;
over ten years of experience primarily focusing on water-related disasters and risk management
(5/10/2021, Interviewed by Cristina Novo, Dr. Duminda Perera, “One-size-fits-all criteria to assess dam
removal are at least useless and at most dangerous,” https://smartwatermagazine.com/news/unu-
inweh/one-size-fits-all-criteria-assess-dam-removal-are-least-useless-and-most-dangerous, JMP)
Q: The report calls for protocols to guide the process of dam removal, to understand processes and outcomes. What do you see as the path ahead for this to become a
reality? Are any countries leading in this regard?

A: Over 90% of large dams are located in 25 countries. The majority of them are in the developed world, which is economically and technologically advanced enough
to find sustainable alternatives for the ageing dams, including dam decommissioning as a solution. So
far, dam removal is limited mainly to
small dams in North America and Europe. However, sharing the lesson learned, technology, and
experience can lead the other nations to develop sound plans for dam removal in their soils. Ultimately,
value judgments will determine the fate of many of these large water storage structures. It is not an easy
process, and thus distilling lessons from and sharing dam decommissioning experiences should be a
common global goal. Lack of such knowledge and lack of its reflection in relevant regional/national
policies/practices may progressively and adversely affect the ability to manage water storage dams
properly as they age.
 1AC---Environment ADV
Advantage 2 is environment:
First methane
The methane from dams is not currently accounted for AND independently dams
disrupt the carbon cycle
Benson, 21--- Masters of Environmental Policy Candidate (MAY 16, 2021, Jen Benson, “The Murky
Ethics and Complicated Environmental Claims of Big Hydro,” https://www.bard.edu/cep/blog/?p=12930,
JMP)
Dam(n) Greenhouse Gasses Despite consistent rhetoric around dams being a renewable energy source and
an environmentally responsible alternative to fossil fuels, hydropower has been found to cause significant
disruptions to the natural carbon cycle. Human constructed dam reservoirs trap almost one-fifth of
organic carbon moving from riverine to oceanic environments. With 90% of rivers world wide predicted
to host at least one dam in the next 15 years, impacts on the natural carbon cycle will continue to intensify
over time. As the building block of life, the carbon cycle is the basis for primary productivity, and
reductions in carbon moving through an ecosystem can have significant detrimental effects on its
stability and productivity. Furthermore, the reservoirs created by dams emit methane. A study using
bubble-tracking sonar found that each square meter of reservoir surface emitted 25% more methane than
previous estimates suggested. Despite considerable emissions, methane from dams is not currently
calculated into global or United States greenhouse gas inventories. When under consideration as a
renewable energy, the carbon and methane associated with dams must be included in all cost benefit
analyses, along with impacts to local biological and human communities.

Warming causes extinction

Ng ’19 [Yew-Kwang; May 2019; Professor of Economics at Nanyang Technology University, Fellow of
the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and Member of the Advisory Board at the Global Priorities
Institute at Oxford University, Ph.D. in Economics from Sydney University; Global Policy, “Keynote:
Global Extinction and Animal Welfare: Two Priorities for Effective Altruism,” vol. 10, no. 2, p. 258-266;
RP]
Catastrophic climate change
Though by no means certain, CCC causing global extinction is possible due to interrelated factors of non‐
linearity, cascading effects, positive feedbacks, multiplicative factors, critical thresholds and tipping
points (e.g. Barnosky and Hadly, 2016; Belaia et al., 2017; Buldyrev et al., 2010; Grainger, 2017; Hansen and Sato, 2012; IPCC 2014; Kareiva
and Carranza, 2018; Osmond and Klausmeier, 2017; Rothman, 2017; Schuur et al., 2015; Sims and Finnoff, 2016; Van Aalst, 2006).7

A possibly imminent tipping point could be in the form of ‘an abrupt ice sheet collapse [that] could cause a
rapid sea level rise’ (Baum et al., 2011, p. 399). There are many avenues for positive feedback in global warming,
including:

 the replacement of an ice sea by a liquid ocean surface from melting reduces the reflection and increases the
absorption of sunlight, leading to faster warming;
 the drying of forests from warming increases forest fires and the release of more carbon; and
 higher ocean temperatures may lead to the release of methane trapped under the ocean floor, producing
runaway global warming.
Though there are also avenues for negative feedback, the scientific consensus is for an overall net positive feedback (Roe and Baker, 2007). Thus,
the Global Challenges Foundation (2017, p. 25) concludes, ‘The world is currently completely unprepared to envisage, and
even less deal with, the consequences of CCC’.
The threat of sea‐level rising from global warming is well known, but there are also other likely and more
imminent threats to the survivability of mankind and other living things. For example, Sherwood and Huber (2010)
emphasize the adaptability limit to climate change due to heat stress from high environmental wet‐bulb
temperature. They show that ‘even modest global warming could … expose large fractions of the [world]
population to unprecedented heat stress’ p. 9552 and that with substantial global warming, ‘the area of land
rendered uninhabitable by heat stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level’ p. 9555, making extinction much
more likely and the relatively moderate damages estimated by most integrated assessment models unreliably low.

While imminent extinction is very unlikely and may not come for a long time even under business as usual, the main point is that we cannot
rule it out. Annan and Hargreaves (2011, pp. 434–435) may be right that there is ‘an upper 95 per cent probability limit for S [temperature
increase] … to lie close to 4°C, and certainly well below 6°C’. However, probabilities of 5 per cent, 0.5 per cent , 0.05 per cent or
even 0.005 per cent of excessive warming and the resulting extinction probabilities cannot be ruled out
and are unacceptable. Even if there is only a 1 per cent probability that there is a time bomb in the
airplane, you probably want to change your flight. Extinction of the whole world is more important to
avoid by literally a trillion times.

Second rivers
Dams disrupt entire aquatic ecosystems.
Miller 20 --- B.A. from UT Austin, seasoned writer who has written over one hundred articles, which
have been read by over 500,000 people (Mar 13, 2020, Brandon Miller, “17 Biggest Advantages and
Disadvantages of Dams,” https://greengarageblog.org/17-biggest-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-dams,
JMP)
3. This technology disrupts local ecosystems.

Dams create a flooding issue behind the structure as a way to form a reservoir. Not only does this disrupt human activities, but it also
destroys the existing wildlife habitats that exist. This issue can disrupt entire ecosystems, which can have
an adverse effect on a whole regional biome. Marine life that relies on an unobstructed flow of a river,
such as migratory fish, can be adversely affected by the decision to dam the water.
4. Some river sediment is beneficial.

Dams can have a profound impact on the overall aquatic ecosystem of a region. The transformation
upstream creates a lack of settlement that moves down the waterway to support the entire marine
habitat. It can also cause changes in temperature, chemical composition, and shoreline stability. Many
reservoirs also host invasive species, such as algae or snails, that undermine the natural communities of
the plants and animals that lived on the river before.
The riverbeds that are downstream from a dam can erode by several yards within the first decade of operations. This damage can extend for hundreds of miles
downstream afterward.
That spills over, jeopardizing the entire planet.
Wernick 14 (September 10, 2014, Adam Wernick, “How 'clean power' dams actually damage the
environment,” https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-10/how-clean-power-dams-actually-damage-
environment, JMP) ***Note --- Jason Rainey is the executive director of International Rivers
But despite those successes, Rainey says there's
not enough attention being paid to river health. “The world's rivers are
in grave peril, and there is no international institution, no panel of experts, looking squarely at the problem," he says.
His group recently unveiled an interactive Google Earth-based online platform that allows users to look at the health of the world's rivers. And if the crisis continues
unabated, Rainey believes there will be serious environmental consequences.

“The rate of species extinction is greatest in aquatic freshwater ecosystems. But we're really dealing
with planetary cycles here,” he says. “Rivers connect us to deltas and to coastal marine systems; they carve
their way through the land and are the ribbon of life in dry and wet communities.”
We are “clogging the arteries of the planet,” Rainey says, because of the illusion that the "alternative [to
energy pollution] is to just dam our way to some sustainable future.”
The problem is especially large in developing countries , where dams can provide badly-need power — and jobs. "[These] regions have
very legitimate needs for energy access and development,” Rainey emphasizes, “but they are doing so by pushing a mega-dam energy agenda. It's just a
dangerous course for the planet.”

Fresh water sustains all life

Boltz et al. 15 --- Managing Director Ecosystems at The Rockefeller Foundation (Dr Frederick Boltz,
Alex Martinez - Stanford University Tom Ford Fellow The Rockefeller Foundation, Dr Casey Brown -
Associate Professor Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering University of Massachusetts
Amherst, Dr Johan Rockström - Professor in Environmental Science Stockholm University Executive
Director Stockholm Resilience Centre, Water for Development – Charting a Water Wise Path, “Chapter 7
Healthy freshwater ecosystems: an imperative for human development and resilience,”
https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-WWW-report-Chapter-7.pdf, JMP)
Introduction | Fresh water is vital to human life and wellbeing. Along with food and shelter, it forms our most basic
need. So vital, in fact, that access to drinking water is commonly considered a fundamental right for all humanity.
Healthy, functioning freshwater ecosystems provide reliable and quality water flows upon which these
basic human needs depend. Energy, food and health – all indispensable to human development – rely on
the water services provided by natural ecosystems. Freshwater ecosystems, such as wetlands and rivers, also provide crucial regulating
services, such as water purification, flood mitigation and the treatment of human and industrial wastes. Now, more than ever, we must incorporate the value of water-
related environmental services in our water management decisions. Eradicating
poverty and hunger among the billions living
in deprivation today and those in the future will depend fundamentally on water security – for both people
and ecosystems.
Water is central to the functioning and resilience of the biosphere. Its availability and variability strongly influences the
diversity and distribution of biomes and habitats that harbour the wealth of plant and animal life on Earth. Water of specific quantity and quality
is required to preserve the state and stability of ecosystems and build their resilience to localised
disturbance and to global change. It mediates the persistence of ecosystem types, their composition and function, and facilitates the migration of
species and habitats as key environmental conditions such as temperature, rainfall, and soil moisture change.

Water’s central role in the biosphere has long implied that several of the most important challenges confronting human development are related to fresh water (e.g.,
Falkenmark, 1990). This has been true for decades and will only intensify without a change in the course of human water use. For
too long,
conventional approaches to water planning have focused narrowly on economic productivity, largely
ignoring the costs of overdrawing water from ecosystems or disrupting natural flow regimes with hard
infrastructure. If we are serious about meeting human development objectives for the coming century, the way we plan and manage water resources must
change.

Rapid dam removal stabilizes rivers quickly.

O'Connor et al. 15 --- Research Geologist, U.S. Geological Survey, Portland, Oregon (May 2015, J.
E. O'Connor, J. J. Duda, G. E. Grant, Science, “1000 dams down and counting; Dam removals are
reconnecting rivers in the United States,” VOL 348 ISSUE 6234, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24747366,
JMP)
Forty years ago, the demolition of large dams was mostly fiction, notably plotted in Edward Abbey's novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. Its 1975 publication roughly
coincided with the end of large-dam construction in the United States. Since then, dams have been taken down in increasing numbers as they have filled with
sediment, become unsafe or inefficient, or otherwise outlived their usefulness (7) (see the figure, panel A). Last year's removals of the 64-m-high Glines Canyon Dam
and the 32-m-high Elwha Dam in northwestern Washington State were among the largest yet, releasing over 10 million cubic meters of stored sediment.
Published studies conducted in conjunction with about 100 U.S. dam removals and at least 26 removals
outside the United States are now providing detailed insights into how rivers respond (2, 3).
A major finding is that rivers are resilient, with many responding quickly to dam removal. Most river
channels stabilize within months or years, not decades (4), particularly when dams are removed rapidly;
phased or incremental removals typically have longer response times . The rapid physical response is
driven by the strong upstream/downstream coupling intrinsic to river systems. Reservoir erosion commonly begins at
knickpoints, or short steep reaches of channel, that migrate upstream while cutting through reservoir sediment. Substantial fractions of stored reservoir sediment—
50% or more—can be eroded within weeks or months of breaching (4) (see the figure, panel B). Sediment eroded from reservoirs rapidly moves down stream (5, 6).
Some sediment is deposited downstream, but is often redistributed within months . Many rivers soon trend
toward their pre-dam states (5, 7).
Migratory fish have also responded quickly to restored river connectivity. Removal of a dam on Virginia's Rappahannock
River increased American eel populations in Shenandoah National Park, 150 km upstream (8). Similarly, following a small dam removal in Maine, sea lamprey
recolonized newly accessible habitat, increasing abundance and nesting sites by a factor of 4 (9). Within
days of the blast removing the last
of Glines Canyon Dam, Elwha River Chinook salmon swam upstream past its rocky abutments. Responses have
been mixed for less mobile bottom-dwelling plants and animals in former reservoirs and down-stream channels (10, 11).

Dam size, river size, reservoir size and shape, and sediment volume and grain size all exert first-order controls on physical and ecological responses to dam removal.
Larger dam removals have had longer-lasting and more widespread downstream effects than the much
more common small-dam removals (4). Local environmental and habitat conditions and the dam's position in the watershed also affect physical
and ecologic consequences. In the case of the Elwha River, both dams were near the river mouth, minimizing the extent of downstream effects while reconnecting
large areas of high quality fish habitat upstream in Olympic National Park.

Atlantic salmon are critically endangered---removing dams revitalizes the whole

ecosystem
- fishways are insufficient

Lohan 21 (APRIL 11, 2021 6:59PM (UTC), TARA LOHAN, “Our last, best chance to save Atlantic
salmon; Atlantic salmon are perilously close to extinction in the United States,”
https://www.salon.com/2021/04/11/our-last-best-chance-to-save-atlantic-salmon_partner/, JMP)
Atlantic salmon have a challenging life history — and those that hail from U.S. waters have seen things get increasingly
difficult in the past 300 years.
Dubbed the "king of fish," Atlantic salmon once numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the United States and ranged up and down most of New England's coastal
rivers and ocean waters. But dams, pollution and overfishing have extirpated them from all the region's rivers except in Maine. Today only around 1,000 wild salmon,
known as the Gulf of Maine distinct population segment, return each year from their swim to Greenland. Fewer will find adequate spawning
habitat in their natal rivers to reproduce.
That's left Atlantic salmon in the United States critically endangered. Hatchery and stocking programs have kept them from disappearing
entirely, but experts say recovering healthy, wild populations will require much more, including eliminating some of the
obstacles (literally) standing in their way.
Conservation organizations, fishing groups and even some state scientists are now calling for the removal of up
to four dams along a 30-mile stretch of the Kennebec River, where about a third of Maine's best salmon
habitat remains.
The dams' owner — multinational Brookfield Renewable Partners — has instead proposed building fishways to aid salmon and
other migratory fish getting around dams as they travel both up and down the river. But most experts think that plan has
little chance of success.
A confusing array of state and federal processes are underway to try and sort things out. None is likely to be quick, cheap or easy. And there's a lot at stake.

"Ultimately the
fate of the species in the United States really depends upon what happens at a handful of key
dams," says John Burrows, executive director of U.S. programs at the Atlantic Salmon Federation. "If those
four projects don't work — or even if just one of them doesn't work — you could basically preclude
recovering Atlantic salmon in the United States."
Prime habitat

The best place for salmon recovery is in Maine's two largest watersheds.
"The Penobscot River and the Kennebec River have orders of magnitude more habitat, production
potential and climate resilient habitat" than other parts of the state , says Burrows.
The rivers and their tributaries run far inland and reach more undeveloped areas with higher elevations. That helps provide salmon with the cold, clean water they
need for spawning and rearing. Smaller numbers of salmon are hanging on in lower-elevation rivers along the coastal plain in Maine's Down East region, but climate
change could make that habitat unsuitable.

"There's definitely concern about how resilient those watersheds are going to be for salmon in the future," says Burrows. "To recover the population, we need to be
able to get salmon to the major tributaries farther upriver, in places where we're still going to have cold water even under predictions with climate change."

One of those key places is the Penobscot, which has already seen a $60 million effort to help recover salmon and other native sea-run fish. A 16-year project resulted
in the removal of two dams, the construction of a stream-like bypass channel at a third dam, and new fish lift at a fourth. In all, the project made 2,000 miles of river
habitat accessible.

While there's still more work to be done on the Penobscot, says Burrows, attention has shifted to the Kennebec. The river has what's regarded as the largest and best
salmon habitat in the state, especially in its tributary, the Sandy River, where hatchery eggs are being planted to help boost salmon numbers.

"That's helped us go from zero salmon in the upper tributaries of Kennebec to getting 50 or 60 adults back, which is still an abysmally small number compared to
historical counts," says Burrows. "But these are the last of the wildest fish that we have."

The obstacles

The Sandy may be good salmon habitat, but it's also hard to reach. Brookfield's four dams stand in the way of fish trying to get upriver.

At the lowest dam on the river, Lockwood Dam in Waterville, there's a fish lift — a kind of elevator that should allow fish that enter it to pass up and around the dam.
But if fish do find the lift — and only around half of salmon do — they don't get far.

"It's a terminal lift," says Sean Ledwin, division director of Maine's Department of Marine Resources' Sea Run Fisheries and Habitat. "The lift was never completed.
So we pick up those fish in a truck and drive them up to the Sandy River."

That taxi cab arrangement isn't a long-term solution, though, and was part of an interim species protection plan.

Only the second dam, Hydro Kennebec, has a modern fish passage system. But how well that actually works hasn't been tested yet since fish can't get by Lockwood
Dam. As part of a consultation process related to the Endangered Species Act, Brookfield has submitted a plan proposing to fix the fishway at Lockwood and add
passage to the third and fourth dams.

But federal regulators found it inadequate.

"Brookfield's proposal was rejected by the Federal Energy Regulatory Committee [which oversees hydroelectric projects] and all the [federal management] agencies,"
says Ledwin. The company now has until May 2022 to come up with a new plan.
State scientists aren't convinced Brookfield's plan would work either.

"We have really low confidence that having four fishways would ever result in meaningful runs of all the
sea-run fish and certainly not recovery of Atlantic salmon," says Ledwin. "We don't think that it's going to be
conducive to recovery."
In addition to considerations related to the Endangered Species Act, Shawmut Dam, the third on the Kennebec, is currently up for relicensing, which triggers a federal
review process by FERC.

And at the same time the Maine Department of Marine Resources has drafted a new plan for managing the Kennebec River that recommends removing Shawmut Dam
and Lockwood Dam. A public comment period on the proposed plan closed in March.

Brookfield isn't happy with it and responded with a lawsuit against the state.

It was good news to conservation groups, however, which would like to see all four of the dams removed if possible — or at least a few of them.

"There's no self-sustaining population of Atlantic salmon anywhere in the world that we know of that
have to go by more than one hydro dam," says Burrows. He believes that having Brookfield spend tens of millions of
dollars on new fishways will just result in failure for salmon.
It's partly a game of numbers. Not all fish will find or use a fishway. And if you start with a low number
of returning fish and expect them to pass through four gauntlets, you won't be left with many at the end.
"If you're passing 50% of salmon that show up at the first dam, and then you've got three more dams passing 50%, that means you're left with only an eighth of the
population you started with by the end," says Nick Bennett, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Council of Maine. "You
can't start a restoration
program where you're losing seven-eighths of the adults before they even get to their spawning habitat."
And getting upriver is just part of the salmon's journey. Juvenile
salmon face threats going downstream to the ocean as well,
including predation and warm water in impoundments. They also risk being injured or killed going
through spillways or turbines. Only about half are likely to survive the four hydro projects.
Atlantic salmon, unlike their Pacific cousins, don't always die after spawning , either. So some adults will
also make the downstream trek, too.
"Just looking at our reality, at least two dams need to go, hopefully three, and it would be amazing if all four would go," says Burrows.

Ecosystem restoration

The fate of Atlantic salmon hangs in the balance, but so do the futures of other fishes.
The Pacific coast of the United States is home to five species of salmon. And while the Atlantic side has just the one, it has a dozen other native sea-run species that
have also seen their habitat shrink.

"Those dams
are preventing other native species like American shad, alewives, blueback herring and
American eel from accessing large amounts of historic habitat," says Burrows.
Ledwin says removing dams on the Kennebec could result in populations of more than a million shad, millions of blueback herring, millions of eels and hundreds of
thousands of sea lampreys.

"The recovery of those species would actually help Atlantic salmon as well because they provide prey
buffers and there are a lot of co-evolved benefits," he says.
Salmon are much more successful at nesting when they can lay their eggs in old sea lamprey nests , explains
Bennett. "But sea lamprey are not good at using fish lifts and we've essentially blocked 90% of the historic sea lamprey habitat at Lockwood dam. We need to get
those fish upstream, too."

Dam removal advocates don't have to look too far to find an example of how well river ecosystems respond when dams are removed.

The removal of the Edwards Dam on the lower Kennebec River in 1999 and the Fort Halifax Dam just upstream on the
Sebasticook in 2008 helped ignite a nationwide dam-removal movement. It also brought back American shad, eel, two native species
of sturgeon and millions of river herring to lower parts of the watershed .
"We've got the biggest river herring run in North America now due to the dam removals," says Ledwin. "And
the largest abundance of eel we've ever seen on the lower Kennebec."
The resurgence of native fishes helps the whole ecosystem. When they returned, so too did eagles,
osprey and other wildlife.
"When people see all those fish in the river and the eagles overhead, it just kind of blows their minds because they never realized what had been lost for so long in our
rivers," says Burrows.

Rebuilding key forage fish like herring also benefits species that live not just in the river, but the Gulf of
Maine and even the Atlantic Ocean. The tiny fish feed whales, porpoises and seabirds. They're also used for lobster bait and can help rebuild
fisheries for cod and haddock, which has economic benefits for the region, too.

"We have to rebalance the scales if we want to have marine industries and commercial fishing industries and if we want the ecological benefits of what sea-run
fisheries do for us," says Bennett.

Snake River dams drive salmon to extinction AND starve killer whales---removal is
the sole effective option.
 wind energy and natural gas have supplanted hydropower as Pacific Northwest’s cheapest sources
of power
 increasing availability of wind and solar energy means Bonneville probably won’t find new
customers for that electricity
 freight volume on the Snake corridor already declining – growing shift to rail and trucks
 fish hatcheries have been a failure

Leslie 19 --- book on dams, Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the
Environment, won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for its "elegant, beautiful
prose”(OCTOBER 10, 2019, JACQUES LESLIE, “On the Northwest’s Snake River, the Case for Dam
Removal Grows; As renewable energy becomes cheaper than hydropower and the presence of dams
worsens the plight of salmon, pressure is mounting in the Pacific Northwest to take down four key dams
on the lower Snake River that critics say have outlived their usefulness,”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/on-the-northwests-snake-river-the-case-for-dam-removal-grows, JMP)
North America’s largest Pacific watershed, the Columbia River Basin, is in the midst of an
environmental and energy crisis so severe that the most obvious, yet hotly contested, antidote —
removal of four dams on the Columbia’s longest tributary, the Snake River — is gaining traction.
The hydropower dams have been controversial since before their completion, between 1962 and 1975, because of their disastrous impact on salmon and the other 137
species that are part of the salmon food chain. Most
of the Columbia Basin’s 250-plus dams have played roles in the
salmon’s decline, but the four lower Snake River dams are prime targets for removal because their
economic value has diminished and their absence would inordinately benefit salmon.
Even though the dams include ladders and other fish passage mechanisms, they have made salmon
passage to and from the sea so difficult that populations have plummeted from already low mid-20th century levels. The
dams effectively prevented all but a few salmon from carrying out some of nature’s most astonishing migrations, reaching
spawning grounds in Idaho’s Snake River Basin as far as 900 river miles from the Pacific Coast and more than a mile in elevation. As a result, all three
Snake River salmon species are endangered or threatened. Nevertheless, federal agencies and regional politicians have
steadfastly declined to consider removing the Snake dams .
Now orcas off the coast of Washington are dying of starvation, the direct result of the near-absence of
chinook salmon, the foundation of their diet. A whale mother that seemed to mourn her lost calf by carrying its carcass on her back for 17
days as she swam hundreds of miles drew so much international attention that a Seattle Times headline cited “the grief felt around the world.” Biologists have
observed orcas with “peanut head,”a misshapen head and neck brought on by starvation. The three local orca pods are down to 73 animals, from a recent peak of 99 in
the late 1980s. Given a dearth of reproducing females and a paucity of recent births, the biologists fear that their population has dropped below a sustainable level.

The orcas’ plight has refocused attention on the Snake

River dams, for their removal offers the most likely prospect of
generating chinook — and, in turn, orca — recovery. Even with its dams, the Snake River watershed supports 70
percent of the habitat available for chinook in the entire Columbia Basin — no other dam removals in
the Columbia Basin would open as much habitat.
The case for keeping the dams has been weakened as solar and wind energy and natural gas have
supplanted hydroelectricity as the Pacific Northwest’s cheapest sources of power. That development has sent the
Bonneville Power Administration, the long-tentacled federal agency that markets electricity from the Snake River dams and 27 other federally owned Columbia Basin
dams, into a tailspin. Nevertheless, Bonneville and the dams’ many supporters continue to resist removal because, they say, the hydropower system and the Pacific
Northwest economy are inseparable.

The lower Snake River dams have enabled large quantities of grain to be shipped by barge from Lewiston, Idaho all the way to the mouth of the Columbia River, 465
miles away, making the ninth-largest city in the nation’s 39th most populous state the West Coast’s farthest-inland port. But in
the last two decades,
freight volume on the Snake corridor has declined by 70 percent, as farmers have turned to rail and trucks
to move their grain to the West Coast, and container shipments dropped from 18,000 a year in 2000 to zero in 2017.
Last year, 32 Pacific Northwest salmon biologists and six whale scientists signed letters to Washington Govenor Jay Inslee, advocating removal of the four dams.
Dam decommissioning, the whale scientists wrote, “will re-establish productive access” for chinook and
other salmon to more than 5,000 miles of high-quality habitat in the Snake Basin. Inslee hired a consulting team in
August to conduct an “engagement process” with Snake River Basin stakeholders that is supposed to result in a recommendation in February on whether to remove
the dams.

Mike Simpson, a rare environmentally-minded, climate change-believing conservative Republican Congressman from Idaho, broke ranks with other Congress
members in the region last April by declaring in a speech, “I am going to stay alive long enough to see salmon return to healthy populations in Idaho.” Though the
only way that can happen is through dam removal, Simpson didn’t quite endorse that option, but he made clear that it should be considered.

Recent studies have buttressed the case for removing the dams. A 2017 study by the Fish Passage Center,
a nonpartisan, government-funded Columbia Basin research group, found that removal of the four Snake River dams
would result in a two- to three-fold increase in salmon abundance in the Snake River Basin, even though
the fish would still have to negotiate four more dams downstream , on the Columbia River.
Another study published in July by ECONorthwest, an independent economic consulting firm, conducted cost-benefit analyses that the report said “strongly justify”
removing the dams. The study is notable for its inclusion of “non-use values,” assessments of the worth to local residents of a thriving, free-flowing Snake River in
which salmon runs rebound. According to four surveys conducted for the study, Pacific Northwest households were willing to pay an average of $40 each for the
dams’ removal, much higher than the $8.44 per household that the study concluded justified removal. But proponents of retaining the dams said the study’s
methodology was faulty and that respondents overstate how much they would hypothetically pay for a promised result like dam removal.

Daniel Malarkey, a report co-author, maintains, however, “These dams have reached the end of their useful lives. They are going to take a lot more additional
investment if they’re going to be operated for another 30 years, and when you factor in their true costs, including their effect on fish, they are no longer the low-cost
resource. We have low-carbon and zero-carbon alternatives that don’t make fish go extinct.”
For now, the dams’ fate rests with Bonneville, which markets more than a quarter of the Pacific Northwest’s hydroelectricity and owns about three-fourths of its
transmission lines. Beginning in the 1940s, Bonneville’s distribution of low-cost electricity generated by the mammoth Grand Coulee and other main-stem Columbia
River dams gave the Pacific Northwest a competitive advantage that stimulated its economy and seemed to signify dams’ endless bounty. Now, however, the agency
faces financial collapse. As Elliott Mainzer, its administrator, stated publicly last year, Bonneville has experienced a “bloodbath.” “I’m not in a panic mode,” he said,
“but I am in a very, very significant sense of urgency mode.”

The 21st century has caught up with Bonneville, as the cost of renewable energy and natural gas has
dropped below the price of Bonneville’s hydroelectricity. Bonneville historically maintained low prices for its contracted customers,
chiefly 134 Pacific Northwest public utility districts, by selling its surplus power at much higher rates to California. But when the state began embracing solar energy
in the last decade, the going price for Bonneville’s surplus power dropped sharply.
As a result, Bonneville has been forced to raise rates it charges its contracted customers by about 30 percent over the last eight years. Those customers now pay Bonneville more than $35 per megawatt-hour; were it not for their contractual obligations, they could buy electricity on the open
market for prices that over the last year averaged less than $30 a megawatt-hour and occasionally dropped to below zero. The public utility districts’ contracts expire in 2028, when many may opt for cheaper electricity somewhere else. Bonneville might then be forced to raise its rates even
more, driving away still more customers and intensifying the “death spiral” that utilities increasingly fear.

A Bonneville spokesman said in an email that its electricity prices aren’t “entirely comparable” to open market prices because both Bonneville’s prices and its electricity supply are more stable than electricity purchased on the open market. As for the raising of rates that would trigger a death
spiral, he cited Bonneville’s 2018-2023 strategic plan, which calls for “holding program costs at or below the rate of inflation through 2028.”

Bonneville regards the lower Snake River dams as vital to its operations, comprising a quarter of the system’s electricity reserves. Those reserves are needed, it says, to counteract high winter energy demand and the variability of the system’s more intermittent wind power. In addition, the
dams’ hydropower provides needed support for the system’s western Montana-to-eastern Washington transmission lines.

But Bonneville’s prospects aren’t likely to improve. Its six dams on the main stem of the Columbia River provide all the electricity its contracted customers need; the electricity generated by its 25 other dams, including the four lower Snake River dams, is all surplus. Given the increasing
availability of wind and solar energy, Bonneville probably won’t find new customers for that electricity, says Anthony Jones, an independent economist at Rocky Mountain Econometrics who has studied Bonneville’s finances for more than two decades.

Instead, Bonneville has become the nation’s most highly leveraged utility. It spent down its financial reserves from nearly a billion dollars in 2008 to about $5 million in 2017, and it accumulated $15 billion in debt, on which it spent $1.56 billion on interest and related fees in fiscal year 2018.
Most of its dams are at least half-a-century old, and will require billions of dollars to repair; the cost of rehabilitating 21 aging Snake River dam turbines alone is likely to exceed $1 billion.
Bonneville is also required to spend large sums on Columbia Basin fish and wildlife mitigation to make up for the environmental damage the dams cause. From 2008 to 2017, that effort cost Bonneville $727 million a year, about a fourth of its annual budget. Much of the mitigation money
has been spent on the basin’s 178 salmon hatcheries, yet the hatcheries have amounted to an abysmal boondoggle. No salmon species is in better condition than before hatcheries were introduced, and a mountain of scientific evidence indicates that hatchery salmon not only don’t support wild
salmon, but reduce chances of their recovery. The salmon recovery effort has cost Bonneville ratepayers more than $16 billion since 1980, about a quarter of their electricity bills. That makes it the nation’s most expensive endangered species recovery failure. According to Jones, salmon and
other wildlife mitigation efforts attributable to the four Snake River dams have cost between a third and a fourth of Bonneville’s total mitigation expenditures.

On top of this, dam removal advocates say, the Snake River dams are both unneeded and unprofitable. Their hydroelectricity comprises between 5 and 13 percent of Bonneville’s total electricity output, depending on season, but the last time the dams’ power helped meet Bonneville’s
contracted customer demand was in 2009, according to Linwood Laughy, an advocate of removing the Snake River dams who follows Bonneville’s financial activities. Since then, all their electricity has been surplus, and it’s the price of that surplus electricity that has plummeted.

“Even if you don’t give a rat’s ass about the fish,” Jones said, “there is good justification for taking the dams down purely on a cost savings basis.”

Those are federally-owned dams.

Geranios, 20 (5 October 2020, NICHOLAS K. GERANIOS, Associated Press Newswires, “Critics
vow to continue efforts to remove Snake River dams,” Factiva database, Document
APRS000020201005ega500ha9, JMP)
The four dams are part of a vast and complex hydroelectric power system operated by the federal
government in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. The 14 federal dams on the Columbia and
Snake rivers together produce 40% of the region’s power — enough electricity for nearly 5 million homes.
But the dams have proven disastrous for salmon that hatch in freshwater streams, then make their way hundreds of miles to the ocean, where
they spend years before finding their way back to mate, lay eggs and die.

The dams cut off more than half of salmon spawning and rearing habitat, and many wild salmon runs in
the region have 2% or less of their historic populations, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

only quick removal solves widespread extinctions.

 Salmon and Southern Resident orcas are being driving to extinction
 Fish ladders and other recovery fails

Steinbauer 21 --- contributing writer covering national environmental policy, was an editorial fellow
at Sierra (MAR 2 2021, JAMES STEINBAUER, “Will the Snake River’s Dams Be the Next to Come
Down? A multibillion-dollar rescue package to pull Idaho’s salmon back from extinction,”
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/will-snake-river-s-dams-be-next-come-down, JMP) ***Note --- Bill
Arthur went on to chair the Sierra Club’s Columbia–Snake River Salmon Recovery Campaign
In 1991, the salmon and steelhead that returned to the Snake River were listed as endangered species,
kicking into motion the process of developing a federal recovery plan. The first such plan focused on
small restoration projects and largely ignored the four dams. Over the next 30 years, a coalition of environmental organizations,
including the Sierra Club, sued the federal government six times, arguing that the recovery plan was inadequate. The most recent lawsuit, in 2016, resulted in a
four-year study of the environmental impact of the four lower Snake River dams . Although it found that
breaching the dams would be the most effective salmon recovery action, the federal agencies
ultimately decided against it.
Simpson calls this history of lawsuits the “unsustainable status quo.” Arthur
describes it as a hamster wheel of failed and
inadequate salmon recovery plans from the federal agencies. “Each time they redo their recovery plan,
they add a few new bells and whistles but still forgo the problem that these last four dams are just
fundamentally lethal to salmon,” Arthur said.
To date, the United States hasspent more than $17 billion trying to recover Snake River salmon, with little to
show for it. In 2017, the number of Chinook returning to the Snake River dropped below 10,000. Only 500 made it past the dams (via
fish ladders) to central Idaho. Just a few months before his speech at Boise State, Simpson traveled to Marsh Creek, a tributary of the Salmon River in
central Idaho, to look for salmon that had made the 900-mile journey from the Pacific to lay their eggs and die—the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. He
found just one.
The effects of salmon's decline on the Pacific Northwest’s web of life reverberated widely. When Chinook, sockeye, and steelhead make the journey back to the
streams and tributaries where they were born to spawn, they bring with them the collected nutrients of up to five years spent in the ocean. For
thousands of
years, the salmon not only provided sustenance for Native Americans, but also their decaying bodies
fertilized and shaped the forests of the Northwest and fed more than 140 species, from bald eagles to
salamanders.
Perhaps no animal has felt the decrease in salmon more intensely than the endangered Southern Resident killer
whale. Southern Resident orcas are distinct from other orca populations through their dialect and the fact that they are obligate piscivores, meaning they eat only
fish. And not just any fish: More than 90 percent of their diet is salmon, and 80 percent of that is Columbia Basin
Chinook.
The health of salmon can be used as a sort of barometer for the health of the orcas. Southern Resident killer whales need to eat between 350 and 450 pounds of fish a
day to survive. Deborah Giles, who studies orcas at the University of Washington’s Center for Conservation
Biology, said this probably wasn’t a problem when the salmon returning from the North Pacific weighed in at over 100 pounds, but a lack of quality Chinook is
the number one threat affecting the orcas today. Giles said Simpson’s proposal is the best plan for salmon recovery she has
seen in 30 years, but the timeline he lays out—his plan calls for breaching the dams starting in 2030—isn’t fast
enough. “There is no doubt in my mind that removing those dams will have a positive impact on the
whales,” Giles said. “But they need to come down tomorrow.”

Otherwise, extinction.
Stephan 13 --- broker of Eco Realty, co-hosts KWMR’s Post Carbon Radio and blogs at
MarinSonoma.com (10/24/2013, Bernie Stephan, “Protecting our salmon and our human survival,”
http://www.ptreyeslight.com/article/protecting-our-salmon-and-our-human-survival, recut by JMP)
It’s time we valued our freshwater creeks —nature’s roads—for the value they bring in the long term. Biodiversity in our
watershed is essential for many species and is essential for ultimate human survival. We must protect our
watersheds, respecting the natural flows of water and the life they enable. Extinction is far more serious
than anyone’s financial investment.
The cumulative effect of many small land disturbances near a stream can be devastating. Land-use restrictions to protect salmon streams have successfully been
implemented elsewhere in California and around the United States. Marin’s failure to take permanent action is truly disturbing, considering that other counties and
cities have enacted stream protection measures. The need to control development, to protect Marin’s salmon, has been well understood for decades.

Marin officials have watched coho salmon populations drop by 70 percent since the 1960’s. In 2010, the nonprofit Salmon Protection and Watershed Network sued
the county for its failure to protect salmon. Marin’s Superior Court imposed a ban on new development in San Geronimo Valley pending the adoption of an ordinance
that had been promised since 1994.

In June, almost two decades after the ordinance had been proposed, the Board of Supervisors had before it a draft stream protection ordinance ready for adoption. But
when it came to a vote, supervisors lacked the political courage to protect the salmon. Instead, they chose to punt, appointing a subcommittee to make
recommendations for revising the Countywide Plan once again.

We can have development setbacks for coho and all the other species that don’t recognize our surveyed boundaries. Our creeks are roads for salmon, whose annual
migrations are a marvel of nature. When my family lived on San Geronimo Creek, the sighting of salmon always lifted our spirits, connecting us to the natural world. I
envision Marin’s creeks as wildlife corridors where aquatic and terrestrial critter alike would have their needs met. It’s time for us humans to see the bigger picture
and begin limiting our development.

Private property rights should take a back seat to the needs of nature. As a working realtor, I’m still speaking up for the fish. I value their right to continue co-existing
with us more highly than our right to expand real estate development. But will our supervisors do the same? Human activity, especially land development, has been
the main cause of the collapse of the Lagunitas Creek salmon population, and sustaining the salmon requires rigorous protection along the entire length of the creek
and its tributaries.

As our planet undergoes a biodiversity crisis everywhere, 16,000 species are threatened with extinction ,
including 12 percent of birds, 23 percent of mammals and 32 percent of amphibians. Biologists are clear that humans are responsible for the declines we are
witnessing. The aggregate effect of all our development continues to destroy the homes and habitat of wildlife, even when we as individuals take great care not to.
We should move quickly to enact a rigorous, enforceable ordinance to protect our salmon, or they will all be gone and the
threats to human survival are not far behind. Let’s listen to the scientists over the protestations of
property owners. Let’s heed the dire warnings; there has been enough delay already.
I urge the county supervisors to exercise decisive leadership is reversing the tide that always seems to put private property rights ahead of nature’s rights. Salmon
are the biological foundation—and keystone species—of our precious coastal ecosystems. Let’s hope the
supervisors stem the tide of ecocide and side with the fish on this important issue.
 1AC---Plan
Thus, the plan: The United States federal government should limit water pollution
in the United States through a cap and trade system for dams.
 1AC---Solvency
Finally, Solvency:
Cap-and-trade has decades of empirical success---plan ensures efficient removal or
repair.
 Avoids political fights or individual dam decisions
 cap-and-trade policies for other uses have proliferated from India to China to Europe
 compliance likely from division of responsibilities – government agencies set and enforce caps
and dam owners trade to achieve best overall result

Workman, 7 --- adviser and consultant on water and natural resources issues to governmental and
nongovernmental organizations, including the World Commission on Dams (FALL 2007, JAMES G.
WORKMAN, “How to Fix Our Dam Problems; Thousands of aging dams should be repaired or
destroyed, at a cost of billions. A cap-and-trade policy could speed the process and help pay the bills,”
https://issues.org/workman-water-crisis-drought-fix-dams/, JMP)
California is the world’s eighth largest economy and generates 13% of U.S. wealth. Yet Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says high temperatures, low rainfall, and a
growing population have created a water crisis there. A third of the state is in extreme drought and, if there’s another dry season, faces catastrophe. The governor fears
that his economy could collapse without a $5.9 billion program to build more dams.

His concerns are widely shared in the United States—not to mention in dry Australia, Spain, China, and India. Yet as California desperately seeks new dam
construction, it simultaneously leads the world in old dam destruction. It razes old dams for the same reasons it raises new dams: economic security, public safety,
water storage efficiency, flood management, job creation, recreation, and adaptation to climate change. Dam-removal supporters include water districts, golf courses,
energy suppliers, thirsty cities, engineers, farmers, and property owners.

With 1,253 dams risky enough to be regulated and 50 times that many unregistered small dams,
California is a microcosm of the world. There are more than 2.5 million dams in the United States, 79,000 so large they require government
monitoring. There are an estimated 800,000 substantial dams worldwide. But within the next two decades, 85% of U.S. dams will
have outlived their average 50-year lifespan, putting lives, property, the environment, and the climate at
risk unless they are repaired and upgraded.
Neither dam repair nor dam removal is a recent phenomenon. What is new is their scale and complexity as well as the number of zeros on the price tag. Between 1920
and 1956, in the Klamath River drainage 22 dams were dismantled at a total cost of $3,000. Today, the removal of four dams on that same river—for jobs, security,
efficiency, safety, legal compliance, and growth—will cost upwards of $200 million.

Which old uneconomical dams should be improved or removed? Who pays the bill? The answers have
usually come through politics. Pro-dam and anti-dam interests raise millions of dollars and press their
representatives to set aside hundreds of millions more tax dollars to selectively subsidize pet dam
projects. Other bills bail out private owners: A current House bill earmarks $40 million for repairs; another one sets aside $12 million for
removals. The outcome is gridlock, lawsuits, debt spending, bloated infrastructure, rising risks, dying
fisheries, and sick streams.
Dam decisions don’t have to work that way. Rather than trust well-intentioned legislators, understaffed
state agencies, harried bureaucrats, or nonscientific federal judges to decide the fate of millions of unique
river structures, there’s another approach. State and federal governments should firmly set in place
safety and conservation standards, allow owners to make links between the costs and benefits of
existing dams, and then let market transactions bring health, equity, and efficiency to U.S. watersheds.
Social welfare, economic diversity, and ecological capital would all improve through a cap-and-trade
system for water infrastructure. This system would allow mitigation and offsets from the vast stockpile of
existing dams while improving the quality of, or doing away with the need for, new dam construction.
BIG BENEFITS, THEN BIGGER COSTS

A new dam rises when its public bondholder/taxpayer or private investor believes that its eventual benefits will outweigh immediate costs. When first built, dams
usually fulfill those hopes, even if the types of benefits change over time. In early U.S. history, hundreds of dams turned water mills or allowed barge transport. Soon,
thousands absorbed flood surges, diverted water for irrigation, or slaked the thirst of livestock. Later still, tens of thousands generated electrical power, stored drinking
water for cities, and provided recreation. North America built 13% of its largest dams for flood control, 11% for irrigation, 10% for water supply, 11% for
hydropower, 24% for some other single purpose such as recreation or navigation, and 30% for a mix of these purposes. Today, the primary reason is drinking water
storage and, to a far lesser extent, hydropower and irrigation.

Unfortunately, we usually fail to heed all the indirect, delayed, and unexpected downstream costs of dams. With planners focused primarily on near-term benefits,
during the past century three large dams, on average, were built in the world every day. Few independent analyses tallied exactly why those dams came about, how
they performed, and whether people have been getting a fair return on their $2 trillion investment. Now that the lifecycle cost is becoming manifest, we are beginning
to see previously hidden costs.

First, it turns out that a river is far more than a natural aqueduct. It is a dynamic continuum, a vibrant lifeline, a force of energy. Dams, by definition, abruptly stop it.
But all dams fill with much more than water. They trap river silt or sediment at rates of between 0.5% and 1% of the dam’s storage capacity every year. Layer by
layer, that sediment settles in permanently. By restraining sediment upstream, dams accelerate erosion below; hydrologists explain that dams starve a hungry current
that then must scour and devour more soil from the river bed and banks downstream. Silt may be a relatively minor problem at high altitudes, but it plagues U.S.
landscapes east of the Rockies, where precious topsoil is crumbling into rivers, backing up behind dams, and flowing out to sea. Removing trapped sediment can cost
$3 per cubic meter or more, when it can be done at all.

The second enemy is the sun. Whereas sediment devours reservoir storage from below, radiant heat hammers shallows from above. In dry seasons and depending on
size, dam reservoirs and diversions can evaporate more water than they store. Rates vary from dam to dam and year to year, but on average evaporation annually
consumes between 5% and 15% of Earth’s stored freshwater supplies. That’s faster than many cities can consume. It’s one of the reasons why the Rio Grande and
Colorado Rivers no longer reach the sea and why precious alluvial groundwater is shrinking, too. Nine freshwater raindrops out of 10 fall into the ocean, so the trick is
to see the entire watershed—from headwater forest to alluvial aquifers through downstream floodplain—as potentially efficient storage and tap into water locked
beneath the surface. Today, irrigators pump more groundwater than surface water. In arid landscapes, water is more efficiently and securely stored in cool, clean
alluvial aquifers than in hot, shallow, polluted reservoirs.

The third threat to dam performance, as both a cause and a consequence, is climate change. Dams are point-source polluters. Scientists have long warned that dams
alter the chemistry and biology of rivers. They warm the water and lower its oxygen content, boosting invasive species and algae blooms while blocking and killing
native aquatic life upstream and down. Rivers host more endangered species than any other ecosystem in the United States, and many of the nation’s native plants and
animals, from charismatic Pacific salmon to lowly Southern freshwater mussels, face extinction almost entirely because of dams.

What we didn’t appreciate until recently is that dams also pollute the air. The public may commonly see dams as producers of clean energy in a time of dirty coal and
escalating oil prices. Yet fewer than 2% of U.S. dams generate any power whatsoever. Some could be retrofitted with turbines, and perhaps various existing dams
should be. But peer-reviewed scientific research has demonstrated that dams in fact may worsen climate change because of reservoir and gate releases of methane.
Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research calculated that the world’s 52,000 large dams (typically 50 feet or higher) contribute more than 4% of the total warming
impact of human activities. These dam reservoirs contribute 25% of human-caused methane emissions, the world’s largest single source. Earth’s millions of smaller
dams compound that effect.

Worse, as climate change accelerates, U.S. dams will struggle to brace for predicted drought and deluge cycles on a scale undreamed of when the structures were built.
This brings us to the fourth danger. Dams initially designed for flood control may actually make floods more destructive. First, they lure people to live with a false
sense of security, yet closer to danger, in downstream floodplains. Then they reduce the capacity of upstream watersheds to absorb and control the sudden impact of
extreme storms. Looking only at mild rainstorms in October 2005 and May 2006, three states reported 408 overtoppings, breaches, and damaged dams. Only half of
the nation’s high-hazard dams even have emergency action plans.

The scariest aspect of dams’ liabilities is the seemingly willful ignorance in the United States of their long-term public safety risks. Engineers put a premium on
safety, from design to construction through eventual commission. Yet after politicians cut the ceremonial ribbon, neglect creeps in. As dams age they exhibit cracks,
rot, leaks, and in the worst cases, failure. In 2006, the Kaloko Dam on the Hawaiian island of Kauai collapsed, unleashing a 70-foot-high, 1.6-million-ton freshwater
tsunami that carried trees, cars, houses, and people out to sea, drowning seven. This is not an isolated exception, but a harbinger.

These preventable tragedies happen because both public and private dams lack funds for upkeep and repair. In 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave
U.S. dams and water infrastructure a grade of D and estimated that nationwide, repairing nonfederal dams that threaten human life would cost $10.1 billion. The U.S.
Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) placed the cost of repairing all nonfederal dams at $36.2 billion. Yet Congress has failed to pass legislation
authorizing even $25 million a year for five years to address these problems.

Cash-strapped states generally don’t even permit dam safety officials to perform their jobs adequately. Dozens of states have just one full-time employee per 500 to
1,200 dams. Hence state inspectors, like their dams, are set up to fail. Between 1872 and 2006, the ASDSO reports, dam failures killed 5,128 people.

As environmental, health, and safety regulations drive up the cost of compliance, owners of old dams tend to litigate or lobby against the rules. Others simply walk
away. The number of abandoned or obsolete dams keeps rising: 11% of inventoried dams in the United States are classified under indeterminate ownership.

To date, warnings have been tepid, fitful, disregarded, or politicized. In 1997, the American Society of Civil Engineers produced good guidelines for the refurbishment
or retirement of dams. They have been ignored. In 2000, the landmark World Commission on Dams established criteria and guidelines to address building, managing,
and removing dams, but its report so challenged water bureaucrats that the World Bank, the commission’s benefactor, has tried to walk away from its own creation.
Environmental organizations have published tool kits for improving or removing old dams, but activists often target only the most egregious or high-profile dozen or
so problems that best advance their profile or fundraising needs.

Dams have always been politically charged and often the epitome of pork-barrel projects. For the same reasons, dam removal can get bipartisan support from leading
Democrats and Republicans alike. The switch from the Clinton to Bush administrations led to attempted alterations of many natural resource policies, but one thing
did not change: the accelerating rate of dam removals. In 1998, a dozen dams were terminated; in 2005, some 56 dams came down in 11 states. Yet despite bipartisan
support, there has never been any specific dam policy in either administration. A dam’s demise just happened, willy-nilly, here and there. Dams died with less legal,
regulatory, or policy rationale than accompanied their birth.

THOREAU HAD IT RIGHT

No laws, no regulations, no policy? Federal restraint remains an alluring ideal in a nation that feels cluttered with restrictions. It’s a deeply ingrained American
sentiment, embodied in Henry David Thoreau’s famous remark in Civil Disobedience: “That government is best which governs least.” Yet the founder of principled
civil disobedience was also the first critic of seemingly benign dams because of their unintended effects.
While paddling with his brother on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1839, Thoreau lamented the disappearance of formerly abundant salmon, shad, and
alewives. Vanished. Why? Because “the dam, and afterward the canal at Billerica …put an end to their migrations hitherward.” His elegy reads like an Earth First!
manifesto: “Poor shad! where is thy redress? …armed only with innocence and a just cause …I for one am with thee, and who knows what may avail a crowbar
against that Billerica dam?”

Thoreau restrained himself from vigilante dam-busting, but 168 years later the effects of the country’s dams have only multiplied in number and size. Happily, the end
of Thoreau’s tale might nudge us in the right direction. He did not complain to Washington or Boston for results, funds, or a regulatory crackdown. He looked
upstream and down throughout the watershed and sought to build local consensus. Because the dam had not only killed the fishery but buried precious agricultural
farmland and pasture, Thoreau advocated an emphatically civic-minded, consensus-based, collective, economically sensible proposal, in which “at length it would
seem that the interests, not of the fishes only, but of the men of Wayland, of Sudbury, of Concord, demand the leveling of that dam.”

In other words, if those watershed interests were combined, they could sort out fixed liabilities from liquid assets. The economic beneficiaries of a flowing river,
including the legally liable dam owner, should pay the costs of old dam removal, just as the beneficiaries of any new dam pay the costs of its economic,
environmental, and security effects. In a few words, Thoreau sketched the outlines of what could emerge as a policy framework for existing dams that could be
adapted to a river basin, a state, or a nation.

The most successful and least intrusive policies can be grouped under the strategic approach known as
cap and trade. That is, the government sets a mandatory ceiling on effects, pollution, or emissions by a
finite group of public and private property stakeholders . This ceiling is typically lower than present conditions. But rather than
forcing individual stakeholders to comply with that target by regulatory fiat, each one can trade offsets,
what amount to pollution credits, with each other. Those who cut waste, emissions, and effects better may sell their extra credits to
laggards or newcomers. This approach leverages incentives to reform, innovate, and improve into a competitive
advantage in which everyone benefits, and so does nature. Although it did not involve dams, a cap-and-
trade policy was tested nationally under the 1990 Clean Air Act revisions aimed at cutting acid rain–
causing sulfur dioxide emissions of U.S. factories in half. When it was announced, the utility industry gloomily predicted a clean-air
recession, whereas environmentalists cried sellout over the lack of top-down regulatory controls. But cap and trade turned out to reduce
emissions faster than the most optimistic projection. The industry grew strong and efficient, and the result
was the largest human health gains of any federal policy in the 1990s. Annual benefits exceeded costs
by 40:1.
Since then, cap-and-trade policies have proliferated from India to China to Europe . Though far from flawless, a cap-and-trade
carbon policy is one success story to emerge from the troubled Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions that accelerate climate change. Nations and multinational
corporations such as General Electric and British Petroleum used it to reduce polluting emissions of carbon dioxide and methane while saving voters and shareholders
money in the process. More recently, atmospheric cap and trade has been brought down to earth; the valuation and exchange in environmental offsets have been
applied to land and water ecosystems. Certain states use cap and trade in policies to curb nitrogen oxides and nonpoint water pollution, others to reduce sediment loads
and water temperature, and still others to trade in water rights when diversions are capped. California’s Habitat Conservation Plans work within the Endangered
Species Act’s “cap” of preservation, yet allow “trade” of improving, restoring, and connecting habitat so that although individuals may die, the overall population
recovers. Under the Clean Water Act, a cap-and-trade policy encourages mitigation banking and trading, which leads to a net gain in wetlands.

In each case the

policy works because it lets democratic governments do what they do best—set and enforce a strict
uniform rule—while letting property owners, managers, investors, and entrepreneurs do what they do
best: find the most cost-effective ways to meet that standard. Given the documented risks of the vast
stockpile of aging dam infrastructure in the United States, a cap-and-trade policy for dams could be tested to
see if it can restore efficiency, health, and safety to the nation’s waters .
MAKING THE POLICY WORK

The first step would be to inventory and define all the stakeholders. In air-quality cap-and-trade cases, these include factory owners, public utilities, manufacturers,
refineries, and perhaps even registered car owners. In the case of dams, one could begin with the 79,000 registered owners in the National Inventory of Dams.
Tracking down ownership of the estimated 2.5 million smaller unregistered dams may prove a bit challenging, until their owners realize that dismantling the dams can
yield profit if removal credits can be bought and sold.

The second step would be to recognize the legitimate potential for trades. Dams yield (or once yielded) economic benefits, but every
dam also has
negative effects on air emissions and water quality, quantity, and temperature, therefore on human health and safety, economic
growth, and stability. Even the most ardent dam supporter acknowledges that there is room for potentially
significant gains in performance from dams as well as from the rivers in which they squat. Whereas the
top-down goal in the past had been to subsidize or regulate new dams for their economic benefits, the aim
in this case is horizontal: to encourage an exchange to reduce old dams’ economic and ecological costs.
Third, quantify the kind, extent, and nature of those negative effects. Our scientific tools have advanced
considerably and are now ready to measure most if not all of those qualitative damages observed by amateurs since
Thoreau. By breaking them down into formal “conservation units,” degrees Celsius, water quality, cubic
meters of sediment, and so forth, we can quantify potential offsets in ecological and economic terms. The
United States could set out rigorous scientific standards modeled on the Clean Air Act cap-and-trade policy or
wetlands mitigation banking,
Fourth, start small, then replicate and scale up with what works best. The pilot exchanges could be structured by geography or by type of effect. But both kinds of pilot
programs have already begun. One creative company in North Carolina, Restoration Systems, has begun to remove obsolete dams to gain wetlands mitigation credits
that it can sell and trade, in most cases, to offset the destruction of nearby wetlands by highway building. In Maine, several dams in the Penobscot River watershed
have been linked through mitigation as part of a relicensing settlement. On the Kennebec River, also in Maine, the destruction cost of the Edwards Dam was financed
in large part by upstream industrial interests and more viable dams as part of a package for environmental compliance. On the west coast, the Bonneville Power
Administration is using hydropower funds to pay for dam removals on tributaries within the Columbia River basin.

These early efforts are fine, but restricted geographically; each approach could be allowed to expand. The larger the pool of stakeholders, the greater are the
economies of scale and the more efficient the result. But a national consensus and standards do not emerge overnight, nor should they, given that there are so many
different dams. Each dam is unique in its history and specific in its effects, even though the cumulative extent and degree of those effects are statewide, national, and
sometimes even global. A cap-and-trade policy will emerge nationally only as it builds on examples like these.

Finally, work
within existing caps while using a standard that lets the amoral collective marketplace sort out
good from bad. The beauty of this framework is that many of the national standards are already in place.
Legal obligations to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, Clean
Water Act, and Clean Air Act all have strong bearing on decisions to remove or improve dams. Some tweaking
may be required, but perhaps not much. Recently, Congress revised the Magnuson-Stevens Act to pilot cap-and-trade policies in fishery management, in which
fishermen trade shares of a total allowable or capped offshore catch of, say, halibut or red snapper.

Those overworked state and federal agencies responsible for enforcing laws—the ASDSO, the Army Corps of Engineers, the
Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Marine Fisheries Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency— need
not get bogged down in the
thankless task of ensuring that each and every dam complies with each and every one of the laws. Dam
owners may have better things to do than argue losing battles on several fronts with various government
branches. All parties can better invest their time according to their mandate, strengths, and know-how:
officials in setting the various standard legal caps and ensuring that they are strictly applied to the entire
tributary, watershed, state, or nation; and dam owners in trading their way to the best overall result.
A CAP-AND-TRADE SCENARIO

Suppose, for example, that a worried governor determines to cap at one-third below current levels all state dam
effects: methane emissions, sedimentation rates, evaporative losses, aquatic species declines, habitat fragmentations, artificial warming, reduced oxygen content,
and number of downstream safety hazards. He wants these reductions to happen within seven years and is rigorous in enforcing the ceiling .
That’s the stick, but here’s the carrot: He would allow dam owners to decide how to get under that ceiling
on their own.
At first, dam owners and operators, public as well as private, could reliably be expected to howl. They would label the policy environmentally extreme and say it was
sacrificing water storage, energy, food, and flood control. But eventually, innovative
dam owners and operators would see the policy
for what it really is: a flexible and long-overdue opportunity with built-in incentives to become efficient
and even to realize higher returns on existing idle capital . They would seize a chance to transform those fixed liabilities into liquid
assets.

One likely effect would be private acquisition of some of the many thousands of small orphan dams. By
liquidating these, an investor would accumulate a pool of offset credits that could be sold or traded to
cumbersome dams with high value but low flexibility. This development has already emerged in isolated
cases. In northern Wisconsin, the regional power company bought and removed two small, weak dams in
exchange for a 25-year license to operate three healthier ones in the same watershed. Utilities in the West have taken
notice and begun to package their relicensing strategies accordingly.

Another predictable outcome would be that, in order to retain wide popular and political support, big
power, transport, and irrigation dam projects—think Shasta, Oroville, San Luis Reservoir, Glen Canyon, and Hoover—would
mitigate their effects first by looking upstream at land and water users, then at other smaller dams that
could be upgraded, retrofitted, or removed to gain efficiencies in ways easier or cheaper than they could
get by overhauling their own operations and managements.
There would also be a likely expansion outward and upward in user fees raised from formerly invisible or
subsidized beneficiaries from the services of existing dams. Such services range from recreational boaters, anglers, and bird hunters
to urban consumers, lakefront property owners, and even those who merely enjoy the bucolic view of a farm dam. These disaggregated interests have largely
supported dams, but only as long as others foot the bill for maintenance and upkeep. Economists call them free riders, and a new cap-and-trade dam policy would
reduce their ranks. Dams
that failed to generate enough revenues to meet national standards could earn credits by
selling themselves to those interests that could. This happened when viable upstream industries on the Kennebec River helped finance the
removal of Edwards Dam.

Federal dams are critical

Owen & Apse, 15 --- *Professor at the University of Maine School of Law, AND **Freshwater
Conservation Advisor, The Nature Conservancy (February 2015, Dave Owen and Colin Apse, “Trading
Dam,” 48 U.C. Davis L. Rev. 1043, Nexis Uni, JMP)
2. Federally Owned Dams
While the FERC regulatory process dominates the legal-academic literature on dams, the federal
government also owns dams, and those dams are beyond FERC's jurisdiction. 149 Between them, seven
federal agencies own 171 hydroelectric dams. 150 Many of these dams are among the nation's largest -
collectively, they contain just over 50% of the nation's hydroelectric capacity - and they have some of
the farthest-reaching environmental and non-environmental effects. 151 They also are subject to a very
different legal regime.
The authorizing statute for each dam provides the primary legal blueprint for its management, with
subsequent water resource development acts providing additional overlays. 152 Those blueprints can be
complex, often specifying multiple purposes for management of the dam. 153 What they generally do not
do, however, is create administrative processes for reconsidering dam operations. Federally owned dams
therefore are not subject to a process like FERC relicensing, and the leverage that the FPA supplies to
other agencies and to environmental advocates is missing. Similarly, CWA section 401, [*1068] which
supplies states with significant leverage over FERC-regulated projects, does not apply. 154
That does not mean federally owned dams are free of regulatory constraint. In addition to authorizing
legislation, other federal statutes, like the ESA and NEPA, do still apply. 155 Indeed, ESA obligations
provide one of the primary legal levers that advocates can use to compel changes in federal dam
management, and on ongoing dispute on California's Yuba River, where the National Marine Fisheries
Service ("NMFS") recently attempted to compel a massive fish passage project, illustrates the
possibilities. 156 Congress also has often authorized, if not clearly obligated, changes designed to
mitigate the adverse environmental effects of federal water projects. 157 But the absence of a relicensing
process with a regulatory overseer creates a very different, and often weaker, leverage structure than
exists for FERC-regulated dams.
Because of these differences, environmental advocates and regulators generally have less influence
over federally owned dams than they do over federally regulated dams. That disparity in influence also
can produce some interesting side effects. On some river systems, the first dam anadromous fish
encounter as they migrate upstream is a federally owned dam, and upstream from that dam is a series of
FERC-regulated dams. 158 In that circumstance, the federally owned dam can serve as a [*1069] partial
regulatory shield, keeping protected fish populations, and the legal obligations that come with them,
from reaching the upstream dams.

That is politically popular

Plumer, 20 (13 October 2020, Brad Plumer, NYTimes.com Feed, “Environmentalists and Dam
Operators, at War for Years, Start Making Peace,” Factiva database, Document
NYTFEED020201013egad002gx, JMP)
WASHINGTON — The industry that operates America’s hydroelectric dams and several environmental
groups announced an unusual agreement Tuesday to work together to get more clean energy from
hydropower while reducing the environmental harm from dams, in a sign that the threat of climate change
is spurring both sides to rethink their decades-long battle over a large but contentious source of
renewable power.
The United States generated about 7 percent of its electricity last year from hydropower, mainly from
large dams built decades ago, such as the Hoover Dam, which uses flowing water from the Colorado
River to power turbines. But while these facilities don’t emit planet-warming carbon dioxide, the dams
themselves have often proved ecologically devastating, choking off America’s once-wild rivers and
killing fish populations.
So, over the past 50 years, conservation groups have rallied to block any large new dams from being built,
while proposals to upgrade older hydropower facilities or construct new water-powered energy-storage
projects have often been bogged down in lengthy regulatory disputes over environmental safeguards.
The new agreement signals a desire to de-escalate this long-running war.
In a joint statement, industry groups and environmentalists said they would collaborate on a set of specific
policy measures that could help generate more renewable electricity from dams already in place, while
retrofitting many of the nation’s 90,000 existing dams to be safer and less ecologically damaging.
The two sides also said they would work together to accelerate the removal of older dams that are no
longer needed, in order to improve the health of rivers. More than 1,000 dams nationwide have already
been torn down in recent decades.
The statement, the result of two years of quiet negotiations, was signed by the National Hydropower
Association, an industry trade group, as well as environmental groups including American Rivers, the
World Wildlife Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Another influential organization, The Nature
Conservancy, listed itself as a “participant,” signaling that it was not prepared to sign the full statement
but would stay engaged in the ongoing dialogue over hydropower policies.
Bob Irvin, the president of American Rivers, which has long highlighted the harm that dams cause to the
nation’s waterways, said that growing concern over global warming had caused some environmentalists
to reassess their longstanding opposition to hydropower.
“The climate crisis has become a lot more acute and we recognize that we need to generate carbon-free
energy whenever and wherever we can,” Mr. Irvin said. “And we do see that hydropower has a role to
play there.”
Mr. Irvin emphasized that his group would still oppose any effort to build new dams on rivers. But that
still left plenty of room for compromise.
As an example, he pointed to the Penobscot River in Maine, where environmentalists, energy companies
and the Penobscot Indian Nation reached a landmark agreement in 2004 to upgrade several dams in the
river basin while raising money to remove two other dams that had blocked fish from migrating inland for
more than a century. The result: The hydropower companies on the Penobscot ended up producing at least
as much clean electricity as before, while endangered Atlantic salmon have returned to the rivers.
“The rhetoric has definitely shifted and is becoming more thoughtful,” said Malcolm Woolf, president of
the National Hydropower Association. “We’re now willing to talk about removing uneconomic dams, and
environmentalists are no longer talking about all hydropower being bad .”

States cannot take down federal dams.

Walls, 20 --- senior fellow at Resources for the Future and former associate professor in the Department
of Economics at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand from 1996 through 2000 (October 2020,
Margaret, “Aligning Dam Removal and Dam Safety: Comparing Policies and Institutions across States,”
https://media.rff.org/documents/Aligning_Dam_Removal_and_Dam_Safety_wmTZmC8.pdf, JMP)
2.1. Jurisdictional Dams

The first step in the process is to determine which dams are subject to the state regulations, or jurisdictional dams . This is
based primarily on dam size, both height and impounding capacity. Minimum heights in most states range between 10 and 25 feet and storage capacities between 15
and 50 acre-feet, though there are differences on either end. Many states exempt agricultural dams if they are small enough that flood risks do not go beyond farm
boundaries. Federally
owned dams and hydropower dams in most states are nonjurisdictional because they are
regulated by federal agencies.2
2AC
Warren
 Top
The perm solves—water policy shouldn’t have to choose between competing
ontological understandings of water.
Dicks, 20—environmental philosopher at Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (Henry, “Phenomenology,
Water Policy, and the Conception of the Polis,” The Wonder of Water: Lived Experience, Policy, and
Practice, Chapter 11, pg 201, dml)

In view of this, it could perhaps be argued that what is ultimately required is an approach to water policy that does not
seek to choose between Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, as if only one of epistemology, technics, and ethics were
what really mattered, but rather a more comprehensive water policy based on the articulation of
phenomenological approaches to these three spheres of human experience, and thus capable of accounting for a wide
variety of different ways of understanding and interacting with water. After all, do we really have to
choose between seeing water as an object of scientific/everyday knowledge (Husserl), as a practical
instrument whose role in the world derives ultimately from our relation to Being as set forth in poetry and
philosophy (Heidegger), or as an elemental quality amenable to reification, quantification, and possession by humans
(Levinas)? Is it not rather the case that all of these different modalities of the “as” are valid in their own spheres, thus
requiring careful articulation, rather than being placed in competition for existential primacy? Just as each of the
three phenomenologists we have considered articulates a limited number of layers of experience or ways of relating to things, a more
comprehensive phenomenological framework would articulate the work of all these different phenomenologists (and perhaps others as well), thus
opening up the possibility of their conjoined translation into a more comprehensive approach to water policy.

3 – You gotta map it – even if we reject the state, we should LEARN about it instead
of refocusing the debate over embodiment. Affect doesn’t enable us to bring down
the material structures of oppression
Bryant 12 – (9/15, Levi, professor of Philosophy at Collin College and Chair of the Critical Philosophy program at the New Centre for
Research and Practice, “War Machines and Military Logistics: Some Cards on the Table,” https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/war-
machines-and-military-logistics-some-cards-on-the-table/)

We need answers to these questions to intervene effectively. We can call them questions of “military logistics”. We are, after all, constructing war machines to combat
these intolerable conditions. Military logistics asks two questions: first, it asks what things the opposing force, the opposing war machine

captured by the state apparatus, relies on in order to deploy its war machine: supply lines, communications networks,
people willing to fight, propaganda or ideology, people believing in the cause, etc. Military logistics maps all of these things. Second,
military logistics asks how to best deploy its own resources in fighting that state war machine . In what way should we deploy our war machine to

defeat war machines like racism, sexism, capitalism, neoliberalism, etc? What are the things upon which these state based war machines are based, what are
the privileged nodes within these state based war machines that allows them to function? These nodes are the things upon which we
want our nomadic war machines to intervene. If we are to be effective in producing change we better know what the supply lines are so that we might make them our target.

What I’ve heard in these discussions is a complete indifference to military logistics . It’s as if people like to wave
their hands and say “this is horrible and unjust!” and believe that hand waving is a politically
efficacious act. Yeah, you’re right, it is horrible but saying so doesn’t go very far and changing it. It’s also as if people are horrified
when anyone discusses anything besides how horribly unjust everything is. Confronted with an analysis why the social functions in the horrible

way, the next response is to say “you’re justifying that system and saying it’s a-okay!” This misses the
point that the entire point is to map the “supply lines” of the opposing war machine so you can
strategically intervene in them to destroy them and create alternative forms of life. You see, we already took
for granted your analysis of how horrible things are . You’re preaching to the choir. We wanted to get to work determining how to
change that and believed for that we needed good maps of the opposing state based war machine so we can decide how to intervene. We then look at your actual practices and see that your sole strategy

seems to be ideological critique or debunking. Your idea seems to be that if you just prove that other
people’s beliefs are incoherent, they’ll change and things will be different. But we’ve noticed a couple
things about your strategy: 1) there have been a number of bang-on critiques of state based war machines, without things
changing too much, and 2) we’ve noticed that we might even persuade others that labor under these ideologies that their
position is incoherent, yet they still adhere to it as if the grounds of their ideology didn’t matter much. This leads us to suspect that there are other causal factors that undergird
these social assemblages and cause them to endure is they do. We thought to ourselves, there are two reasons that an ideological critique can be

successful and still fail to produce change: a) the problem can be one of “distribution”. The critique is right but fails to reach the
people who need to hear it and even if they did receive the message they couldn’t receive it because it’s expressed in the
foreign language of “academese” which they’ve never been substantially exposed to (academics seem to enjoy only speaking to other academics even as they say their aim is to change the world).
Or b) there are other causal factors involved in why social worlds take the form they do that are not of the discursive, propositional, or
semiotic order. My view is that it is a combination of both.
I don’t deny that ideology is one component of why societies take the form they do and why people tolerate intolerable conditions. I merely deny that this
is the only causal factor. I don’t reject your political aims, but merely wonder how to get there . Meanwhile, you
guys behave like a war machine that believes it’s sufficient to drop pamphlets out of an airplane debunking the ideological reasons that

persuade the opposing force’s soldiers to fight this war on behalf of the state apparatus, forgetting supply lines, that there are other
soldiers behind them with guns to their back, that they have obligations to their fellows, that they have families to feed or
debt to pay off, etc. When I point out these other things it’s not to reject your political aims, but to say that perhaps these are also good things to intervene in if we wish to change the world. In other words, I’m
objecting to your tendency to use a hammer to solve all problems and to see all things as a nail (discursive
problems), ignoring the role that material nonhuman entities play in the form that social assemblages take.
This is the basic idea behind what I’ve called “terraism”. Terraism has three components: 1) “Cartography” or the mapping of assemblages to understand why they take the form they take and why they endure. This includes the
mapping of both semiotic and material components of social assemblages. 2) “Deconstruction” Deconstruction is a practice. It includes both traditional modes of discursive deconstruction (Derridean deconstruction, post-structuralist

It is not
feminist critique, Foucaultian genealogy, Cultural Marxist critique, etc), but also far more literal deconstruction in the sense of intervening in material or thingly orders upon which social assemblages are reliant.

simply beliefs, signs, and ideologies that cause oppressive social orders to endure or persist, but also
material arrangements upon which people depend to live as they do . Part of changing a social order
thus necessarily involves intervening in those material networks to undermine their ability to maintain their relations or feedback mechanisms that
allow them to perpetuate certain dependencies for people. Finally, 3) there is “Terraformation”. Terraformation is the hardest thing of all , as it requires the activist to be

something more than a critic, something more than someone who simply denounces how bad things are, someone
more than someone who simply sneers, producing instead other material and semiotic arrangements rendering new forms of life

and social relation possible. Terraformation consists in building alternative forms of life. None of this, however, is possible without good
mapping of the terrain so as to know what to deconstruct and what resources are available for building
new worlds. Sure, I care about ontology for political reasons because I believe this world sucks and is profoundly unjust. But rather than waving my hands and cursing
because of how unjust and horrible it is so as to feel superior to all those about me who don’t agree, rather than playing the part of the beautiful
soul who refuses to get his hands dirty, I think we need good maps so we can blow up the right bridges,
power lines, and communications networks, and so we can engage in effective terraformation.

Hope is good for black people as a protective factor against suicide – we cite the best
study
Davidson et al 2010 (Collin L. Davidson, MS, LaRicka R. Wingate, PhD, Meredith L. Slish, MS, and
Kathy A. Rasmussen, MS, "The Great Black Hope: Hope and Its Relation to Suicide Risk among African
Americans", Suice and Life-Threatening Behavior, 40(2) April 2010, The American Association of
Suicidology, https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1521/suli.2010.40.2.170?
casa_token=oe9ou4Of_jMAAAAA:uCu69dDS4qbVfEeARTq-
LV4u_GPbZ8xXYPkMg_wgPzo9A9Ux18FQ_BWCm3XDbF1pq-d5lIU-_Mek, mmv)
The results from this study are generally consistent with our hypotheses. Specifically, hope negatively
predicted thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness while predicting acquired capability to
enact suicide in the positive direction. These results suggest that as a whole, hope may serve to buffer
African American individuals against suicide, consistent with previous findings in other ethnic groups
(Davidson et al., in press; Range & Penton, 1994). As discussed above and in a previous study (Davidson
et al., in press), the marginal positive prediction of hope for acquired capability to enact suicide may be
due to the tendency of people with high hopes to set more goals and more challenging goals, thus possibly
putting themselves in more situations where they would be likely to experience pain. If the experience of
pain became frequent enough, these individuals would theoretically habituate to the pain resulting in
higher levels of acquired capability to enact suicide. Further, it was found that hope and the pathways
subscale significantly predicted suicidal ideation such that higher hope scores predicted less suicidal
ideation. In contrast, the goals and agency subscales did not significantly predict suicidal ideation. This
suggests that simply having the goal or agency to enact suicide is not enough—the strength of the
relationship is in the pathway or plans to enact suicide. This is consistent with previous research that has
shown that plans and preparations for suicide are one of the strongest predictors for suicide completion
(Joiner, Rudd, & Rajah, 1997); stronger even than the desire to enact suicide. These findings may relate to
the significant prediction of the pathways component to suicidal ideation. Taken together with the
aforementioned results, this suggests that hope serves as a protective factor for both suicidal risk as
described in the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicide (Joiner, 2005) and suicidal ideation. These
results are contrary to previous findings (Davidson et al., in press) which showed that although higher
hope did predict lower burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, hope did not predict suicidal
ideation. It is possible that, among African Americans, hope plays a larger role as a protective factor for
suicide in comparison to a predominantly Caucasian sample. Additionally, we investigated the differences
between the two samples and found that the African American sample had significantly higher levels of
hope, goals, and agency and that each of these scales had larger standard deviations than the
predominantly Caucasian sample. It is possible that the larger variability of scores contributed to the
likelihood of significant findings. Future research should aim to clarify this relationship. Finally,
consistent with our third hypothesis, it was found that the components of Joiners (2005) theory of suicidal
behavior together predicted suicidal ideation. These results offer further support for the validity of Joiners
theory in conjunction with the existing empirical studies that support this theory. Additionally, these
results further expand the generalizability of Joiner's theory to an African American sample. Although the
components as a set predicted suicidal ideation, when examined individually, only burden-someness and
belongingness individually predict suicidal ideation, while acquired capability does not. This finding is
not consistent with a previous study that examined the theory in a largely Caucasian population (David-
son et al., in press), wherein each component separately predicted suicidal ideation. Joiner proposed that
for an individual to desire suicide, thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness must be
elevated, whereas for an individual to physically carry out a suicide attempt, they must have higher
acquired capability to enact suicide. Theoretically then, it may be that individuals who only have elevated
levels of acquired capability may not have suicidal ideation because they have no desire to end their lives.
Again, future research should further investigate this relationship. One limitation of the current study is
that the sample is not particularly diverse, as it is composed only of people who self-identified as African
American. However, it is of note that this is the first study to our knowledge to examine Joiners theory of
suicidal behavior in an African American sample. It is ideal to generalize the presence of theoretical
findings to many different populations. Regarding this situation. Popper (1959, p. 269) stated, "once a
theory is well corroborated, further instances raise its degree of corroboration only very little. This ride
however does not hold good if these new instances are very different from the earlier ones, that is if they
corroborate the theory in a new field of application" (emphasis added). Although the participants in this
study were African American, they were somewhat diverse in their place of living, and came from all
over the Big XII conference area, including the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa,
Texas, and Colorado. In line with the previous limitation, it is important to note that there is a great
amount of diversity among Black people, lo elaborate, there are cultural differences related to the
geographic location in which a person lives (all of our participants were living in the midwest), as well as
their ethnic heritage and recent ancestors' country of origin (United States, Africa, Caribbean Islands,
etc.). Given the heterogeneity among Black people in America, it is important that researchers attend to
ethnic differences among Blacks in the study of suicide related behaviors. Future studies should work to
investigate risk factors within Black groups. Some may consider the focus on a relatively low-risk group
of participants (African American college students) a limitation of our study; however, a great deal of
research on suicidal behavior and risk factors has been conducted with college samples. In addition, we
specifically took the stance of examining suicidal behavior from a positive psychology approach, as
suggested in Wingate et al. (2006). Given that the rate of suicide for African Americans has been
consistendy low in comparison to Caucasian Americans, it may be beneficial to identify the protective
factors that help to temper the risk. Once these protective factors are identified in African Americans, it
may then be possible to implement and encourage these factors in other ethnic groups. This emphasis on
buffers against suicide risk may serve to supplement the existing emphasis on suicide risk factors in
clinical practice. Indeed, research has shown that hope tends to protect individuals from negative
outcomes in mental health (e.g., depression and anxiety) and the current study and previous studies have
suggested that hope can also protect against suicide risk (Davidson et al, in press; Range & Penton, 1994).
It is possible that instilling hope in clients can provide incremental increases in client safety' above and
beyond the common clinical practices of identifying and protecting clients from risk factors to ensure
their safety'. Indeed, Stellrecht et al. (2006) highlighted the importance of applying research to the clinical
setting and provided recommendations for using the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicide in risk
assessment, crisis intervention, and general therapy. Specific to African Americans, it may prove
beneficial for clinicians to use techniques that encourage increased feelings of belongingness within, and
contributions to, the African American community. This could include having the client become involved
in activities where they are a member of a group, where they give back, and where they have similarities
to others in the group. Cognitive techniques could be used to address distorted cognitions surrounding
feelings of burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness. Similarly, drawing from hope theory, clinicians
may be able to focus on challenging cognitive distortions related to a lack of hope, subsequendy
increasing hope as a protective factor. They may also be able to capitalize on the hope that clients already
possess when presenting to therapy, and work to generalize that hope to areas of the clients life where it is
lacking. Though the current findings may inform prevention and treatment of suicidal behavior in the
future, it should be noted that additional research is required to confirm some of these potential
applications. The findings from the current study are important in that they replicate and extend the
findings of Davidson et al. (in press), which demonstrated that hope served as a protective factor for
suicide risk in a largely Caucasian sample. As mentioned earlier, African Americans tend to be at higher
risk for suicide due to overrepresentation in lower socioeconomic-status environments , associated stress,
and discrimination, but they enact suicide at lower rates. Some researchers have hypothesized (see Gibbs,
1997) that this paradox is due to protective factors such as religiosity or strong family ties. The current
study adds to these assertions by demonstrating that hope is potentially an important protective factor for
African Americans. To our knowledge, this is the only study that has investigated suicide from a positive
psychology perspective in an African American sample, and one of few studies to do so in a general
sample.
Uniqueness is totalizing – political ontology frame fails to apprehend failure in
the racial project of modernity – institutional meaning is malleable, they
forsake relationality for private satisfaction
Gordon 17. Lewis. Prof of Phil and Af Am Studies, University of Connecticut. “Thoughts on Afropessimism.” Contemporary Political
Theory Forthcoming: 1-33. Emory Libraries.

The first is that ‘‘an antiblack world’’ is not identical with ‘‘the world is antiblack .’’ My argument is
that such a world is an antiblack racist project . It is not the historical achievement. Its limitations emerge from a basic
fact: Black people and other opponents of such a project fought, and continue to fight, as we see today in the
#BlackLivesMatter movement and many others, against it. The same argument applies to the argument about social death. Such an
achievement would have rendered even these reflections stillborn . The basic premises of the Afropessimistic argument are, then,
locked in performative contradictions. Yet, they have rhetorical force. This is evident through the continued growth of its proponents and forums (such as this one)
devoted to it.

In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism, I argued that there are forms of antiblack racism offered under the guise of love, though I was writing about whites who exoticize
blacks while offering themselves as white sources of black value. Analyzed in terms of bad faith, where one lies to oneself in an attempt to flee displeasing truths for
pleasing falsehoods, exoticists romanticize blacks while affirming white normativity, and thus themselves, as principals of reality. These ironic, performative
contradictions are features of all forms of racism, where one group is elevated to godlike status and another is pushed below that of human despite both claiming to be
human.

Antiblack racism offers whites self-other relations (necessary for ethics) with each other but not so for groups forced in a ‘‘zone of nonbeing’’ below them. There is
asymmetry where whites stand as others who look downward to those who are not their others or their analogues. Antiblack racism is thus not a problem of blacks
being ‘‘others.’’ It’s a problem of their not-being-analogical-selves-and-not-even being-others. Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), reminds us that Blacks
among each other live in a world of selves and others. It is in attempted relations with whites that these problems occur. Reason in
such contexts has a bad habit of walking out when Blacks enter. What are Blacks to do? As reason cannot be forced, because that would be ‘‘violence,’’ they must
ironically reason reasonably with forms of unreasonable reason. Contradictions loom. Racism is, given these arguments, a project of imposing non-relations as the
model of dealing with people designated ‘‘black.’’

In Les Damne´ de la terre (‘‘Damned of the Earth’’), Fanon

goes further and argues that colonialism is an attempt to
impose a Manichean structure of contraries instead of a dialectical one of ongoing, human negotiation of
contradictions. The former segregates the groups; the latter emerges from interaction. The police, he observes,
are the mediator in such a situation, as their role is force/violence instead of the human, discursive one
of politics and civility (Fanon, 1991). Such societies draw legitimacy from Black non-existence or invisibility. Black appearance, in other words, would
be a violation of those systems. Think of the continued blight of police, extra-judicial killings of Blacks in those countries.

An immediate observation of many postcolonies is that antiblack

attitudes, practices, and institutions aren’t exclusively white. Black antiblack
dispositions make this clear. Black
antiblackness entails Black exoticism. Where this exists, Blacks simultaneously receive Black love alongside
Black rejection of agency. Many problems follow. The absence of agency bars maturation, which would reinforce
the racial logic of Blacks as in effect wards of whites. Without agency, ethics, liberation, maturation,
politics, and responsibility could not be possible.
Afropessimism faces the problem of a hidden premise of white agency versus Black incapacity . Proponents of
Afropessimism would no doubt respond that the theory itself is a form of agency reminiscent of Fanon’s famous remark that though whites created le Negre it was les
We should avoid the fallacy,
Negres who created Negritude. Whites clearly did not create Afropessimism, which Black liberationists should celebrate.
however, of confusing source with outcome. History is not short of bad ideas from good people. If intrinsically
good, however, each person of African descent would become ethically and epistemologically a switching of the Manichean contraries, which means only changing
players instead of the game.

We come, then, to the crux of the matter. If the goal of Afropessimism is Afropessimism, its achievement would be attitudinal and, in the language of old, stoic – in
short, a symptom of antiblack society. At this point, there are several observations that follow. The first is a diagnosis of the implications of Afropessimism as
symptom. The second examines the epistemological implications of Afropessimism. The third is whether a disposition counts as a political act and, if so, is it
sufficient for its avowed aims. There are more, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll simply focus on these.

An ironic dimension of pessimism is that it is the other side of optimism. Oddly enough, both are connected to
nihilism, which is, as Nietzsche (1968) showed, a decline of values during periods of social decay. It emerges when people no longer want to be responsible for
their actions. Optimists expect intervention from beyond. Pessimists declare relief is not forthcoming.
Neither takes responsibility for what is valued. The valuing, however, is what leads to the second, epistemic point. The presumption that what is at
stake is what can be known to determine what can be done is the problem. If such knowledge were possible, the debate would be about who is reading the evidence
correctly. Such judgment would be a priori – that is, prior to events actually unfolding. The future, unlike transcendental conditions
such as language, signs, and reality, is, however, ex post facto: It is yet to come. Facing the future, the question isn’t what
will be or how do we know what will be but instead the realization that whatever is done will be that on which the future will depend. Rejecting optimism
and pessimism, there is a supervening alternative: political commitment.
The appeal to political commitment is not only in stream with what French existentialists call l’intellectuel engage´ (committed intellectual) but also reaches back
through the history and existential situation of enslaved, racialized ancestors. Many were, in
truth, an existential paradox: commitment to
action without guarantees. The slave revolts, micro and macro acts of resistance, escapes, and returns help
others do the same; the cultivated instability of plantations and other forms of enslavement, and countless other actions, were waged against a gauntlet of forces
designed to eliminate any hope of success. The claim of colonialists and enslavers was that the future belonged to them, not to the enslaved and the indigenous. A
result of more than 500 years of conquest and 300 years of enslavement was also a (white) rewriting of history in which African and First Nations’ agency was, at
least at the level of scholarship, nearly erased. Yet there was resistance even in that realm, as Africana and First Nation intellectual history and scholarship attest. Such
actions set the course for different kinds of struggle today .
Such reflections occasion meditations on the concept of failure. Afropessimism, the existential critique
suggests, suffers from a failure to understand failure. Consider Fanon’s notion of constructive failure,
where what doesn’t initially work transforms conditions for something new to emerge . To understand this argument,
one must rethink the philosophical anthropology at the heart of a specific line of Euromodern thought on what it means to be human. Atomistic and individual-
substance-based, this model, articulated by Hobbes, Locke, and many others, is of a non-relational being that thinks, acts, and moves along a course in which
continued movement depends on not colliding with others. Under that model, the human being is a thing that enters a system that facilitates or obstructs its movement.
An alternative model, shared by many groups across southern Africa, is a relational version of the human being as part of a larger system of meaning. Actions, from
that perspective, are not about whether ‘‘I’’ succeed but instead about ‘‘our’’ story across time. As
relational, it means that each human
being is a constant negotiation of ongoing efforts to build relationships with others, which means no
one actually enters a situation without establishing new situations of action and meaning. Instead of entering a
game, their participation requires a different kind of project – especially where the ‘‘game’’ was premised on their exclusion. Thus, where the system or game repels
initial participation, such repulsion is a shift in the grammar of how the system functions, especially its dependence on obsequious subjects. Shifted energy affords
emergence of alternatives. Kinds cannot be known before the actions that birthed them.

Abstract as this sounds, it has much historical support. Evelyn Simien (2016), in her insightful political study Historic Firsts,
examines the new set of relations established by Shirley Chisholm’s and Jesse Jackson’s presidential
campaigns. There could be no Barack Obama without such important predecessors affecting the demographics of voter participation. Simien
intentionally focused on the most mainstream example of political life to illustrate this point. Although no exemplar of radicalism, Obama’s
‘‘success’’ emerged from Chisholm and Jackson’s (and many others’) so-called ‘‘failure.’’ Beyond presidential electoral
politics, there are numerous examples of how prior, radical so-called ‘‘failures’’ transformed relationships that facilitated
other kinds of outcome. The trail goes back to the Haitian Revolution and back to every act of resistance from Nat Turner’s Rebellion in the USA,
Sharpe’s in Jamaica, or Tula’s in Curacao and so many other efforts for social transformation to come.

In existential terms, then, many ancestors of the African diaspora embodied what Søren Kierkegaard (1983) calls an existential paradox. All the evidence around them
suggested failure and the futility of hope. They first had to make a movement of infinite resignation – that is, resigning themselves to their situation. Yet they must
simultaneously act against that situation. Kierkegaard called this seemingly contradictory phenomenon ‘‘faith,’’ but that concept relates more to a relationship with a
transcendent, absolute being, which could only be established by a ‘‘leap,’’ as there are no mediations or bridge. Ironically, if Afropessimism appeals to transcendent
intervention, it would collapse into faith. If, however, the argument rejects transcendent intervention and focuses on committed political action, of taking
responsibility for a future that offers no guarantees, then the movement from infinite resignation becomes existential political action.

At this point, the crucial meditation would be on politics and political action. An attitude of infinite resignation to the world without the leap of committed action
would simply be pessimistic or nihilistic. Similarly, an attitude of hope or optimism about the future would lack infinite resignation. We see here the underlying
failure of the two approaches. Yet ironically, there is a form of failure at failing in the pessimistic turn versus the optimistic one, since if focused exclusively on
resignation as the goal, then the ‘‘act’’ of resignation would have been achieved, which, paradoxically, would be a success; it would be a successful failing of failure.
For politics to emerge, however, there are two missing elements in inward pessimistic resignation.

The first is that politics is a social phenomenon, which means it requires the expanding options of a social world. Turning
away from the social
world, though a statement about politics, is not, however, in and of itself political . The ancients from whom much
western political theory or philosophy claimed affinity had a disparaging term for individuals who resigned themselves from political life: idiotes, a private person,
one not concerned with public affairs, in a word – an idiot. I mention western political theory because that is the hegemonic intellectual context of Afropessimism. We
don’t, however, have to end our etymological journey in ancient Greek. Extending our linguistic archaeology back a few thousand years, we could examine the
Middle Kingdom Egyptian word idi (deaf). The presumption, later taken on by the ancient Athenians and Macedonians, was that a lack of hearing entailed isolation, at
least in terms of audio speech. The contemporary inward
resignation of seeking a form of purity from the loathsome
historical reality of racial oppression, in this reading, collapses ultimately into a form of moralism (private,
normative satisfaction) instead of public responsibility born of and borne by action.
The second is the importance of power. Politics makes no sense without it. But what is power? Eurocentric etymology points to the Latin word potis as its source,
from which came the word ‘‘potent’’ as in an omnipotent god. If we again look back further, we will notice the Middle Kingdom (2000 BCE–1700 BCE) KMT/
Egyptian word pHty, which refers to godlike strength. Yet for those ancient Northeast Africans, even the gods’ abilities came from a source: In the Coffin Texts,
HqAw or heka activates the ka (sometimes translated as soul, spirit, or, in a word ‘‘magic’’), which makes reality. All this amounts to a straightforward thesis on
power as the ability with the means to make things happen.

There is an alchemical quality to power. The

human world, premised on symbolic communication, brings many forms
of meaning into being, and those new meanings afford relationships that build institutions through a world of
culture, a phenomenon that Freud (1989) rightly described as ‘‘a prosthetic god.’’ It is godlike because it addresses what humanity historically sought from the gods:
protection from the elements, physical maledictions, and social forms of misery. Such power clearly can be abused. It is where those enabling capacities
(empowerment) are pushed to the wayside in the hording of social resources into propping up some people as gods that the legitimating practices of cultural cum
political institutions decline and stimulate pessimism and nihilism. That institutions in the Americas very rarely attempt establishing positive relations to Blacks is the
subtext of Afropessimism and this entire meditation.

Libidinal economy confuses habit with instinct

Hudis 15, Peter. Professor of English and History @ Queens College, 2015, “Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades,” Pg. 35-37
Fanon’s vantage point upon the world is his situated experience. He is trying to understand the inner psychic life of racism, not provide an account of the structure of
human existence as a whole. Racism
is not, of course, an integral part of the human psyche; it is a Social construct
that has a psychic impact. Any effort to comprehend social distress that accompanies racism by reference
to some a priori structure- be it the Oedipal Complex or the Collective Unconscious- is doomed to failure.
Carl Jung sought to deepen and go beyond Freud's approach by arguing that the subconscious is grounded in a universal layer of the psyche- which he called "the
collective unconscious:' This refers to inherited patterns of thought that exist in all human minds, regardless of specific culture or upbringing, and which manifest
themselves in dreams, fairy tales, and myths. Jung referred to these universal patterns as "archetypes:' It may seem, on a superficial reading, that 1 Fanon is
drawing from Jung, since he discusses how white people tend to unconsciously assimilate views of blacks that are
based on negative stereotypes. Even the most "progressive" white tends to think of blacks a certain way (such
as "emotional;' "physical," or / "aggressive"), even as they disavow any racist animus on their part. However, Fanon denies that
such collective delusions are part of a psychic structure; they are not permanent features of the mind.
They are habits acquired from a series of social and cultural impositions. While they constitute a kind a
collective unconscious on the part of many white people, they are not grounded in any universal
"archetype." The unconscious prejudices of whites do not derive from genes or nature, nor do they derive from some form independent of culture or
upbringing. Fanon contends that Jung "confuses habit with instinct."

Fanon objects to Jung's "collective unconscious" for the same reason that he rejects the notion of a
black ontology. His phenomenological approach brackets out ontological claims on both a social and
psychological level insofar as the examination of race and racism is concerned. He writes, "Neither Freud nor Adler nor
even the cosmic Jung took the black man into consideration in the course of his research.”

This does not mean that Fanon rejects their contributions tout court. He does not deny the existence of the unconscious. He only denies that the inferiority complex of
blacks operates on an unconscious level. He does not reject the Oedipal Complex. He only denies that it explains (especially in the West Indies) the proclivity of the
black "slave" to mimic the values of the white "master." And as seen from his positive remarks on Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, he does not reject the idea of
psychic structure. He only denies that it can substitute for an historical understanding of the origin of neuroses .23 Fanon adopts a socio-genetic approach to a study of
the psyche because that is what is adequate for the object of his analysis.

For Fanon, it is the relationship between the socio-economic and psychological that is of critical import. He makes it clear, insofar as the subject matter of his study is
concerned, that the socio-economic is first of all responsible for affective disorders: "First, economic. Then, internalization or rather epidermalization of this
inferiority."24 Fanon never misses an opportunity to remind us that racism owes its origin to specific economic relations of domination- such as slavery, colonialism,
and the effort to coopt sections of the working class into serving the needs of capital. It is hard to mistake the Marxist influence here. It does not follow, however, that
what comes first in the order of time has conceptual or strategic priority. The inferiority complex is originally born from economic subjugation, but it takes on a life of
its own and expresses itself in terms that surpass the economic. Both sides of the problem-the socio-economic and psychological-must be combatted in tandem: "The
black man must wage the struggle on two levels; whereas historically these levels are mutually dependent, any unilateral liberation is flawed, and the worst mistake
would be to believe their mutual dependence automatic:''5

On these grounds he argues that the problem of racism

cannot be solved on a psychological level. It is not an "individual"
problem; it is a social one. But neither can it be solved on a social level that ores the psychological. It is small wonder that although his name never
appears in the book, Fanon was enamored of the work of Wilhelm Reich. This important Freudian-Marxist would no doubt feel affinity with Fanon's comment,
"Genuine disalienation will have been achieved only when things, in the most materialist sense, have resumed their rightful place:'27
Neurological bias is flexible and determined by coalitional habit forming in
the brain---orienting groups around institutional change best breaks down
bias. This is offense because their theory rejects these solutions.
Cikara and Van Bavel 15. (Mina Cikara is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of
the Intergroup Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University. Her research examines the conditions under
which groups and individuals are denied social value, agency, and empathy. Jay Van Bavel is an Assistant
Professor of Psychology and Director of the Social Perception and Evaluation Laboratory at New York
University. The Flexibility of Racial Bias: Research suggests that racism is not hard wired, offering hope
on one of America’s enduring problems. June 2, 2015. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-
flexibility-of-racial-bias/)
The city of Baltimore was rocked by protests and riots over the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old African American man who died in police custody. Tragically, Gray’s death was only one of
a recent in a series of racially-charged, often violent, incidents. On April 4th, Walter Scott was fatally shot by a police officer after fleeing from a routine traffic stop. On March 8th, Sigma Alpha
Epsilon fraternity members were caught on camera gleefully chanting, “There Will Never Be A N***** In SAE.” On March 1st, a homeless Black man was shot in broad daylight by a Los

Angeles police officer. And these are not isolated incidents, of course.Institutional and systemic racism reinforce discrimination in
countless situations, including hiring, sentencing, housing, and even mortgage lending . It would be easy
to see in all this powerful evidence that racism is a permanent fixture in America’s social fabric and even,
perhaps, an inevitable aspect of human nature. Indeed, the mere act of labeling others according to their age, gender, or race is a reflexive habit of the human

mind. Social categories, like race, impact our thinking quickly, often outside of our awareness. Extensive research has found that these implicit racial

biases—negative thoughts and feelings about people from other races— are automatic, pervasive, and
difficult to suppress. Neuroscientists have also explored racial prejudice by exposing people to images of faces while scanning their brains in fMRI machines. Early
studies found that when people viewed faces of another race, the amount of activity in the amygdala—a
small brain structure associated with experiencing emotions, including fear—was associated with
individual differences on implicit measures of racial bias . This work has led many to conclude that racial biases might be part of a primitive—and
possibly hard-wired—neural fear response to racial out-groups. There is little question that categories such as race, gender, and age play a major role in

shaping the biases and stereotypes that people bring to bear in their judgments of others . However,
research has shown that how people categorize themselves may be just as fundamental to understanding
prejudice as how they categorize others. When people categorize themselves as part of a group, their self-concept shifts from the individual (“I”) to the collective
level (“us”). People form groups rapidly and favor members of their own group even when groups are formed on arbitrary grounds, such as the simple flip of a coin. These findings

highlight the remarkable ease with which humans form coalitions . Recent research confirms that
coalition-based preferences trump race-based preferences. For example, both Democrats and Republicans
favor the resumes of those affiliated with their political party much more than they favor those who
share their race. These coalition-based preferences remain powerful even in the absence of the animosity
present in electoral politics. Our research has shown that the simple act of placing people on a mixed-race
team can diminish their automatic racial bias. In a series of experiments, White participants who were randomly
placed on a mixed-race team—the Tigers or Lions—showed little evidence of implicit racial bias . Merely
belonging to a mixed-race team trigged positive automatic associations with all of the members of their
own group, irrespective of race. Being a part of one of these seemingly trivial mixed-race groups produced
similar effects on brain activity—the amygdala responded to team membership rather than race. Taken
together, these studies indicate that momentary changes in group membership can override the influence of

race on the way we see, think about, and feel toward people who are different from ourselves . Although these
coalition-based distinctions might be the most basic building block of bias, they say little about the other factors that cause group conflict. Why do some groups get ignored while others get
attacked? Whenever we encounter a new person or group we are motivated to answer two questions as quickly as possible: “is this person a friend or foe?” and “are they capable of enacting their
intentions toward me?” In other words, once we have determined that someone is a member of an out-group, we need to determine what kind? The nature of the relations between groups—are
we cooperative, competitive, or neither?—and their relative status—do you have access to resources?—largely determine the course of intergroup interactions. Groups that are seen as
competitive with one’s interests, and capable of enacting their nasty intentions, are much more likely to be targets of hostility than more benevolent (e.g., elderly) or powerless (e.g., homeless)
groups. This is one reason why sports rivalries have such psychological potency. For instance, fans of the Boston Red Sox are more likely to feel pleasure, and exhibit reward-related neural
responses, at the misfortunes of the archrival New York Yankees than other baseball teams (and vice versa)—especially in the midst of a tight playoff race. (How much fans take pleasure in the

misfortunes of their rivals is also linked to how likely they would be to harm fans from the other team.) Just as a particular person’s group membership
can be flexible, so too are the relations between groups. Groups that have previously had cordial relations
may become rivals (and vice versa). Indeed, psychological and biological responses to out-group members
can change, depending on whether or not that out-group is perceived as threatening. For example, people exhibit greater pleasure—they smile—in response to the misfortunes of
stereotypically competitive groups (e.g., investment bankers); however, this malicious pleasure is reduced when you provide participants with counter-stereotypic information (e.g., “investment
bankers are working with small companies to help them weather the economic downturn). Competition between “us” and “them” can even distort our judgments of distance, making threatening
out-groups seem much closer than they really are. These distorted perceptions can serve to amplify intergroup discrimination: the more different and distant “they” are, the easier it is to

disrespect and harm them. Thus, not all out-groups are treated the same: some elicit indifference whereas others become
targets of antipathy. Stereotypically threatening groups are especially likely to be targeted with violence,
but those stereotypes can be tempered with other information. If perceptions of intergroup relations can
be changed, individuals may overcome hostility toward perceived foes and become more responsive to
one another’s grievances. The flexible nature of both group membership and intergroup relations offers
reason to be cautiously optimistic about the potential for greater cooperation among groups in conflict (be they black
versus white or citizens versus police). One strategy is to bring multiple groups together around a common goal. For
example, during the fiercely contested 2008 Democratic presidential primary process, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters gave more money to strangers who supported the same
primary candidate (compared to the rival candidate). Two months later, after the Democratic National Convention, the supporters of both candidates coalesced around the party nominee—Barack

creating a sense of cohesion between two competitive groups can increase

Obama—and this bias disappeared. In fact, merely

empathy for the suffering of our rivals. These sorts of strategies can help reduce aggression toward hostile out-
groups, which is critical for creating more opportunities for constructive dialogue addressing
greater social injustices. Of course, instilling a sense of common identity and cooperation is extremely difficult in entrenched intergroup conflicts, but when it happens, the
benefits are obvious. Consider how the community leaders in New York City and Ferguson responded differently to protests against police brutality—in NYC political leaders expressed grief
and concern over police brutality and moved quickly to make policy changes in policing, whereas the leaders and police in Ferguson responded with high-tech military vehicles and riot gear. In
the first case, multiple groups came together with a common goal—to increase the safety of everyone in the community; in the latter case, the actions of the police likely reinforced the “us” and
“them” distinctions. Tragically, these types of conflicts continue to roil the country. Understanding the psychology and neuroscience of social identity and intergroup relations cannot undo the
effects of systemic racism and discriminatory practices; however, it can offer insights into the psychological processes responsible for escalating the tension between, for example, civilians and

Even in cases where it isn’t possible to create a common identity among groups in conflict, it
police officers.

may be possible to blur the boundaries between groups. In one recent experiment, we sorted participants into groups—red versus blue team—
competing for a cash prize. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to see a picture of a segregated social network of all the players, in which red dots clustered together, blue dots
clustered together, and the two clusters were separated by white space. The other half of the participants saw an integrated social network in which the red and blue dots were mixed together in
one large cluster. Participants who thought the two teams were interconnected with one another reported greater empathy for the out-group players compared to those who had seen the
segregated network. Thus, reminding people that individuals could be connected to one another despite being from different groups may be another way to build trust and understanding among
them. A mere month before Freddie Gray died in police custody, President Obama addressed the nation on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma: “We do a disservice to the cause of
justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, or that racial division is inherent to America. To deny…progress – our progress – would be to rob us of our own agency; our

responsibility to do what we can to make America better." The president was saying that we, as a society, have a responsibility to reduce prejudice and
discrimination. These recent findings from psychology and neuroscience indicate that we, as individuals,
possess this capacity. Of course this capacity is not sufficient to usher in racial equality or peace. Even when the level of prejudice against particular out-groups decreases, it
does not imply that the level of institutional discrimination against these or other groups will necessarily improve. Ultimately, only collective action and

institutional evolution can address systemic racism. The science is clear on one thing, though: individual
bias and discrimination are changeable. Race-based prejudice and discrimination, in particular, are
created and reinforced by many social factors, but they are not inevitable consequences of our
biology. Perhaps understanding how coalitional thinking impacts intergroup relations will make it easier for us to affect real social change going forward.

1. The alt reifies ontological blackness and only causes ressentiment

Barlow Jr. ’16 (Michael A. Barlow Jr. graduated in 2016 with a Bachelors degree in Sociology from
United States Military Academy at West Point in West Point, NY. “Addressing Shortcomings in Afro-
Pessimism”, http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1435/2/addressing-shortcomings-in-afro-
pessimism) /NoWa
The question remains of how to create consistency in ontological and intra-ontological resistance . Is it materially possible to both
call for a disruption of civil society while finding points of productivity in society? The answer is
yes, at the margins. It is here that this paper makes another substantive departure from conventional pessimistic theorization, and again,
it is useful to refer to Wilderson’s work. His theorization of the Black’s antagonistic relationship with the world concludes that the world is
parasitic on Black life. Thus, he forwards the end of the world as the only ethical alternative. Afro-
Pessimists are often criticized for their highly theoretical abstraction with this concept. Though there are no explicit specifications of what the end
of the world is or how Black resistance movements are to specifically get there, it is widely accepted that the position is more of an epistemic
orientation rather than one that forwards literal destruction. In addition, Wilderson calls for Black refusal to engage in civil
society in an unflinching paradigmatic analysis meaning that any form of engagement with civil
society would require Black abjection. This is the point of friction that this paper seeks to address.
Even though Black bodies stand in an antagonistic relationship to the world, there needs to be a distinction made. The notion that any
level of stability within civil society affirms Black Death has two major problems. First, it produces
the exact same pattern of ressentiment which reproduces the internalization of self-hate which only
sets the stage for communal violence in an attempt to cleanse. If the standard for measuring the
effectiveness of Black movements is the destruction of every part of society, then failure is the only
appropriate descriptor for every Black resistance strategy in history. If this is the case, the
internalization of Black slaveness becomes all but inevitable by reinforcing psychological, mental,
and emotional chains of depression on all those who seek to resistance. The second problem is that
Black bodies have no means of creating instability at the state or societal level. Society is a
manifestation of hundreds of years of economic and political accumulation that has yielded
countless weapons against the oppressed. Simply expecting the dominant order to forgo the use of
those weapons is a fantasy. The scope of orienting towards the end of the world in terms of instability is far too large. The end of
the world is not possible. Afro-Pessimism is far too separated from the material practice of
resistance in this regard. If the justification for detaching from state involvement is that it requires a sacrificing of Black flesh, then
resistance strategies must consider the effect of a complete embrace of political refusal. Calls for absolute Black pessimism is also an abjection of
Black flesh in the same manner Wilderson bases the need for the end of the world because an open refusal and rejection to at least seemingly
conform to degrees of social norms will have deadly consequences for Black bodies. For
pessimists to call for Blacks to openly
embrace physical death in pursuit of theory is irresponsible and unethical. Wilderson uses the
question of flinching as a misnomer. The term seems to suggest that any participation in or any
implicit affirmation of society is an insufficient Black politic. The problem is that at its core the very nature of
Black life is one that requires a series of strategic and tactical flinches. This means that in different
situations and settings, Black bodies take different forms. If confronted on the street by a racist police officer, asking
for one to unconditionally refuse to recognize the position of the officer is in turn asking for Black suicidal politics. As posited above, there is
something inherently valuable within Black intra-ontological arrangements, and as such, suicide is a non-starter. Not only is this a strategy for
sustaining intra-ontological freedom, but it is also a strategy for pursuing the disorganization of civil society. It problematizes society’s ability to
Tactical flinches allow Blackness to become a thousand
easily script the nature of Black life and Black resistance.
different villains disguised as citizens. It is a protective mechanism for those who seek to fight against tyranny without inciting
the wrath of the tyrannical. This is not to say that Black resistance should ever flinch in its orientation to
civil society at a fundamental level. It is to say that in order for Black life to exist in a world that
wishes its death, it is necessary to disguise that orientation and strategically present it in certain settings. Some will be
highly critical of this notion because it will be perceived as a call to sacrifice expressions of authentic self in an appeasement of the dominant
order. Instead, this is a call to reassess the very understanding of political orientation. Black resistance should embody refusal
at the core level; that should be internalized, and it is the very process of mystifying that core refusal in acts of fugitive transgressions against
civil society that renders its violence inoperable. This
is not a sacrifice of the authentic self, but the mystification
and protection of authentic Blackness in an act of rebellion against societal production of anti-
Black violence. This is an effective means of navigating Black ontological questions. Again, Black liberation
cannot be measured in terms of the absence of white violence, but it must be measured using different rubrics. In terms of Black ontological
resistance as an ensemble, this resistance is a question is the maintenance of Black communities through the inoperability of violence by
complicating perceptions of Black criminality. Since the slave has no capacity to orchestrate the manifestation of the end of the world, then Black
orientation to the end of the world must begin with one of constructing the illegality of the body. This is the means in which Black movements
must employ fleshly politics in modern resistance strategies.
The end of the world should not be understood through
the instability of civil society or the state, but rather, it should be understood through the ability of
Black communities to render themselves self-sufficient which should very well include a strategic
and criminal relationship with civil society.
No prior questions, politics is relatively autonomous from the ontological—making
debate about competing ontologies stultifies its potential – also proves the perm isn’t
severance
Khan, 17—School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham (Gulshan,
“Beyond the Ontological Turn: Affirming the Relative Autonomy of Politics,” Political Studies Review
Volume: 15 issue: 4, page(s): 551-563, dml)

A number of prominent examples will have to suffice here to illustrate this general trend. The debate (which is mainly) between those who follow
Deleuze and proponents of psychoanalysis has been presented as an alternative between theories of ‘abundance’ and ‘lack’.9 This is, for sure, an
important topic, which is in large part about the status of desire and whether desire should be understood as a productive force of life or is instead
generated by prohibition. The point is not to underestimate the importance of these respective claims, but simply to note how this debate
operates at the level of competing ontological positions. The same is true for more recent debates which have followed
from the intervention of the ‘new materialism’, which is further discussed by Mark Wenman in his contribution to this symposium. Central to
these approaches has been a critique of anthropocentricism and an attempt to undermine the distinction between human and nonhuman forms of
agency (Bennett, 2010). Again, the critical responses to these arguments have tended to focus on claims about the
fundamental characteristics of human beings, for example, in their capacities for action and judgement (Zerilli, 2015). As I
have said, my objective here is not to choose between these positions but simply to draw attention to the ontological register in
which these claims have been articulated. In some senses, this is ironic, given that poststructuralism is widely
perceived to eschew foundations, and yet what we find is seemingly endless debates about different
forms of post-foundations; here, there are no essences but, it seems, many competing – often passionately
competing – forms of anti-essentialism. The message that emerges from these debates is clearly that
ontology matters and informs a particular vision of politics. However, the danger is, I think, that questions
of ontology tend to displace a more direct focus on explicitly political questions. Often, these debates
take the form of a respective fine-tuning of ontological viewpoints. At this level of abstraction, there is
a lot of respective talking past each other, but little in the way of a direct analysis of forms of power
and control or a refinement of political concepts.
Indeed, another
difficulty that emerges from these recent trends is the tendency towards a proliferation of
competing sets of complex and seemingly obscure ontological concepts and categories. Of course,
poststructuralists have for a long time been criticised by analytical philosophers for their apparent obscurantism,10 and I stress that my claim here
is not that poststructuralists are deliberately obscure. Rather, I think the
problem follows more directly from this standoff
between competing ontologies. As each side seeks to refine their respective ontological perspectives,
they do so through the initiation of novel concepts and terms. For the most part, these terms do have specific
meaning within the respective theoretical frameworks, but, to the uninitiated, these frameworks must
increasingly appear to resemble an abyss of murky and incomprehensible vocabularies. Finally, when
poststructuralists do engage more directly with questions of politics, there is a tendency to read their
favoured forms of politics directly from the ontological categories, that is, to reduce politics to these
underlying ontological viewpoints. Again, a couple of pertinent examples will have to suffice to illustrate this more general trend.
This can, for example, be seen on each side of the categories of ‘abundance’ and ‘lack’ – for instance, when Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
(2001) move directly from a Deleuzean ontology of desire to a conception of political subjectivity in terms of the immanent movement of ‘the
multitude’ and when Žižek (2002) similarly sees a direct connection between the Lacanian account of constitutive ‘lack’ and his defence of a
Leninist politics of revolutionary rupture or what he calls ‘the Act’. This
tendency – to treat ontology and politics as
somehow synonymous – needs, I think, to be resisted, and so in the final section, I advance some more general reflections on
the relationship between ontology and politics, with a view to establishing the relative autonomy of politics from ontological concerns.

The Relative Autonomy of Politics from Ontology

Having outlined these various criticisms, in this section I consider the notion of ‘weak ontology’ that has been invoked to describe the forms of
ontological argument associated with poststructuralism, and I defend the idea of ontological
pluralism, which not only draws attention to
the multiplicity of different worldviews but also insists that no specific viewpoint can claim metaphysical certainty
or priority. Moreover, I make the case that the circumstances of ontological pluralism suggest a relative
autonomy of politics from ontology. This emphasis is designed to open space between ontology and
politics, to re-direct our efforts towards a more concrete analysis of political concerns. Indeed, the future
success of poststructuralism will depend, I think, on the capacity of theorists working with distinct ontological
viewpoints partly to look across these differences and to prioritise instead the need to sharpen our
conceptual tools for understanding politics, power and domination.
To appreciate the approaches to ontology characteristic of the various traditions of poststructuralism, we need to briefly acknowledge the
influence of Martin Heidegger. Indeed, Heidegger was a significant inspiration for the development of poststructuralism, and more generally, his
work has been central to the way in which we think about ontology today. For the ancient Greeks, ontology was a branch of metaphysics
concerned with the nature of ‘Being’ or with ‘what is’. However, Heidegger highlighted how conventional approaches to ontology – especially
since Plato and Aristotle – have tended to take a foundationalist approach. Here, ontology is more or less associated with a categorising of the
basic kinds of phenomena that are said to exist beyond the realm of appearances. On Heidegger’s account, this conventional metaphysical
orientation, which runs through the Western tradition, is too simple and straightforward. As he sees it, these approaches have forgotten the most
elementary question of ontology, which is about the ‘meaning of Being’ as such. Therefore, what ought to be a most difficult and demanding
question has instead ‘taken on a clarity and self-evidence such that if anyone continues to ask about it he is charged with an error of method’
(Heidegger, 1998: 21). Traditional metaphysical approaches also typically present ontological questions in cognitive and rational terms, that is, as
a matter ultimately to be resolved regarding epistemological questions about what can and cannot be known to be true, and again this tendency
runs through the tradition and is just as evident in Plato as it is in Hobbes, as well as in contemporary analytical philosophy.11

In addition to these critical observations, Heidegger also put forward an alternative approach that he called ‘fundamental ontology’. By way of
contrast, Heidegger proceeded by way of a phenomenological rather than a cognitive approach. His focus was on the basic modes of human
‘being in the world’, and his analysis moved inexorably to the conclusion that the question of the meaning of Being ultimately resists every
attempt at definition, in part because of the disruptive temporality that is constitutive of human experience (Heidegger, 1998: 53). Heidegger’s
influence on poststructuralism (especially on Derrida) – with its comparable stress on temporal dislocation – should be evident, and this is so too
with his general approach to ontology.12 Indeed, when poststructuralists engage in questions of ontology, they are generally not seeking to
resolve the ancient philosophical problem, that is, to define with cognitive certainty the ‘essence’ or ‘nature of being’ (Strathausen, 2009).
Instead, following Heidegger, they typically aim simultaneously both to define some fundamental features of the world and to acknowledge that
these fundaments are contingent, and so they cannot be fully grounded. With this characteristic double gesture, Oliver Marchart (2007) has
argued, poststructuralists are best understood as post-foundationalist rather than as resolutely anti-foundationalist or anti-essentialist. Similarly,
Stephen K. White has distinguished between what he calls ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ ontology. The former – more traditional – approaches ‘claim to
show us how the world [really] is’, whereas poststructuralist proponents of ‘weak’ ontology draw attention to the need for ontological
foundations, but at the same time present their assumptions about the ‘self’ and the ‘world’ as inherently contestable (White, 2000: 6).

This characteristic double gesture has been exemplified in the work of Connolly.13 Connolly’s appreciation of post-foundationalism
leads him to stress the inherent contestability of every set of ontological claims . This effectively politicises
ontology, because it follows that no set of ontological assumptions can claim metaphysical certainty ,
nor is it possible to describe reality in neutral terms. Indeed, we saw in the previous section that we currently experience a condition
of ontological pluralism, and we can now add that none of the contending ontological viewpoints are
incontestable, and so they are all in some sense politicised . Moreover, I want to stress that these circumstances – of
the politicisation of ontology – are different from the tendencies I described above, that is, the tendency to displace
more straightforwardly political concerns with ontological questions. Indeed, the politicisation of
ontology seems both inevitable, given the fact of ontological pluralism, and something to be welcomed.
However, this inevitability does not also follow for the tendency to reduce politics to ontology. There are,
as we saw above, reasons for this increasing tendency, and these do, in part, follow from the circumstances of ontological pluralism, as each side
seeks to defend and refine their ontological categories. Indeed, it is not easy to avoid questions of ontology altogether. As Carsten Strathausen
(2006) says, ‘ontologies literally live (i.e., they become embodied and practiced) by the credo of those who adhere to them, and this credo is not
simply a matter of rational power or philosophical logic’. Nevertheless, my sense is that the
tendency to reduce the study of
politics to categories of ontology is not inexorable, and it remains possible to establish some element of
critical distance from a given set of ontological assumptions. To finesse this point, I advance the idea of a ‘relative
autonomy’ to further highlight the relationship between ontology and politics.14

The term ‘relative autonomy’ is borrowed from Althusser (1971), who was, of course, working within the Marxist framework and who
developed this idea to explain the relationship between the economic base and the various realms of the ‘superstructure’, that is, politics, law,
ideology and culture. Althusser (1971) sought
to overcome what he understood as the simplistic account of economic
determinism characteristic of conventional Marxism, where the superstructure was conceived ultimately as a
‘reflection’ of the underlying economic infrastructure or of the ‘forces and relations of production’. By way of contrast, on
his account, each
of the different elements of the superstructure needs to be grasped in terms of its own
distinct purposes and effects, and these, in turn, are only ever related to the infrastructure, as well as to
each other, in complex forms of mutual imbrication or ‘over-determination’ (Althusser, 1971). In other words,
while the economy necessarily retained a determining role in relation to the various elements of the superstructure, this was never a simple or
absolute form of determination, and the latter retained a degree of ‘relative autonomy’ from the former.

Althusser’s intervention gave rise to a great deal of debate and critical assessment, his relationship to structuralism and poststructuralism is
complex, and there is no scope here to evaluate these discussions in detail. We should note, however, that the most pertinent reproach of the idea
of ‘relative autonomy’ was developed by Laclau and Mouffe. They showed that the idea of relative autonomy could not be squared with
Althusser’s simultaneous desire to retain the notion of the overarching ‘determination of the economy in the last instance’ (Laclau and Mouffe,
1985: viii). Laclau and Mouffe were, I think, correct to emphasise the incongruity between these two contrasting objectives in Althusser’s theory.
Nevertheless, the preliminary move in Althusser’s argument, that is, to establish the relative autonomy of the superstructures from the economic
base, seems also highly pertinent and analogous to our discussion of the relationship between ontology and politics. Moreover, Laclau and
Mouffe’s criticism of ‘relative autonomy’ does not apply here since my aim is not to attribute ontology with a determinate status in the first, last
or any other instance. Instead, my suggestion is that we need to appreciate that politics
is something distinct from ontology
with its own discrete characteristics and that ontology plays a conditioning and constraining role in
how we perceive and interpret political events and experiences, but this is not a relationship of
determination. In fact, to the contrary, politics is not reducible to ontology and there is no straightforward
relationship between one’s political views and commitments and one’s ontological assumptions about
how the world is. My sense is that the term ‘relative autonomy’ neatly captures what is at stake in this
complex interrelationship, where this takes the form of a strong mutual imbrication between ontology and
politics, but where this is not a relationship of straightforward necessity and where these different registers
are not simply reducible to each other.15
As evidence for this relative autonomy of politics from ontology, we can highlight how it
is possible to get different kinds of
political analyses from those who share a basic set of ontological assumptions . In this respect, we might note
the traditions of both left and right Hegelianism, or that Heidegger’s association with Nazism did not stop
many French leftists intellectuals appropriating core elements of his thought , or, as the saying goes, that there are as
many different forms of Marxism and there are Marxists. More recently, we could cite the heated exchanges between Laclau (2006) and Žižek
(2006) who share a common commitment to Lacanian psychoanalysis but who have disagreed strongly about their respective political
viewpoints. Laclau (1996: 43) stressed a Gramscian-inspired politics, with an emphasis on the role of the new social movements and the need to
build a collective hegemony, whereas Žižek (1999: 236, 2002) has sought to retain a conventional Marxist account of the priority of class struggle
and to revive a Leninist story about the need to seize political power. Similarly, we might note the way in which Mouffe has invoked Schmitt’s
conception of ‘the political’ in the service of a broadly left/pluralist form of politics, which is clearly distinct from Schmitt’s own brand of neo-
conservatism. These examples demonstrate how it
is possible to derive different political analyses and commitments
from a given ontological horizon, and by way of conclusion I stress that it must also be possible to establish
common political alliances and agendas between those who disagree about questions of ontology.
Conclusion

Clearly, one does not fully choose one’s ontological horizon. Nevertheless, I think we do retain greater choice
with respect to our political opinions and priorities, and, in my view, the future direction of poststructuralism
would be best served by an explicit shift towards a more concrete focus on forms of power and domination, as well
as an analysis of the conditions of freedom and emancipation. I recognise that these points of emphasis reflect a particular set
of assumptions about the nature of ‘the political’, and these suppositions are contestable. However, my
contention is that this emphasis on politics as power and domination remains crucially important in the context of neo-liberalism. Indeed, this is
an area where, I think, the insights of poststructuralism – with its stress
on contingency, relationality and temporal
dislocation – can be particularly fruitful. This is because the forms of power that we face today are
increasingly complex and cannot be properly explained by approaches which reduce domination to
single explanation (e.g. Marxism), nor by those who take a methodically individualist approach (e.g. the neo-republican account of
domination put forward by Philip Pettit). By way of contrast, if those associated with poststructuralism (broadly defined) could begin to
talk a little less about questions of ontology and instead build common political objectives and
frameworks of analysis across different ontological traditions, then our understanding of the
operations of power in the current system of global capitalism might well be significantly advanced. Moreover,
there is a degree of urgency here because the current preoccupation with ontology ( at the expense of a
more concrete analysis of power and domination) is, in the end, to give into the philosopher’s impulse, that is,
to merely interpret the world, when the point is to change it through political critique and activism.
1AR
 Warren
Here’s proof
Warren 2018 (Calvin Warren, "Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation", Duke
University Press, April 2018, https://www.dukeupress.edu/ontological-terror, mmv) **edited to be read
out loud by non-black folks**
What do I mean by the “execration of Being”? I simply mean the death or obliteration of African
existence. This obliteration provides the necessary condition for the invention of the Negro, or black
being—black as metaphysical nothing or groundless existence. One anchors one’s existence in this
primordial relation, but the [black] Negro is precisely the absence of such relationality, a novelty for
modernity (or a “new ontology,” as Frank Wilderson would describe it). The Negro is born into absence
and not presence. We can also describe this death of a primordial relation as a “metaphysical holocaust,”
following Franz Fanon and Frank Wilderson. For Fanon, “Ontology—once it is finally admitted as
leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man . . . the
black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man . . . his metaphysics, or less
pretentiously, his customs and the sources on which they are based, were wiped out because they were in
conflict with a civilization that he did not know and that imposed itself on him.”

Here’s more
Warren 2018 (Calvin Warren, "Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation", Duke
University Press, April 2018, https://www.dukeupress.edu/ontological-terror, mmv)
Frank Wilderson perspicuously argues that “civil society is held together by a structural prohibition
against recognizing and incorporating a being that is dead, despite the fact that this being is sentient and
so appears to be very much alive.”44 Civil society depends on a prohibition on blackness to function—
and we can suggest that this prohibition supplants the taboo prohibition that Freud claimed grounded
civilization, since antebellum law permits incest and murder through the “chattel distinction,” as Kalpana
Seshadri-Crooks suggests.45 If death “structures political life in terms of aversion as well as desire,”
according to Russ Castronovo, and “produces bodies whose materiality disturbs the impersonality of
citizenship, but whose remove from socio-political life also idealizes the unhistorical and abstract nature
of state identity,” then the materiality and non-ontology of blackness, as the embodiment of death,
desanitizes civil society.46 The Census of 1840 articulates, through numerical signifirs, this very
prohibition on blackness as death, and insanity provides the necessary grammar of prohibition. Nothing
contaminates civil society and must be contained and removed. This is the metaphysical impetus behind
antiblackness.

Second, they have no clue what metaphysics means – the 1AC makes both a
metaphysical AND ontological claim
Ravenet 2011 (Jaime Ravenet, BA Philosophy University of Maryland College Park, "What is the
difference between metaphysics and ontology?", Stack Exchange, October 27 2011,
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/1534/what-is-the-difference-between-metaphysics-and-
ontology#:~:text=Metaphysics%20is%20a%20very%20broad,entities%20exist%20in%20the%20world,
mmv)
Metaphysics is a very broad field, and metaphysicians attempt to answer questions about how the world
is. Ontology is a related sub-field, partially within metaphysics, that answers questions of what things
exist in the world. An ontology posits which entities exist in the world. So, while a metaphysics may
include an implicit ontology (which means, how your theory describes the world may imply specific
things in the world), they are not necessary the same field of study.
Let's consider an example that might clarify the distinction a little more: gravity. Gravity is certainly not
an object, but I assume that physics would be in a pretty bad spot if we say that gravity isn't real. So what
should we make of gravity? Well, we roughly know that gravity is a physical law that affects matter.
So, a metaphysical conclusion we can draw from this is:
"The world is such that matter is governed by physical laws."
This is a metaphysical conclusion because it describes a way that reality is - laws are a property of reality
(and further, reality is the kind of reality that can have laws). The distinct ontological conclusion to draw
from our discussion so far is:
"There is a physical law of gravity."͏͏
This is ontological because it is about a posited entity - the entity that we call "the law of gravity". Now,
where most people seem to get tripped up here is in the fact that our ontological conclusion is also a
metaphysical conclusion; any posited entities are also part of (or describe) how the world may or may not
be. But the ontological conclusion differs from the non-ontological metaphysical conclusion insofar as it
may imply metaphysical conclusions, but is not itself about reality. "Meta" means roughly "about" or
"after", and physics means physics, so metaphysics means "about (or after/beyond) reality". The
ontological conclusion is about a given entity (or kind of entities).

Here’s more evidence, you can’t have metaphysics without ontology

Heckman 2017 (Ian Heckman, PhD candidate in philosophy and aesthetics, "What is the difference
between metaphysics and ontology?", Quora, June 4 2017, https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-
difference-between-metaphysics-and-ontology, mmv)
Ontology is the study of what things exist and what kinds of things they are. A completed ontology is an
ontology that states what things exist in the world. There might be one individual thing in which
everything else is merely a property of that one thing (Spinoza). There might be lots of little things,
namely fundamental particles, and things like chairs and tables are really just arrangements of those
particles. (Reductionism). It’s about carving up the world and seeing what really exists and how many
things exist.
Once we have an ontology, we can finish building the rest of our metaphysics. A completed metaphysics
is a full picture of reality. This is not just a picture consisting of what things exist, but it is a picture which
understands the objects posited by the ontology both how they work, and how they interact with one
another. This picture is ultimately much more informative than merely an ontology.
For example, an ontology of the mind might posit two fundamental substances, a spiritual substance and a
material substance. But then a metaphysical but non-ontological question is how do these two substances
interact? And more importantly, how can they interact, given that their natures are so substantially
different from one another? And this gives rise to the mind-body problem.
It should be clear that a complete metaphysics is always going to include an ontology , but not vice versa.
You can always posit entities without saying much about understanding them. But you can’t understand
how reality works without knowing what kinds of entities exist.