Acess to drinking water ought to be valued as a human right instead of a commodity

A: Uniqueness - Populations are rising. Kates[1]writes: It took the world population millions of years to reach the first billion, then 123 years to get to the second, 33 years to the third, 14 years to the fourth, and 13 years to the fifth billion,The U.N.’s revisedpopulation projection estimated world populationwould swell to 11 billion by 2050. And the availability of drinkable water is decreasing for two reasons: 1 – Climate change is lessening our supply of water. The Arlington Institute[2] states: Climate change is depleting [the] supply of water. As the climate warms, glaciers in the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau have been melting. According to the IPCC, global temperatures have warmed by .76 Celsius over the last 100 years. In subsequent years, there will be less and less glacial meltwater to continuously supply India’s rivers.Nearly 70% of discharge to the River Ganges comes from Nepalese snow-fed rivers,if Himalayan glaciers dry up, so could the Ganges. The Ganges has numerous tributary rivers which supply water to hundreds of millions of people across India. Therefore, if the Ganges even partly dried up, it would have drastic consequences for a huge population. 2 – Government ability to gain drinkable water is failing. The Arlington Institute furthers: India receives an average of 4,000 billion cubic meters of rainfall every year. Unfortunately, only 48% of rainfall ends up in India’s rivers. Due to lack of storage and crumbling infrastructure, only 18% can be utilized. Rainfall is confined to the monsoon season,when India gets 75% of its total annual precipitation. Due to India’s storage crunch the government is unable to store surplus water for the dry season. Such uneven seasonal distribution of rainfall has not stimulated the development of better capturing and storing infrastructure, making water scarcity acritical problem. B: Link – The affirmative claims that everyone ought to have access to water as per their human rights links in because a) it lowers our supply of water to give to other people and b) further causes the population to rise by increasing the quality of life. C: Internal Link – As the population rises in the affirmative world, it causes us to deplete more and more resources, which has the potential to set up a very bad situation. Hance writes:[3] Wealth is dependent on the environment, and our environmentis both finite and increasingly plundered. There is a limited amount of oil, coal, and gold in the world. There is only so far one can push renewable resources. The rise of a global throwaway culture has resulted in an economy based on collapsing environmental capital, creating the ultimate bubble. As more people populate the planet the wealth disparity has been widening. Once our supplies reach a certain limit, and the population reaches a certain size, mass chaos comes from it. Kates 2 writes: Ecologists havecalculated [that] if world population grows to 10 billion people, that will create a “dire situation,” with “catastrophic” health and environmental problems. Birth rates would spiral out of control, and the crowded planet couldn’t continue to efficiently sustain its population, which would consume water at a faster rate than it could be renewed. There are physical limitations to how much food can be grown on the planet’s surface, and the density of a 10-billion person world would be incompatible D: Impact – Once our world enters a state of water scarcity, it sets up the possibility of wide-spread conflict arising out of the need for water. The Arlington Institute states: More than two billion people worldwide live in regions facing water scarcity. In India this is a particularly acute crisis. Millions of Indianslack access to clean drinking water, and the situation is only getting worse. India’s demand for water is growing at an alarming rate. India’s populationis expected to overtake China’s by 2050 when it reaches1.6 billionputting strain on water resources as the numbergrows. A rapidly growing economy and a large agricultural sector stretch India’s supply of water thinner. Meanwhile, India’s supply of water is rapidly dwindling Climate change is expected to exacerbate the problem causing unpredictable weather, which could drastically diminish the water coming from rainfall and glaciers. As demand for potable water outstrip[s] supply in coming years, India will face a slew of problems, such as food shortages, intrastate, and international conflict. And by conflicts I’m not talking about just a simple skirmish. The conflict that I’m talking about is nuclear war. Klare writes:[4] The[re is an] inadequate capacity of poor countries to cope with the effects of change, and the resulting state collapse, civil war and mass migration. "More than 300 million people in Africa currently lack access to safe water," provoking more wars like Darfur. these scenarios use more deadly weapons. As oil and natural gas disappears, more countries will rely on nuclear power to meet their energy needs -- and this "will accelerate nuclear proliferation as countries develop enrichment capabilities to ensure their national security. Drought, flooding and storms can kill us but so will wars among the survivors over what remains of food, water and shelter. This impact is going to outweigh because: 1) The affirmative is trying to save lives by giving everyone access to water, but by doing this they only damn people to death via nuclear war and eventual extinction via nuclear explosions and radiation. 2) By advocating for the right to access drinking water, the affirmative only violates people’s base right to life in the long run, which prevents them from even accessing a right to drinking water. This case functions in two ways: 1) It’s an independent reason to negate because I’m saying that by affirming, we violate the ultimate human right to life through causing a nuclear war. By negating, we prevent nuclear war, which solves back for the aff harms of dying from lack of water. 2) It functions as a case turn to the affirmative because they’re advocating that we distribute water to all people, as per their human rights explicitly stated in the resolution. But I’m telling you that if we did that, we would only further violate their rights in the long run. So as long as I'm winning my side of the case, you have to vote con as I'm sufficiently case turning the entirety of the pro case. To respond to the pro case: I concede the third point of my opponent's case. Since I'm not attacking the feasibility of giving everyone drinking water, this third point doesn't apply to the debate in any way. To respond to my opponent's two other points, the disadvantage I read functions as a turn to both of these contentions. Since my opponent read no framework, he MUST WIN both points in order to win. In order to win both points, he MUST sufficiently and successfully refute the disadvantage I read, since it functions as a turn to those two contentions.Since I lack characters to go further in depth to my opponent's arguments, I'll conclude here for the round. Vote con. Sources are listed below. [1] Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College – 2004 [Carol, Reproductive Liberty And Overpopulation, Reproductive Liberty, Environmental Values 13:1] [2]"Imminent Water Crisis in India." The Arlington Institute. Web. 08 Feb. 2012. <http://www.arlingtoninstitute.org...;. [3] Jeremy Hance [economist and environmentalist activist for mongabay]. 11 challenges facing 7 billion super-consumers. October 31, 2011. http://www.mongabay.com... [4] Michael T. Klare [professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author of Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency]. The Coming Resource Wars. Alter Net.