Algae biofuel Neg

Frontline
K
Algae biofuels sanction overconsumption and reproduce neoliberalism theyre
science fiction used to deflect environmental criticism of the squo
Smith 10 (Charles Hugh Smith, writes the Of Two Minds which includes topics on finance and
sustainability; The Overlapping Crises of Neoliberal Global Capitalism;
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept10/crises-capitalism09-10.html; September 7, 2010)
4. Resource depletion. Though many are drawn to appealing fantasies of endless oil (abiotic or
otherwise), breeder nuclear reactors burning plutonium, etc., the awkward reality is that the world does
not contain enough oil, gas, lithium, uranium, etc. etc. for another 1.5 billion middle-class consumers,
never mind an additional 3 billion. Capitalism is based on the idea that The Invisible Hand of self-interest
will drive markets to benefit all participants. This means that when one resource becomes scarce and
thus costly, then an alternative will be found, manufactured or exploited. This has played out
satisfactorily in the procession from wood to whale oil to coal to oil and natural gas, but the concept
that no real substitute is available runs counter to capitalist ideals. The notion that there will only be
shortages and no substitutions seamlessly appearing via the magic of free markets is alien. Like the
person falling from a tall cliff, the fact that they we haven't slammed into any hard limit yet provides a
false faith in the magic of the markets to provide a technological alternative. Thus mini-nuclear reactors,
algae-based fuels, and various other exciting schemes are routinely trotted out as the "source of
unlimited energy in the near future," always with the implicit faith that the process can be scaled up
from the laboratory to a global scale with only modest difficulties. The idea that these grand concepts
cannot be scaled up cheaply or quickly due to physics or other severe limitations of Nature is anathema
to a faith in the unconquerable power of human ingenuity and open markets. Maybe algae will scale up
from a few thousand gallons a month to billions of gallons a day, or solar energy can be converted to
hydrogen, which will then power the planet's 600 million vehicles via fuel cells; but the market has no
way to price the possibility than essential resources will enter permanent depletion declines and that no
cheap, scalable substitute exists. 5. The market is intrinsically incapable of pricing extinction and other
social/shared costs of global production and consumption. As I often note, the last wild tuna will fetch a
handsome price when it's auctioned off in the Tokyo Fish Market. Was the value of a wild species
calculated by the market? No. the "market" has no mechanism for pricing in the "value" of a species, or
of the social costs of poisoned air and water--the Commons we all depend on. It also is intrinsically
incapable of pricing control of resources or assets; the free market presumes that an unfilled demand
will be met by someone, somewhere. That ignores the potential for political control of assets and
resources which are immune to market pricing. Risk, future value, control--all of these critical elements
are reduced to a "futures bid" which has no inputs for the value of a wild species, the "value" of clean
air, the costs of polluted air borne by the tax-paying citizenry, the difficult-to-assess cost of a floating
"island" of plastic garbage in the Pacific 2,000 kilometers in diameter, etc.
The impact is massive environmental destruction and social inequality imposition of
neoliberal landscapes on local landscapes produces fast capitalist extraction and
causes displacement and dehumanization
Nixon 11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 17-18)
In the global resource wars, the environmentalism of the poor is frequently triggered when an official
landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one." A vernacular landscape is shaped by the affective,
historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete with names
and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features. A vernacular landscape,
although neither monolithic nor undisputed, is integral to the socioenvironmental dynamics of
community rather than being wholly externalized-treated as out there, as a separate nonrenewable
resource. By contrast, an official landscape-whether governmental, NGO, corporate, or some
combination of those-is typically oblivious to such earlier maps; instead, it writes the land in a
bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that is often pitilessly instrumental.
Lawrence Summers' scheme to export rich-nation garbage and toxicity to Africa, for example, stands as
a grandiose (though hardly exceptional) instance of a highly rationalized official landscape that, whether in terms of
elite capture of resources or toxic disposal, has often been projected onto ecosystems inhabited by those whom Annu Jalais, in an Indian context, calls "dispensable citizens.'?" I would argue,
then, that the exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions across the globe during the high age of
neoliberalism has resulted largely from a clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers
who arrive (with their official landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who
must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time's scales. In the pages that follow, I will highlight and explore
resource rebellions against developer-dispossessors who descend from other time zones to impose on habitable environments unsustainable calculations about what constitutes the duration
of human gain. Change is a cultural constant but the pace of change is not. Hence the temporal contests over
how to sustain, regenerate, exhaust, or obliterate the landscape as resource become critical. More than
material wealth is here at stake: imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular
landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased. The
ensuing losses are consistent with John Berger's lament over capitalism's disdain for interdependencies
by foreshortening our sense of time, thereby rendering the deceased immaterial: The living reduce the
dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great collective. Until
the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the experience of the dead. It was
their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus living and dead were
interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken this interdependence. With
disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the eliminated.40 Hence, one should add,
our perspective on environmental asset stripping should include among assets stripped the mingled presence in the landscape of multiple
generations, with all the hindsight and foresight that entails. Against this backdrop, I consider in this book what can be called the temporalities of place. Place is a
temporal attainment that must be constantly renegotiated in the face of changes that arrive from
without and within, some benign, others potentially ruinous. To engage the temporal displacements
involved in slow violence against the poor thus requires that we rethink questions of physical
displacement as well. In the chapters that follow, I track the socioenvironmental fallout from
developmental agendas whose primary beneficiaries live elsewhere; as when, for example, oasis
dwellers in the Persian Gulf get trucked off to unknown destinations so that American petroleum
engineers and their sheik collaborators can develop their "finds." Or when a megadam arises and (whether erected in the name of Some
dictatorial edict, the free market, structural adjustment, national development, or far-off urban or industrial need) displaces and disperses those who had developed through their vernacular
landscapes their own adaptable, if always imperfect and vulnerable, relation to riverine possibility. Paradoxically, those forcibly removed by development include conservation refugees. Too
often in the global South, conservation, driven by powerful transnational nature NGOs, combines an antidevelopmental rhetoric with the development of finite resources for the touristic few,
thereby depleting vital resources for long-term residents. (I explore this paradox more fully in Chapter 6: Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time.) In much of what
follows, I address the resistance mounted by impoverished communities who have been involuntarily moved out of their knowledge; I address as well the powers transnational, national, and
local-behind such forced removals. My angle of vision is largely through writers who have affiliated themselves with social movements that seek to stave off one of two ruinous prospects:
either the threatened community capitulates and is scattered (across refugee camps, placeless "relocation" sites, desperate favelas, and unwelcoming foreign lands), or the community refuses
to move but, as its world is undermined, effectively becomes a community of refugees in place. What I wish to stress here, then, are not just those communities that are involuntarily (and
often militarily) relocated to less hospitable environs, but also those affected by what I call displacement without moving. In other words, I want to propose a more
radical notion of displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from
their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that
leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable.

Alternative text: the judge should vote negative to endorse an ethic of social flesh
An ethic of social flesh foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an
ecological view of relationships for the affs commodity thinking only the alternative
can produce ethical institutional decisionmaking
Beasley & Bacchi 7
(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide,
Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of
`social flesh', Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)
The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it
conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied as interconnected mutually reliant flesh in a more
thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts
of political change as making transactions between the less fortunate and more privileged, more
trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which
fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the
vulnerable from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A
political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis
of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and
international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism.
Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to
acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up the scope of what counts as relevant (Shildrick, 2001:
238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the
private sphere as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend
to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion
In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to
the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal
called social flesh. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper,
we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of atomistic individualism
they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the disposition of
individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in certain ways.
Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing conception of
asymmetrical power relations between strong and weak, carers and cared for, altruistic and
needy. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social
debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there
are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative
understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in
rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social
institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic
practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that
characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be acknowledged. As an ethico-
political starting point, social flesh highlights human embodied interdependence. By drawing attention
to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure
and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and
removes the social distance and always already given distinction between strong and weak. There is
no sense here of givers and receivers; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated
goods and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over
other bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space,
environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these
means, the grounds are created for defending a politics beyond assisting the less fortunate. Social
flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of noblesse oblige that still appear to linger in emphasis upon
vulnerability and altruism within the apparently reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care,
responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts into question the social privilege that produces
inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for altruism. Vital debates about appropriate
distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic
processes are reopened.

DA
A. Prices are up and rising
Strauss 2/20
(Gary Strauss, February 20 2014, USA TODAY, Natural gas prices climb to 5-year highs,
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2014/02/19/natural-gas-prices-soaring-again/5612471/)
Natural gas prices, up more than 45% year-to-date on cold weather demand and slumping supplies,
surged 11% Wednesday, hitting their highest levels since 2009. The price on contracts for March delivery
jumped to $6.22 per million British thermal units in early trading before settling at $6.15 on the New
York Mercantile Exchange. It was the highest price since late 2009. Behind the run-up: expectations that
the cold weather that's plagued the Midwest and Northeast and parts of other regions since December
will linger, keeping demand high. The jump came after the National Weather Service forecast another
round of sub-freezing temperatures for parts of the Central Rockies and Midwest, snow in the Pacific
Northwest and cooler temperatures in the South. More than half the nation's homes are heated by
natural gas. Even with wholesale prices spiking, consumers are largely protected by regulatory agencies
from short-term price blips. Still, for millions, monthly utility bills have been climbing since December
because thermostats have been turned up longer and more frequently. Cold temperatures, snow and
lousy weather have also cooled consumer spending and big-ticket purchases, such as homes and cars.
New vehicle sales fell 3% last month but were down more sharply in the Midwest, where weather kept
shoppers from showrooms. Natural gas prices could remain high for the rest of 2014 and into 2015 as
suppliers build up inventories and demand outpaces supplies, says Robert Ineson, head of the natural
gas research unit at energy consultants IHS CERA. But Ineson expects 2014 prices to drop to an average
of about $5 per million BTUs. Rising natural gas prices could continue as demand continues to draw
down inventories, already about 25% below five-year norms. The Energy Information Agency is expected
to report a drop in supplies in its latest survey, due out Thursday. Crude oil also rose Wednesday,
continuing its climb above $100 a barrel. Benchmark West Texas crude gained $1.01 to $103.44.

B. If US Oil consumption declines, world prices will drop and Russia will have to
stand aside
Carey 3 John Carey, senior correspondent in Businessweeks bureau since 89, various awards for
his analysis on various subjects (Taming the Oil Beast, BloombergBusinessweek, February 24
th
, 2003,
available at http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2003-02-23/taming-the-oil-beast, accessed July 15
th
,
2014)
Yet reducing oil use has to be done judiciously. A drastic or abrupt drop in demand could even be
counterproductive. Why? Because even a very small change in capacity or demand "can bring big swings
in price," explains Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State
University's Robinson College of Business. For instance, the slowdown in Asia in the mid-1990s reduced
demand only by about 1.5 million bbl. a day, but it caused oil prices to plunge to near $10 a barrel. So
today, if the U.S. succeeded in abruptly curbing demand for oil, prices would plummet. Higher-cost
producers such as Russia and the U.S. would either have to sell oil at a big loss or stand on the sidelines.
The effect would be to concentrate power--you guessed it--in the hands of Middle Eastern nations, the
lowest-cost producers and holders of two-thirds of the known oil reserves. That's why flawed energy
policies, such as trying to override market forces by rushing to expand supplies or mandating big fuel
efficiency gains, could do harm.

C. High oil prices key to Russia economy/stability
American Enterprise Institute 13 May 29, 2013 The political economy of Russian oil and gas
from http://www.aei.org/outlook/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/europe/the-political-economy-
of-russian-oil-and-gas/
Key points in this Outlook: One of the worlds two largest oil producers and the leading provider of natural gas to Europe, Russia has
increasingly used its revenues from energy exports to strengthen the Putin regime. As new, cheaper energy
providers emerge and the market becomes leaner and more competitive, Russia needs to lessen its dependence on profits from these
resources if it is to avoid stagnation and possibly an economic crisis. The regime needs to implement deep institutional reforms to create a
better investment climate and diversify the economy, but in doing so it risks undermining the authoritarian vertical of power. Vladimir
Putins commitment to oil and gas as the mainstay of Russias progress stems from a deep and abiding
conviction about its importance to the nations economy. Long before he came to power, he had believed that the
restructuring of the national *Russian+ economy on the basis of mineral and raw material resources was a strategic factor of economic growth
in the near term.*1+ In an article published a year before he became president, he reiterated that Russian mineral resources would be central
to the countrys economic development, security, and modernization through at least the first half of the 21st century.*2+ In Putins view,
the only way for Russia to achieve economic growth of 4 to 6 percent per yearthe tempo he deemed
minimally necessary for Russia to reduce its lag behind the developed countrieswas via extraction,
processing and exploitation of mineral raw resources. This was the key to Russias becoming a great economic power,
Putin believed.[3] For Putin, oil and gas were also paramount politically as guarantors of the security and
stability of the Russian state. As he put it, The countrys natural resource endowment is the most important economic and political
factor in the development of social production. Furthermore, the raw material complex was the basis for the countrys military might and
an essential condition for modernization of the military-industrial complex.[4] Finally, he believed the mineral extraction sector of the
economy diminishes social tensions by raising the level of well-being of the Russian population.*5+ Oil, Gas, and the Putin Doctrine
State control or outright ownership of the oil and gas industry became a central element in the Putin Doctrine, which postulated the recovery
of the states political, economic, and geostrategic assets following the antitotalitarian revolution of late 198791.[6] The state was to become
again the only sovereign political and economic actor in Russia, with the private sector, civil society, and its institutions mere objects. Putin
saw as nonnegotiable the states control of rent flows from the sale of mineral resources, with nonstate property rights remaining
contingent.*7+ Almost a decade and a half later, the authors of an influential analytical report on the composition and division of labor in the
Kremlins Politburo singled out long-term natural gas contracts, and the management of the natural gas industry in general and Gazprom in
particular as one of only two areas under Putins direct control.*8+ (The other sector was the largest banks.) In pursuit of this agenda, the
Putin regime has effected a steady accretion of the states sway over the oil industry. (Unlike oil, Russias natural gas production escaped large-
scale privatization in the 1990s. As a result, the majority-state-owned Gazprom dominates the sector with 78 percent of the national output
and has a pipeline and export monopoly.[9]) The key to the effective state takeover of more than half of Russian oil output was a dramatic
expansion of the majority state-owned Rosneft, headed since 2010 by Putins confidant and former KGB officer Igor Sechin. Starting as a minor
company that the government tried and failed to sell in 1998 because nobody wanted it, Rosneft skyrocketed in 2004 after it took over the key
assets of Russias formerly largest and privately owned oil corporation, Yukos, which the Kremlin had bankrupted, broken up, and sold at rigged
auctions.[10] "For Putin, oil and gas were also paramount politically as guarantors of the security and stability of the Russian state."Since
Rosneft bought Russias third-largest private company, TNK-BP, for $55 billion this past March, it has become the largest publicly traded oil
company in the world by output.*11+ As a result, the state share of Russias oil production increased from 20 percent in the early 2000s to 56
percent today, with Rosneft accounting for 48 percent of the total.[12] The increase in the state ownership paralleled a steady rise in overall
production, which reached a post-Soviet record of 10.5 million barrels per day, or 518 million tons per year, in November 2012.[13] The Rise of
the Russian Petro-Gas State From less than 50 percent in the mid-1990s,[14] the share of commodities in Russian exports has grown to 70
percent today, with oil accounting for more than half of the export income.*15+ Representing up to 30 percent of the countrys GDP and half of
its GDP growth since 2000,*16+ hydrocarbons provided at least half of the states budget revenues last year.*17+ Five years ago, Russia
needed oil prices of $50 to $55 a barrel to balance its budget, but Alexei Kudrin, former first deputy prime
minister and finance minister, estimated the breakeven price at $117 per barrel last year.[18] Russias
dependence on energy exportsand, consequently, its economys vulnerability to commodity price
fluctuationwas highlighted by the 2009 world financial crisis. As oil plunged from $147 to $34 per
barrel, the resource-based economy contracted by almost 8 percentthe largest drop among the G20
top industrial nations. Russia has begun to exhibit the signs of what economists call the Dutch disease, when overreliance on
commodity exports depresses other sectors of the economy by starving them of investments and modernization while the increasing value of
the national currency makes exports of other goods and services more expensive and thus less competitive in world markets. Industrial
stagnation has even spread to the military-industrial complex, which, like in Soviet times, continues to be the states favorite sector and enjoys
its continuous and very generous support. Despite this, according to a recent survey, only 20 percent of the Russian defense enterprise
qualified as modern.*19+ As in virtually every other petro-gas state, the rise of the Russian one has been attended by corruption likely
unprecedented even in the countrys far-from-pristine history. Venality and extortion have come close to subverting or even paralyzing
governance, social institutions, justice, and entrepreneurial activity. In Transparency Internationals 2012 Corruption Perception Index, Russia
was 133rd among 176 countries, worse than Belarus, Vietnam, and Sierra Leone and on par with Honduras, Iran, and Kazakhstan.[20] Yet the
most dangerous political legacy of the Russian petro-gas state is the centrality of oil and gas revenues, which amounted to $215 billion last
year,*21+ to the loyalty of two groups that are essential for the regimes survival: the lower-income and elite segments. Trillion-ruble transfers
help to maintain social peace in what is known as Russia-2*22+poorer regions, especially the volatile and increasingly violent Muslim North
Caucasus, small towns and rural areas, and the rusting monotowns (one-company towns) of Stalinist industrialization.[23] The sporadic
raising of meager pensions and salaries for the millions of Russians on the government payroll, including doctors and teachers (usually in the
run-up to the Duma or presidential elections) is part of the same strategy. At the same time, oil and gas rents are a vital component in elite
management under Putins neopatrimonial regime: a tacit but ironclad agreement between the Kremlin and the bureaucracies from top to
bottom that permits the latter to enrich themselves at the treasurys expense in exchange for their loyalty. So long as the regime continues to
regard export revenues as a palliative, if not a panacea, for economic, social, and political problems, they will impede or even obviate the need
for economic and political modernization. The problem of being a petro-state is that the natural resources trend corrupts the institutions,
said Sergei Guriev, rector of the New Economic School in Moscow and a leading expert on Russian political economy. This is what is called the
resource curse. This is a trap, where democratic political and economic institutions do not develop because rents coming from natural
resources provide incentives to the elite not to develop institutions.*24+

D. Russian economic collapse spreads globally risks nuclear war
Filger, 09 (Sheldon, Global economic forecaster, founder of GlobalEconomicCrisis.com, named one of
the most viable websites focused on global economic crisis, writer for Huffington Post, Russian
Economy Faces Disastrous Free Fall Contraction, Huffington Post, 5/10/09,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sheldon-filger/russian-economy-faces-dis_b_201147.html, 7/17/14)
In Russia, historically, economic health and political stability are intertwined to a degree that is rarely
encountered in other major industrialized economies. It was the economic stagnation of the former
Soviet Union that led to its political downfall. Similarly, Medvedev and Putin, both intimately acquainted
with their nation's history, are unquestionably alarmed at the prospect that Russia's economic crisis will
endanger the nation's political stability, achieved at great cost after years of chaos following the demise
of the Soviet Union. Already, strikes and protests are occurring among rank and file workers facing
unemployment or non-payment of their salaries. Recent polling demonstrates that the once supreme
popularity ratings of Putin and Medvedev are eroding rapidly. Beyond the political elites are the
financial oligarchs, who have been forced to deleverage, even unloading their yachts and executive jets
in a desperate attempt to raise cash. Should the Russian economy deteriorate to the point where
economic collapse is not out of the question, the impact will go far beyond the obvious accelerant such
an outcome would be for the Global Economic Crisis. There is a geopolitical dimension that is even more
relevant then the economic context. Despite its economic vulnerabilities and perceived decline from
superpower status, Russia remains one of only two nations on earth with a nuclear arsenal of sufficient
scope and capability to destroy the world as we know it. For that reason, it is not only President
Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin who will be lying awake at nights over the prospect that a national
economic crisis can transform itself into a virulent and destabilizing social and political upheaval. It just
may be possible that U.S. President Barack Obama's national security team has already briefed him
about the consequences of a major economic meltdown in Russia for the peace of the world. After all,
the most recent national intelligence estimates put out by the U.S. intelligence community have already
concluded that the Global Economic Crisis represents the greatest national security threat to the United
States, due to its facilitating political instability in the world. During the years Boris Yeltsin ruled Russia,
security forces responsible for guarding the nation's nuclear arsenal went without pay for months at a
time, leading to fears that desperate personnel would illicitly sell nuclear weapons to terrorist
organizations. If the current economic crisis in Russia were to deteriorate much further, how secure
would the Russian nuclear arsenal remain? It may be that the financial impact of the Global Economic
Crisis is its least dangerous consequence.
Food vs. Fuel
Algae doesnt solve food crisis
Forbes 12 (Professor Chris Rhodes became involved with environmental issues while working in Russia during the
aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He studied chemistry at Sussex University, rising to become the youngest
professor of physical chemistry in the U.K. at the age of 34. The Achilles' Heel Of Algal Biofuels: Peak Phosphate
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/02/29/the-achilles-heel-of-algal-biofuels-peak-phosphate-3/] 2/29/2012 @
1:25PM- M.V.)
The depletion of world rock phosphate reserves will restrict the amount of food that can be grown
across the world, a situation that can only be compounded by the production of biofuels, including
the potential large-scale generation of biodiesel from algae. The world population has risen to its
present number of 7 billion due to cheap fertilizers, pesticides and energy sources, particularly oil.
Almost all modern farming has been engineered to depend on phosphate fertilizers, and those made
from natural gas, e.g. ammonium nitrate, and on oil to run farm machinery and to distribute the final produce. A peak in
worldwide production of rock phosphate is expected by 2030, which lends fears over how much
food the world will be able to grow in the future, against a rising number of mouths to feed. We may be close to the
peak in world oil production too. World rock phosphate production amounts to around 140 million tons,
and food production is already being thought compromised by rock phosphate resource depletion.
In comparison, we would need 352 million tons of the mineral to grow sufficient algae to replace all
the oil-derived fuels used in the world. The US produces less than 40 million tons of rock phosphate annually, but would
require enough to produce around 25% of the worlds total algal diesel, in accord with its current share of world petroleum-based fuel,
or 88 million tons of rock phosphate. Hence, for the US, security of fuel supply could not be met by algae-to-diesel production using even
all its indigenous rock phosphate output, and significant further imports would be needed. This is in addition to the amount of the
mineral necessary to maintain agriculture. It is salutary that there remains a competition between growing
crops (algae) for fuel and those for food, even if not directly in terms of land, for the fertilizers that
both depend upon. This illustrates for me the complex and interconnected nature of, indeed Nature, and which like any stressed
chain, will ultimately converge its forces onto the weakest link in the it takes energy to extract energy sequence. It seems quite
clear that with food production already stressed, the production of (algal) biofuels will never be
accomplished on a scale anywhere close to matching current world petroleum fuel use (>20 billion
barrels/annum). Thus, the days of a society based around personalized transport run on liquid fuels are numbered. We must reconsider
too our methods of farming, to reduce inputs of fertilizers, pesticides and fuel. Freshwater supplies are also at issue, in the complex
transition to a more localised age that uses its resources much more efficiently. There is a Hubbert-type analysis of human population
growth which indicates that rather than rising to the putative 9 billion by 2050 scenario, it will instead peak around the year 2025 at
7.3 billion, and then fall. It is probably significant too that that population growth curve fits very closely both with that for world
phosphate production and another for world oil production. It seems to me highly indicative that it is the decline in resources that will
underpin our demise in numbers as is true of any species: from a colony of human beings growing on the Earth, to a colony of bacteria
growing on agar nutrient in a Petri-dish.
No food wars- empirics prove
Salehyan 07 [Idean, Professor of Political Science, University of North Texas, The New Myth About
Climate Change, Foreign Policy, Summer,
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3922]

First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and
changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an abundance of
natural resources is more likely to contribute to conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil
wars and insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University and the International Peace
Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some 100
armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global warming causes conflict, we should
not be witnessing this downward trend. Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in Darfur, why have scores of environmental
catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N. World Food Programme warns that 5 million people
in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-wracked Malawi
has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands of people,
generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet
the tsunami, one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars.
Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural disasters.
Alt cause lack of investment in agriculture, natural disasters, displacement, and food
wastage
WFP 14
World Food Programme is the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger, as well as the United Nations frontline agency. Hunger:
What Causes Hunger?. 2014. http://www.wfp.org/hunger/causes
The world produces enough to feed the entire global population of 7 billion people. And yet, one person in eight on the planet goes to bed
hungry each night. In some countries, one child in three is underweight. Why does hunger exist? There are many reasons for the
presence of hunger in the world and they are often interconnected. Here are six that we think are important. Poverty trap People living in
poverty cannot afford nutritious food for themselves and their families. This makes them weaker and less able to earn the money that would
help them escape poverty and hunger. This is not just a day-to-day problem: when children are chronically malnourished, or stunted, it can
affect their future income, condemning them to a life of poverty and hunger. In developing countries, farmers often cannot afford seeds, so
they cannot plant the crops that would provide for their families. They may have to cultivate crops without the tools and fertilizers they need.
Others have no land or water or education. In short, the poor are hungry and their hunger traps them in poverty. Lack of investment in
agriculture. Too many developing countries lack key agricultural infrastructure, such as enough roads,
warehouses and irrigation. The results are high transport costs, lack of storage facilities and unreliable water
supplies. All conspire to limit agricultural yields and access to food. Investments in improving land management,
using water more efficiently and making more resistant seed types available can bring big improvements. Research by the UN Food
and Agriculture Organization shows that investment in agriculture is five times more effective in
reducing poverty and hunger than investment in any other sector. Climate and weather. Natural
disasters such as floods, tropical storms and long periods of drought are on the increase -- with
calamitous consequences for the hungry poor in developing countries. Drought is one of the most
common causes of food shortages in the world. In 2011, recurrent drought caused crop failures and
heavy livestock losses in parts of Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya. In 2012 there was a similar situation in the Sahel region of West
Africa. In many countries, climate change is exacerbating already adverse natural conditions. Increasingly, the
world's fertile farmland is under threat from erosion, salination and desertification. Deforestation by
human hands accelerates the erosion of land which could be used for growing food. War and
displacement. Across the globe, conflicts consistently disrupt farming and food production. Fighting
also forces millions of people to flee their homes, leading to hunger emergencies as the displaced find themselves
without the means to feed themselves. The conflict in Syria is a recent example. In war, food sometimes becomes
a weapon. Soldiers will starve opponents into submission by seizing or destroying food and livestock
and systematically wrecking local markets. Fields are often mined and water wells contaminated,
forcing farmers to abandon their land. Ongoing conflict in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo has contributed
significantly to the level of hunger in the two countries. By comparison, hunger is on the retreat in more peaceful parts of Africa such as Ghana
and Rwanda. Unstable markets. In recent years, the price of food products has been very unstable. Roller-
coaster food prices make it difficult for the poorest people to access nutritious food consistently. The
poor need access to adequate food all year round. Price spikes may temporarily put food out of reach, which can
have lasting consequences for small children. When prices rise, consumers often shift to cheaper, less-
nutritious foods, heightening the risks of micronutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition.
Food wastage. One third of all food produced (1.3 billion tons) is never consumed. This food wastage
represents a missed opportunity to improve global food security in a world where one in 8 is hungry. Producing
this food also uses up precious natural resources that we need to feed the planet. Each year, food that
is produced but not eaten guzzles up a volume of water equivalent to the annual flow of Russia's Volga River.
Producing this food also adds 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, with
consequences for the climate and, ultimately, for food production.
Warming
Warming is inevitable and we are pass the point of no return
Worstall 5/13 (Tim Worstall, Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, written for The Times, Daily Telegraph, Wall
Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The Guardian, The Register and
Techcentralstation, If Antarctic Melting Has Passed The Point Of No Return We Should Do Less About Climate Change,
Not More, http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/05/13/if-antarctic-melting-has-passed-the-point-of-no-return-we-
should-do-less-about-climate-change-not-more/, 5/13/14, 7/19/14, MEM)
Except an economist is going to look at that past the point of no return. That is, again without contesting the
water level rise resulting, that this is all about sunk costs. Whatever it was that we needed to do to cause this sea
level rise (you can even call it a calamity or a disaster if you wish) we have already done. It doesnt matter what we
do in the future because, given that its past that point of no return, whatever we do do wont
make it not happen. Thats what that point of no return phrase actually means. So, given that its going
to happen whatever we do what effort should we be expending to try and stop it happening, what should we be doing? The answers to those
two questions being none and nothing. If its going to happen anyway then we shouldnt waste
resources in trying to stop it happening. Now, if the original claim was that without immediate and stringent action then it
might happen then perhaps more action might be logically supportable. But given that the claim is actually that whatever we do its going to
happen then the correct decision is simply to shrug our shoulders and go invest in some sandbags to keep back the floods. For however
much we impoverish ourselves by killing off industrial society, or by razing all the coal fired
stations to build more expensive solar installations, that flooding is going to happen anyway. So,
why make ourselves poorer in order to change nothing? As I say, the policy prescriptions you can get from these descriptions of climate change
can change quite alarmingly depending upon whether you view them through the lens of economics or not. If its inevitable that
past emissions will raise sea levels four feet then theres no point at all in limiting current
emissions to prevent that four foot rise. We might as well face the floods being as rich, fat and
happy as we can, without wasting resources on trying to prevent something inevitable.
Warming improves biodiversity.
Goklany 12 science and technology policy analyst for the US Department of the Interior, Assistant Director of Programs, Science, and
Technology Policy, represented the US at the IPCC, rapporteur for the Resource Use and Management Subgroup of Working Group III of the
IPCC First Assessment Report, PhD in electrical engineering (Indur M., Is Climate Change the Number One Threat to Humanity? 8/28/12;
http://goklany.org/library/Goklany_WIREs.pdf)
Despite concerns about the ecological impacts of warming, the FTA studies suggest that it may actually reduce
existing stresses on ecosystems and biodiversity through 20852100. Table 4, provides FTA results for 20852100 regarding
the variation in three specific ecological indicators across the different IPCC scenarios. 23,25 One indicator is the net biome productivity (a
measure of the terrestrial biospheres net carbon sink capacity). The second indicator is the area of cropland (a crude measure of the amount of
habitat converted to human use; the lower it is, the better is it for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystems). Such land conversion to
agriculture is perhaps the single largest threat to global terrestrial biodiversity. 114,115 The third indicator is the global loss of coastal wetlands
relative to 1990 levels. The table shows that biospheres sink capacity under each scenario would be higher in 2100
than in the base year (1990), largely due to higher CO 2 concentrations and because these effects were
not projected to be overridden by the negative effects of higher temperatures over that period. For the
same reasons, global sink capacity would be higher for the A1FI and A2 scenarios. Partly for the same reasons and its lower population
compared to other scenarios, the amount of cropland in 2100 would be lowest for the A1FI world. This is followed by the B1 and B2 worlds.
[Levy et al. did not provide cropland estimates for the A2 scenario.] Thus, through 2100 the warmest (A1FI) scenario would
have the least habitat loss and, therefore, pose the smallest risk to terrestrial biodiversity and
ecosystems, while the B2 scenario would pose the greatest risk to habitat, biodiversity and ecosystems. Regarding coastal
wetlands, although losses due to sea level rise (SLR) are substantial, the contribution of global warming
to total losses in 2085 are smaller than losses due to subsidence from other man made causes. 23 Table 4
shows that wetland losses are much higher for the A1FI and A2 scenarios than for the B1 and B2 scenarios. This is, however, due mainly to the
assumption that the first two scenarios would have higher non climate change related subsidence (Ref. 23, p. 76) but this assumption is
questionable. 9
Algae biofuels dont solve climate warming
Varicon Aqua 10 (Varicon Aqua, specializes in algae production expertise, Can Algae Save The World,
http://www.variconaqua-asia.com/arti01.html)
Burning fossil fuels releases carbon thats been locked away for millions of years. This is rapidly adding
extra CO2 to our atmosphere today. Burning biofuels also releases CO2. But this is exactly the same
amount of CO2 the plant absorbed from the atmosphere while it was growing. Perfect? Not quite...
Biofuels have to be cultivated, processed and transported and using fossil fuels to do all that adds
extra CO2 to the atmosphere. We can call this biofuels carbon footprint.
Green Tech Leadership
China surpassed the US in renewable energy
Hargreaves 13 (Steve Hargreaves, Senior writer for CNN money, China trounces U.S. in green energy
investments, http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/17/news/economy/china-green-energy/, 4/17/13)
China retook its top spot as global leader in the clean energy race, attracting nearly twice the green
energy investment dollars last year as the United States did. Investors plowed $65 billion into Chinese
wind farms, solar panel arrays and other clean energy projects in 2012, a 20% increase over the year prior, according to a
report released Wednesday by Pew Charitable Trusts and Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The numbers reflect only private investments in
power projects, and do not include government subsidies or R&D money. China's total made it the world's top destination
for green energy investments in 2012, a position it held in 2009 and 2010 but lost to the United States in 2011. In the United
States, green energy investments last year plummeted 37% to $35.6 billion, although the country still came in second
worldwide.
Renewable energy jobs are bad
Green 11 (Kenneth P. Green, studied energy and energy-related environmental policy for nearly 20 years
and testified before the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, The Myth of Green Energy
Jobs: The European Experience, http://www.aei.org/outlook/energy-and-the-environment/the-myth-
of-green-energy-jobs-the-european-experience, 2/15/11)
It is well understood, among economists, that governments do not "create" jobs; the willingness of entrepreneurs to invest their capital, paired
with consumer demand for goods and services, does that. All the government can do is subsidize some industries while
jacking up costs for others. In the green case, it is destroying jobs in the conventional energy sector--and
most likely in other industrial sectors--through taxes and subsidies to new green companies that will use
taxpayer dollars to undercut the competition. The subsidized jobs "created" are, by definition, less efficient
uses of capital than market-created jobs. That means they are less economically productive than the jobs
they displace and contribute less to economic growth. Finally, the good produced by government-favored jobs is inherently
a non-economic good that has to be maintained indefinitely, often without an economic revenue model, as in the case of roads, rail systems,
mass transit, and probably windmills, solar-power installations, and other green technologies.
US hegemony is bad
Gulli 13 (Bruno, Professor of History, Philosophy and Political Science at Kingsborough College, For
the critique of sovereignty and violence,
http://academia.edu/2527260/For_the_Critique_of_Sovereignty_and_Violence, pg. 5, CH)
I think that we have now an understanding of what the situation is: The sovereign everywhere, be it the
political or financial elite, fakes the legitimacy on which its power and authority supposedly rest. In
truth, they rest on violence and terror, or the threat thereof. This is an obvious and essential aspect of
the singularity of the present crisis. In this sense, the singularity of the crisis lies in the fact that the struggle
for dominance is at one and the same time impaired and made more brutal by the lack of hegemony. This
is true in general, but it is perhaps particularly true with respect to the greatest power on earth, the United
States, whose hegemony has diminished or vanished. It is a fortiori true of whatever is called the
West, of which the US has for about a century represented the vanguard. Lacking hegemony, the sheer
drive for domination has to show its true face, its raw violence. The usual, traditional ideological
justifications for dominance (such as bringing democracy and freedom here and there) have now
become very weak because of the contempt that the dominant nations (the US and its most powerful
allies) regularly show toward legality, morality, and humanity. Of course, the so-called rogue states,
thriving on corruption, do not fare any better in this sense, but for them, when they act autonomously
and against the dictates of the West, the specter of punishment, in the form of retaliatory war or even
indictment from the International Criminal Court, remains a clear limit, a possibility. Not so for the
dominant nations: who will stop the United States from striking anywhere at will, or Israel from
regularly massacring people in the Gaza Strip, or envious France from once again trying its luck in Africa? Yet,
though still dominant, these nations are painfully aware of their structural, ontological and historical,
weakness. All attempts at concealing that weakness (and the uncomfortable awareness of it) only
heighten the brutality in the exertion of what remains of their dominance. Although they rely on a
highly sophisticated military machine (the technology of drones is a clear instance of this) and on an
equally sophisticated diplomacy, which has traditionally been and increasingly is an outpost for military
operations and global policing (now excellently incarnated by Africom), they know that they have lost
their hegemony. Domination without hegemony is a phrase that Giovanni Arrighi uses in his study of
the long twentieth century and his lineages of the twenty-first century (1994/2010 and 2007). Originating
with Ranajit Guha (1992), the phrase captures the singularity of the global crisis, the terminal stage of
sovereignty, in Arrighis historical investigation of the present and of the future (1994/2010: 221). It
acquires particular meaning in the light of Arrighis notion of the bifurcation of financial and military
power. Without getting into the question, treated by Arrighi, of the rise of China and East Asia, what I want to note is that for Arrighi, early
in the twenty-first century, and certainly with the ill-advised and catastrophic war against Iraq, the US
belle poque came to an end and US world hegemony entered what in all likelihood is its terminal
crisis. He continues: Although the United States remains by far the worlds most powerful state, its
relationship to the rest of the world is now best described as one of domination without hegemony
(1994/2010: 384). What can the US do next? Not much, short of brutal dominance. In the last few years, we have
seen president Obama praising himself for the killing of Osama bin Laden. While that action was most
likely unlawful, too (Noam Chomsky has often noted that bin Laden was a suspect, not someone charged with or
found guilty of a crime), it is certain that you can kill all the bin Ladens of the world without gaining
back a bit of hegemony. In fact, this killing, just like G. W. Bushs war against Iraq, makes one think of a
Mafia-style regolamento di conti more than any other thing. Barack Obama is less forthcoming about the
killing of 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, whose fate many have correctly compared to that of 17-year-
old Trayvon Martin (killed in Florida by a self-appointed security watchman), but it is precisely in cases like this one that
the weakness at the heart of empire, the ill-concealed and uncontrolled fury for the loss of hegemony,
becomes visible. The frenzy denies the possibility of power as care, which is what should replace
hegemony, let alone domination. Nor am I sure I share Arrighis optimistic view about the possible rise of a new
hegemonic center of power in East Asia and China: probably that would only be a shift in the axis of
uncaring power, unable to affect, let alone exit, the paradigm of sovereignty and violence. What is
needed is rather a radical alternative in which power as domination, with or without hegemony, is
replaced by power as care in other words, a poetic rather than military and financial shift.

Peak Oil
Algae cannot be produced at the scale needed for U.S. consumption.
The Oil Drum 08 *Biofuel Conference Call Including a New Biodiesel from Algae, August 22,
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4439#more]
Regarding whether this could be a panacea, there are still a lot of obstacles in the way. The process is
only at a developmental stage, and hasn't been tested at scale. Also, the total amount of biomass
available in the US isn't necessarily all that great, if one starts burning it for fuel in vehicles. We are
basically using the same biomass to replenish our soil; to provide wood for heating homes; to provide
biomass for fueling electric power plants; to provide feedstock for cellulosic ethanol and now to provide
feedstock for algal diesel as well. There is clearly not enough biomass to do all of these things at the
scale some might like, simultaneously.
No conflict from peak oil reserves will last
Kaminsky, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, 2011
(Ross, Energy Myths of the Left, The American Spectator, Online: http://spectator.org/
archives/2011/05/27/energy-myths-of-the-left)
From confused "peak oil" theorists to confused Congressmen, it's all but impossible to hear a
discussion of US energy policy without hearing the left's tired refrain: "The United States currently uses
25% of the world oil production but has only 2% of world reserves." The left uses this misinformation to
argue against domestic oil drilling, claiming that with only two percent of the world's reserves, we can't possibly have enough oil in the
ground to matter. It's a line which reminds me of Mark Twain's wisdom (which he attributed to Benjamin Disraeli) that "There are three
kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." Twain would be proud of these haters of fossil fuels whose "statistics" fall apart upon examination
of a couple of definitions and a few pieces of data. First, the word "reserves." As the Congressional Research Service notes, there are
several different types of reserves, classified based on their official discovery, as well as "concentration, quality, and accessibility."
The top of the "resource pyramid" is made of "proved" reserves, namely reserves of oil, natural gas,
coal, or other fuel "which geological and engineering data demonstrate with reasonable certainty to be
recoverable in future years from known reservoirs under existing economic and operating conditions."
This is the most limiting definition of reserves, and of course it is the one which the left relies on when
saying that we have "only two percent of the world's oil reserves." Specifically, the U.S. has 20.7 billion
barrels of proved crude oil reserves as of the end 2009. (That's actually up from 2008 numbers which by itself should be a
clue how meaningless the left's two-percent argument is.) The problem with the use of the "proved reserves" statistic
is that it ignores the many more billions of barrels of oil which we know exist and are likely to be
recoverable on American land and just off our coasts. Since our government prevents exploration, there are massive
deposits of oil (and other fuels) which are prevented from being measured adequately to be defined as "proved." But that doesn't make them
less real. A broader measure of fossil fuel deposits is UTRR, undiscovered technically recoverable resources. Marcus Koblitz,
energy analyst at the American Petroleum Institute, sent me this "short" definition of the term: "UTRR are estimated by USGS and/or BOEMRE
using advanced modeling techniques that apply knowledge of geologic formations and technical access capabilities to currently unexplored
formations that are similar to producing formations in order to determine the amount of oil and natural gas in a specific area or basin." The
UTRR numbers are remarkably high for the United States; indeed they demolish the left's anti-drilling pseudo-logic. Or they would if the media's
talking heads would stop just accepting the 2% lie-statistic. In particular, the United States' UTRR for onshore oil is currently about
38 billion barrels, with the offshore technically recoverable resources coming in at a stunning 86 billion
barrels. (Of this, just over half is in the Gulf of Mexico, a third in Alaska, and the rest off our Pacific and Atlantic coasts.) Our real but
not "proved" resource of oil is thus about 125 billion barrels. Furthermore, the offshore numbers are
based on a report that used data from 2003, at which time oil discovery and drilling technology were far
behind what they are today, the BP disaster notwithstanding. It is likely that a new survey would conclude with a substantially higher
UTRR number. Even with the outdated offshore figures, the U.S.'s total technically recoverable oil, including current
proved reserves and 10 billion barrels of natural gas liquids, is estimated by our government at 163
billion barrels, eight times the number thrown around by the left. Yes, our total recoverable oil
reserves (including proved) are at least eight times our proved reserves alone. It's just that government keeps us
from proving them. And if that's not enough, our UTRR for natural gas is five times our proven reserves of that resource.
Solvency
USFG wont fund renewable energy
Bradly Junior 11 (Robert L. Bradley Jr., CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research, More
False Hope About Renewable Energies That Consumers Reject,
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2011/09/19/more-false-hope-about-renewable-energies-that-
consumers-reject/, 9/19/11)
Without the artificial support of government, the economic inefficiencies and unrealistic potential of the
renewable energy industry become blatantly apparent. This is why green jobs are bubble jobs, as shown
by the recent bankruptcies of U.S. solar firms. Instead of investing in emerging green technologies
incapable of delivering results, the government needs to embrace the proven, still developing economic
power of the natural gas and oil industries. Supporting 9.2 million American jobs, and accounting for 8%
of the domestic GDP, the oil and gas industry is responsible for 78% of energy production. These
companies dont consume tax dollars, they pay an average 41% of net income in federal taxes.
Algae biofuels will fail
Picket 12 (Kerry Picket, wrote for the Washington Times and appeared on Fox News and CNN, Algae as
bio-fuel in large scale production will fail,
http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/watercooler/2012/oct/31/picket-report-algae-bio-fuel-large-
scale-productio/)
In late February, at the University Miami in Coral Gables, Fla., President Barack Obama touted how remarkable it would be if the United States
could grow its own energy through the algae plant: Were making new investments in the development of gasoline,
and diesel, and jet fuel thats actually made from a plant-like substancealgae. Youve got a bunch of algae out here. If we can
figure out how to make energy out of that, well be doing alright, he said. The president added, Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17
percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in America. That means greater security. That means
lower costs. That means more jobs. It means a stronger economy. Science Online recently reported that the National Research
Council of the U.S. National Academies released a new report saying that large-scale production of
biofuels from algae is untenable with existing technology.: it would require the use of too much water,
energy, and fertilizer. To improve matters, the reports authors suggest that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which supports
much of the research in the field, should conduct assessments of proposed technologies that examine sustainability at all stages of fuel
production, including growing or collecting algae and harvesting their oil and converting it into transportation fuels. The report continues: But
there are many different approaches to growing algae, such as growing the microscopic plants in shallow outdoor ponds, or in enclosed plastic
tubes called bioreactors. And the industry is far from settled on a single approach. No matter what the strategy, however,
the NRC committee concluded that current technology scaled up to produce 39 billion liters a yearapproximately 5% of U.S. transportation
fuel needswould require an unsustainable level of inputs. Current technologies, for example, need between 3.15 liters and
3650 liters of water to produce the amount of algal biofuel equivalent to 1 liter of gasoline, the panel
concluded.
Algae is under-researched, not economical, and not proven on a large scale.
Sapling 08 *TheEnvironmentSite.org, Algenol, http://www.theenvironmentsite.org/forum/biofuel-
forum/14476-algenol.html]
Another reason could be it would be more difficult to check it out in Mexico. I have no idea why you
would assume the permitting process is easier in Mexico. They are going to be using photo bioreactors
(PBR) made of plastic. The size of the proposed farm is 102,000 acres, or 156 square miles or 2.3 times
the size of Washington DC! Their PBRs are sealed so they need some sort of piping and pumping system
to get CO2 and nutrients in and another set of tubing to collect condensed ethanol. This is a lot of
material. And it has to be maintained and repaired in the blistering hot sun. Look at the state of algae
research on the DOEs NREL website. Look at the state of the USAF/DOE program. The Algae Biomass
Organization shows only a handful of peer reviewed documents on algae and all of them are about
CO2abatement, none are about fuel. Im not saying algae fuel cant be done, Im saying it cant be done
economically and has not been proven on a large scale.
Case Neg
Food vs fuel
Resource wars
Market adjustments solve the internal link.
National Post 08 (National Post, National Edition, Dont Panic, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-
news/2007759/posts, 4/26/08, 7/23/14, MEM)
The trouble with doom-and-gloom predictions -- whether they be about oil shortages, food scarcity,
water wars or population explosions --is that most are based on the linear extrapolation of short-term
trends. If, say, rice prices rise, alarmists assume they will keep rising indefinitely at the same rate -- and
then produce scary-looking graphs that show trend lines veering up into the wild-eyed blue yonder.
But history shows that human adaptation invariably intervenes --especially in parts of the world that
have the benefit of a market economy. Scarcity drives innovations that pull the world back from the
brink. Consumers take high prices as their cue to consume less; producers take the same cue to
produce more. A new equilibrium is reached, just as college microeconomics textbooks would predict.
That's why we aren't losing any sleep over the latest predictions from Canadian Imperial Bank of
Commerce chief economist Jeffrey Rubin, which were fronted prominently on Friday's National Post.
New inventions, new oil discoveries and improvements in existing technologies will conspire to spare
us Mr. Rubin's parade of horribles, which include $2.25-a-litre gasoline and tens of thousands of job
losses in the auto-making sector. In a report entitled The Age of Scarcity, released on Thursday, Mr.
Rubin predicts that by 2012, demand for oil, gas and diesel in the rest of the world will exceed that in
OECD countries. As developing nations get richer, they will begin competing with the current
industrialized world for diminishing resources. This will drive up the cost of everything from energy to
food to computer components. Mr. Rubin predicts this will lead to the biggest economic disruption in
North America since the 1973 oil crisis. But that same historical comparison suggests a reason
Canadians should be suspicious of this ominous forecast: While the oil shortages of the 1970s
displaced millions of assembly-line workers and led to a temporary slowdown of the North American
economy, the adaptations they spurred ultimately made industry more efficient and ordinary people
more prosperous. North American manufacturing is far more productive and energy-efficient now
than it was 30 years ago, as well as producing far less pollution. (Many Canadians under 30, who have
been reared on a constant diet of dire environmental claims, may have trouble believing this, but
despite the rapid growth of our economy in the last three decades, smog is actually less toxic and our
waters less polluted than in 1970.) In an interview with the National Post, Mr. Rubin fell into a
common trap: He assumed growth is a zero-sum game, whereby someone must lose ground every
time someone else gains it. "I think there will be fewer people on the road in North America in five
years than there is right now," Mr. Rubin said on Thursday. "For everybody who's about to get on the
road by buying a new Tata or a Chery car in the developing world, someone's going to have to get off
the road in this part of the world. There's just not enough gasoline to go around." Anyone tempted to
buy into this line of thinking would do well to remember the famous bet between Paul R. Ehrlich,
author of the apocalyptic 1968 book The Population Bomb, and economist Julian Simon. Mr. Erlich
predicted that by the late 1970s, the world would begin to run out of oil and metals, and that "wide-
scale famine caused by declining food production" would cause hundreds of millions of deaths
annually. Mr. Simon, on the other hand contended, that "natural resources are not finite in any serious
way; they are created by the intellect of man, an always renewable resource." In 1980, he bet Mr.
Ehrlich $1,000 that by 1990 a basket of any five commodities of his choosing would cost less than it
had 10 years earlier. By the end-is-nigh thinking embraced by Mr. Ehrlich (and, to a lesser extent, Mr.
Rubin), he should have won easily. Instead, Mr. Simon won. The five commodities chosen were, after
inflation, 40% cheaper in 1990 than they had been a decade before. The same pattern is beginning to
unfold in 2008. In just a few short months, rising prices for fuel have prompted the sort of market-
driven energy efficiencies and environmental solutions that the green movement has failed to achieve
through years of hectoring, regulating and legislating. Full-sized SUV sales have plummeted, home
builders are designing smaller, low-consumption houses, airlines and railways are switching to more
efficient planes and engines and car makers are scrambling to lighten their models. Thanks to just a
30% increase in pump prices, the automobile sector is likely to raise fleet fuel efficiency more than all
the laws demanding higher standards passed in the past 35 years combined. There is no doubt that
our society is changing because of the scarcity in food and fuel that Mr. Rubin highlights. But it defies
the principles of economics to imagine that such scarcity will persist indefinitely. If there is one trend
we can depend on, it is that the law of supply and demand will intervene to blunt the economic shocks
that even the most prosperous nations must inevitably face.
No resource wars states are rational and strategic
Salehyan 08 (Idean Salehyan, Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas, From Climate Change to
Conflict? No Consensus Yet* Journal of Peace Research, vol. 45, no. 3
http://emergingsustainability.org/files/resolver%20climate%20change%20and%20conflict.pdf, May 2008, MEM)7/23/14,
MEM)
On a fundamental level, if we acknowledge that actors faced with environmental stress make decisions
strategically, then we can see that violence is generally a poor response to resource scarcity, given the
alternatives. Barring the defeat, subjugation, or extermination of the other party, armed conflict by itself
does nothing to resolve the underlying incompatibility over the distribution of resources. Violence is
typically used as a strategy used to influence outcomes during negotiations, whether in a domestic or
international setting (Filson & Werner, 2002; Wagner, 2000); eventually, actors must come to the
bargaining table. Moreover, there is good reason to think that civil wars are extremely disruptive to the
natural environment, leaving fewer resources than there were to begin with. Warfare is, therefore, an
inefficient and costly way to resolve conflicts over resources (Fearon, 1995). Failure to find a suitable
bargain and forgo fighting stems from failures in the political process, not from the absolute level of
resources. Thus, while environmental degradation is certainly not a necessary condition for armed conflict,
neither is it a sufficient one, since states play a key role in containing or aggravating violence
Warming
Warming is caused by natural processes
The Daily Galaxy 09 (The Daily Galaxy, Great Discoveries Channel science news, Is Global Warming
Part of Earths Natural Cycle: MIT Teams Says Yes,
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/06/is-global-warming-part-of-earths-natural-cycle-mit-
team-says-yes.html)
A team of MIT scientists recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels -the first
increase in ten years. What baffles the team is that this data contradicts theories stating humans are the
primary source of increase in greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the
highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. Since all
worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, however, it is probable that this may
be part of a natural cycle - and not the direct result of man's contributions. MIT's Matthew Rigby and
Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric
and Planetary Science, state that this imbalance has resulted in several million metric tons of additional
methane in the atmosphere. Methane is produced by wetlands, rice paddies, cattle, and the gas and
coal industries, and is destroyed by reaction with the hydroxyl free radical (OH), often referred to as the
atmosphere's "cleanser." Methane accounts for roughly one-fifth of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, though its effect is 25x greater than that of carbon dioxide. Its impact on global warming
comes from the reflection of the sun's light back to the Earth. Methane is broken down in the
atmosphere by the free radical hydroxyl (OH), a naturally occuring process. This atmospheric cleanser
has been shown to adjust itself up and down periodically, and is believed to account for the lack of
increases in methane levels in Earth's atmosphere over the past ten years despite notable simultaneous
increases by man. Prinn has said, "The next step will be to study [these changes] using a very high-
resolution atmospheric circulation model and additional measurements from other networks. The key
thing is to better determine the relative roles of increased methane emission versus [an increase] in the
rate of removal. Apparently we have a mix of the two, but we want to know how much of each [is
responsible for the overall increase]."
Green tech Leadership

Fossil fuels are better than algae biofuel
Stecker 12 (Tiffany Stecker, Agriculture reporter, Greenwire at E&E Publishing,LLC, Algal Biofuel Sustainability Review
Highlights Concerns about Water Supply, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/algal-biofuel-sustainability-review-
hightlights-concerns-about-water-safety/, 10/25/12, 7/18/14, MEM)
Energy output in relation to inputs, or "energy return on investment," remains an issue for algae, says
the report. Overall, algae biofuel yields a low energy output for all of the energy needed to produce it.
Fossil fuels can produce up to six times more energy than even the most efficient algae fuels, as a
ratio of output to the input energy.
No jobs from renewable energy sectors
Wilder 7/25 (Clint Wilder, senior editor at leading clean-tech research and advisory firm Clean Edge, As US Clean Energy Goes
Mainstream, Leadership Is Focused on States and Cities, http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2014/07/as-us-clean-
energy-goes-mainstream-leadership-is-focused-on-states-and-cities, 7/25/14)
The role of the clean-tech industry as a job creator in the U.S. has also been the topic of much political
debate, but two developments in recent months could significantly boost that role, and do so in the hard-hit but recovering American
manufacturing sector. Texas, California, and three other states are competing furiously to lure Tesla Motors planned battery gigafactory,
while SolarCitys recently-announced acquisition of solar panel maker Silevo could lead to a significant number of manufacturing jobs in the
unlikely locale of Buffalo, New York. Showing the critical importance of public-private partnerships in developing clean-tech hubs at the state
and metro level, Silevo and LED lighting maker Soraa have agreed to invest a combined $1.5 billion to locate manufacturing in Buffalos new
RiverBend Innovation Hub while New York State provided $225 million. The federal government level, however, continues to be a
(mostly) different story. Although the Washington, D.C. metro area ranks eighth in the nation in our Metro Index, partisan gridlock
remains the rule on Capitol Hill, where even the broadly supported Shaheen-Portman bill on energy
efficiency failed to reach a floor vote in the Senate in May. Congress has also failed to pass tax-credit
extensions for the wind and solar power industries, while doing nothing about ending decades-long tax support for the oil
and gas industries. Last month, however, President Obama took perhaps the boldest step of his administration to
advance clean energy, announcing new Environmental Protection Agency regulations to cut greenhouse
gas emissions by 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. The new rules already face significant political and legal
challenges, but they could dramatically accelerate the ongoing shift from coal-fired power generation to a future of renewables, energy
efficiency, and limited natural gas. Notably, and perhaps not surprisingly, implementation of the carbon rules would be left up to the states.
That will provide regional players a significant role in setting policies and programs, making the tracking of state and metro progress in the U.S.
Clean Tech Leadership Index all the more critical.



Peak Oil
Oil dependence is inevitable we have become too reliant
New York Times, 2008
(Gusher of Lies, New York Times, 3-7-08, Online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/07/books/chapters/first-chapter-gusher-of-
lies.html?pagewanted=all)
This book focuses on the need to acknowledge, and deal with, the difference between rhetoric and
reality. The reality is that the world and the energy business in particular is becoming ever more
interdependent. And this interdependence will likely only accelerate in the years to come as new
supplies of fossil fuel become more difficult to find and more expensive to produce. While alternative
and renewable forms of energy will make minor contributions to Americas overall energy mix, they
cannot provide enough new supplies to supplant the new global energy paradigm, one in which every
type of fossil fuel crude oil, natural gas, diesel fuel, gasoline, coal, and uranium gets traded and
shipped in an ever more sophisticated global market. Regardless of the ongoing fears about oil
shortages, global warming, conflict in the Persian Gulf, and terrorism, the plain, unavoidable truth is that
the U.S., along with nearly every other country on the planet is married to fossil fuels. And that fact will
not change in the foreseeable future, meaning the next 30 to 50 years. That means that the U.S. and the
other countries of the world will continue to need oil and gas from the Persian Gulf and other regions.
Given those facts, the U.S. needs to accept the reality of energy interdependence. The integration and
interdependence of the global energy market can be seen by looking at Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil
producer on the planet. In 2005, the Saudis imported 83,000 barrels of gasoline and other refined oil
products per day. It can also be seen by looking at Iran, which imports 40 percent of its gasoline needs.
Iran also imports large quantities of natural gas from Turkmenistan. If the Saudis, with their 260 billion
barrels of oil reserves, and the Iranians, with their 132 billion barrels of oil and 970 trillion cubic feet of
natural gas reserves, cant be energy-independent, why should the U.S. even try? An October 2006
report by the Council on Foreign Relations put it succinctly: The voices that espouse energy
independence are doing the nation a disservice by focusing on a goal that is unachievable over the
foreseeable future and that encourages the adoption of inefficient and counterproductive policies.
Americas future when it comes to energy as well its future in politics, trade, and the environment
lies in accepting the reality of an increasingly interdependent world. Obtaining the energy that the U.S.
will need in future decades requires American politicians, diplomats, and businesspeople to be actively
engaged with the energy-producing countries of the world, particularly the Arab and Islamic producers.
Obtaining the countrys future energy supplies means that the U.S. must embrace the global market
while also acknowledging the practical limits on the ability of wind power and solar power to displace
large amounts of the electricity thats now generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors. The rhetoric
about the need for energy independence continues largely because the American public is woefully
ignorant about the fundamentals of energy and the energy business. It appears that voters respond to
the phrase, in part, because it has become a type of code that stands for foreign policy isolationism
the idea being that if only the U.S. didnt buy oil from the Arab and Islamic countries, then all would be
better. The rhetoric of energy independence provides political cover for protectionist trade policies,
which have inevitably led to ever larger subsidies for politically connected domestic energy producers,
the corn ethanol industry being the most obvious example.
Resource wars dont happen other variables at play
Victor, professor of law at Stanford Law School and the director of the Program on
Energy and Sustainable Development, 2007
(David, What Resource Wars?, November 12, Online:
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=16020)

RISING ENERGY prices and mounting concerns about environmental depletion have animated fears that
the world may be headed for a spate of "resource wars"-hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab
valuable resources. Such fears come in many stripes, but the threat industry has sounded the alarm bells especially loudly in three areas.
First is the rise of China, which is poorly endowed with many of the resources it needs-such as oil, gas, timber and most minerals-and has
already "gone out" to the world with the goal of securing what it wants. Violent conflicts may follow as the country shunts others aside. A
second potential path down the road to resource wars starts with all the money now flowing into poorly governed but resource-rich countries.
Money can fund civil wars and other hostilities, even leaking into the hands of terrorists. And third is global climate change, which could
multiply stresses on natural resources and trigger water wars, catalyze the spread of disease or bring about mass migrations. Most of this is
bunk, and nearly all of it has focused on the wrong lessons for policy. Classic resource wars are good
material for Hollywood screenwriters. They rarely occur in the real world. To be sure, resource money
can magnify and prolong some conflicts, but the root causes of those hostilities usually lie elsewhere.
Fixing them requires focusing on the underlying institutions that govern how resources are used and
largely determine whether stress explodes into violence. When conflicts do arise, the weak link isn't a dearth in resources
but a dearth in governance.
Solvency