The US should adopt a carbon tax

For this round I shall go over the rebuttals and then move on to my opponent's case in the disadvantages that he brings up. 1. Environment My opponent states that these issues are over-exaggerated, but the thing is, this is incorrect. To draw a comparison, former US Army General who served during the Cold War had drawn the comparison that showed nuclear war was simply a Spector, but Global Warming and the issues it is causing is happening here and now [1]. This is not something that we cannot stick our heads in the sand and pretend we can ignore as it is here and has detrimental impacts for humanity and our globe. The thing is there is a high risk for the huge impact no matter what kind of skeptic spin you wish to place on it. When we perform impact analysis we can see that mine outweighs my opponent's as he only brings up job loss while mine is an extinction argument. My argument outweighs as we can see as even though the people may lose jobs, we will see people dying and many generations down the road our grandchildren will suffer due to our mishandling and apathy towards the environment. Even if the extinction occurs further down the road, we can see that it is still important as it poses more of a risk to humanity [2]. Another key issue is that our oceans are being severely harmed. Though my opponent wishes to discard this issue, we do have to look at the ocean and if it were to burp. The ocean is currently taking in a third of the world's Carbon emissions and turning them into acid which is harming our ecosystems [3]. There will be a loss of millions of jobs worldwide and many people's livelihoods would be destroyed by the loss of many people's only source of diet and incomes. My opponent may have attempted to refute the acidification, but cannot deny the job loss and ecosystem damage that would result due to such an event that would occur. The Ocean's 30 million tons of Carbon intake is climbing higher and higher and could soon halt. Which would result in the 'burping' of the ocean. According to a source from the NOAA, they have reported that such an acidification would result in human extinction due to the total destruction of freshwater, food sources, and even simple economic resources that would occur as such a result [4]. My opponent goes on to commit an ad pop fallacy as he states that most scientists disagree, but just because that more people disagree does not make it fact. NASA had stated that this was one of their models of a 'burp' not really a simple ice cap melting or any other kind of event. I have already shown that the world is in a tipping point as we have already crossed the 400 ppm Carbon limit. This has been dubbed as the 'tipping point' by many including several NASA scientists. 2. Will it work I would first like to go on record to say that I'm neither an "attention-seeking 'progressive'" nor a "PC SJW," so I'm going to ignore this first part. My opponent brings up Australia, and I will bring up Australia later on, but let's look to other areas. If we look at Germany, we can see that their take reduced carbon emissions by 2.4% as well as increased jobs by 250,000 jobs. If the Carbon Tax harms jobs, then why is Germany's increasing [5]? In British Columbia, we have seen a decrease in Carbon consumptions by 16% while the GDP per capita in BC, from '09-13, leads the rest of Canada by 0.5% [6]. If anything, this shows that not only does this work, but it helps the economy, which I'll go more in-depth later on. 3. Nuclear “[T]he cost of producing nuclear-generated electricity in 2007 was 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, compared with 2.4 cents for coal, 6.7 cents for natural gas and 10.2 cents for oil.[7]" We can see that the cost per kilowatt-hour is quite a different story than what my opponent states. If you look at his EIA article, you'll see that the average conventional coal edges out nuclear by .1 $mwh, while the other types of coal are quite more expensive and the maximum, nuclear is cheaper. My opponent brings up the few meltdowns, but these are rare, Fukushima inspired a new fixture which is using the same technology that they use for offshore drilling. Why is this important? These floating platforms create automatic cooling which negates the factors that would create overheating or the lack of care post natural disaster and the nuclear plants would be safe [8]. There are many myths that come out of this issue that my opponent is bringing-up. For one instant, nuclear physics have stated that coal and oil plants both put out more radiation than that of a nuclear power plant [9]. These plants even contain several shutdown mechanics that can help mitigate the effects of a meltdown even under a terror attack creating a safer environment than my opponent wishes to attack it with. ===Disadvantages=== Outsourcing My opponent brings up how this will cause more and more companies to move overseas, but he fails to explain why outsourcing is such a bad idea outside of just stating that it will result in job loss. Many people have argued for outsourcing due to it resulting in cheaper products which many people support. We do have to observe, when we revisit the Germany example, the Carbon Tax resulted in an increase in jobs of 250,000, not a net loss. Such an outcome clearly shows that this creates job with it being a freer market option than the status quo of Cap-and-Trade which my opponent has dropped on how bad the status quo is and how much more preferable the Carbon Tax it is. Implementation My opponent uses the Australian example, but fails that more than Australia had tried this. There are several nations and even US states that have tried this and with a success: Switzerland, Norway, UK, California, Colorado, BC, etc... Implementation may have been an issue with Australian, but it mustn't have been an issue with all of these other areas that have enacted it as they still have it and have gotten a net benefit out of this. Economic Harm My opponent's claims are false. The German example has shown job net gain and the BC example has shown a GDP increase due to the Carbon Tax. My opponent claims that Australia only fell 0.1%, but that was only the first year. It turns out that it later dropped to a 5% drop [10]. Australia had also reduced its income tax when this was implemented, so the harm on the average Australian was mitigated. My opponent also drops how people would make rational choices to do what they will to decrease their costs and this has been shown to happen across the board. If this tax is implemented, then we will see a net benefit for the American economy. Conclusion My opponent attempted to attack my case with these disadvantages, but we can see that these are futile and many actually help me. The economy has been shown to improve under the Carbon Tax and many of these attacks are simply mythical and non-existent. All of his disadvantages have been negated and some have actually been converted into an advantage for my side in this debate and must be viewed as such. My opponent has dropped a huge amount of my economic arguments from my previous round showing on how much the economy can benefit under the Carbon Tax. We can see that there is a significant impact that will occur if we do not enact this as our environment will suffer and can lead to a human extinction in the long run. When we look to an economics argument, we can see that the Carbon Tax wins there as well as not only does it led to innovation, clean energy encouragement, and nuclear solutions, but it increases jobs. For these reasons, I urge you to vote Pro! Sources 1. (http://tinyurl.com...) pg 10 2. (http://tinyurl.com...) 3. (http://tinyurl.com...) 4. (http://tinyurl.com...) 5. (http://tinyurl.com...) 6. (http://tinyurl.com...) 7. Hertel, Nolan E. "“Has the Time Come for Nuclear Power? Yes: It's Safe, Clean, Cost-Effective,”." Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 27 July 2008. Web. 24 July 2016. 8. (http://tinyurl.com...) 9. (http://tinyurl.com...) 10. (http://tinyurl.com...)