Experts' Tier FINALE: Environmental Protections vs. Resource Extraction

Thanks again to Bench for an awesome debate. I shall use my brief free moment this afternoon to refute Con's core case. CON's CASECONTENTION ONE: SuccessFirstly, Con hasn't defined what "success" is. We can define "success" as the "measure of succeeding;" we can further clarify that "succeeding" is "to do what you're trying to do." [1]Fundamentally, every government has an obligation to promote societal welfare as part of a social contract. Everything a legitimate government does should be to advance that end. Prof. Steve Heyman writes, “by virtue of the social contract, the state has an affirmative obligation to preserve the lives of its members. This obligation includes not only the protection of life, liberty, and property against violence, but also the provision of means of sustenance to those unable to provide for themselves. In return for such preservation, individuals have an affirmative duty to assist the state." So, when we ask, what should a government be trying to do, at its most essential level, the answer is to promote societal welfare. Success is NOT simply meeting development goals; it is a much more expansive concept. My argument is that while many governments see development as the path towards success, that unless it is tempered by environmental protections, it will go awry and produce net harm instead.Unfortunately, governments place too much emphasis on development, and less on other factors relevant to societal welfare. Profs. H. Kartodihardjo and H. Jhamtani state: "The measure for success in government agencies...are increased economic productivity...in utilizing natural resources. Conversely, neither natural resources conservation nor the equitable allocation of natural resources benefits have been benchmarks of success.”Now that I have finished on my tangent, we can refocus to Con's arguments. Con's first claim is that "In this day and age, the most successful nations are often the nations that industrialized the earliest in human history." That may very well be true; however, the detriment to the environment is cumulative. So, as time passes and more and more nations begin to pollute, the situation is deteriorating towards a crisis point. Sure, industrialization may have worked in the past, but it cannot be a solution anymore. It's just not safe.We can look at source 9 from my R1 speech to see this. It writes, each "country has its own footprint, which describes the total area required to build its infrastructure, to produce food and other goods and services, and to absorb emissions from the consumption of fossil fuels. If all the strains on the biosphere...are added up and converted into area magnitudes, it is possible to quantify the ecological footprint that humans leave on the planet. In the past forty years this indicator has changed dramatically: the global ecological footprint increased by more than 150 percent between 1960 and 2000. If this is related to the biologically productive area of the world…it turns out that since the second half of the 1980s the footprint has been larger than the biologically productive area, currently 25 percent larger.” Simply put, the longer pollution continues, the more its impacts are felt.Con assets that "when you have a developed economy, you have a healthy middle class that can be taxed, with those taxes being used by the government to improve things like education and health." Unfortunately, the benefits of development rarely impact the middle class.“Resource extraction industries tend to have ‘enclave’ characteristics, i.e., they create only small pockets of wealth and have few linkages to the rest of the national economy, particularly if the resources are exported before any processing takes place. The benefits to the economy and population at large are therefore quite limited.” [2] The poor are not “the main beneficiaries of nature's bounty. This is possible because resources found in commons often complement private assets, such as land and livestock. The poorest, who lack these private resources will not benefit [from this resource extraction]." [3] We can look to empirical examples to see further evidence of this. “In Nigeria, ‘where hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil have been pumped since the 1950s, 85 percent of revenues accrue to only 1 percent of the population.’” [4] In other words, the elites pocket the wealth, and the poor stay poor. The middle class does not become wealthier in these developing nations, at least not significantly, and so there is no substantial increase in the taxable population.CONTENTION TWO: IndustrializationIt is important to observe here the wording of the resolution: "Developing nations should PRIORITIZE environmental protections over resource extraction." I am not arguing that all industrialization activities should be curtailed entirely, merely I am asserting that environmental protectionism should be valued more highly than industrialization.Therefore, I am not saying we should skip the industrialization step entirely. Con misunderstands the topic here. Furthermore, I would like Con to produce a credible warrant for why industrialization is actually necessary. Just because it has helped nations advance in the past, that does not mean it is the ONLY way forward.Con then discusses how modernization improves living standards. I would point out that extraction is not the same thing as industrialization. The topic is specific to "resource extraction." It is possible to industrialize, as China is doing, through manufacturing, which is not itself extraction. Therefore, not all forms of industrialization as even topical to this debate. But, if we take Con's remarks to imply that extraction promote quality of life, we only need to reference my R1 health and poverty impacts to see that this notion is totally fallacious.CONTENTION THREE: ExtractionFirstly, Con's quote from Wikipedia shows only that extraction is one component of industrialization. Specifically, extraction is a "key positive factor." The source NEVER argues that extraction is absolutely necessary for industrialization, nor does it say that environmental protections would necessarily impeded industrialization to the point where it would stop the process entirely.Con erroneously assumes that extraction "drastically improves the nation's wealth." There are several reasons why this is patently false:1. Extraction fuels violence and war, which drain national coffers and, ironically enough, natural resources. "Many contemporary resource-related conflicts are being fought in areas of great environmental value. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and Colombia, for example, together account for 10 percent of the world's remaining intact forests. Not surprisingly, these and other countries in which resource conflicts are raging are home to some of the world's biodiversity hotspots. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, accounts for more than half of Africa's forests. It has the largest number of bird and mammal species of any country on the continent (including okapis, rhinos, chimpanzees, and lowland gorillas) and is also one of the region's most flora-rich countries. Yet during the 1990s, Congo and other well-endowed countries suffered from the world's highest net loss of forest area.” [2]2. Extraction-based economies fail to diversify. “Ample resource endowments can have negative economic consequences, as countries grow overly dependent on these resources, allocate inadequate capital and labor to other sectors…and underinvest in critical social areas such as education and health. The result is a failure to diversify the economy and to stimulate innovation and the development of human skills.” [2] We can see this occurring in Botswanna, where it's economy is too reliant on diamonds, which makes it economically vulnerable. [5]3. Extraction is unsustainable. Once resources evaporate, the extraction industry, and industries reliant on it, crash and disappear. This phenomenon is called “Dutch Disease” where resource “wealth leads to levels of consumption and investment during boom periods that cannot be sustained through subsequent downswings. This brings exchange rate and wage effects that cripple the growth of non-mineral tradable sectors such as agriculture and manufacturing, leading to an economic structure dominated by enclave economies linked to resource extraction. Such effects are commonly observed in mineral-dependent economies.” [6]For these three reasons, resource extraction is actually a bad and unstable way to modernize. It's ineffective, and can lead to disastrous results.CONTENTION FOUR: ElectricityAgain, I am prioritizing the environment, not eliminating extraction. That is a key point to underscore. However, when we look at incidents like the chemical spill is W. VA. here in the U.S. [7] we can see that without environmental protections, extraction and its dependent industries (like waste repositories) actually harm the environment, endanger health, and harm economies. In contrast to these harms, a higher electricity bill seems preferable.SOURCES1 - http://www.merriam-webster.com...2 - Renner, Michael, 2002 [Senior Researcher-World Watch Institute] The Anatomy of Resource Wars, Worldwatch Paper 162, p. 48-93 - Sinnot, Emily, et al., 2010, [The World Bank] Natural Resources in Latin America and the Caribbean: Beyond Booms and Busts?, p. 274 - Carmody, Padraig, 2010, [Geography Lecturer-Trinity College (Dublin)] Globalization in Africa: Recolonization or Renaissance?, p. 735 - http://peopleandresources.blogspot.com...6 - Bebbington, Anthony, et al., 2008, [Professor of Nature, Society and Development, University of Manchester] "Contention and Ambiguity" Development and Change, Vol, 39, Issue 6, p. 9017 - http://www.msnbc.com...Thanks! Over to Con...