***Aff Updates

CP+DA K+alt Case+DA DA that turns the case Topicality K+case CP+internal net benefit Case with no DA? Solve the link and neutralize the impacts- give a plausible scenario about how the alternative sovles the advantages. Alt is a pre-requisite for solvency (can never solve the aff until the alt happens), sequencing arguments (must do the alternative before the case). First priority is to neutralize the case Specific case: JARC case- argued the way the state was using money was bad

PEMEX Advantage Updates

Oil Dependence Scenario

PEMEX reform is critical to solve oil dependence. Johnson 9
Keith Johnson. Oil Addiction: Dont Count on Mexico to Supplant Mid-East Crude. January 20, 2009. The Wall Street Journal. http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/01/20/oiladdiction-dont-count-on-mexico-to-supplant-mid-east-crude/ Whether the calls for reducing Americas oil dependence on the Middle East that played

such a big part in Barack Obamas campaign will find a home in todays inaugural address is an open question. But one thing is increasingly clear: America wont be able to count much on Mexico, still its third-biggest supplier, to help it wean off Persian

Gulf oil. The Mexican oil industry is in steep decline. The huge production falls seen through the first nine months of the year continued in the fourth quarter, Bloomberg says,

as Mexicos state oil company is set to report its steepest annual production declines since World War II. Mexican production will fall from more than 3 million barrels a day in 2007 to about 2.8 million barrels in 2008, Bloomberg estimates. President-elect Obama
repeatedly promised to reduce Americas dependence on Middle Eastern oil. But with Mexico struggling to keep its head above water, and Canadas tar sands an environmental no-go zone, making that promise a reality may be one of the next administrations biggest challenges. Mexicos decline was already clear through the

first nine months, as Petroleos Mexicanos, or PEMEX watched a precipitous decline at its biggest oil field, Cantarell, where production fell about 9.6% every quarter. In the third-quarter, Cantarell produced less than 1 million barrels for the first time; as recently as 2005, the Gulf of Mexico field was still producing more than 2 million barrels per day. The implications for the U.S. are big. Mexico provided on average 1.2 million barrels of oil per day, making it the third-biggest supplier after Canada and Saudi Arabia. Reversing Mexicos production decline is made trickier because of both politics and economics. Despite recent changes to the countrys oil-industry laws, Mexicos oil
industry still carries the torch of the 1938 oil nationalization. Foreign companies, which have a technological edge over the state-run PEMEX, cant do production-sharing agreements there like they can in other oil regions.

U.S. dependence on oil from outside North America risks multiple flash points for conflict. Rosen 10
Mark E. Rosen, Deputy General Counsel, CNA Corporation. LL.M., 1991, University of Virginia School of Law; J.D., 1978, University of Georgia School of Law; A.B., 1974, University of Georgia. Mr. Rosen has over thirty years of experience in the legal and national security fields, including positions with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and a twenty-one year career as an international and maritime lawyer with United States Navy. Mr. Rosen holds adjunct teaching appointments at George Washington University School of Law and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Energy Independence and Climate Change: The Economic and National Security Consequences of Failing to Act. March 2010. 44 U. Rich. L. Rev. 977. Lexis.

President Roosevelt's tacit agreement in 1945 with Saudi Arabia promising U.S. protection in return for special U.S. access to Saudi oil has more or less put the United States in the
middle of four regional conflicts: Israel vs. Arab nations, Iraq vs. Iran, Iraq vs. Kuwait, and the United States vs. Iraq. n65 The links between access to oil and national security became explicit during the Carter administration, in which the United States signaled its
willingness to use military force to protect the world's access to oil in order to protect the

global market. n66 During that period, some international lawyers apparently

reasoned that access to oil - essential for the generation of energy and food - is a fundamental human right, which might reasonably justify the use of armed force to protect commercial access. n67 Indeed, shortly after the [*988] Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, President Bush imposed a de facto military blockade of Iraq in advance of an authorization by the UN Security Council for states to take military action to remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait. n68 This action was the first time since the Vietnam War that the United States had used military force to protect an economic interest. n69 The action prompted criticisms from many - including the UN Secretary General - that the United States must work through the Security Council. n70 Given that blockades are generally considered equivalent to the aggressive use of armed force under a traditional law-of-war analysis, n71 the 1990 blockade vignette clearly demonstrates that the United States - and presumably other states as well - regard access to oil as a fundamental right, which may legally justify the use of military force. There is a growing consensus in U.S. national security circles that American dependence on imported oil constitutes a threat to the United States because a substantial portion of those oil reserves are controlled by governments that have historically pursued policies inimical to U.S. interests. For example, anti-U.S. influence in parts of Latin and South America ..." n72 that retards the growth of friendly political and economic ties among the United States, Venezuela, and a few other states in Latin and South America. This scenario plays out in many different regions. Russia, for example, has used its oil leverage to exert extreme political pressure upon Ukraine and Belarus. n73 Longstanding Western commercial relations with
repressive regimes in the Middle East - i.e., Iran, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia - raise similar issues because of the mixed strategic messages that are being sent. Of course, large
wealth

Venezuela, which represents eleven percent of U.S. oil imports, "regularly espouses antiAmerican and anti-Western rhetoric both at home and abroad ... [and] ... promotes ... [an]

[*989] transfers have allowed the Taliban in Saudi Arabia to bankroll terrorism . n74 A. Chokepoints and Flashpoints For the foreseeable future, the U.S. military will most likely be involved in protecting access to oil supplies - including the political independence of oil producers - and the global movements of using oil to help sustain the smooth functioning of the world economy. The security challenges associated with preserving access to oil are complicated by geographical "chokepoints," through which oil flows or is transported, but which are vulnerable to piracy or closure. n75 "Flashpoints" also exist as a result of political - and sometimes military - competition to secure commercial or sovereign access to oil in the face of disputed maritime and land claims that are associated with oil and gas deposits. Together, these challenges have necessitated that the United States and its allies maintain costly navies and air forces to protect sea lanes, ocean access, and maintain a presence to deter military competition in disputed regions. A selection of today's chokepoints and flashpoints follow. The Strait of Hormuz. This strait is the narrow waterway that allows access from the Indian Ocean into the Persian Gulf. Two-thirds of the world's oil is transported by ocean, and a very large percentage of that trade moves through Hormuz. The northern tip of Oman forms the southern shoreline of the strait. n76 Hormuz is protected by the constant transits of the U.S. Navy and its allies. Even though the strait has not been closed, the Persian Gulf has

been the scene of extensive military conflict. n77 On September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, initiating an eight-year war between the two countries that featured the "War of the Tankers," in which 543 ships, including the USS Stark, were attacked, while the U.S. Navy provided escort services to protect tankers [*990] that were transiting the Persian Gulf. n78 There have been past threats by Iran to militarily close the strait. n79 Additionally, there are ongoing territorial disputes between the United Arab Emirates and Iran over ownership of three islands that are located in approaches to the strait. n80 Closure of the strait would cause severe disruption in the movements of the world's oil supplies and, at a minimum, cause significant price increases and perhaps supply shortages in many regions for the duration of the closure. n81 During the War of the Tankers, oil prices increased from $ 13 per barrel to $ 31 a barrel due to supply disruptions and other "fear" factors. n82 Bab el-Mandeb. The strait separates Africa (Djibouti and Eritrea) and Asia (Yemen), and it connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean via the Gulf of Aden. The strait is an oil transit chokepoint since most of Europe's crude oil from the Middle East passes north through Bab el-Mandeb into the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal. n83 Closure of the strait due to terrorist activities or for political/military reasons, could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal and Sumed Pipeline complex, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa (the Cape of Good Hope). n84 This would add greatly to transit time and cost, and would effectively tie-up spare tanker capacity. Closure of the Bab el-Mandeb would effectively block non-oil shipping from using the Suez Canal. n85 In October 2002 the French-flagged tanker Limburg was attacked off the coast of Yemen by terrorists. n86 During the [*991] Yom Kippur War in 1973, Egypt closed the strait as a means of blockading the southern Israeli port of Eilat. n87 The Turkish Straits and Caspian Oil. The term "Turkish Straits" refers to the two narrow straits in northwestern Turkey, the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, which connect the Sea of Marmara with the Black Sea on one side and the Aegean arm of the Mediterranean Sea on the other. Turkey and Russia have been locked in a longstanding dispute over passage issues involving the Turkish Straits. n88 The 1936 Montreux Convention puts Turkey in charge of regulating traffic through the straits; n89 yet Turkey has been hard pressed to stop an onslaught of Russian, Ukrainian, and Cypriot tankers, which transport Caspian Sea oil to markets in Western Europe. n90 Because of the very heavy shipping traffic and very challenging geography, there have been many collisions and groundings in the past, creating terrible pollution incidents and death. n91 Thus far, none of these incidents have been attributed to state-on-state-conflict or terrorism; n92 however, the confined waterway is an especially attractive target because of the grave economic and environmental damage that would result from a well-timed and well-placed attack on a loaded tanker. The issues surrounding the straits are also a subset of larger problems associated with the exploitation of Caspian oil, including severe pollution of the Caspian Sea as a result of imprudent extraction techniques, as well as the ever-present potential for conflict among the various claimants to the Caspian's hydrocarbon resources due to an inability of the various Caspian littoral states to agree on their maritime boundaries - and their [*992] legal areas in which to drill. n93 Any one of these problems could become a major flashpoint in the future. China vs. Japan. The Daiyu/Senkaku islands located in the

East China Sea have become an increasingly contentious dispute because both claimants have ,

in the past, used modern military platforms to patrol the areas of their claims in which there are suspected oil and gas deposits in the seabed. n94 In September 2005, for example, China dispatched five warships to disputed waters surrounding its oil and gas platforms, which were spotted by a Japanese maritime patrol aircraft. n95 There have been other similar military-to-military encounters. n96 Given the fact that both countries have modern armed forces and are comparatively energy starved, it is not difficult to envision serious conflict erupting over these disputed areas. The Arctic Super Highway. Traditionalists would probably not include the Arctic as a security chokepoint. The oil connection is reasonably well known: "22 percent of the world's undiscovered energy reserves are projected to be in the region (including 13 percent of the world's petroleum and 30 percent of natural gas)." n97 However, given the very small margins that transporters earn transporting oil from point A to B, n98 shipping companies are always in search of shorter routes to transport oil to market. As the thawing of the Arctic Ocean continues as a result of climate change, n99 this may create new shipping routes that transporters of [*993] oil and other goods will use to maximize their profits and minimize their transit times. As supplies of readily exploitable crude oil are reduced, the probability increases that some of this trade will result from exploitation activities in the land and littoral areas adjacent to the Arctic Sea. This development is concerning for a number of reasons: (1) the area is very remote and could provide a safe haven to pirates seeking to hijack cargoes; (2) the environmental sensitivity of the area, and the concomitant difficulty of mounting a cleanup effort, means that an oil spill in that marine environment will be much more persistent than an oil spill in temperate waters; n100 (3) the Arctic presents unique navigational difficulties due to the lack of good charts, navigational aids, and communications towers, as well as the impacts of extreme cold on the operational effectiveness of systems; n101 (4) the unsettled nature of claims by various countries, including the United States, to the seabed continental shelf resources in the littoral areas off their coastlines creates the potential for military competition and conflict over these claims. n102 The International Maritime Organization ("IMO") is now circulating draft guidelines for ships operating in Arctic areas to promote - but not require - ship hardening against an iceberg strike, better crew training, and environmental protection measures. n103 These guidelines are merely advisory and can only be implemented via the flag states. n104 Also, neither IMO nor any of the UN Law of the Sea Institutions have mandatory jurisdiction over any of the flashpoint issues relating [*994] to competing continental shelf claims in the Arctic, n105 meaning that any disputes will remain unresolved for a long time. The
above is only a selected list of potential flashpoints in which oil is the main culprit . Disputes
between China and six other nations of the Spratly Islands, and other territories in the South China Sea, remain unresolved. n106 The Spratly Islands could become a flashpoint in the future, involving the United States or its allies, because of the proximity of those areas

to the major sea routes to Japan and Korea. n107 The strategic straits of Malacca, Lombok, and Sunda in Southeast Asia are absolutely essential to the movement of raw materials to Japan, Korea, and China. n108 Because of Lombok's depth and strategic location, it is a major transit route for very large crude carriers that move

between the Middle East and Asia. n109 Lombok is an undefended waterway that is only eighteen kilometers in width at its southern opening, making it an attractive chokepoint for hijacking or eco-terrorism in which the waters of the environmentally sensitive Indonesian archipelago would be held hostage.

Global Econ I/L EXT

Collapses the economy Shirk 11
David, director of the Trans-Border Institute and assistant professor of political science at the University of San Diego. He conducts research on Mexican politics, U.S.-Mexico relations, and law enforcement and security along the U.S.-Mexican border. Dr. Shirk received his PhD in political science at the University of California, San Diego, and was a fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies from 1998 t fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC. He is currently the principal investigator for the Justice in Mexico project, March, CFR, The Drug War in Mexico, Google Scholar Second, economically, Mexico is an important market for the United States. As a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), it is one of only seventeen states with which the United States has a free trade pact, outside of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). The United States has placed nearly $100 billion of foreign direct investment in Mexico. Mexico is also the United States thirdlargest trade partner, the third-largest source of U.S. imports, and the second-largest exporter of U.S. goods and serviceswith potential for further market growth as the country develops. Trade with Mexico benefits the U.S. economy, and the market collapse that would likely accompany a deteriorated security situation could hamper American economic recovery.

Heg Collapse I/L XTN

Mexican state collapse would collapse U.S. hegemony. Haddick 8
Rober Haddick, University of Illinois, managing editor of the Small Wars Journal. Now that would change everything. December 21, 2008. Westhawk Blog. http://westhawk.blogspot.com/2008/12/now-that-would-change-everything.html On November 25th, United States Joint Forces Command released to the public The Joint Operating Environment, the commands historically informed, forward-looking effort to discern most accurately the challenges we will face at the operational level of war, and to determine their inherent implications. The report discusses demographic, economic, environmental, technological, and regional trends and their implications for military planning. USJFCOM insists that the report is neither a forecast of the future, nor a statement of official U.S. government policy. But in order to be the slightest bit useful, the report would have to be a little provocative. Thus, on page 35 we get to a section titled Weak and Failing states from which I extract this excerpt: There is one dynamic in the literature of weak and failing states that has received relatively little attention, namely the
phenomenon of rapid collapse. For the most part, weak and failing states represent chronic, long-term problems that allow for management over sustained periods. The collapse of a

state usually comes as a surprise, has a rapid onset, and poses acute problems. The collapse of Yugoslavia into a chaotic tangle of warring nationalities in 1990 suggests how suddenly and catastrophically state collapse can happen - in this case, a state which had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics at Sarajevo, and which then quickly became the epicenter of the ensuing civil war. In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. Some forms of collapse in Pakistan would carry with it the likelihood of a sustained violent and bloody civil and sectarian war, an even bigger haven for violent extremists, and the question of what would happen to its nuclear weapons. That perfect storm of uncertainty alone might require the engagement of U.S. and coalition forces into a situation of immense complexity and danger with no guarantee they could gain control of the weapons and with the real possibility that a nuclear weapon might be used. The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its
politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by the Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone. Yes, the rapid collapse of Mexico would change everything with respect to the global security environment. Such a collapse would have enormous humanitarian, constitutional, economic, cultural, and security implications for the U.S. It would seem the U.S. federal government, indeed American society at large, would have little ability to focus serious attention on much else in the world. The hypothetical collapse of Pakistan is a

scenario that has already been well discussed. In the worst case, the U.S. would be able to isolate itself from most effects emanating from south Asia. However, there would be no running from a Mexican collapse.

Anti-Americanism Impact Add-on

Mexican Instability causes vast anti-Americanism and tanks Latin American relations Tobin 6 - TAO Emergency Management Consulting
Rick, THE COMING CIVIL WAR IN MEXICO, 4-29, http://www.ricktobin.com/papers/thecomingcivilwarinmexico.pdf In a fast moving State of War in Mexico, the U.S. government would have to declare neutrality and seal its borders immediately. Within days, the President and Congress would take actions that would be condemned by every country in the worldand of course the U.N. The map on the next page shows the 100-mile buffer zone that would be taken by force by the U.S. military. This would become the new no-mans zone. Military exchanges would occur between the U.S. and Mexico along the new boundary. After a number of air losses and ground losses, the Mexican government would withdraw and accept the boundary. Every Mexican citizen that remained there would have to carry dual identification at all times. The entire area would be sealed so that traffic of any kind would be highly restricted and monitored. Martial law would be in place with open shoot-to-kill orders. At the old border, anyone attempting to cross illegally would be shot. The border would be surveilled by the same flying drones now used over Afghanistan and Iraq. They would also be armed with Hellfire missiles. In addition, particularly well-known pathways would be mined and re-mined weekly. In the United States the order would be given to round up all undocumented aliens with Mexican heritage for immediate deportation to the no-mans zone. Those who resisted would be arrested and held in internment camps at abandoned military bases until they could be processed (under the Rex 84 Program and supporting Executive Orders such as 11051 and 11002, etc). A permanent marking would be placed on the hands of those so interned (or a RFID chip). If they were found back in the United States they would face felony imprisonment. An underground railroad would develop to move illegal Mexican aliens to Canada. The U.S. would then demand that if Pemex products were interrupted for even a day, the U.S. would take the oil fields and nationalize them for the U.S. Again, this would raise the threat of intense hostilities, leading to new alliance in the Western Hemisphere. Canada would become a neutral party and no longer support NAFTA or trade with the U.S., including cutting water, electrical and petroleum exports. The Latin American countries might unite as a block and form a powerful alliance with a strong socialist, anti- American focus , led by the triad of Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela. Later, Brazil would join to make the fourth major power. The United States federal government would now face the existence of threats that included unfriendly border neighbors to the north and south, a declining world position, and internal strife with its own citizens, especially those with Mexican heritage or Latin America links .

Leads to global counterbalancing against the US

Suchlicki 97 - Professor @ Miami Jamie, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Scholar A scenario of US differences with Latin America -- which may include repudiation of debt owed to the US, hostile environment for investments, and redirection of trade - will significantly affect Latin America's economic development as well as impact the United States adversely. Even if US business and the US economy could absorb their losses in Latin America, the political consequences for Latin America would likely be such as to exert a

significant effect upon US security interests. The United States is not able to ignore so large a region, which is situated in such close geographic proximity, and particularly one whose

total population is expected to reach more than 600 million by the end of the century. On the other hand, any US retrenchment or retreat from economic involvement in Latin America would generate enormous political and economic instability , intensifying the risk of violence and civil wars. In turn, such developments could easily result in pressures for US political and military intervention and could (and would) increase the cost of US defense requirements. The political influence of the United States is inseparable from its economic relations in Latin America, and any loss of one would undoubtedly result in loss of the other . At present, the United States appears to be concerned with events in Mexico. Violence, drugs, and migration from that country could easily engender a public attitude of uneasiness, fear, anger, or a combination of these. Major changes in US-Latin America
relations might well generate domestic reactions in the United States that could either revive isolationist attitudes on the one hand, or lead to demands for a forceful reassertion of the earlier "big stick" policy (US predominance) in the region, on the other. In either case, such public attitudes would not only have a major impact on domestic politics, but would give rise to important repercussions in US foreign policy as well. US interests in Latin America have been

conditioned by the interrelated benefits which the United States has derived from its relations with the region, by its position of influence there, and by its ability, in the past, to exclude other great powers from challenging that position. With the exception of Cuba (and formerly Nicaragua and Grenada), the United States has benefited greatly from the fact that Latin America, unlike other less-developed regions of the world, has not been subjected to the same competition for influence and control on the part of the great power s. In turn, this circumstance has largely localized disputes and conflicts in the area. The United States doubtless owes much of its security over the past century and a half to this happy circumstance. The United States has a clear interest in preserving political stability in Latin America and, to that end, in directing its political institutions toward stable democratic systems. Quite aside from the general American belief in the efficacy of democratic systems as essential to socio-economic progress and peace, the United States clearly has an
interest in preventing the rise of those political conditions in Latin America that could (a) generate hostility toward the US and its economic and political interests; (b) divide the region into antagonistic groups; (c) give rise to violence, either in the form of civil war or of interstate armed conflict; (d) invite inimical influence or intervention by powers from outside the Hemisphere; and (e) work to the detriment of the US or the Hemisphere as a whole . The fact that adverse changes may take place in an area where the United States has predominated for a long time would not only cast doubt on the ability of the US to maintain its position in its own "backyard" but, in consequence, would also damage the image of US power in the world. Doubts about the viability of US power could cause some states to reexamine their relationship with the United States and encourage others to challenge US policies.

Coop Advantage Updates

Illegal Wildlife Mod

Organized crime leads to illegal wildlife trade
Delaney 9 Joan, 3/18, Wildlife Smuggling Nets Big Bucks For Organized Crime, The Epoch Times, http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/13914/ Humming birds bound and stuffed in cigarette packets, snakes and tortoises inside a hollowed out teddy bear, exotic birds eggs made into necklacesthese are just some of the myriad ways used to smuggle wildlife in a lucrative worldwide trade. Run by organized
crime, the illegal trade in wildlife and animal parts is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars per year, making it the biggest money-maker for organized crime after drugs, according

to Interpol, the international police body. Stingrays and piranhas from South America; star tortoises from India; pygmy slow lorises, a primate, from South Asia; rare albino carpet pythons from Australia; Hawaiian chameleons; endangered sea turtles; West African songbirdsthe list of smuggled species is endless.The animals are stolen from their natural habitat by poachers and spirited out, mostly to developed countries where collectors or those who simply want an unusual gift for their kids birthday can afford the exorbitant prices charged. Some of these rare parrots or deer falcons can fetch up to $100,000, says Michael OSullivan, chairman and CEO of The Humane Society of Canada (HSC). And although many creatures do not survive the trip because they are smuggled in cruel conditions, the trade still proves profitable to organized crime.

Leads to zoonotic diseases Mongabay 8

March, Illegal wildlife trade worth $20B per year, http://news.mongabay.com/2008/0319wildlife_trade.html "Controlling illegal wildlife trade is a key component in the spread of zoonotic diseases," said Dr. William Karesh of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "We commend Congressman Nick Rahall and the other Members of the Natural Resources Committee for this important work in shedding light on this major issue, as well as U.S. State Department Assistant Secretary Claudia McMurray who recently established the Coalition Against Wildlife Trafficking." "In addition to the threat to endangered species, wildlife trafficking poses threats to our nation's security and health by spreading disease. For example, avian influenza, SARS, and Ebola can jump from animals to humans and endanger public health. When wildlife is bought and sold illegally, those diseases can spread farther and faster among humans," said Claudia McMurray, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans, Environment and Science. "One of the frightening aspects of the illegal trade in wildlife is the danger of spreading potentially fatal diseases around the world," added Dr. Elizabeth Bennett of WCS's Hunting and Wildlife Trade Program on the international trafficking of illegal wildlife. "Much of the international wildlife trade is illegal, by-passing health and safety regulations, thereby putting the public at considerable risk of diseases. Thorough review and effective implementation of wildlife and health laws along the trade chain from source to consumer would help to rectify these problems."

Extinction Greger 6

Michael, MD, Director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at The Humane Society of the United States, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching The latest National Academy of Sciences report investigating the rising tide of new diseases spoke of myriad factors creating the microbial equivalent of a perfect storm. However, unlike a major climactic event where various meteorologic forces converge to produce a tempest, it reads, this microbial perfect storm will not subside. There will be no calm after the epidemic; rather the forces combining to create the perfect storm will continue to collide and the storm itself will be a recurring event.1244 And there is no storm like influenza. The dozens of emerging zoonotic disease threats that have characterized this third era of human disease must be put into context. SARS infected thousands of human beings and killed hundreds. Nipah only infected hundreds and killed scores. Strep. suis infected scores and only killed dozens. Influenza infects billions and can kill millions. Influenza, the last great plague of man,1245 is the only known pathogen capable of truly global catastrophe.1246 Unlike other devastating infections like malaria, which is confined equatorially, or HIV, which is only fluid-borne, influenza is considered by the CDCs Keiji Fukuda to be the only pathogen carrying the potential to infect a huge percentage of the worlds population inside the space of a year.1247 Make no mistake about it, Osterholm says. Of all the infectious diseases influenza is the lion king.1248 Because of its extreme mutation rate, influenza is a perpetually emerging disease. Anthony Fauci, the NIHs pandemic planning czar, calls it the mother of all emerging infections.1249 In its 4,500 years infecting humans since the first domestication of wild birds, influenza has always been one of the most contagious pathogens.1250 Only since 1997 has it also emerged as one of the deadliest. If influenza is the king of all emerging infections, H5N1 is the king of kings. H5N1 seems a full order of magnitude more lethal than every known human influenza virus on record, completely off the charts. To reduce the risk of future escalating pandemics, we must trace its origin in greater detail to understand how a monster like H5N1 could be hatched.

Russian Loose Nukes Mod

Organized crime leads to Russian loose nukes Carlson 97
Thomas, Commander of the US Navy, The Threat of Transnational Organized Crime to U.S. National Security: A Policy Analysis Using a Center of Gravity Framework, Global Security, Online In the former Soviet Union, a poor economy, eroded safeguards, rampant corruption, and the international connectivity of Russian organized crime combine to create the potential for the theft and smuggling of nuclear materials. There is evidence that Russian crime syndicates have already attempted to smuggle nuclear materials out of the former Soviet Union. As in most illicit markets, that which is clearly known by the authorities is only the tip of the iceberg. If the U.S. can only interdict a fraction of the illegal narcotics coming into this country, it is reasonable to assume that only a fraction of the nuclear material that can be smuggled out of Russia will be interdicted.[39] In summary, Russian organized crime is a tumor on the democratic reform process and thus a threat to U.S. national security. The criminal influence stunts economic growth that is vital for democratic institutions to flourish. Corruption, violence, and lack of civil/business law deters foreign investment, and the flow of capital out of the country exceeds internal reinvestment for now. The banking industry undermines overall financial stability and is a "black hole" for money laundering worldwide. Societal decay is enhanced by a growing illegal narcotics trade. Democracy and regional stability are at risk in Russia, and organized crime is sapping the ability of the government to reverse the trend. In addition, organized crime has the capability to exploit lax Russian nuclear security and accountability, and thereby smuggle nuclear material abroad.

Top priority Chesney 97

Robert, Loyola of Los Angeles International & Comparative Law Journal, November, LN

The horrible truth is that the threat of nuclear terrorism is real, in light of the potential
existence of a black market in fissile material. Nuclear terrorists might issue demands, but then again, they might not. Their target could be anything: a U.S. military base in a foreign land, a crowded U.S. city, or an empty stretch of desert highway. In one fell swoop, nuclear terrorists

could decapitate the U.S. government or destroy its financial system. The human suffering resulting from a detonation would be beyond calculation, and in the aftermath, the remains of the nation would demand both revenge and protection. Constitutional liberties and values might never recover. Then terrorists strike against societies already
separated by fundamental social fault lines, such as in Northern Ireland or Israel, conventional weapons can exploit those fault lines to achieve significant gains. n1 In societies that lack such pre-existing fundamental divisions, however, conventional weapon attacks do not pose a top priority threat to national security, even though the pain and suffering inflicted can be substantial. The bedrock institutions of the United States will survive despite the destruction of federal offices; the vast majority of people will continue to support the Constitution despite the mass murder of innocent persons. The consequences of terrorists employing weapons of

mass destruction, however, would be several orders of magnitude worse than a conventional weapons attack. Although this threat includes chemical and biological weapons, a nuclear weapon's devastating [*32] potential is in a class by itself. n2 Nuclear terrorism thus poses a unique danger to the United States: through its sheer power to slay, destroy, and terrorize, a nuclear weapon would give terrorists the otherwise-unavailable ability to bring the United States to its knees. Therefore, preventing terrorists from obtaining nuclear weapons should be considered an unparalleled national security priority dominating other policy considerations.

Counterfeit Drugs Mod

Counterfeit drugs are the next step for organized crime lowers risk associated with alternative activities Gen En News 4
Genetic Engineering News, Companies Target Counterfeits, http://www.steelefoundation.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=87&Itemid= 104 "The next big deal for organized crime is counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Its more lucrative with less risk, notes Philip Curlewis, managing director, Asia Pacific, The Steele Foundation, a global risk management firm. In effect it can now be said that the profit margins for the counterfeiters are higher than for illegal drugs, whilst the likelihood of imprisonment or being murdered by another gang are minimal. In addition, to put it into a quantifiable perspective, the counterfeit pharmaceutical business is a multi-billion US Dollar annual industry."

Counterfieting of drugs would lead to extinction. Goldberg in 2

Robert M. Goldberg is director of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Medical Progress. Drug reimportation makes no sense. August 23, 2002. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_chictrib-drug_reimportation.htm If they are available, that is. It is unlikely Canada would drain drugs from its health-care system to subsidize our health maintenance organizations. In fact, there would be no way for Canada, which approves drugs for its 25 million citizens, to ensure the safety of drugs for millions of Americans. Reimportation would create a regulatory meltdown that would compromise the safety of drugs for everyone in North America. And that leads to a more chilling likelihood. Counterfeiters and illegal transshipments of adulterated and stolen drugs from the Third World would possibly fill the gap. Indeed, U.S. Customs Service and Food and Drug Administration officials have warned that the vast majority of pharmaceuticals that enter the U.S. via the mail do so in a manner that violates FDA requirements. Canada could become a gateway for counterfeit drugs. In the last 11 months, the U.S. Customs Service has seized more than 110 million tablets of decongestants that contain the primary ingredient for making methamphetamines, or "speed," as smugglers attempt to bring shipments across the border in everything from furniture to glassware. A New York Times article notes that "an alliance of diverse organized crime groups stretching from Mexico to Iraq to Jordan have found Canada an easy entry point into a growing American market for synthetic drugs." Reimportation would give terrorists a medicinal path to poison Americans via Canada that would make the anthrax scare seem like a teenage prank .

INDEPENDENTLY, COUNTERFEITING LEADS PEOPLE WITH HIV TO UNWITTINGLY TERMINATE COURSES OF TREATMENT, BREEDING NEW MUTANT STRAINS Morris and Stevens in 5
Phillip and Julie, Counterfeit Medicine in Less Developed Countries: Problems and Solutions, International Policy Network of London http://www.fightingdiseases.org/pdf/ipn_counterfeit.pdf Perhaps one of the most worrying implications of the global boom in counterfeit medicines is the acceleration of new, drug resistant strains of viruses, parasites and bacteria. If drugs contain too little of the active ingredient, not all the disease agents are killed and resistant strains are able to multiply and spread. Malaria This is already being observed in the

treatment of malaria. Counterfeiters around the world have cashed in on the massive demand for the latest and most effective antimalarial drug, artemisinin. A field survey conducted in 2004 showed that 53 per cent of artemisinin-based antimalarials in a range of South East Asian countries contained incorrect levels of active ingredient (Dondorp et al, 2004), which implies that swathes of patients are receiving the incorrect dose. The direct consequences are death and serious injury resulting from improper treatment: HIV/AIDS treatment is also under threat from counterfeit medicines. The recent discovery of counterfeit antiretrovirals (stavudinelamivudinenevirapine and lamivudine-zidovudine) in the Congo Ahmad, 2004) raises the prospect that the most advanced drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS could soon be rendered useless. With few new research leads the pipeline, this could have grave implications for the people of sub-Saharan Africa.

RAPID MUTATION INCREASES THE RISK OF AIRBORNE HIV that threatens humanity. Lederberg in 91
Joshua Lederberg, Molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winner in 1958, 1991 In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Disease, p 35-6] Will Aids mutate further ? Already known, a vexing feature of AIDS is its antigenic variability, further complicating the task of developing a vaccine. So we know that HIV is still evolving. Its global spread has meant there is far more HIV on earth today than ever before in history. What are the odds of its learning the tricks of airborne transmission? The short is, No one can be sure. But we could make the same attribution about any virus; alternatively the next influenza or chicken pox may mutate to an unprecedented lethality. As time passes, and HIV seems settled in a certain groove, that is momentary reassurance in itself. However, given its other ugly attributes, it is hard to imagine a worse threat to humanity than an airborne variant of AIDS. No rule of nature contradicts such a possibility; the proliferation of AIDS cases with secondary pneumonia multiplies the odds of such a mutant, as an analogue to the emergence of pneumonic plague.

Counterfeit Impact- Bioterror

Counterfeit drugs lead to bioterrorism and impact outweighs aids and malaria combined ABC 2
Australian Broadcasting Company, Health experts urge global action on fake drugs, http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200209/s685348.htm Experts are warning counterfeit drugs pose a bigger threat to global health than AIDS and malaria combined .They say the dangerous or useless pharmaceuticals are seeping into the world's public health systems.Government, drug industry and regulatory representatives have been meeting at a forum on the issue in Geneva.They say authorities must step up efforts to stem what health officials call a scourge that now endangers the Third World and developed countries alike.Gerry Norris of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said: "Counterfeiters are the lowlife of bio-terrorism."The broad-based group of health experts gathered for the Global Forum on Pharmaceutical Anti-counterfeiting called for such measures as international collaboration, public information campaigns and strengthened health care and customs and excise systems to tackle the problem.Dr Dora Nkem Akunyili of Nigeria's National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control said: "The risk from counterfeit pharmaceuticals is greater than that of HIV/AIDS and malaria put together."

Extinction from bioterror Steinbruner 97

John D. Steinbruner senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and holder of the Sydney Stein, Jr. Chair in International Security. His work has focused on issues of international security policy and related problems of international policies. Foreign Policy, Winter 1997 n109 p85(12) Biological weapons: a plague upon all houses.

Although human pathogens are often lumped with nuclear explosives and lethal chemicals as potential weapons of mass destruction, there is an obvious, fundamentally important difference: Pathogens are alive, weapons are not. Nuclear and chemical weapons do not reproduce themselves and do not independently engage in adaptive behavior; pathogens do both of these things. That deceptively simple observation has immense implications. The use of a manufactured weapon is a singular event. Most of the damage occurs immediately. The aftereffects, whatever they may be, decay rapidly over time and distance in a reasonably predictable manner. Even before a nuclear warhead is detonated, for instance, it is possible to estimate the extent of the subsequent damage and the likely level of radioactive fallout. Such predictability is an essential component for tactical military planning. The use of a pathogen, by contrast, is an extended process whose scope and timing cannot be precisely controlled. For most potential biological agents, the predominant drawback is that they would not act swiftly or decisively enough to be an effective weapon. But for a few pathogens - ones most likely to have a decisive effect and therefore the ones most likely to be contemplated for deliberately hostile use - the risk runs in the other direction. A lethal pathogen that could efficiently spread from one victim to another would be capable of initiating an intensifying cascade of disease that might ultimately threaten the entire world population. The 1918 influenza epidemic demonstrated the potential for a global contagion of this sort but not necessarily its outer limit.

A2: Piracy Defense

Dont trust their impact defense the impact is under-reported and under-estimated Treverton 9
Gregory, Et al, Senior Policy Analyst, an expert in Intelligence US-Foreign Relations Europe Japan Korea, RAND, Film Piracy, Organized Crime and Terrorism, Online This report draws on the first global, in-depth, on-site research that has produced case studies indicating the extent of the connections among organized crime, terrorism, and counterfeiting. In this study, some 2,000 pages of primary documents were analyzed, and interviews were conducted with more than 120 law enforcement and intelligence agents from more than 20 countries. Because of counterfeitings image as a victimless crime and the fact that those who buy counterfeit goods are complicit in the crime, information about counterfeiting is sparse, and information about the involvement of organized crime is sparser still. Because most instances of counterfeiting go unaddressed, there is reason to believe that more-formal data, such as arrests and convic- tions, understate the extent of the crime.

Setting Bilateral Agenda Key

Demonstrating bilateral good faith is critical to the future of the security relationship Wood 13
Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Institute for Scholars, May 8, 2013, Inter-American Dialogues Latin America Advisor "The change in approach from the Pea Nieto government is hardly surprising. It has expressed a clear desire to centralize control on multiple policy issues, and to bring about much more effective coordination between government departments. In the security sphere, there was the concern that the left hand didn't know what the right was doing, which was confusing both the message on security and the implementation of strategy. The reorganization of security policy under the Interior Ministry therefore necessitates the centralization of relations with the United States. What's more, the United States clearly understands this and is working hard to engage with the ministry and with Secretary Osorio Chong. The intense dialogue and multiple bilateral talks ahead of the presidential visit testify to this. The challenge now is to find a bilateral security agenda that both sides are comfortable with . It will clearly change, and we are already talking about a post-Mrida relationship. But there are a number of issues that will appeal to the Mexican government, including continuing with justice reform, police standards and money laundering. Obama's visit was a political statement about the importance of Mexico to the United States, as well as the opportunity to further develop the personal relationship with President Pea Nieto."

Cred Key To Organized Crime

Credible relationship key to steer new approach to solve organized crime Stratfor 13
Stratfor, U.S.-Mexico Cooperation Against Cartels Remains Strong, 5/16/2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/stratfor/2013/05/16/u-s-mexico-cooperation-against-cartelsremains-strong/ Aside from the political struggles, the Mexican government still faces very real challenges on the streets as it attempts to quell violence, reassert control over lawless areas and gain the trust of the public. The holistic plan laid out by the Pena Nieto administration sounds good on paper, but it will still require a great deal of leadership by Pena Nieto and his team to bring Mexico through the challenges it faces. They will obviously need to cooperate with the United States to succeed, but it has become clear that this cooperation will need to be on Mexicos terms and in accordance with the administrations new, holistic approach .

Changing political landscape demands new methods of cooperation ONeil 13

Shannon K. ONeil, Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies Council on Foreign Relations, Refocusing U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation, June 18, 2013 U.S.-Mexico security cooperation, led by the Merida Initiative, is vital and must continue . But Mexico's political landscape has changed under the Enrique Pea Nieto government, and the United States must adjust its strategy and support accordingly. Building on the lessons of the past five years, the United States should work with Mexico to implement the nonmilitary programs envisioned in the current Merida framework, in particular supporting and prioritizing Mexico's ongoing judicial reform, training police officers at the state and local levels, investing in local community and youth-oriented programs, and modernizing the U.S.-Mexico border.

New strategies require a major reset of relations ONeil 13

Shannon K. ONeil, Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies Council on Foreign Relations, Refocusing U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation, June 18, 2013 Some strategic changes are planned. The government has announced it will create a new national gendarmerie, a 40,000 member force. It has also begun the process of centralizing control and command of the security apparatus under the Ministry of the Interior, beginning with folding the autonomous Federal Police back under its wing. These centripetal tendencies also will affect U.S.-Mexico cooperation, requiring joint programs to be channeled through this same Ministry, ending the decentralized engagement between U.S. and Mexican agencies and agents that occurred during the Caldern administration. The Pea Nieto government has also announced it will consolidate the roughly 2,000 local police forces into thirty one state level commandssomething the Caldern administration tried but failed to do.

Bilateral strategies need reorientation to solve organized crime- resetting bilateral credibility is crucial ONeil 13
Shannon K. ONeil, Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies Council on Foreign Relations, Refocusing U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation, June 18, 2013

These announced changes will lead to some shifts in how U.S. law enforcement and other agencies work with Mexico on security issues. Within the United States there are worries that these changes will stifle cooperation, and in particular the flow of informationespecially sensitive intelligencethat has been important in many of the successful operations and takedowns of recent years. But the most recent articulation by the Mexican government should not be seen as the last or permanent word on the future of U.S.-Mexico security cooperation. Instead, it should be considered as part of the ongoing discussion and evolution in the relationship that has happened, that is happening, and that will continue to happen in the coming months and years. The challenge for the United States is to work with the new Mexican administration and legislative branch in ways that are both congruent with their objectives, and that also enable both countries to push past the current limits on security cooperation and implementation. As the consequences of the changes in the operational relationship become clear, there will likely be both the desire and the opportunity to adapt bilateral and operational strategies, and the United States should be prepared to take advantage of these openings to focus and refocus bilateral efforts.

Econ Ties Key to Relations

Economic ties, business facilitiation and border dispute resolution are critical to relations Rozenthal 13
Andrs Rozental, Brookings Institute Senior Fellow for Latin America, What Is the Future of U.S.Mexico Security Cooperation? May 8, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/05/08-us-mexico-security-cooperationrozental Aside from the security agenda, which is still an important element in the relationship, the two presidents indicated that other priorities will characterize the agenda going forward, especially economic ties , business facilitation , border infrastructure and educational exchanges. This is a positive development in my view as it moves the U.S.-Mexico agenda back to the issues that have historically brought our two countries together and deemphasizes the monothematic nature of the relationship over the past six years.

Failed States Mod

Relations are key to prevent Mexico from becoming a failed state Dresser 9
Denise Dresser, LA Times, a contributing writer to Opinion, is a columnist for the newspaper Reforma, Reality check for U.S.-Mexico relations, January 15, 2009, http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/15/opinion/oe-dresser15
On Monday, President-elect Barack Obama and Mexican President Felipe Calderon engaged in a time-honored tradition: At the outset of a new U.S. administration, the American president meets the Mexican head of state before all others. Obama and Calderon got the chance to look into each other's eyes and speak about the importance of U.S.-Mexico relations -- the diplomatic equivalent of new neighbors meeting over a cup of tea. Now it's time to move beyond etiquette and face hard facts. Mexico is becoming a lawless country. More people died here in drug- related violence last year than were killed in Iraq. The government has been infiltrated by the mafias and drug cartels that it has vowed to combat. Although many believe that Obama's greatest foreign policy challenges lie in Afghanistan or Iran or the Middle East, they may in fact be found south of the border. Mexico may not be a failed state yet, but it desperately needs to wage a more effective war against organized crime, and it must have the right kind of American help and incentives to succeed. Over the last decade, the surge in drug trafficking and Calderon's failed efforts to contain it have been symptomatic of what doesn't work in Mexico's dysfunctional democracy. In 2007, violence related to the drug trade resulted in more than 2,000 murders in Mexico, and in 2008, the toll was more than 5,000. Only a few months ago, top-level officials in the Public Security Ministry were arrested and charged with protecting members of Mexico's main drug cartels. Calderon's promises to "clean up the house" have not gone far enough. As George Orwell wrote, "People denounce the war while preserving the type of society that makes it inevitable." The Mexican president, who is seeking a stronger "strategic" relationship with the United States, surely told Obama on Monday that the heightened level of violence was a result of government efficiency in combating drug cartels. In that view, the rise in street "executions" is evidence of a firm hand, not an ineffectual one.

Mexican state failure triggers escalating warsdraws in the US Debusmann 9 senior World Affairs columnist
Bernd, Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state New York Times, January 9 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/world/americas/09iht-letter.1.19217792.html What do Pakistan and Mexico have in common? They figure in the nightmares of U.S. military planners trying to peer into the future and identify the next big threats. The two countries are mentioned in the same breath in a just-published study by the United States Joint Forces Command, whose jobs include providing an annual look into the future to prevent the U.S. military from being caught off guard by unexpected developments. "In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico," says the study - called Joint Operating Environment 2008 - in a chapter on "weak and failing states." Such states, it says, usually pose chronic, long-term problems that can be managed over time. But the little-studied phenomenon of "rapid collapse," according to the study, "usually comes as a surprise, has a rapid onset, and poses acute problems." Think Yugoslavia and its disintegration in 1990 into a chaotic tangle of warring nationalities and bloodshed on a horrific scale. Nuclear-armed Pakistan, where Al Qaeda has established safe havens in the rugged regions bordering Afghanistan, is a regular feature in dire warnings. Thomas Fingar, who retired as the chief U.S. intelligence analyst in December, termed Pakistan "one of the single most challenging places on the planet." This is fairly routine language for Pakistan, but not for Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile, or 3,200-kilometer, border with the United States. Mexico's mention beside Pakistan in a study by an organization as weighty as the Joint Forces Command, which controls almost all conventional forces based in the continental United States, speaks volumes about growing concern over what is happening south of the U.S. border. It added: "Any descent by Mexico into chaos

would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone."

THA Key to Energy Coop/Reform

THA key to energy coop and establishing a framework for future cooperation- spills over to Mexican PEMEX reform Wood 12
Duncan Wood Professor, Instituto Tecnolgico Autnomo de Mxico Senior Adviser, Mexico Institute, Renewable Energy Initiative March 2012 US-Mexico Cross Border Energy Cooperation: a new era in the Gulf of Mexico The Transboundary Agreement is a major step forward for energy relations between the two countries, providing a major boost to Pemex as it tries to improve its reserve position and its production outlook. The prospect of significant oil discoveries in the border region, and the possibility of working alongside the private sector, is intriguing and controversial, to say the least. What is certain is that the Treaty sets a new framework for cooperation between the two countries that will produce new ways of thinking about oil production in Mexico, an issue that will surely be of importance in the looming debate over energy reform.

The THA establishes a precedent that cements future energy cooperation, including between the US and Cuba Wood 12
Duncan Wood Professor, Instituto Tecnolgico Autnomo de Mxico Senior Adviser, Mexico Institute, Renewable Energy Initiative March 2012 US-Mexico Cross Border Energy Cooperation: a new era in the Gulf of Mexico WPR: What is the likely political and economic impact of increased U.S.-Mexico energy cooperation? Wood: The transboundary agreement is an exciting new departure for Pemex and for U.S.Mexico cooperation. First, it gives Pemex access to much-needed oil reserves in the border region that were previously restricted. These reserves are estimated to be upward of 9 billion barrels. Second, it allows Pemex to work directly in partnership with the private sector, foreign firms and particularly IOCs to extract the oil -- arrangements prohibited to date. Third, the agreement sets a precedent for further transboundary talks with Cuba in the eastern section of the gulf, where Mexico again shares potential reserves. For U.S.-Mexico cooperation, the deal is highly significant, less for the oil involved than for the precedent it sets . Rather than rivals, in this area the United States and Mexico are partners in oil exploration and production. The lack of political opposition to the deal within Mexico demonstrates that the traditionally inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric of political forces on the Mexican left has diminished in recent years, as a consensus emerges over the pressing need to reform the oil sector.

Energy sector gains increase US-Mexico relations Taylor 13 (Guy Taylor, The Washington Times, Energy links seen boosting U.S. ties to
Mexico, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/28/energy-links-seen-boosting-usties-mexico/, February 28, 2013)

A senior Obama administration official voiced optimism about the growing economic relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, stressing that energy sector ties between the two nations have enormous potential for progress. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta S. Jacobson told a congressional hearing Thursday that Washingtons overall approach to Latin American ties is as much about seizing opportunities as it is about countering threats. Her remarks during a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs dovetailed with comments this week from a top Mexican official, who expressed optimism that the nations state-run oil monopoly, long managed as a closely held national asset, is on the verge of opening up to billions of dollars in foreign investment. Emilio Lozoya, the newly tapped chief of the monopoly known as Pemex told the Financial Times that he expects Mexican lawmakers to sign off as early as this summer on landmark changes to the sector proposed by recently elected Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. Pemex is already ranked seventh on the list of the worlds most productive oil producers, with sales of more than $100 billion a year. The proposed reforms could pave the way for U.S. oil companies to begin tapping that market and helping it grow. According to Mr. Lozoya, the changes would allow the monopoly to begin working for the first time in more than 50 years with the worlds largest oil companies. Several such companies are based in Texas, just north of the border. The potential for foreign firms to become more deeply involved in Mexicos economic future could signal a significant shift in the narrative of crime and illegal immigration that has dominated relations between the U.S. and its southern neighbor particularly since nearly 60,000 people were killed in drug-related violence in Mexico during recent years.

Gas Advantage Updates

Chemical Industry/Manufacturing Mod

Low natural gas prices are revitalizing chemical and manufacturing industry now Yergin 12
Daniel, vice chairman of IHS, a global market information and analytics company, Daniel Yergin: The Real Stimulus: Low-Cost Natural Gas; The impact of the U.S. energy revolution is only beginning. It is already providing a foundation for a domestic renaissance in manufacturing., 8/22, WSJ online, factiva An unconventional oil and gas revolution is under way in the United States, but its full ramifications are only beginning to be understood. The basic facts are clear enough. Half a decade ago, it was assumed that the U.S. would become a large importer of liquefied natural gas; now the domestic natural gas market is oversupplied, thanks to the ability to produce shale gas through hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies. Shale gas alone is now 10% of the overall U.S. energy supply. And similar technologies to recover so-called tight oil trapped in rock formations are largely responsible for boosting U.S. oil production by 25% since 2008the highest growth in oil output of any country in the world over that time period. So far more than 1.7 million jobs are the result, according to a report titled "America's New Energy Future," released Tuesday by my research firm, IHS. These jobs include people working on rigs in Pennsylvania or North Dakota, manufacturing equipment in Ohio or Illinois, and providing informationtechnology services in California or legal services to royalty owners nationwide. The number of jobs could rise to three million by 2020. The energy revolution will add an estimated $62 billion to federal and state revenues this year. But the energy revolution is having other effects that get less attention. The balance of payments is one. The increase in domestic oil production over the past five years will reduce our oilimport bill this year by about $75 billion. The growth of shale gas will save the U.S. from spending $100 billion a year on imported LNG, which was the likely prospect five years ago. There is also a geopolitical dimension. The increase in U.S. oil production since 2008 is equivalent to almost 80% of what was Iran's export level before the imposition of sanctions on the Tehran regime. Without the additional oil coming from the surge in U.S. oil output, the Iranian oil sanctions could not have worked as well as they have. Domestically, growing natural gas supplies provide a foundation for a manufacturing renaissance , at least for industries for which energy is an important feedstock or where energy costs are significant. Chemical companies have been leaving the U.S. for years in the search for lower-cost countries in which to operate. Now they are planning to invest billions of dollars in new factories in this country because of inexpensive and relatively stable natural gas prices . The price of natural gas, which averaged $2.66 per thousand cubic feet in the first nine months of this year, is less than half of what it was five years ago. This holds out a tantalizing prospect that the U.S. could regain market share among the world's manufacturing exporters. That prospect preoccupies companies around the world, from Europe to China. When I was in China recently I heard much talk about how China's historical advantage in cheap labor (which is becoming less cheap) could in the years ahead be offset by cheap energy in the U.S.

Natural gas prices low and stable nowkey to investment, and ensures sustainability CCES 12

NATURAL GAS IN THE INDUSTRIAL SECTOR, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions is a nonpartisan, and independent organization dedicated to providing credible information, straight answers, and innovative solutions in the effort to address global climate change, May, http://www.c2es.org/publications/natural-gas-industrial-sector Increased availability and low prices of natural gas have significant implications for domestic manufacturing, which has historically been concerned about supply availability and price volatility. Recently, abundant supply and low prices have led to an increase in domestic manufacturing, creating new jobs and economic value. Numerous companies have cited natural gas supply and price in announcing plans to open new facilities in the chemicals, plastics, steel, and other industries in the United States.18 In the past few years, the number of firms disclosing the positive impact of new gas resources for facility power generation and feedstock use to the Securities and Exchange Commission has increased substantially.19 In 2010, exports of basic chemicals and plastics increased 28 percent from the previous year, yielding a trade surplus of $16.4 billion.20 If the expectation that low prices will continue is correct, these economic benefits would be significant over the long term . A study by the American Chemistry Council, for instance, estimates that a 25 percent increase in ethane supplies would yield a $32.8 billion increase in U.S. chemical production.21 Industry, however, needs more than just abundance and low prices to maintain use of natural gas. Price stability is necessary to encourage long- term investments in industry, and increased natural gas supplies also have the potential to stabilize prices.22

Access to an abundance of shale gas is key to the American chemical industrys competitiveness Govoni 12
Steve, Senior Financial Writer; The Shale Revolution, Lord Abbett, 3/22, http://www.lordabbett.com/investor/education/insights/investmentperspectives/414117/ No matter how one thinks about the environmental consequences, shale gas has been a boon to American businesses that had seen their competitive advantage steadily erode over the last several decades. "From a domestic macroeconomic point of view, lower gas prices are a wonderful thing," said Heffernan. "Many, many industries use natural gas or can use natural gas as a means for operating a plant. The premier example is the chemicals industry, which breaks down natural gas into a number of molecules used in many kinds of plastics, which factor in the manufacturing of innumerable consumer and industrial products. Elsewhere in the world, the primary chemical input is naphtha, a petroleum distillate, which is much more expensive." As a result, America's chemicals industry is booming, said Lord Abbett Research Analyst Jonathan Chung. "Abundant supplies of cheap natural gas give the industry such a big cost advantage because whatever it makes can be produced more cheaply and sold around the world," he added. "Chemicals are probably the easiest industry to understand because the demand curve doesn't change that much; it's always upward sloping," Chung explained. "Almost every product has chemicals in it, and if you slash the cost of manufacturing those chemicals [by using much cheaper natural gas], the U.S. chemicals industry benefits disproportionately." How long can that last, though? Much depends on the price of Brent crude oil, the name that is typically attached to petroleum from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. That's because outside the United States, the price of petroleum feedstocks for the chemicals industry is pegged to the price of Brent crude oil,3 which lately has been pushing $115 a barrel. "If oil prices don't

collapse, you are in the early innings of the resurgent chemicals story," said Chung. "Brent prices would have to drop to $60 a barrel to wipe out the benefit of shale gas." In the meantime, oil refineries and chemical fertilizer companies that use large amounts of natural gas in their manufacturing process should continue to benefit, adds Lord Abbett Research Analyst Phil Kaukonen.

Chemical industry solves extinction

Baum 99 Chemical & Engineering News Copyright 1999 MILLENNIUM SPECIAL REPORT December 6, 1999 Volume 77, Number 49 CENEAR 77 49 pp.46-47 Rudy M. Baum C&EN Washington http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/cenear/991206/7749spintro2.html But people are living a lot longer. That is certainly good news for the individuals who are living longer, but it also poses challenges for health care and social services the world over. The 1998 UN report estimates for the first time the number of octogenarians, nonagenarians, and centenarians living today and projected for 2050. The numbers are startling. In 1998, 66 million people were aged 80 or older, about one of every 100 persons. That number is expected to increase sixfold by 2050 to reach 370 million people, or one in every 24 persons. By 2050, more than 2.2 million people will be 100 years old or older! Here is the fundamental challenge we face: The world's growing and aging population must be fed and clothed and housed and transported in ways that do not perpetuate the environmental devastation wrought by the first waves of industrialization of the 19th and 20th centuries. As we increase our output of goods and services, as we increase our consumption of energy, as we meet the imperative of raising the standard of living for the poorest among us, we must learn to carry out our economic activities sustainably. There are optimists out there, C&EN readers among them, who believe that the history of civilization is a long string of technological triumphs of humans over the limits of nature. In this view, the idea of a "carrying capacity" for Eartha limit to the number of humans Earth's resources can supportis a fiction because technological advances will continuously obviate previously perceived limits. This view has historical merit. Dire predictions made in the 1960s about the exhaustion of resources ranging from petroleum to chromium to fresh water by the end of the 1980s or 1990s have proven utterly wrong. While I do not count myself as one of the technological pessimists who see technology as a mixed blessing at best and an unmitigated evil at worst, I do not count myself among the technological optimists either. There are environmental challenges of transcendent complexity that I fear may overcome us and our Earth before technological progress can come to our rescue. Global climate change, the accelerating destruction of terrestrial and oceanic habitats, the catastrophic loss of species across the plant and animal kingdomsthese are problems that are not obviously amenable to straightforward technological solutions. But I know this, too: Science and technology have brought us to where we are, and only science and technology, coupled with innovative social and economic thinking, can take us to where we need to be in the coming millennium. Chemists, chemistry, and the chemical industrywhat we at C&EN call the chemical enterprisewill play central roles in addressing these challenges. The first section of this Special Report is a series called "Millennial Musings" in which a wide variety of representatives from the chemical enterprise share their thoughts about the future of our science and industry. The five essays that follow explore the contributions the chemical enterprise is making right now to ensure that we will successfully meet the challenges of the 21st century. The essays do

not attempt to predict the future. Taken as a whole, they do not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of the efforts of our science and our industry to tackle the challenges I've outlined above. Rather, they paint, in broad brush strokes, a portrait of scientists, engineers, and business managers struggling to make a vital contribution to humanity's future. The first essay, by Senior Editor Marc S. Reisch, is a case study of the chemical industry's ongoing transformation to sustainable production. Although it is not well known to the general public, the chemical industry is at the forefront of corporate efforts to reduce waste from production streams to zero. Industry giants DuPont and Dow Chemical are taking major strides worldwide to manufacture chemicals while minimizing the environmental "footprint" of their facilities. This is an ethic that starts at the top of corporate structure. Indeed, Reisch quotes Dow President and Chief Executive Officer William S. Stavropolous: "We must integrate elements that historically have been seen as at odds with one another: the triple bottom line of sustainabilityeconomic and social and environmental needs." DuPont Chairman and CEO Charles (Chad) O. Holliday envisions a future in which "biological processes use renewable resources as feedstocks, use solar energy to drive growth, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, use lowtemperature and low-pressure processes, and produce waste that is less toxic." But sustainability is more than just a philosophy at these two chemical companies. Reisch describes ongoing Dow and DuPont initiatives that are making sustainability a reality at Dow facilities in Michigan and Germany and at DuPont's massive plant site near Richmond, Va. Another manifestation of the chemical industry's evolution is its embrace of life sciences. Genetic engineering is a revolutionary technology. In the 1970s, research advances fundamentally shifted our perception of DNA. While it had always been clear that deoxyribonucleic acid was a chemical, it was not a chemical that could be manipulated like other chemicalsclipped precisely, altered, stitched back together again into a functioning molecule. Recombinant DNA techniques began the transformation of DNA
into just such a chemical, and the reverberations of that change are likely to be felt well into the next century. Genetic engineering has entered the fabric of modern science and

technology. It is one of the basic tools chemists and biologists use to understand life at the molecular level. It provides new avenues to pharmaceuticals and new approaches to treat disease. It expands enormously agronomists' ability to introduce traits into crops, a capability seized on by numerous chemical companies. There is no doubt that this powerful new tool will play a major role in feeding the world's population in the coming century, but its adoption has hit some bumps in the road. In the second essay, Editor-atLarge Michael Heylin examines how the promise of agricultural biotechnology has gotten tangled up in real public fear of genetic manipulation and corporate control over food. The third essay, by Senior Editor Mairin B. Brennan, looks at chemists embarking on what is perhaps the greatest intellectual quest in the history of sciencehumans' attempt to understand the detailed chemistry of the human brain, and with it, human consciousness. While this quest is, at one level, basic research at its most pure, it also has enormous practical significance. Brennan focuses on one such practical aspect: the effort to understand neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease that predominantly plague older humans and are likely to become increasingly difficult public health problems among an aging population. Science and technology are always two-edged swords. They bestow the power to create and the power to destroy. In addition to its enormous potential for health and agriculture, genetic engineering conceivably could be used to create horrific biological warfare agents. In the fourth essay of this Millennium Special Report, Senior Correspondent Lois R. Ember examines the

challenge of developing methods to counter the threat of such biological weapons. "Science and technology will eventually produce sensors able to detect the presence or release of biological agents, or devices that aid in forecasting, remediating, and ameliorating bioattacks," Ember writes. Finally, Contributing Editor Wil Lepkowski discusses the most mundane, the most marvelous, and the most essential molecule on Earth, H2O. Providing clean water to Earth's population is already difficultand tragically, not always accomplished. Lepkowski looks in depth at the situation in Bangladeshwhere a well-meaning UN program to deliver clean water from wells has poisoned millions with arsenic. Chemists are working to develop better ways to detect arsenic in drinking water at meaningful concentrations and ways to remove it that will work in a poor , developing country. And he explores the evolving water management philosophy, and the science that underpins it, that will be needed to provide adequate water for all its vital uses. In the past two centuries, our science has transformed the world. Chemistry is a wondrous tool
that has allowed us to understand the structure of matter and gives us the ability to manipulate that structure to suit our own purposes. It allows us to dissect the molecules of life to see what makes them, and us, tick. It is providing a glimpse into workings of what may be the most

complex structure in the universe, the human brain, and with it hints about what constitutes consciousness. In the coming decades, we will use chemistry to delve ever deeper into these mysteries and provide for humanity's basic and not-so-basic needs.

Reviving US domestic manufacturing industry key to stop Chinas effort to monopolize manufacturing for its aggressive hegemonic rise and South China Sea conflict Mosher 6
Steven, expert on China, president of the Popular Research Institute, CHINESE INFLUENCE ON U.S. FOREIGN POLICY THROUGH U.S. EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, MULTILATERAL ORGANIZATIONS AND CORPORATE AMERICA, HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 2/14, http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa26076.000/hfa26076_0f.htm The ruthless mercantilism practiced by the CCP is thus a form of economic warfare. China's rulers seek to move as much of the world's manufacturing base to their country as possible, thus increasing the PRC's ''comprehensive national strength'' at the same time that it undermines U.S. national security by hollowing out America's industrial base in general and key defense-related sectors of the economy in particular. China will not lightly abandon this policy, which strengthens China as it weakens the U.S., and is an integral part of China's drive for Hegemony. Many of China's military modernization effortssupersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, stealthy submarines, theater based missiles with terminal guidance systemsare aimed specifically at U.S. forces and bases. By is acquiring weapons designed to exploit U.S. vulnerabilities, the PRC is clearly preparing for a contest with the United States. Beijing is interested in deterring, delaying, or complicating U.S. assistance to Taiwan in the event of an invasion, so as to force a quick capitulation by the democratically elected Taiwan government. But while the near-term focus is Taiwan, many of China's new lethal capabilities are applicable to a wide range of potential operations beyond the Taiwan Strait. As the 2005 Report to Congress of the USCC report notes, ''China is in the midst of an extensive force modernization program aimed at increasing its force projection capabilities and confronting U.S. and allied forces in the region.''(see footnote 20) The rapid growth in China's military power not only threatens Taiwanand by

implication the U.S.but U.S. allies throughout the Asian Pacific region. China possesses regional, even global ambitions, and is building a first-rate military to realize those ambitions. It is naive to view the PRC's military build-up as ''merely'' part of the preparations for an invasion of Taiwan in which American military assets in the AsianPacific will have to be neutralized. China's construction of naval bases in the Indian Ocean, and its aggressive pursuit of territorial claims in the East and South China Seas point to its wider ambitions. Finally, even a cursory reading of China's 2004 Defense White Paper suggests that it views U.S. power and military presence throughout the world with a jaundiced eye, and that it seeks to become, over the mid-term, the dominant power in Asia. This goal necessarily brings it into potential conflict with the U.S. and its allies, chiefly Japan. Additional evidence that China's territorial ambitions go well beyond Taiwan comes from its aggressive pursuit of territorial claims in the East China and South China seas.(see footnote 21) Since the early 1970s, Beijing has claimed the Japanese-controlled Senkaku Islands (or Tiaoyutai in Chinese) and the continental shelf that extends into Japanese territorial waters. China's increasingly aggressive intrusions into Japanese airspace and Japanese territorial waters has raise d eyebrows in Tokyo and Washington. In November 2004, for example, the Japanese navy chased a Han-class nuclear submarine away from the waters off Okinawa. China also orchestrated the removal of U.S. logistics forces from the Central Asian republics, demonstrating that its commitment to fighting terrorism was less important that its desire to reduce U.S. influence and presence in the region.

South china sea conflict on the brink now Perlez 12/8

Chief diplomatic correspondent in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times. She covers China and its foreign policy, particularly relations between the United States and China, and their impact on the Asian region.(Jane, Dispute Flares Over Energy in South China Sea, December 4th, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/world/asia/china-vietnam-and-india-fight-overenergy-exploration-in-south-china-sea.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0&pagewanted=print China and two of its neighbors, Vietnam and India, were locked in a new dispute on Tuesday over energy exploration in the South China Sea, a signal that Beijing plans to continue its hard line in the increasingly contentious waterway. Vietnam accused a Chinese fishing boat of cutting a seismic cable attached to one of its vessels exploring for oil and gas near the Gulf of Tonkin, an act apparently intended to inhibit Vietnam from pursuing energy deposits. Vietnam said Tuesday that in retaliation, it would send out new patrols, which would include the marine police, to guard against increasing encroachment by Chinese fishing boats in the South China Sea. India, which operates several joint ventures with Vietnams national energy company, Petro Vietnam, said it would consider sending navy vessels to protect its interests in the South China Sea. The latest episode followed an announcement by Hainan Province in southern China last week that Chinese vessels would board and search ships in contested areas of the waterway, which includes vital shipping lanes through which more than a third of global trade moves. The new tensions among China, Vietnam and India illustrate in stark terms the competition in the South China Sea for what are believed to be sizable deposits of oil and gas. Some energy experts in China see the sea as an important new energy frontier close to home that could make China less dependent on its huge oil imports from the Middle East. On Monday, Chinas National Energy Administration named the South China Sea as the main offshore site for natural gas production. Within

two years, China aims to produce 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas from fields in the sea, a significant increase from the 20 billion cubic meters produced so far, the agency said. Earlier this year, Chinas third-largest energy company, the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation, began drilling with a rig in deep water in nondisputed waters off the southern coast of China. The escalation in the South China Sea comes less than a month after Xi Jinping took office as Chinas leader. Mr. Xi appears to have taken a particular interest in the South China Sea and the serious dispute between China and Japan over the islands known as Diaoyu in China and as Senkaku in Japan. Whether any of Chinas most recent actions in the South China Sea were associated with Mr. Xi was not clear. But Mr. Xi does lead a small group of policy makers clustered in the Maritime Rights Office, which serves to coordinate agencies within China, according to Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Peking University, and other Chinese experts. The unit is part of the office of the Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group, Mr. Zhu said. The leading small group, now headed by Mr. Xi, is widely believed to be Chinas central policy-making group. Chinas Foreign Ministry reiterated on Tuesday that China opposed oil and gas development by other countries in disputed waters of the sea. China maintains that it has undisputed sovereignty over the South China Sea, and that only China is allowed to develop the energy resources. We hope that concerned countries respect Chinas position and rights, said the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei. Vietnam, which has long been wary of China but enjoys a relationship through its governing Communist Party, summoned the Chinese ambassador on Monday to protest the cutting of the seismic cable, the Vietnamese news media reported. A Web site run by Petro Vietnam, the oil company, reported that the companys exploration vessel Binh Minh 02 had its seismic cable severed by a Chinese fishing vessel on Friday. In May 2011, the Vietnamese authorities said a similar cable of the Binh Minh 02 was cut by three Chinese surveillance ships, resulting in weeks of antiChina protests in Hanoi. In its decree on the new patrols, Vietnam said that civilian ships, supported by the marine police and a border force, would be deployed starting next month to stop foreign vessels that violate fishing laws in waters claimed by Vietnam. A senior official of Petro Vietnam, Pham Viet Dung, was quoted in the Vietnamese news media as saying that large numbers of Chinese fishing boats, many of them substantial vessels, had recently entered waters claimed by Vietnam. The fishing vessels interfered with the operations of the oil company, he said. India, whose state-run oil company, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, has a 45 percent interest in exploration with Petro Vietnam, also reacted strongly. The head of the Indian Navy, Adm. D. K. Joshi, said that India was prepared to send navy vessels to protect its interests in the sea. Now, are we preparing for it? Are we having exercises of that nature? The short answer is yes, Admiral Joshi told reporters in India.

Extinction Wittner 11
Professor of History @ State University of New York-Albany. *Lawrence S. Wittner, Is a Nuclear War with China Possible?, Huntington News, Monday, November 28, 2011 - 18:37 pg. http://www.huntingtonnews.net/14446] While nuclear weapons exist, there remains a danger that they will be used. After all, for centuries national conflicts have led to wars, with nations employing their deadliest weapons. The current deterioration of U.S. relations with China might end up providing us with yet another example of this phenomenon. The gathering tension

between the United States and China is clear enough. Disturbed by Chinas growing economic and military strength, the U.S. government recently challenged Chinas claims in the South China Sea, increased the U.S. military presence in Australia, and deepened U.S. military ties with other nations in the Pacific region. According to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States was asserting our own position as a Pacific power. But need this lead to nuclear war? Not necessarily. And yet, there are signs that it could. After all, both the United States and China possess large numbers of nuclear weapons. The U.S. government threatened to attack China with nuclear weapons during the Korean War and, later, during the conflict over the future of Chinas offshore islands, Quemoy and Matsu. In the midst of the latter confrontation, President Dwight Eisenhower declared publicly, and chillingly, that U.S. nuclear weapons would be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else. Of course, China didnt have nuclear weapons then. Now that it does, perhaps the behavior of national leaders will be more temperate. But the loose nuclear threats of U.S. and Soviet government officials during the Cold War, when both nations had vast nuclear arsenals, should convince us that, even as the military ante is raised, nuclear saber-rattling persists. Some pundits argue that nuclear weapons prevent wars between nuclear-armed nations; and, admittedly, there havent been very manyat least not yet. But the Kargil War of 1999, between nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed Pakistan, should convince us that such wars can occur. Indeed, in that case, the conflict almost slipped into a nuclear war. Pakistans foreign secretary threatened that, if the war escalated, his country felt free to use any weapon in its arsenal. During the conflict, Pakistan did move nuclear weapons toward its border, while India, it is claimed, readied its own nuclear missiles for an attack on Pakistan. At the least, though, dont nuclear weapons deter a nuclear attack? Do they? Obviously, NATO leaders didnt feel deterred, for, throughout the Cold War, NATOs strategy was to respond to a Soviet conventional military attack on Western Europe by launching a Western nuclear attack on the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Furthermore, if U.S. government officials really believed that nuclear deterrence worked, they would not have resorted to championing Star Wars and its modern variant, national missile defense. Why are these vastly expensiveand probably unworkablemilitary defense systems needed if other nuclear powers are deterred from attacking by U.S. nuclear might? Of course, the bottom line for those Americans convinced that nuclear weapons safeguard them from a Chinese nuclear attack might be that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is far greater than its Chinese counterpart. Today, it is estimated that the U.S. government possesses over five thousand nuclear warheads, while the Chinese government has a total inventory of roughly three hundred. Moreover, only about forty of these Chinese nuclear weapons can reach the United States. Surely the United States would win any nuclear war with China. But what would that victory entail? A nuclear attack by China would immediately slaughter at least 10 million Americans in a great storm of blast and fire, while leaving many more dying horribly of sickness and radiation poisoning. The Chinese death toll in a nuclear war would be far higher. Both nations would be reduced to smoldering, radioactive wastelands. Also, radioactive debris sent aloft by the nuclear explosions would blot out the sun and bring on a nuclear winter around the globedestroying agriculture, [and] creating worldwide famine, and generating chaos and destruction. Moreover, in another decade the extent of this catastrophe would be far worse. The Chinese government is currently expanding its nuclear arsenal, and by the year 2020 it is expected to more than double its number of nuclear weapons that can hit the United States. The U.S. government, in turn, has plans to spend hundreds

of billions of dollars modernizing its nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities over the next decade. To avert the enormous disaster of a U.S.-China nuclear war, there are two obvious actions that can be taken. The first is to get rid of nuclear weapons, as the nuclear powers have agreed to do but thus far have resisted doing. The second, conducted while the nuclear disarmament process is occurring, is to improve U.S.-China relations. If the American and Chinese people are interested in ensuring their survival and that of the world, they should be working to encourage these policies.

Chemical Industry/Manufacturing Internals

*Natural gas prices low and stable nowkey to investment CCES 12
NATURAL GAS IN THE INDUSTRIAL SECTOR, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions is a nonpartisan, and independent organization dedicated to providing credible information, straight answers, and innovative solutions in the effort to address global climate change, May, http://www.c2es.org/publications/natural-gas-industrial-sector Increased availability and low prices of natural gas have significant implications for domestic manufacturing, which has historically been concerned about supply availability and price volatility. Recently, abundant supply and low prices have led to an increase in domestic manufacturing, creating new jobs and economic value. Numerous companies have cited natural gas supply and price in announcing plans to open new facilities in the chemicals, plastics, steel, and other industries in the United States.18 In the past few years, the number of firms disclosing the positive impact of new gas resources for facility power generation and feedstock use to the Securities and Exchange Commission has increased substantially.19 In 2010, exports of basic chemicals and plastics increased 28 percent from the previous year, yielding a trade surplus of $16.4 billion.20 If the expectation that low prices will continue is correct, these economic benefits would be significant over the long term. A study by the American Chemistry Council, for instance, estimates that a 25 percent increase in ethane supplies would yield a $32.8 billion increase in U.S. chemical production.21 Industry, however, needs more than just abundance and low prices to maintain use of natural gas. Price stability is necessary to encourage long- term investments in industry, and increased natural gas supplies also have the potential to stabilize prices.22

Low prices key to manufacturing and chemical industryprojections based on future production levels PWC 11
PWC's Industrial Products (IP) practice provides financial, operational, and strategic services to global organizations, "Shale Gas - A Renaissance in US Manufacturing?", 12/11, www.pwc.com/en_US/us/industrial-products/assets/pwc-shale-gas-us-manufacturingrenaissance.pdf The economic environment remains difficult for many US manufacturers, with soft demand and margin pressures making it harder to grow their domestic workforces. In this analysis, we present our point of view on how shale gas resources can help the sector address these challenges and create more jobs in the United States. During the last couple of years, increased commercialization of alternative energy has ushered in mounting debate on the impact or lack of impact that the deployment of new energy sources has on US job creation. Shale gas is one such alternative energy source that has drawn momentous investment and discussion as the country pursues a cleaner and more sustainable energy mix. Indeed, the shale gas industry has captured national attention, with even the names of reserves Marcellus, Utica, Bakken, Barnett, and Eagle Ford recognizable as national assets by even the casual observer And for good reason. The amount of shale gas in these reserves and others potentially makes the United States one of the top producers of shale gas in the world. While there has been a sharp focus cast upon shale gas both on its potential promise and possible drawbacks as a tenable

energy source, there has been less focus on how shale gas impacts other industries. This led PsC to ask a simple but important question: What could a growing shale gas industry mean for manufacturing job creation in the United States going forward? Potential opportunities A PwC analysis finds that full-scale and robust shale gas development through 2025 would likely have a number of knock-on effects for other industries, particularly the manufacturing and chemical sectors. Given a scenario calling for high recovery of shale gas and low prices of natural gas, the US manufacturing sector and the broader US economy could stand to benefit in the following ways: Energy affordability Lower feedstock and energy costs could help US manufacturers reduce natural gas expenses by as much as $11.6 billion annually through 2025. Demand growth In 2011, 17 chemical, metal, and industrial manufacturers commented in SBC filings that shale gas developments drove demand for their products, compared to none in 2008. More jobs US manufacturing companies could employ approximately one million more workers by 2025 due to benefits from affordable energy and demand for products used to extract the gas. This report demonstrates how shale gas can lead to each of these opportunities, based upon our analysis of trends in, and forecasts of, the domestic economy, manufacturing, and employment. An increase in domestic investment With shale gas resources more abundant than previously thought, US manufacturers can look forward to multiple new opportunities and a significant uptick in employment in the sector. Chemicals and metals companies are expected to gain the greatest benefit over the next several years. Chemicals companies can acquire affordable feedstock, meriting greater capital expenditures in the United States. For metals companies and some industrial manufacturers, opportunities abound to sell the equipment required for more robust drilling activity. Many companies have already announced new investment plans geared to the development of shale gas. Our research on recent capex plans shows an increase in domestic investment going to support incremental gas production, along with more explicit communication to investors about shale-related growth opportunities. An underappreciated part of the shale gas story is the substantial cost benefit to manufacturers, based on estimates of future natural gas prices as more shale gas is recovered. , Historically, there has been an indirect relationship between the level of energy prices, such as those for natural gas, and the level of domestic manufacturing employment, as manufacturers consume approximately one-third of all the energy produced in the United States. Consequentially, this relatively abundant domestic energy source has the potential to drive an uptick in US manufacturing over the long term and create new jobs in the sector.

LA Influence Add-On

2AC Econ Leadership Version

Economic leadership is on the decline now InterAmerican Dialogue 12 (The Inter-American Dialogue is the leading U.S. center for
policy analysis, exchange, and communication on issues in Western Hemisphere affairs, Remaking The Relationship The United States And Latin America, http://www.thedialogue.org/PublicationFiles/IAD2012PolicyReportFINAL.pdf, April 2012) US economic preeminence in Latin America has, however, waned in recent years . Just a decade ago, 55 percent of the regions imports originated in the United States . Today, the United States supplies less than one-third of Latin Americas imports . China and Europe have made huge inroads . Chinas share of trade in Brazil, Chile, and Peru has surpassed that of the United States; it is a close second in Argentina and Colombia . Furthermore, Latin American nations now trade much more among themselves . Argentina, for example, may soon replace the United States as Brazils second largest trad - ing partner, just behind China . Still, these changes must be put in perspective . Even as the US share of the Latin American market has diminished, its exports to the region have been rising at an impressive pace . They have more than doubled since 2000, grow - ing an average of nearly 9 percent a year, 2 percent higher than US exports worldwide . US trade should expand even faster in the coming period as Latin Americas growth continues to be strong . But the United States will have to work harder and harder to compete for the regions markets and resources . While Latin America has been diversifying its international economic ties, the regions expanding economies have become more critical to US economic growth and stability . Today the United States exports more to Latin America than it does to Europe; twice as much to Mexico than it does to China; and more to Chile and Colombia than it does to Russia . Even a cursory examination of the numbers points to how much the United States depends on the region for oil and minerals . Latin America accounts for a third of US oil imports . Mexico is the secondbiggest supplier after Canada . Venezuela, Brazil, and Colombia sit among the top dozen, and imports from Brazil are poised to rise sharply with its recent offshore dis - coveries . Within a decade, Brazil and Mexico may be two of the three largest suppliers of oil to the United States .

Sustained United States engagement is key to Latin American nations- economic engagement spills over InterAmerican Dialogue 12 (The Inter-American Dialogue is the leading U.S. center for
policy analysis, exchange, and communication on issues in Western Hemisphere affairs, Remaking The Relationship The United States And Latin America, http://www.thedialogue.org/PublicationFiles/IAD2012PolicyReportFINAL.pdf, April 2012) economics/ energy Expanded trade, investment, and energy cooperation offer the greatest promise for robust US-Latin American relations . Independent of government policies, these areas have seen tremendous growth and development, driven chiefly by the private sector . The US government needs to better appreciate the rising importance of Latin America with its expanding markets for US exports, burgeoning opportunities for US investments,

enormous reserves of energy and minerals, and continuing supply of needed laborfor the longer term performance of the US economy . With Brazil and many other Latin American economies thriving and showing promise for sustained rapid growth and rising incomes, the search for economic opportunities has become the main force shaping relationships in the hemisphere . Intensive economic engagement by the United States may be the best foundation for wider partnerships across many issues as well as the best way to energize currently listless US relations with the region . What Latin Americas largely middle and upper middle income countries and their increasingly middle class populationsmost want and need from the United States is access to its $16-trillion-a-year economy, which is more than three times the regions economies combined . Most Latin American nations experienced quicker recovery from the financial crisis than did the United States, and they are growing at a faster pace . Nonetheless, they depend on US capital for investment, US markets for their exports, and US technology and managerial innovation to lift productivity . They also rely on the steady remittances from their citizens in the United States . The United States currently buys about 40 percent of Latin Americas exports and an even higher percentage of its manufactured products . It remains the first or second commercial partner for nearly every country in the region . And it provides nearly 40 percent of foreign investment and upwards of 90 percent of the $60 billion or so in remittance income that goes to Latin America .

And US economic leadership key to global stability

Gelb 10 (GDP Now Matters More Than Force Leslie H. Gelb is President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was a senior official in the U.S. Defense Department from 1967 to 1969 and in the State Department from 1977 to 1979, and he was a Columnist and Editor at The New York Times from 1981 to 1993. Published 2010 by Foreign Affairs in Washington DC, USA . Written in English. Table of Contents A U.S. Foreign Policy for the Age of Economic Power Today, the United States continues to be the world's power balancer of choice . It is the only regional balancer against China in Asia, Russia in eastern Europe , and Iran in the Middle East . Although Americans rarely think about this role and foreign leaders often deny it for internal political reasons, the fact is that Americans and non-Americans alike require these services. Even Russian leaders today look to Washington to check China. And Chinese leaders surely realize that they need the U.S. Navy and Air Force to guard the world's sea and trading lanes. Washington should not be embarrassed to remind others of the costs and risks of the United States' security role when it comes to economic transactions. That applies, for example, to Afghan and Iraqi decisions about contracts for their natural resources, and to Beijing on many counts . U.S. forces maintain a stable world order that decidedly benefits China's economic growth, and to date, Beijing has been getting a free ride. A NEW APPROACH In this environment, the first-tier foreign policy goals of the United States should be a strong economy and the ability to deploy effective counters to threats at the lowest possible cost. Second-tier goals, which are always more controversial, include retaining the military power to remain the world's power balancer, promoting freer trade, maintaining technological advantages (including cyberwarfare capabilities), reducing risks from various environmental and health challenges, developing alternative energy supplies, and advancing U.S. values such as democracy and human rights. Wherever possible, second-tier goals should reinforce first-tier ones: for example, it makes sense to err on the side of freer trade to help boost the economy

and to invest in greater energy independence to reduce dependence on the tumultuous Middle East. But no overall approach should dictate how to pursue these goals in each and every situation. Specific applications depend on, among other things, the culture and politics of the target countries. An overarching vision helps leaders consider how to use their power to achieve their goals. This is what gives policy direction, purpose, and thrust--and this is what is often missing from U.S. policy. The organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy should be to use power to solve common problems. The good old days of being able to command others by making military or economic threats are largely gone. Even the weakest nations can resist the strongest ones or drive up the costs for submission. Now, U.S. power derives mainly from others' knowing that they cannot solve their problems without the United States and that they will have to heed U.S. interests to achieve common goals. Power by services rendered has largely replaced power by command. No matter the decline in U.S. power, most nations do not doubt that the United States is the indispensable leader in solving major international problems. This problem-solving capacity creates opportunities for U.S. leadership in everything from trade talks to militaryconflict resolution to international agreements on global warming. Only Washington can help the nations bordering the South China Sea forge a formula for sharing the region's resources. Only Washington has a chance of pushing the Israelis and the Palestinians toward peace. Only Washington can bargain to increase the low value of a Chinese currency exchange . rate that disadvantages almost every nation's trade with China. But it is clear to Americans and nonAmericans alike that Washington lacks the power to solve or manage difficult problems alone; the indispensable leader must work with indispensable partners. To attract the necessary partners, Washington must do the very thing that habitually afflicts U.S. leaders with political hives: compromise. This does not mean multilateralism for its own sake, nor does it mean abandoning vital national interests. The Obama administration has been criticized for softening UN economic sanctions against Iran in order to please China and Russia. Had the United States not compromised, however, it would have faced vetoes and enacted no new sanctions at all. U.S. presidents are often in a strong position to bargain while preserving essential U.S. interests, but they have to do a better job of selling such unavoidable compromises to the U.S. public. U.S. policymakers must also be patient. The weakest of nations today can resist and delay. Pressing prematurely for decisions--an unfortunate hallmark of U.S. style--results in failure, the prime enemy of power. Success breeds power, and failure breeds weakness. Even when various domestic constituencies shout for quick action, Washington's leaders must learn to buy time in order to allow for U.S. power--and the power of U.S.-led coalitions--to take effect abroad. Patience is especially valuable in the economic arena, where there are far more players than in the military and diplomatic realms. To corral all these players takes time. Military power can work quickly, like a storm; economic power grabs slowly, like the tide. It needs time to erode the shoreline, but it surely does nibble away. To be sure, U.S. presidents need to preserve the United States' core role as the world's military and diplomatic balancer--for its own sake; and because it strengthens U.S. interests in economic transactions. But economics has to be the main driver for current policy, as nations calculate power more in terms of GDP than military might. U.S. GDP will be the lure and the whip in the international affairs of the twenty-first century. U.S. interests abroad cannot be adequately protected or advanced without an economic reawakening at home.

US Trade leadership is critical to multilateral trade which solves all global problems Panitchpakdi 4 (Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade
and Development, 2/26/2004, American Leadership and the World Trade Organization, p. http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/spsp_e/spsp22_e.htm The second point is that strengthening the world trading system is essential to America's wider global objectives. Fighting terrorism, reducing poverty, improving health, integrating China and other countries in the global economy all of these issues are linked, in one way or another, to world trade. This is not to say that trade is the answer to all America's economic concerns; only that meaningful solutions are inconceivable without it. The world trading system is the linchpin of today's global order underpinning its security as well as its prosperity. A successful WTO is an example of how multilateralism can work. Conversely, if it weakens or fails, much else could fail with it. This is something which the US at the epicentre of a more interdependent world cannot afford to ignore. These priorities must continue to guide US policy as they have done since the Second World War. America has been the main driving force behind eight rounds of multilateral trade negotiations, including the successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round and the creation of the WTO. The US together with the EU was instrumental in launching the latest Doha Round two years ago. Likewise, the recent initiative, spearheaded by Ambassador Zoellick, to re-energize the negotiations and move them towards a successful conclusion is yet another example of how essential the US is to the multilateral process signalling that the US remains committed to further liberalization, that the Round is moving, and that other countries have a tangible reason to get on board. The reality is this: when the US leads the system can move forward; when it withdraws, the system drifts. The fact that US leadership is essential, does not mean it is easy. As WTO rules have expanded, so too has as the complexity of the issues the WTO deals with everything from agriculture and accounting, to tariffs and telecommunication. The WTO is also exerting huge gravitational pull on countries to join and participate actively in the system. The WTO now has 146 Members up from just 23 in 1947 and this could easily rise to 170 or more within a decade. Emerging powers like China, Brazil, and India rightly demand a greater say in an institution in which they have a growing stake. So too do a rising number of voices outside the system as well. More and more people recognize that the WTO matters. More non-state actors businesses, unions, environmentalists, development NGOs want the multilateral system to reflect their causes and concerns. A decade ago, few people had even heard of the GATT. Today the WTO is front page news. A more visible WTO has inevitably become a more politicized WTO. The sound and fury surrounding the WTO's recent Ministerial Meeting in Cancun let alone Seattle underline how challenging managing the WTO can be. But these challenges can be exaggerated. They exist precisely because so many countries have embraced a common vision. Countries the world over have turned to open trade and a rules-based system as the key to their growth and development. They agreed to the Doha Round because they believed their interests lay in freer trade, stronger rules, a more effective WTO. Even in Cancun the great debate was whether the multilateral trading system was moving fast and far enough not whether it should be rolled back. Indeed, it is critically important that we draw the right conclusions from Cancun which are only now becoming clearer. The disappointment was that ministers were unable to reach agreement. The achievement was that they exposed the risks of failure, highlighted the need for North-South collaboration, and after a period of introspection acknowledged the inescapable logic of negotiation. Cancun showed that, if the challenges have increased, it is because the stakes are higher. The bigger challenge to American

leadership comes from inside not outside the United States. In America's current debate about trade, jobs and globalization we have heard a lot about the costs of liberalization. We need to hear more about the opportunities. We need to be reminded of the advantages of America's openness and its trade with the world about the economic growth tied to exports; the inflation-fighting role of imports, the innovative stimulus of global competition. We need to explain that freer trade works precisely because it involves positive change better products, better job opportunities, better ways of doing things, better standards of living. While it is true that change can be threatening for people and societies, it is equally true that the vulnerable are not helped by resisting change by putting up barriers and shutting out competition. They are helped by training, education, new and better opportunities that with the right support policies can flow from a globalized economy. The fact is that for every job in the US threatened by imports there is a growing number of high-paid, high skill jobs created by exports. Exports supported 7 million workers a decade ago; that number is approaching around 12 million today. And these new jobs in aerospace, finance, information technology pay 10 per cent more than the average American wage. We especially need to inject some clarity and facts into the current debate over the outsourcing of services jobs. Over the next decade, the US is projected to create an average of more than 2 million new services jobs a year compared to roughly 200,000 services jobs that will be outsourced. I am well aware that this issue is the source of much anxiety in America today. Many Americans worry about the potential job losses that might arise from foreign competition in services sectors. But its worth remembering that concerns about the impact of foreign competition are not new. Many of the reservations people are expressing today are echoes of what we heard in the 1970s and 1980s. But people at that time didnt fully appreciate the power of American ingenuity. Remarkable advances in technology and productivity laid the foundation for unprecedented job creation in the 1990s and there is no reason to doubt that this country, which has shown time and again such remarkable potential for competing in the global economy, will not soon embark again on such a burst of job-creation. America's openness to service-sector trade combined with the high skills of its workforce will lead to more growth, stronger industries, and a shift towards higher value-added, higher-paying employment. Conversely, closing the door to service trade is a strategy for killing jobs, not saving them. Americans have never run from a challenge and have never been defeatist in the face of strong competition. Part of this challenge is to create the conditions for global growth and job creation here and around the world. I believe Americans realize what is at stake. The process of opening to global trade can be disruptive, but they recognize that the US economy cannot grow and prosper any other way. They recognize the importance of finding global solutions to shared global problems. Besides, what is the alternative to the WTO? Some argue that the world's only superpower need not be tied down by the constraints of the multilateral system. They claim that US sovereignty is compromised by international rules, and that multilateral institutions limit rather than expand US influence. Americans should be deeply sceptical about these claims. Almost none of the trade issues facing the US today are any easier to solve unilaterally, bilaterally or regionally. The reality is probably just the opposite. What sense does it make for example to negotiate e-commerce rules bilaterally? Who would be interested in disciplining agricultural subsidies in a regional agreement but not globally? How can bilateral deals even dozens of them come close to matching the economic impact of agreeing to global free trade among 146 countries? Bilateral and regional deals can sometimes be a complement to the multilateral system, but they can never be a substitute . There is a bigger danger. By treating some countries preferentially, bilateral and regional deals exclude others fragmenting global trade and distorting the world economy. Instead of liberalizing trade and widening

growth they carve it up. Worse, they have a domino effect : bilateral deals inevitably beget more bilateral deals, as countries left outside are forced to seek their own preferential arrangements, or risk further marginalization. This is precisely what we see happening today. There are already over two hundred bilateral and regional agreements in existence, and each month we hear of a new or expanded deal. There is a basic contradiction in the assumption that bilateral approaches serve to strengthen the multilateral, rules-based system. Even when intended to spur free trade, they can ultimately risk undermining it. This is in no one's interest, least of all the United States. America led in the creation of the multilateral system after 1945 precisely to avoid a return to hostile blocs blocs that had done so much to fuel interwar instability and conflict. America's vision, in the words of Cordell Hull, was that enduring peace and the welfare of nations was indissolubly connected with the friendliness, fairness and freedom of world trade. Trade would bind nations together, making another war unthinkable. Non-discriminatory rules would prevent a return to preferential deals and closed alliances. A network of multilateral initiatives and organizations the Marshal Plan, the IMF, the World Bank, and the GATT, now the WTO would provide the institutional bedrock for the international rule of law, not power. Underpinning all this was the idea that freedom free trade, free democracies, the free exchange of ideas was essential to peace and prosperity, a more just world. It is a vision that has emerged pre-eminent a half century later. Trade has expanded twenty-fold since 1950. Millions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa are being lifted out of poverty, and millions more have new hope for the future. All the great powers the US, Europe, Japan, India, China and soon Russia are part of a rules-based multilateral trading system, greatly increasing the chances for world prosperity and peace . There is a growing realization that in our interdependent world sovereignty is constrained, not by multilateral rules, but by the absence of rules.

2AC Resource Wars Version

US-Mexican actions spill over to the region and energy infrastructure key- prevent resource wars Barshefsky et al 8 (Charlene Barshefsky, James T. Hill, and Shannon K. ONeil, Council on
Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/mexico/us-latin-america-relations/p16279, U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality, May 2008) The rise of resource nationalism represents a difficult challenge for both the United States and Latin American countries. One side effect of this has been the decline of high-level multilateral energy forums, further lessening the likelihood that political, financial, environmental, and other impediments will be tackled aggressively. In particular, the termination of the Western Hemisphere energy ministers meetings (held annually between 1999 and 2004 under U.S. leadership and the rubric of the Summit of the Americas process) has left a void. While South American leaders pledged at an April 2007 regional energy summit to initiate a ministerial-level South American Energy Council, the success of this effort is far from assured. Infrastructure deficiencies are another obstacle. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), in order to meet increased energy demands, Latin America will require close to $1.3 trillion in overall investment in the energy sector between 2001 and 2030, the equivalent of 1.5 percent of GDP each 49 year. The sheer size of the deficiency should encourage Latin American governments to adjust regulatory frameworks and provide opportunities for public and private investment from the United States and around the world. The Task Force finds that Latin America remains a relatively stable oil- producing region and potentially an important source of natural gas exports, though state ownership and political turmoil limit international and private sector involvement in some countries, impeding efficiency and growth. Future output will depend on substantial investments in exploration and production, favoring the energy sectors in countries more open to investment, expanded collaboration, and trade. In these nations, in particular Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, the extent of dialogue and collaboration taking place among Mexico , Canada, and the United States should serve as a positive model . Expanding and stabilizing the energy trade across the region would have important benefits to economic development, political stability, and the U.S.-Latin America relationship.

Resource conflict causes prolif and nuclear conflict. Wooldridge 9. (Frosty, free lance writer, once lectured at Cornell University, Humanity
galloping toward its greatest crisis in the 21st century http://www.australia.to/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10042:humanitygalloping-toward-its-greatest-crisis-in-the-21st-century&catid=125:frostywooldridge&Itemid=244 It is clear that most politicians and most citizens do not recognize that returning to more of the same is a recipe for promoting the first collapse of a global civilization. The required changes in energy technology, which would benefit not only the environment but also national security, public health, and the economy, would demand a World War II type mobilization -- and even that might not prevent a global climate disaster. Without transitioning away from use of fossil fuels, humanity will move further into an era of resource wars (remember, Africom has

been added to the Pentagons structure -- and China has noticed), clearly with intent to protect US interests in petroleum reserves. The consequences of more resource wars, many likely triggered over water supplies stressed by climate disruption, are likely to include increased unrest in poor nations, a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, widening inequity within and between nations, and in the worst (and not unlikely) case, a nuclear war ending civilization.

2AC Updates

Framework Argument
Our framework is that the alternative should be judged on the efficacy of its response to existing institutional practices This means that the neg should have to answer the following questions what is the alternative institution/social order that should be put into place? Is that feasible? What would have to be done to create that change and what would be the consequences of those actions? Absent these questions shifts in knowledge production are useless governments obey institutional logics that exist independently of individuals and constrain decisionmaking Wight Professor of IR @ University of Sydney 6
(Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology, pgs. 48-50 One important aspect of this relational ontology is that these relations constitute our identity as social actors. According to this relational model of societies, one is what one is, by virtue of the relations within which one is embedded. A worker is only a worker by virtue of his/her relationship to his/her employer and vice versa. Our social being is constituted by relations and our social acts presuppose them. At any particular moment in time an individual may be implicated in all manner of relations, each exerting its own peculiar causal effects. This lattice-work of relations constitutes the structure of particular societies and endures despite changes in the individuals occupying them . Thus, the relations, the structures, are ontologically distinct from the individuals who enter into them. At a minimum, the social sciences are concerned with two distinct, although mutually interdependent, strata. There is an ontological difference between people and structures: people are not relations, societies are not conscious agents. Any attempt to explain one in terms of the other should be rejected. If there is an ontological difference between society and people, however, we need to elaborate on the relationship between them. Bhaskar argues that we need a system of mediating concepts, encompassing both aspects of the duality of praxis into which active subjects must fit in order to reproduce it: that is, a system of concepts designating the point of contact between human agency and social structures. This is known as a positioned practice system. In many respects, the idea of positioned practice is very similar to Pierre Bourdieus notion of habitus. Bourdieu is primarily concerned with what individuals do in their daily lives. He is keen to refute the idea that social activity can be understood solely in terms of individual decisionmaking , or as determined by surpa-individual objective structures. Bourdieus notion of the habitus can be viewed as a bridge-building exercise across the explanatory gap between two extremes. Importantly, the notion of a habitus can only be understood in relation to the concept of a social field. According to Bourdieu, a social field is a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined. A social field, then, refers to a structured system of social positions occupied by individuals and/or institutions the nature of which defines the situation for their occupants. This is a social field whose form is constituted in terms of the relations which define it as a field of a certain type. A habitus (positioned practices) is a mediating link between individuals subjective worlds and the socio-cultural world into which they are born and which they share with others. The power of the habitus derives from the thoughtlessness of habit and habituation, rather than consciously learned rules. The habitus is imprinted and encoded in a socializing process that

commences during early childhood. It is inculcated more by experience than by explicit teaching. Socially competent performances are produced as a matter of routine, without explicit reference to a body of codified knowledge, and without the actors necessarily knowing what they are doing (in the sense of being able adequately to explain what they are doing). As such, the habitus can be seen as the site of internalization of reality and the externalization of internality. Thus social practices are produced in, and by, the encounter between: (1) the habitus and its dispositions; (2) the constraints and demands of the socio-cultural field to which the habitus is appropriate or within; and (3) the dispositions of the individual agents located within both the socio-cultural field and the habitus. When placed within Bhaskars stratified complex social ontology the model we have is as depicted in Figure 1. The explanation of practices will require all three levels. Society, as field of relations, exists prior to, and is independent of, individual and collective understandings at any particular moment in time; that is, social action requires the conditions for action. Likewise, given that behavior is seemingly recurrent, patterned, ordered, institutionalised, and displays a degree of stability over time, there must be sets of relations and rules that govern it. Contrary to individualist theory, these relations, rules and roles are not dependent upon either knowledge of them by particular individuals, or the existence of actions by particular individuals; that is, their explanation cannot be reduced to consciousness or to the attributes of individuals . These emergent social forms must possess emergent powers. This leads on to arguments for the reality of society based on a causal criterion. Society, as opposed to the individuals that constitute it, is, as Foucault has put it, a complex and independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms of reaction, its regulations as well as its possibility of disturbance. This new reality is societyIt becomes necessary to reflect upon it, upon its specific characteristics, its constants and its variables.

Cede the Political DA

Forcing specific policy analysis is key allows state institutions to be reclaimed and generates debater education necessary to create a left governmentality necessary to create a public sphere Ferguson, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford, 11
(The Uses of Neoliberalism, Antipode, Vol. 41, No. S1, pp 166184) If we are seeking, as this special issue of Antipode aspires to do, to link our critical analyses to the world of grounded political strugglenot only to interpret the world in various ways, but also to change itthen there is much to be said for focusing, as I have here, on mundane, real- world debates around policy and politics, even if doing so inevitably puts us on the compromised and reformist terrain of the possible, rather than the seductive high ground of revolutionary ideals and utopian desires. But I would also insist that there is more at stake in the examples I have discussed here than simply a slightly better way to ameliorate the miseries of the chronically poor, or a technically superior method for relieving the suffering of famine victims. My point in discussing the South African BIG campaign, for instance, is not really to argue for its implementation. There is much in the campaign that is appealing, to be sure. But one can just as easily identify a series of worries that would bring the whole proposal into doubt. Does not, for instance, the decoupling of the question of assistance from the issue of labor, and the associated valorization of the informal, help provide a kind of alibi for the failures of the South African regime to pursue policies that would do more to create jobs? Would not the creation of a basic income benefit tied to national citizenship simply exacerbate the vicious xenophobia that already divides the South African poor, in a context where many of the poorest are not citizens, and would thus not be eligible for the BIG? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is the idea of basic income really capable of commanding the mass support that alone could make it a central pillar of a new approach to distribution? The record to date gives powerful reasons to doubt it. So far, the technocrats dreams of relieving poverty through efficient cash transfers have attracted little support from actual poor people, who seem to find that vision a bit pale and washed out, compared with the vivid (if vague) populist promises of jobs and personalistic social inclusion long offered by the ANC patronage machine, and lately personified by Jacob Zuma (Ferguson forthcoming). My real interest in the policy proposals discussed here, in fact, has little to do with the narrow policy questions to which they seek to provide answers. For what is most significant, for my purposes, is not whether or not these are good policies, but the way that they illustrate a process through which specific governmental devices and modes of reasoning that we have become used to associating with a very particular (and conservative) political agenda (neoliberalism) may be in the process of being peeled away from that agenda, and put to very different uses. Any progressive who takes seriously the challenge I pointed to at the start of this essay, the challenge of developing new progressive arts of government, ought to find this turn of events of considerable interest. As Steven Collier (2005) has recently pointed out, it is important to question the assumption that there is, or must be, a neat or automatic fit between a hegemonic neoliberal political-economic project (however that might be characterized), on the one hand, and specific neoliberal techniques, on the other. Close attention to particular techniques (such as the use of quantitative calculation, free choice, and price driven by supply and demand) in particular settings (in Colliers case, fiscal and budgetary reform in post-Soviet Russia) shows that the relationship between the technical and the political-economic is much more polymorphous and unstable than is assumed in much critical geographical work,

and that neoliberal technical mechanisms are in fact deployed in relation to diverse political projects and social norms (2005:2). As I suggested in referencing the role of statistics and techniques for pooling risk in the creation of social democratic welfare states, social technologies need not have any essential or eternal loyalty to the political formations within which they were first developed. Insurance rationality at the end of the nineteenth century had no essential vocation to provide security and solidarity to the working class; it was turned to that purpose (in some substantial measure) because it was available, in the right place at the right time, to be appropriated for that use. Specific ways of solving or posing governmental problems, specific institutional and intellectual mechanisms, can be combined in an almost infinite variety of ways, to accomplish different social ends. With social, as with any other sort of technology, it is not the machines or the mechanisms that decide what they will be used to do. Foucault (2008:94) concluded his discussion of socialist government- ality by insisting that the answers to the Lefts governmental problems require not yet another search through our sacred texts, but a process of conceptual and institutional innovation. *I+f there is a really socialist governmentality, then it is not hidden within socialism and its texts. It cannot be deduced from them. It must be invented. But invention in the domain of governmental technique is rarely something worked up out of whole cloth. More often, it involves a kind of bricolage (Le vi- Strauss 1966), a piecing together of something new out of scavenged parts originally intended for some other purpose. As we pursue such a process of improvisatory invention, we might begin by making an inventory of the parts available for such tinkering, keeping all the while an open mind about how different mechanisms might be put to work, and what kinds of purposes they might serve. If we can go beyond seeing in neoliberalism an evil essence or an automatic unity, and instead learn to see a field of specific governmental techniques, we may be surprised to find that some of them can be repurposed, and put to work in the service of political projects very different from those usually associated with that word. If so, we may find that the cabinet of governmental arts available to us is a bit less bare than first appeared, and that some rather useful little mechanisms may be nearer to hand than we thought.

Public sphere key to solve extinction multiple structural trends Boggs 97

(CARL BOGGS Professor and Ph.D. Political Science, National University, Los Angeles -- Theory and Society 26: 741-780) The false sense of empowerment that comes with such mesmerizing impulses is accompanied by a loss of public engagement, an erosion of citizenship and a depleted capacity of individuals in large groups to work for social change. As this ideological quagmire worsens, urgent problems that are destroying the fabric of American society will go unsolved -- perhaps even unrecognized -- only to fester more ominously into the future. And such problems (ecological crisis, poverty, urban decay, spread of infectious cannot be understood outside the larger social and global context diseases, technological displacement of workers) of internationalized markets, finance, and communications. Paradoxically, the widespread retreat from politics, often inspired by localist sentiment, comes at a time when agendas that ignore or side-step these global realities will, more than ever, be reduced to impotence. In his commentary on the state of citizenship today, Wolin refers to the increasing sublimation and dilution of politics, as larger numbers of people turn away from public concerns toward private ones. By diluting the life of common involvements, we negate the very idea of politics as a source of public ideals and visions.74 In the meantime, the fate of the world hangs in the balance. The unyielding truth is

that, even as the ethos of anti-politics becomes more compelling and even fashionable in the United States, it is the vagaries of political power that will continue to decide the fate of human societies. This last point demands further elaboration. The shrinkage of politics hardly means that corporate colonization will be less of a reality, that social hierarchies will somehow disappear, or that gigantic state and military structures will lose their hold over people's lives. Far from it: the space abdicated by a broad citizenry, well-informed and ready to participate at many levels, can in fact be filled by authoritarian and reactionary elites -- an already familiar dynamic in many lesser- developed countries. The fragmentation and chaos of a Hobbesian world, not very far removed from the rampant individualism, social Darwinism, and civic violence that have been so much a part of the American landscape, could be the prelude to a powerful Leviathan designed to impose order in the face of disunity and atomized retreat. In this way the eclipse of politics might set the stage for a reassertion of politics in more virulent guise -- or it might help further rationalize the existing power structure. In either case, the state would likely become what Hobbes anticipated: the embodiment of those universal, collective interests that had vanished from civil society.75

Newman DA
Our use of institutions like the state realizes our complicity with power and produces agonism- the alternative is a string of antis that never produce positive change Newman 00,
(Saul, Postdoctoral Fellow @ Macquarie University, Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment, muse) What is the point of this distinction between power and domination? Does this not bring us back to original anarchist position that society and our everyday actions, although oppressed by power, are ontologically separated from it? In other words, why not merely call domination 'power' once again, and revert back to the original, Manichean distinction between social life and power? However the point of this distinction is to show that this essential separation is now impossible. Domination -- oppressive political institutions like the State -- now comes from the same world as power. In other words it disrupts the strict Manichean separation of society and power. Anarchism and indeed radical politics generally, cannot remain in this comfortable illusion that we as political subjects, are somehow not complicit in the very regime that oppresses us. According to the Foucauldian definition of power that I have employed, we are all potentially complicit, through our everyday actions, in relations of domination. Our everyday actions, which inevitably involve power, are unstable and can easily form into relations that dominate us. As political subjects we can never relax and hide behind essentialist identities and Manichean structures -- behind a strict separation from the world of power. Rather we must be constantly on our guard against the possibility of domination. Foucault says: "My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous...If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism."[52] In order to resist domination we must be aware of its risks -- of the possibility that our own actions, even political action ostensibly against domination, can easily give rise to further domination. There is always the possibility, then, of contesting domination, and of minimizing its possibilities and effects. According to Foucault, domination itself is unstable and can give rise to reversals and resistance. Assemblages such as the State are based on unstable power relations that can just as easily turn against the institution they form the basis of. So there is always the possibility of resistance against domination. However resistance can never be in the form of revolution -- a grand dialectical overcoming of power, as the anarchists advocated. To abolish central institutions like the State with one stroke would be to neglect the multiform and diffuse relations of power they are based on, thus allowing new institutions and relations of domination to rise up. It would be to fall into the same reductionist trap as Marxism, and to court domination. Rather, resistance must take the form of what Foucault calls agonism -- an ongoing, strategic contestation with power -based on mutual incitement and provocation -- without any final hope of being free from it.[53] One can, as I have argued, never hope to overcome power completely -because every overcoming is itself the imposition of another regime of power. The best that can be hoped for is a reorganization of power relations -- through struggle and resistance -- in ways that are less oppressive and dominating. Domination can therefore be minimized by acknowledging our inevitable involvement with power, not by attempting to place ourselves impossibly outside the world of power. The classical idea of

revolution as a dialectical overthrowing of power -- the image that has haunted the radical political imaginary -- must be abandoned. We must recognize the fact that power can never be overcome entirely, and we must affirm this by working within this world, renegotiating our position to enhance our possibilities of freedom.

NG Prices Low
Natural gas prices are low- hot weather and speculation Investing.com 7/5
Investing.com, Commodity News Service, Natural gas prices drop as weather models point to moderate temperatures, Jul 05, 20 13, http://www.investing.com/news/commodities-news/natural-gas-prices-drop-as-weather-models-point-to-moderate-temperatures249921

Natural gas prices dropped on Friday after updated weather forecasting models called for moderate temperatures across portions of the eastern half of the U.S. Mild summer temperatures cut into the need for gas-fired electricity to cool homes and businesses, dampening demand for natural gas. In the New York Mercantile Exchange, natural gas futures for delivery in August traded at USD3.583 per million British thermal units, down 2.91%. The commodity hit a session low of USD3.578 and
a high of USD3.681. Weather forecasting services predicted normal temperatures coupled with pockets of below-normal temperatures to move across the Midwest and head east across the northeastern reaches of the country. While most areas in that region will experience near-normal temperatures and some may even seen warming trends, the absence of

hotter-than-normal

temperatures sparked a selloff in natural gas markets.

NG Prices High
Sun spots show natural gas price hikes are inevitable Constable 6/29
SIMON CONSTABLE, Barrons, Sun Spots Down, Gas Prices Up, JUNE 29, 2013, http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748704382404578565463702730052.html SECOND, TRACK THE NATURAL-GAS market, Coxe says. "You can assume because of the low level of sunspot activity that we will have colder winters and shorter growing seasons than expected," he says. Those colder winters will drive up natural-gas prices , as people use more of the fuel to heat their homes and businesses. In 2008, temperatures fell an average of 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit for the year, and natural-gas prices rose 25% in the winter months. That year the sunspot count dropped close to zero. In addition, the shorter growing seasons for crops will also drive up demand for natural gas to make more fertilizer. Natural gas is used to make nitrogen-based plant food, which is vital to growing corn and rice. Typically, a shorter growing season means more fertilizer is required.

Were entering a period of less spots now Constable 6/29

SIMON CONSTABLE, Barrons, Sun Spots Down, Gas Prices Up, JUNE 29, 2013, http://online.barrons.com/article/SB50001424052748704382404578565463702730052.html A decline in the number of spots on the sun could warm up the market for natural gas . These spots, which scientists have observed for centuries, are caused by changes in the magnetic fields on the solar surface, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says. Scientists aren't sure why, but when the number of visible spots declines, temperatures on Earth tend to be lower. This matters for investors because the sun is entering another period of fewer spots. You can profit from this situation if you focus on two things.

AT Russia AT EconOil Not Key

High oil prices are no longer critical to Russias economic growth oil is becoming a secondary driver, revenues are not used productively, high prices increase inflation, and Russia lacks investment for growth. Weaver 11
Courtney Weaver. Oil price: no panacea for Russia. BeyondBrics blog @ The Financial Times. April 6, 2011. http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/04/06/oil-price-no-panacea-for-russiangrowth/ For eight years, the oil price and Russias economic growth fit together like two peas in a pod. But no longer. While Russias economic development ministry has raised its 2011 forecast for the oil price by 30 per cent from $81 to $105 a barrel, it has kept its forecast for gross domestic product growth the same, at 4.2 per cent. What gives? According to economists and analysts, it comes down to pre-election social spending and Russias oil and gas sector becoming a secondary driver of the economy. With the 2012 presidential election on the horizon, the government has been keen to make sure a big chunk of oil revenues go back to social programmes and the electorate. As Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Uralsib, says: Incremental oil revenues are not being used for productive purposes but are being used to fund social programme spending, pension increases, state employee and military salary increases, etc. Some economists such as Yulia Tsepliaeva, chief Russia economist at BNP Paribas, disagree with the economic development ministrys forecast. As Tsepliaeva tells Russian daily Vedomosti, it would be completely impossible for GDP growth to be unaffected by such a substantial rise in the oil price. She predicts there will be an increase in GDP growth from 4.2 per cent to 5 per cent on the back of an oil price. On the other hand thats still a far cry from 2000-2008 when the a 2530 per cent annual rise in the oil price helped the Russian economy grow 7 per cent a year. To reach anywhere near that kind of growth, analysts say Russia needs to attract more foreign direct investment a problem the Kremlin is trying to fix with state-asset sales and efforts to make Russias investment climate more appealing. Says Weafer: Russia is facing a declining rate of economic growth over the next decade unless there is a significant increase in investment spending. A lot of that will have to come from an increase in the currently very low rate of foreign direct investment and via public-private partnership schemes with foreign partners. In other problems for the Kremlin, higher oil prices now appear to be pushing inflation up further. According to the economic development ministry, inflation is now projected to reach 7 7.5 per cent this year, compared to their earlier forecast of 6-7 per cent - a problem the government really needs to be focusing on. According to Uralsib, the Russian budget comfortably balances at $100 per barrel, while last year Prime Minister Vladimir Putin ordered the oil price assumption raised from $58 per barrel to $75 barrel, much to the chagrin of Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, a fiscal hawk, who worries that an increase in social spending will drive up inflation. As Kudrin noted on Tuesday, while social programmes will improve the populations trust in the government in the short-term under high inflation they will lose *the people's+ trust in the years going forward. A higher oil price may be good news for Russia but its certainly not a panacea.

Russian economy diversifying Halligan 8/25

Liam, The Telegraphy of London, "Russia joins the 'global club' as economy slows," 8/25/12 www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/9499282/Russia-joins-the-global-club-aseconomy-slows.html AD 8/26/12 One of the very few pieces of good news in terms of the global economy last week was that Russia became the 156th member of the World Trade Organisation. During the 21 years since the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian economy, despite the trauma of the transition from state-planning, has emerged as the ninth largest on earth, and the sixth largest as measured by purchasing-power parity. Despite what you read in the papers, the Russian economy isnt all about commodities. While oil and gas accounted for 40pc of GDP in 2003, last year the figure was 17pc. Russias service sector, pretty much nonexistent under the state-planning of yesteryear, has grown like Topsy and is now three times bigger than its commodity sector.

AT Russia AT Econ Low Now

Russian economy declining Bloomberg 8/10
Milda Seputyte and Scott Rose "Russias Economy Expanded 4% in Second Quarter, Slowest in Year," 8/10/12 www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-10/russia-s-economy-expanded-4percent-in-second-quarter-slowest-in-year AD 8/26/12 Russias economic expansion eased in the second quarter to the slowest pace in a year as weaker growth in China and Europes debt crisis curbed demand for its commodities exports. Gross domestic product rose 4 percent from a year earlier, the weakest pace since the same quarter of 2011 and down from 4.9 percent in the JanuaryMarch period, the Federal Statistics Service in Moscow said today in an e-mailed statement. That matched the median estimate of 18 economists in a Bloomberg survey, with forecasts ranging from 3.6 percent to 5.6 percent.

Decreased exports inevitableEU slowing down Bloomberg 8/10

Milda Seputyte and Scott Rose "Russias Economy Expanded 4% in Second Quarter, Slowest in Year," 8/10/12 www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-10/russia-s-economy-expanded-4percent-in-second-quarter-slowest-in-year AD 8/26/12 The European Union, which accounts for 49 percent of Russian trade, is battling to stanch a debt crisis thats threatening to trigger another global slowdown. Euro-area GDP will probably drop 0.3 percent this year before rising 1 percent in 2013, the European Commission said May 11. Russias trade surplus narrowed in June to the smallest since November 2010 as exports shrank to $40.8 billion, down from $45.2 billion in May, the central bank said today. Economic growth in China, Russias largest single trade partner, eased to 7.6 percent last quarter, the weakest level in three years, lowering demand for imports such as metals. Chinese export growth fell to 1 percent in July, missing all 30 estimates in a Bloomberg survey, the customs bureau said today in Beijing. Russian industry growth decelerated to 1.9 percent in June from 3.7 percent the previous month, easing more than economists forecast. Fixed-capital investment rose 4.7 percent, down from 7.7 percent.

AT Russia AT EconNo MPX

Claims of Russian economic decline and disintegration are all conspiratorial and hype Clover 9
Charles Clover, Conspiracy theorists thrive on Russia anxiety, 3/8/2009 Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a9596ed4-0c14-11de-b87d0000779fd2ac.html?ftcamp=rss&nclick_check=1 The transition of the [economic] crisis into the political arena has already begun happening, Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the popular Moskovski Komsomolets tabloid. He warned of a remake of the 1991 street protests that helped bring down the Soviet Union, and the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The sources of social protest should be sought in the corridors of power, Mr Pavlovsky wrote. His and other gloomy predictions have left some analysts scratching their heads. Alexei Levinson, at the Levada Centre, a research company, said: Do I see the potential for serious unrest? It is very dangerous to say no, because so many people are saying publicly that this is happening . . . But I simply dont see it. However, it was just as true that the number of people saying they see this potential has shot up, he added. So that must be significant. It shows that the relationship to the authorities is changing. Speculation has surrounded the relationship between president and prime minister since Mr Putin, head of state since 2000, stepped aside for Mr Medvedev last year. It is widely believed that Mr Putin, who was barred from a third consecutive presidential term by the constitution, plans to return to the Kremlin. That the prime ministers political future is openly speculated on is, for some politicians, a watershed in Russias political life. It is very conspiratorial, said Vladimir Milov, former deputy energy minister and a leader of the opposition group Solidarnost.

AT Venezuela AT EconDiversifying Now

Venezuela is diversifying means oil impact is muted Gupta 11
Girish Gupta May 20, 2011 High Oil Prices Boost Venezuela's Economy, but Growth Isn't Sustainable http://www.minyanville.com/businessmarkets/articles/venezuela-ecoomy-hugochavez-imf-oil/5/20/2011/id/34668(Girish Gupta is a British freelance journalist based in Caracas, Venezuela, from where he surveys Latin Americas economic climate) Chvez has been looking to focus on gold production to perhaps reduce the monopoly oil has on his success. He recently said that he wanted to make the precious metal, a highly strategic resource for the country. The means of doing this would be a state-run entity such as Petroleos de Venezuela, the much criticized oil company. CVG Minerven, the countrys state-run gold miner, has asked for $70m to boost production. The mining industry in the country is weak, hit by low investment, strikes and illegal smuggling which allows up to 11 tons of gold to slip through the countrys fingers.

AT Venezuela AT EconCollapse Inevitable

Oil prices would have to be much higher than $100 a barrel to maintain Venezuelas economy Financial Times 7/11
Financial Times July 11, 2012 Venezuela: US fuel import junkie http://blogs.ft.com/beyondbrics/2012/07/11/venezuela-us-fuel-import-junkie/#axzz20KIxMvc2 Despite having the worlds largest oil reserves, Venezuela is now more dependent than ever on refined products (including gasoline, fuel additives and liquefied petroleum gas) from the US, with imports rising to about 40,000 barrels per day in the first four months of the year, compared with 32,000 bpd in 2011. Embarrassing? Perhaps, for those in the know but the truth of the matter is that most Venezuelans arent. As presidential elections approach, the issue probably wont harm Chvezs campaign rhetoric, which repeats over and over again how important it is that he has won back Venezuelas independence from the Yankees. Its jolly expensive though, given that the government buys these refined products at market prices from the US and promptly gives them away at hugely subsidised prices to Venezuelans, who enjoy the cheapest gasoline prices in the world. As Bloomberg recently pointed out, Venezuela pays some $200 per barrel of gasoline imported from the US, and then sells it on to Venezuelans for the equivalent of just $5. One blogger calculates thats costing Venezuela about $2.8bn a year. Add to that the fact that Venezuela has been sending gasoline additive to Iran and more recently diesel to Syria, as well as donating heating oil to low-income US citizens in places like the Bronx, and one is simply left scratching ones head. But its best not to try to make too much sense of Chvezs oil policy, which is governed more by political than economic considerations. Indeed, the reason why Venezuela, which once exported refined products, is now importing them from the US is that it has failed to keep investing in its network of refineries. Instead, it has been spending money earned from oil exports on political projects that have nothing to do with the oil industry. Oil prices will probably need to rise considerably beyond $100 a barrel for Chvez both to keep financing his pet projects and get the national oil industry back into shape.

AT Venezuela AT EconNo Collapse

Chinese loans will keep the economy afloat Financial Times 11
Financial Times September 16, 2011 More Chinese loans for Venezuela http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2011/09/16/more-chinese-loans-4bn-worth-forvenezuela/#axzz20KIxMvc2 But what Venezuela and China may lack in mutual cultural understanding is more than made up for in a burgeoning economic relationship, with a $4bn loan from the Chinese Development Bank confirmed on Thursday adding to existing lending from China of some $32bn. This follows projects announced earlier this month, including three contracts signed with Chinese companies valued at $473m intended to boost steel production. At the same time, Chavez unveiled a project with Chinas Chery Automobile, which aims to have built 5,000 cars in Venezuela by the end of the year, and 18,000 next year. Chavez says they will be buenos, bonitos y baratos (good quality, good looking and cheap). These are just the latest in a long line of development projects the government says there are now 137, ranging from railways, factories, housing and agricultural projects, and even a new satellite financed by loans from China, which are repaid with oil exports. Venezuela says it is currently sending about 400,000 barrels per day to China, but is hoping, rather optimistically, to raise that to 1m bpd by the end of next year. Given state oil company PDVSAs production difficulties, and that it is notoriously poor at meeting its targets, in order to achieve that aim it might have to cut exports elsewhere, with its main client being the US (also possibly Venezuelas only customer that pays in full, although Chavez has insisted that the Chinese do too). What is certain is that Chavez doesnt want to fall out of favour with China, which may be one reason why the terms of the loans seem so unfavourable for Venezuela. Given the magnitude of economic support it has extended to Venezuela enabling its wobbly economy to stay afloat Chinese loans amount to about as much as the rest of Venezuelas outstanding external debt put together its probably not an exaggeration to say that Chavez will owe some thanks to the Chinese if he wins presidential elections due in just over a years time.

AT Venezuela AT StabilityPrices Not Key

High prices dont cause Venezuelan stability Norden 10
Deborah, Sowing Conflict in Venezuela: Political Violence and Economic Policy *PDF+ July 25 Oil wealth has often anchored explanations of Venezuelas successful post-1958 political stability. According to Terry Karl, along with providing resources, the oil industry also restructured the society (Karl 1987). Venezuelas oil industry drew many agrarian elites into trade and encouraged rapid urbanization, thereby diminishing the potential for urban-rural cleavages. Oil wealth also meant that the government had sufficient resources to satisfy many different interests. The fact that Venezuela began to become less stable after the decline of oil prices in the early 1980s would appear to support the argument that oil income explains the shifts in political stability. Yet, increasing oil prices during the 1990s and early 2000s (with the exception of 2002-2003, during the PDVSA strike) did not suffice to prevent social conflict and political violence from plaguing the Chvez government. This indicates the importance of policies, versus mere resources. As various authors have observed, one reason for Venezuelas struggles has been its failure to maximize the benefits from petroleum. Venezuelas substantial oil reserves thus have not been sufficient to ensure either economic prosperity or social stability.

High Prices Bad- China

High oil prices collapse business investment in China- need to bring down heavy crude prices Tang, Wu, and Zhang 10 Professors of Economics @ the Center for Energy Economics and Strategy Studies @ Fudan University.
Weiqi Tang, Department of World Economy, School of Economics, Fudan University, Libo Wu, Center for Energy Economics and Strategy Studies, Fudan University, and Zhong Xiang Zhang, Research Program @ the East-West Center. Oil Price Shocks and Their Short- and Long-Term Effects on the Chinese Economy. Energy Economics Volume 32, Supplement 1, September 2010, Pages S3-S14. Oil-price shocks have both the long-term and short-term effects on economic performance. The short-term effect is caused mainly by the change in capacity-utilization ratio, while the long-term effect is due to the change in capacity itself. Since investment determines the potential output capacity in the long run, the long-term impact of oil-price shock is attributed to the decrease of investment caused by higher input costs. Our ECM results clearly indicate the negative short-term relationship between oil price and output: 1% increase in oil price can reduce the output by about 0.38%. But the significance of the coefficient is relatively small, compared to that of investment in the cointegration equation. This is an illustration of the importance of investment to the long-term impact in China. In the free market economies, producers could mark up their products to offset the increased input costs due to oil-price shock, depending on the price elasticity of demand, and their profit rate would not be severely affected. When the disadvantageous situation fades away, production can recover very quickly within the range of output capacity. In most developed countries where markets are well established, this kind of adjustment can be realized very quickly. However in China, as well as in most other developing countries, this kind of adjustment is baffled by the distorted pricing mechanism, and oilprice shock impacts the economy differently. Our in-depth study on the difference in response of CPI and PPI to oil-price shock clearly indicates this unique price transmission mechanism in China. Prevailing price controls in China have targeted at two kinds of goods: fundamental industrial raw materials and CPI commodities. Intermediate products are mostly free from price restrictions. The price controls toward raw materials used to be capable in stabilizing input costs for producers and strengthening the comparative advantage which fueled the remarkable economic growth in China. However, with the increasing dependence on imported industrial raw materials like crude oil, iron ore and certain kinds of farm products, it is becoming increasingly difficult and impractical to control the raw material prices in China. Meanwhile, the oil pricing system on domestic market went through two revolutions from the late 1990s to the early 2000s: the first was in 1998, which pegged the prices of crude and petrochemical products to Singapore market; the second was in 2001, two more markets, Rotterdam and New York were brought into equation. We can see that the domestic oil prices are becoming increasingly related to the world market, and price controls are losing their effectiveness gradually. According to our partial equilibrium analysis, PPI is positively related to oil price: 100% increase in oil price can cause 7.34% increase in PPI in the same month, and 11.33% in the following month. On the other hand, CPI commodities are still under strict restriction. Our empirical research finds no evidences for a direct relationship between oil price and CPI. This structure of price control keeps the price of final output under restriction, and at the

same time leaves input costs floating. For consumers, the baffled price transmission mechanism stabilizes commodity prices even when oil-price shock happens. This can somewhat mitigate the short-term effect. For producers, their aggregate profit rate is more sensitive to oil-price shocks because of limited space for them to mark up their products. This would doubtlessly cause the decrease in investment, and thus amplify the long-term impact.

Chinese economic decline would collapse the global economy and ensure war over Taiwan Lewis 7
Dan, Research Director of the Economic Research Council, The nightmare of a Chinese economic collapse, April 19, http://www.worldfinance.com/news/137/ARTICLE/1144/2007-04-19.html A reduction in demand for imported Chinese goods would quickly entail a decline in Chinas economic growth rate. That is alarming. It has been calculated that to keep Chinas society stable ie to manage the transition from a rural to an urban society without devastating unemployment - the minimum growth rate is 7.2 percent. Anything less than that and unemployment will rise and the massive shift in population from the country to the cities becomes unsustainable. This is when real discontent with communist party rule becomes vocal and hard to ignore. It doesnt end there. That will at best bring a global recession. The crucial point is that communist authoritarian states have at least had some success in keeping a lid on ethnic tensions so far. But when multi-ethnic communist countries fall apart from economic stress and the implosion of central power, history suggests that they dont become successful democracies overnight. Far from it. Theres a very real chance that China might go the way of Yugoloslavia or the Soviet Union chaos, civil unrest and internecine war. In the very worst case scenario, a Chinese government might seek to maintain national cohesion by going to war with Taiwan whom America is pledged to defend.

Taiwan conflict would lead to US-China conflict that escalates to nuclear conflict. Glaser 11 Professor of Political Science and International Affaits @ George Washington University
Charles Glaser, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Will China's Rise Lead to War? Why Realism Does Not Mean Pessimism. Foreign Affairs. Mar/Apr 2011. Vol. 90, Iss. 2; pg. 80. ProQuest. The prospects for avoiding intense military competition and war may be good, but growth in China's power may nevertheless require some changes in U.S. foreign policy that Washington will find disagreeable- particularly regarding Taiwan. Although it lost control of Taiwan during the Chinese Civil War more than six decades ago, China still considers
Taiwan to be part of its homeland, and unification remains a key political goal for Beijing. China has made clear that it will use force if Taiwan declares independence , and much of

China's conventional military buildup has been dedicated to increasing its ability to coerce Taiwan and reducing the United States' ability to intervene. Because China places such high value on Taiwan and because the United States and China-whatever they might formally agree to-have such different attitudes regarding the legitimacy of the status quo, the issue poses special dangers and challenges for the U.S.-Chinese relationship, placing it in a different category than Japan or South Korea. A crisis over Taiwan could fairly easily

escalate to nuclear war, because each step along the way might well seem rational to the actors involved. Current U.S. policy is designed to reduce the probability that Taiwan will declare

independence and to make clear that the United States will not come to Taiwan's aid if it does. Nevertheless, the United States would find itself under pressure to protect Taiwan against any sort of attack, no matter how it originated . Given the different interests and
perceptions of the various parties and the limited control Washington has over Taipei's behavior, a crisis could unfold in which the United States found itself following events rather than leading them. Such dangers have been around for decades, but ongoing improvements in China's military capabilities may make Beijing more willing to escalate a Taiwan crisis . In addition to its improved conventional capabilities, China is modernizing its nuclear forces to increase their ability to survive and retaliate following a large-scale U.S. attack. Standard

deterrence theory holds that Washington's current ability to destroy most or all of China's nuclear force enhances its bargaining position. China's nuclear modernization might remove
that check on Chinese action, leading Beijing to behave more boldly in future crises than it has in past ones. A U.S. attempt to preserve its ability to defend Taiwan, meanwhile, could fuel

a conventional and nuclear arms race. Enhancements to U.S. offensive targeting capabilities and strategic ballistic missile defenses might be interpreted by China as a signal of malign U.S. motives, leading to further Chinese military efforts and a general poisoning of U.S.-Chinese relations.