Cars+Air+Pollution+AFF+Group

For the final 1ac, click here
= = =DOWNLOAD OUR SORTING MATRIX != =[|CarsMatrix.xls]=

We are subdivided into 3 groups

Air Pollution
Alexandra, Chris & Alison

Hydrogen transition/impacts
Jeffrey, Mike & Jonah

Solvency mechanisms - including the search for non hydrogen alternative energies for cars, as well as solvency for hydrogen
Jessica & Bill

here are some cites to follow

[|Oil End Game] - free online book to download

Other stuff: [|http://environment.about.com /od/globalwarming/a/california _law.htm] [|http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin /article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/22 /MN3J10A11O.DTL&tsp=1] http://www.hydrogen.gov/ and in particular http://www.hydrogen.gov/federalprograms.html to find pages such as http://www.usps.com/green/ http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/robert_boyd/story/16179.html http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2008/05/hydrogen http://fuelcells.org/ http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/22087/ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120468405514712501.html [|http://www.netl.doe.gov /publications/others/pdf/Oil _Peaking_NETL.pdf]

Search in the Dartmouth Library for [|Science Direct] - an online resource. using keywords "hydrogen car" here are some articles [|A Strategy for Introducing Hydrogen into Transportation] [|A comparison of alternative technologies to de-carbonize Canada's passenger transportation sector] [|Sustainable energy and transportation systems introduction and overview] The International Journal of Vehicle Design -

Air Pollution Cites http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1523-1739.1995.09061528.x http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=wtp7tN2EescC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=air+pollution+extinction&ots=9ZjuTrGMg4&sig=cGMzOWsOam4B0cdFZWFeJROJdkg [|PFAirPollution.pdf] This pdf has tons of cites in it.

Search in Dartmouth Library for http://www.jstor.org/pss/2260933 http://www.popline.org/docs/269465 http://www.springerlink.com/content/q1u36346172265u8/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/h4364m6522816380/ http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/184/4142/1176 (and check out the bottom cites from that page too) http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/221/4610/520 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/250088 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V78-43CRG9V-6&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=3005ff9293ca64162e55350f07022eb1 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/282/5391/1024

Books to find http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=U22AxXheqpAC&oi=fnd&pg=PR13&dq=acid+rain&ots=qI1N5lbgx7&sig=0JwoBsM-c5-L5gUUlY2KhHhGI9g

More Air Pollutiion cites Chris Maser, Resolving Environmental Conflict Towards Sustainable Community Development, 1996 p. 31-38 Karla Smith, 2001, NIRA Review, http://nira.or.jp/past/publ/review/2001winter/smith.txt http://edie.net/ http://www.wastenews.com/headlines.html (there is a free registration)

A2 Air Pollution (also Alexandra's group) Thomas Lumley, Biostatistics U of Washington '2, http://faculty.washington.edu/tlumley/multiscale.html Victor Runeckles & Sagar krupa, Environmental Pollution, v. 83, 1994 p. 206 Washington Post April 15 1993 p. A19 "Botantists have found . . . . dropping it to low levels through the night" Richard Benedick, 11-18-98, Environmental Diplomacy: conference report. American Institute for Contemporary German studies. p. 6 "The common factor that probably . . . . against long-term risks" http://eteam.ncpa.org/news/smog-and-climate-change-connection-false



Contention 1: Inherency While hydrogen car prototypes have been created, they aren’t yet commercially available CNet News, 6/16/08, Honda produces first commercial hydrogen cars, http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9969263-54.html Honda has begun the first commercial production ever of a hydrogen fuel cell-powered car. The Japanese auto manufacturer ceremoniously launched production of its first hydrogen-powered vehicles on Sunday in Tochigi, Japan, and announced its first customers. The four-door sedan, called the FCX Clarity, runs on electricity from a fuel cell battery that is powered by hydrogen fuel. Steam is the car's only byproduct. The car can get a combined (city and highway driving) fuel efficiency of about 72 miles per kg of H2 which, according to Honda's own estimates, is the equivalent of getting about 74 mpg on a gas-powered car. The car can be driven for about 280 miles before needing to be refueled. While many automakers and researchers have prototypes and pilot projects using hydrogen fuel to power fuel cells on electric hybrids, or as a direct fuel source for vehicles with converted engines, there are no hydrogen-powered cars yet available for lease or purchase to the average consumer.

THUS THE PLAN: THE UNITED STATES FEDERAL GOVERNMENT SHOULD SUBSTANTIALLY INCREASE ECONOMIC INCENTIVES FOR HYDROGEN-FUELED CARS

Contention 2: Environment Hydrogen fuel reduces air pollution and prevents harmful emissions Blue Water Network, May 2003, Hydrogen-Fueled Hybrid Internal Combustion Engines, http://www.bluewaternetwork.org/reports/rep_ca_global_hydrogenengine.pdf Ultimately, the use of hydrogen fuel produced from renewable energy sources could solve the air pollution, global warming, and energy security problems associated with today’s fossil fuel-powered passenger vehicles. Although commercial application of hydrogen fuel cell technology for passenger vehicles is still over a decade away, optimization of today’s hybrid internal combustion engines (ICE) to run on hydrogen may provide a vital intermediary step. This paper summarizes recent technological developments, studies, and emissions tests which indicate that these vehicles could substantially reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. With regulatory and legislative support, they could soon be produced on a commercial scale across the United States. Key Results: Gaseous hydrogen fuel made from renewable energy and used in a hybrid ICE could reduce well-to-wheel greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 100 percent, relative to today’s conventional vehicles. If produced from natural gas, hydrogen used in a hybrid ICE could reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20-30 percent, relative to existing conventional gasoline vehicles. The hydrogen-fueled hybrid ICE produces near-zero regulated air pollution emissions even without exhaust after-treatment. Ford has developed a hydrogen-fueled hybrid ICE concept vehicle that is 25 percent more efficient than gasoline-fueled vehicles, and has a range of 300 miles. This vehicle—the Model U—was specifically designed with mass production and affordability in mind.

Combustion automobiles create acid rain Clean Air Trust, 1999, Acid Rain, http://www.cleanairtrust.org/acidrain.html Acid rain (or acid deposition, as it's called in technical circles) is produced by the burning of fossil fuels. It is formed when emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides react in the atmosphere with water, oxygen and oxidants to form various acidic compounds. These compounds then fall to the ground in either wet or dry form. Acid rain acidifies lakes and streams and contributes to damage of trees at high elevations. (Check out Mount Mitchell in North Carolina if you want a graphic example of tree damage.) Hundreds of lakes in the Adirondacks have become too acidic to support sensitive fish species. In addition, acid rain accelerates the decay of paints and buildings. Electric power plants account for about 70 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions about 30 percent of nitrogen oxides emissions. Cars, trucks and buses also are major sources of nitrogen oxides.

Acid rain kills coral reefs and ocean biodiversity Andrea Thompson, LiveScience Staff Writer, 12/13/07 “Increasing Acid Could Kill Most Coral by 2050” http://www.livescience.com/environment/071213-coral-acid.html SAN FRANCISCO — The world’s coral reefs face almost certain death as increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are absorbed by the oceans, acidifying the water in which corals live, a new study warns. In the past few decades, corals have come under increasing pressure from warming ocean waters, overfishing and disease. A recent study found corals in Pacific ocean were disappearing faster than previously thought. The new study, to be presented tomorrow at a meeting here of the American Geophysical Union, points to yet another factor plaguing these underwater bastions of biodiversity: carbon dioxide. As carbon dioxide is emitted through the burning of fossil fuels, some of it is absorbed by the world’s oceans. “About a third of the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans,” said study team member Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, “which helps slow greenhouse warming, but is a major pollutant of the oceans.” When the carbon dioxide is absorbed in the water, it produces carbonic acid, the same acid that gives soft drinks their fizz. This acid also makes certain minerals dissolve more readily in seawater, particularly aragonite, the mineral used by corals and many other marine organisms to grow their skeletons. Caldeira and his colleagues ran computer simulations of ocean chemistry based on a range of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, from 280 parts per million (ppm) (pre-industr3ial levels) to 5,000 parts per million. (Present levels are 380 ppm and rising.) Their findings, detailed in the Dec. 14 issue of the journal Science, show that if current emission trends continue, 98 percent of present-day reef habitats will be too acidic by mid-century for reef growth. “Before the industrial revolution, over 98 percent of warm water coral reefs were bathed with open ocean waters 3.5 times supersaturated with aragonite, meaning that corals could easily extract it to build reefs,” said study co-author Long Cao, also of the Carnegie Institution. “But if atmospheric CO2 stabilizes at 550 ppm—and even that would take concerted international efforts to achieve—no existing coral reef will remain in such an environment.” At greatest risk of these changes are Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest living structure, and the reefs of the Caribbean Sea. To slow ocean acidification, Caldeira and Cao warn, will likely take more stringent and immediate reductions in carbon dioxide than would be needed to reduce the other effects of global warming. “The science speaks for itself. We have created conditions on Earth unlike anything most species alive today have experienced in their evolutionary history,” said co-author Bob Steneck of the University of Maine. “Corals are feeling the effects of our actions, and it is now or never if we want to safeguard these marine creatures and the livelihoods that depend on them.”

Ocean Biodiversity prevents Extinction Robin Kundis Craig, Associate Professor of Law – Indiana University, 2003, Taking Steps Toward Marine Wilderness Protection?” 34 McGeorge L. Rev. 155, accessed through Lexis Biodiversity and ecosystem function arguments for conserving marine ecosystems also exist, just as they do for terrestrial ecosystems, but these arguments have thus far rarely been raised in political debates. For example, besides significant tourism values - the most economically valuable ecosystem service coral reefs provide, worldwide - coral reefs protect against storms and dampen other environmental fluctuations, services worth more than ten times the reefs' value for food production. 856 Waste treatment is another significant, non-extractive ecosystem function that intact coral reef ecosystems provide. 857 More generally, "ocean ecosystems play a major role in the global geochemical cycling of all the elements that represent the basic building blocks of living organisms, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, as well as other less abundant but necessary elements." 858 In a very real and direct sense, therefore, human degradation of marine ecosystems impairs the planet's ability to support life. Maintaining biodiversity is often critical to maintaining the functions of marine ecosystems. Current evidence shows that, in general, an ecosystem's ability to keep functioning in the face of disturbance is strongly dependent on its biodiversity, "indicating that more diverse ecosystems are more stable." 859 Coral reef ecosystems are particularly dependent on their biodiversity.

Contention 3: Hydrogen Economy The distribution of hydrogen cars causes a transition to a hydrogen economy Amory B. Lovins, is Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient (1993), and author and co-author of many books on renewable energy and energy efficiency, 1998, Winning the Oil Endgame, p. 229, https://nc.rmi.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=192&srcid=271 The hydrogen transition depends on superefficient vehicles and distributed generation taking hold in the U.S., more than either of these breakthroughs depend on the hydrogen economy. There has been much misplaced angst about whether the U.S. should invest now in efficient vehicles or in hydrogen technologies. This debate makes as much sense as arguing about whether star athletes should play football or baseball, which occur during different seasons. The answer is, of course, “both”: first today’s gasoline hybrids, then ultralight hybrids, then ultimately fuel-cell ultralight hybrids. (Some experts believe an intermediate step—efficient hybrids with small hydrogen-fueled internal-combustion engines, like hybrid successors to Ford’s Model U concept car—may also make sense;920 these could be considered a partial backstop technology in case cheap, durable fuel cells take longer to commercialize than expected.) In the case of hydrogen, efficiency and distributed generation should clearly come first because these set the stage for the hydrogen economy, which will have trouble competing without them. That is, hydrogen needs State of the Art-class vehicles far more than they need hydrogen. However, once we have such vehicles and once fuel cells become cheaper, there will be a robust business case for producing the hydrogen that those vehicles would then use.

Disseminating hydrogen fuel allows for a decentralized hydrogen economy, and cheap distribution of energy Jeremy Rifkin, Author of "Hydrogen Economy", President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, 2004, http://www.ari.vt.edu/hydrogen/Resources/ConfDoc/FullText/RifkinTalk.html Good afternoon everybody. It's a pleasure to be here with you. The great economic revolutions in history, the really great ones, occur when two things happen. The first is a basic change in the way we organize the energy of the earth. Second, a basic change in the way we communicate with each other to organize the new energy régime. The coming together, the convergence, of a new energy régime and a new communications régime, these really are the pivotal points in history. Although infrequent, when they happen, they truly are paradigmic. They are a Gestalt change. Let me give you an example. Let's go back to ancient Sumeria, the first great agricultural civilization. Sumerians found a way to capture the Sun’s energy in cereal plants. Those plants became the prime energy mover for human history for 10,000 years - the agricultural era. When the Sumerians went to agriculture it was complicated, involving irrigation, hydraulics and mechanics. They had to know about the changing seasons. They had to deal with cultivation, harvest and storage and distribution. The great changes in energy history are actually great changes in spatial-temporal orientation. Changes in spatial-temporal orientation quickened the pace, the speed, the flow the connectivity and the density of human exchange. When we change energy régimes, we change the density of human exchange. Technologies are an extension of our being. We inflate ourselves with technologies so that we can expropriate our surroundings, compress time and space, and exchange more densely. The locomotives extends our running legs, the computer amplifies memory, the bow and arrow extends our throwing arm. They are all keys to new communications and energy régimes. The coming together of writing and agriculture was a turning point in our species’ history. Gutenberg invents the printing press with movable type; for three centuries that invention had a social value, but not an economic value. The economic mission of the printing press did not really become clear until James Watt invented the steam engine and patented it, signaling the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. We went down to the burial grounds of the Jurassic age and we dug up those remains and we burned them as stored energy and we greatly increased the speed and pace, the connectivity and the density of exchange. It used to be if one wanted to go from London to Manchester it took days; by the time the rails were laid down it was a matter of hours. When we moved to the steam engine and coal, we had to have a new command-and-control mechanism to organize it because it was so complicated. In hindsight, try to imagine organizing the first Industrial Revolution with codex or with oral culture. It would have been slow and parochial, and not expansive enough in time and space to organize that new energy régime. We could not have done it without print. The telegraph and telephone preceded the internal combustion engine by a few years: it became the command-and-control mechanism for a régime ultimately based on the flow of oil. I just want to make this point. We had a dramatic communications revolution in this past decade. Personal computers, the World Wide Web - we've actually connected the central nervous system of a billion people at the speed of light worldwide in less than 12 years. We now have wireless communication, and we are going to move to grid technology. After that, we are going to be moving into parallel computing, quantum mechanics and nanotechnology. But the point of this revolution is this: we did increase productivity with this new communication, because we thought that was its main mission, we did connect the central nervous system of a lot of human beings, but we never did really step back and ask what is the anthropological mission of this communications revolution. It can't be just about increasing traditional productivity or connecting people. I think we are about to be on the cusp of a new convergence, and this decentralized communication revolution of the 1990s will become the command and control mechanism for the new energy régime. That new energy régime is distributed generation and hydrogen. Hydrogen - a basic element of the universe, stuff of the stars, ubiquitous, and when we harness that energy we get just pure water and heat. How does the decentralized communication régime connect to distributed generation of energy in the first few decades of the 21st century? We have to begin to imagine the fuel cell as analogous to the personal computer; there's a direct analogy here. When we use a personal computer we are using our own information; the end-user becomes the author. We have a lot of end-users who are desirous of sharing information, and we took that science-based Internet and turn it into the global Internet, so that you and I can generate information on the personal computer and share it with a billion people. Imagine a fuel cell powered by hydrogen, and now imagine millions and millions of fuel cells by mid-century. Every home, every factory, every office, portables with every human being, 800 million automobiles and trucks, Those will be our power plants. We - the end-users - begin to generate our own power. But then how do we share it? We're just getting to how we share the computers; it's called grid technology. We now realize that we can get the software together to connect all the personal computers, thousands of them, to do work that individual supercomputers could never do. What is the analogy to grid technology? You and I generate our hydrogen from electricity-to-hydrogen powered fuel cells. We send it back to the grid; all the energy we don't need. The problem, though, is that the grid can't handle it now, because the grid is centralized like the old communications grid. What we are going to do in the next 30 years, if we are smart enough, is reconfigure every power grid in America and every power grid in the world, using the architecture and the hardware and the software that was developed in Silicon Valley, so that when you and I generate the electricity, we will be able to send it decentralized, peer-to-peer, with all the appropriate architecture, so that we can say where it is going to go for the grid in real time.

2 Impacts A. Economy Centralized energy sources within the US make a strike inevitable, causing an economic collapse. Decentralizing energy sources through fuel cells is key Jeremy Rifkin,, Author of "Hydrogen Economy", President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, 2002, The Hydrogen Economy, http://www.emagazine.com/view/?171 As horrible as the attacks of September 11, 2001 were, they were symbolic acts on the parts of the perpetrators, designed to destroy the icons of American economic and military power. What has government officials and business leaders in the U.S. and the European Union really worried is the prospect that, next time, Al Qaeda terrorists will strike at the heart of the system, the power grid itself, crippling a large swath of the economy and paralyzing urban society. How justified are the fears? Unfortunately the power grids in North America and Europe are increasingly vulnerable to disruption by terrorists. Even before the September 11 attacks, government officials worried that American power plants, transmission lines and the telecommunications infrastructure could be targets for terrorists. In 1997, the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection issued a warning that cyber-terrorists’ next target might be the computer programs at the power switching centers that move electricity around the country. Disrupting the electrical grid could wreak havoc on the nation’s economic and social infrastructures. Richard A. Clarke, who heads the cyber-terrorism efforts of the Bush administration, warns of an “Electronic Pearl Harbor.” A combination of cyber-attacks and physical attacks could lay waste to the nation’s oil and gas pipelines, power stations and transmission lines with devastating effects on the economy. Government officials are well aware of the vulnerabilities, but not sure if a system so complex and expansive and so centralized in its command and control mechanisms can ever really be completely secured against terrorist attacks. Because of all these factors, many, including Christopher Flavin, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Worldwatch Institute, believe that the future belongs to decentralized, renewable energy. Although they acknowledge that fossil fuels will continue to provide energy, and that a transmission and distribution infrastructure will still be necessary to get hydrogen to retail customers, these experts see a renewable future. Flavin points out that the market for oil is growing at less than 1.5 percent per year, while the wind and photovoltaic (PV) markets are now doubling in size every three years.

Economic collapse causes extinction. T.E. Bearden, Director of Association of Distinguished American Scientists, 2k, “The Unnecessary Energy Crisis: How to Solve It Quickly,” Space Energy Access Systems, http://www.seaspower.com/EnergyCrisis-Bearden.htm] History bears out that desperate nations take desperate actions. Prior to the final economic collapse, the stress on nations will have increased the intensity and number of their conflicts, to the point where the arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) now possessed by some 25 nations, are almost certain to be released. As an example, suppose a starving North Korea launches nuclear weapons upon Japan and South Korea, including U.S. forces there, in a spasmodic suicidal response. Or suppose a desperate China, whose long-range nuclear missiles (some) can reach the United States, attacks Taiwan. In addition to immediate responses, the mutual treaties involved in such scenarios will quickly draw other nations into the conflict, escalating it significantly. Strategic nuclear studies have shown for decades that, under such extreme stress conditions, once a few nukes are launched, adversaries and potential adversaries are then compelled to launch on perception of preparations by one's adversary. The real legacy of the MAD concept is this side of the MAD coin that is almost never discussed. Without effective defense, the only chance a nation has to survive at all is to launch immediate full-bore pre-emptive strikes and try to take out its perceived foes as rapidly and massively as possible. As the studies showed, rapid escalation to full WMD exchange occurs. Today, a great percent of the WMD arsenals that will be unleashed, are already on site within the United States itself. The resulting great Armageddon will destroy civilization as we know it, and perhaps most of the biosphere, at least for many decades

B. Poverty A Hydrogen economy allows for electricity and technological innovation around the world, ending poverty Jeremy Rifkin, Author of "Hydrogen Economy", President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, 2002, The Hydrogen Economy, http://www.emagazine.com/view/?171 Incredibly, 65 percent of the human population has never made a telephone call, and a third of the human race has no access to electricity or any other form of commercial energy. The global average per capita energy use for all countries is only one fifth that of the U.S. The disparity between the connected and the unconnected is deep and threatens to become even more pronounced over the next half century with world population expected to rise from the current 6.2 billion to nine billion people. Most of the population increase is going to take place in the developing world, where the poverty is concentrated. Lack of access to energy, and especially electricity, is a key factor in perpetuating poverty around the world. Conversely, access to energy means more economic opportunity. In South Africa, for example, for every 100 households electrified, 10 to 20 new businesses are created. Electricity frees human labor from day-to-day survival tasks. Simply finding enough firewood or dung to warm a house or cook meals in resource poor countries can take hours out of each day. Electricity provides power to run farm equipment, operate small factories and craft shops, and light homes, schools and businesses. Making the shift to a hydrogen energy regime, using renewable resources and technologies to produce the hydrogen, and creating distributed generation energy webs that can connect communities all over the world, holds great promise for helping to lift billions of people out of poverty. Narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots requires, among other things, narrowing the gap between the connected and the unconnected. It also presents a significant challenge: developing and harnessing renewable energy sources for hydrogen in countries with no current infrastructure.

Poverty causes extinction through the inevitable proliferation of insanely destructive devices. The only way to solve is by disseminating tech Dale Carrico, 3/10/06, lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, PhD, Uc Berkeley, Visiting Faculty, Liberal Arts, San Francisco Art Institute, Human Rights Fellow, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) amormundi.blogspot.com/2006/03/technology-and-terror.html I believe that the power of emerging technologies to redress the sources of legitimate social discontent - to end global poverty, to promote universal health and education and to develop abiding, genuinely representative and accountable public institutions - provides the only way to manage the lethal power of emerging weapons of mass destruction, as well as the relative ease with which they could find their way into the hands of those who would express or exploit such discontent. Contemplating Insane Destructiveness New technologies will be unprecedented in their creative and their destructive power, as well as in their ubiquity, and this changes everything. Two short essays, one by Lawrence Lessig in the April edition of Wired magazine and the other by Richard Rorty in the April 1 issue of the London Review of Books, address this in interestingly similar terms. These essays look at the problem of the likely near-term development and proliferation of relatively cheap and massively destructive new technologies such as bioengineered pathogens (Lessig) and suitcase nukes (Rorty). "Key technologies of the future - in particular, genetic engineering, nanotech, and robotics (or GNR) because they are self-replicating and increasingly easier to craft - would be radically more dangerous than technologies of the past," writes Lessig in terms that evoke an earlier essay by Bill Joy, but the technophobic conclusions of which Lessig significantly rejects. "It is impossibly hard to build an atomic bomb; when you build one, you've built just one. But the equivalent evil implanted in a malevolent virus will become easier to build, and if built, could become self-replicating. This is P2P (peer-to-peer) meets WMD (weapons of mass destruction), producing IDDs (insanely destructive devices)." Rorty writes in a similar vein that "[w]ithin a year or two, suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (crafted in Pakistan or North Korea) may be commercially available. Eager customers will include not only rich playboys like Osama bin Laden but also the leaders of various irredentist movements that have metamorphosed into well-financed criminal gangs. Once such weapons are used in Europe, whatever measures the interior ministers have previously agreed to propose will seem inadequate." It is probably inevitable that discussions of the threat of weaponized emerging technologies will reflect the distress of the so-called contemporary "War on Terror." But it is important to recognize that present-day terrorism, however devastating, is a timid anticipation of the dangers and dilemmas to come. The March 11, 2004 Madrid attacks made use of conventional explosives, and the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States involved the crude hijacking and repurposing of fuel-fat jets as missiles. To the extent that these attacks have provoked as a response (or worse, have provided a pretext for) "preemptive" and essentially unilateral military adventures abroad, and assaults on civil liberties at home, it is increasingly difficult to maintain much hope that we are mature enough as a civilization to cope with the forces we have ourselves set in motion. Regulation Between Relinquishment and Resignation Both Lessig and Rorty anticipate that when confronted with the horrifying reality or even simply the prospect of new technological threats the first impulse of the North Atlantic democracies is almost certain to be misguided compensatory expansions of state surveillance and control. Both essays point to the likely futility of such efforts to perfectly police the creation and traffic of unprecedented technologies. In the worst case, with Lessig's designer pathogen or with the goo bestiary that preoccupies the nightmares of nanotech Cassandras (and don't forget the actual story: Cassandra was right!), we are confronted with the prospect of new massively destructive technologies that might be cooked up in obscure laboratories at comparably modest costs, using easily obtainable materials, employing techniques in the public domain, and distributed via stealthy networks. In the Bill Joy essay that inspired Lessig's piece, the epic scale of the threats posed by emerging technologies prompted Joy to recommend banning their development altogether. The typical rejoinder to Joy's own proposal of "relinquishment," of a principled (or panic-stricken) pre-emptive ban on these unprecedentedly destructive technological capacities is that it is absolutely unenforceable, and hence would too likely shift the development and use of such technologies to precisely the least scrupulous people and least regulated conditions. And all of this would, of course, exacerbate the very risks any such well-meaning but misguided ban would have been enacted to reduce in the first place. Definitely I agree with this rejoinder, but it's important not to misapply its insights. The fact that laws prohibiting murder don't perfectly eliminate the crime scarcely recommends we should strike these laws off the books. If Joy's technological relinquishment was the best or only hope for humanity's survival, then we would of course be obliged to pursue it whatever the challenges. But surely the stronger reason to question relinquishment is simply that it would deny us the extraordinary benefits of emerging technologies -— spectacularly safe, strong, cheap materials and manufactured goods; abundant foodstuffs; new renewable energy technologies; and incomparably effective medical interventions. Technophiles often seem altogether too eager to claim that technological regulation is unenforceable, or that developmental outcomes they happen to desire themselves are "inevitable." But of course the shape that development will take —- its pace, distribution, and deployments -— is anything but inevitable in fact. And all technological development is obviously and absolutely susceptible to regulation, for good or ill, by laws, norms, market forces and structural limits. Market libertarian technophiles such as Ronald Bailey sometimes seem to suggest that any effort to regulate technological development at all is tantamount to Joy's desire to ban it altogether. Bailey counters both Joy's relinquishment thesis and Lessig's more modest proposals with a faith that "robust" science on its own is best able to defend against the threats science itself unleashes. This is an argument and even a profession I largely share with him, but only to the extent that we recognize just how much of what makes science "robust" is produced and maintained in the context of well-supported research traditions, stable institutions, steady funding and rigorous oversight, most of which look quite like the "regulation" that negative libertarians otherwise rail against. For me, robust scientific culture looks like the fragile attainment of democratic civilization, not some "spontaneous order." So too "deregulation" is a tactic that is obviously occasionally useful within the context of a broader commitment to reform and good regulation. But treated as an end in itself the interminable market fundamentalist drumbeat of "deregulation" -— so prevalent among especially American technophiles —- amounts to an advocacy of lawlessness. Does this really seem the best time to call for lawlessness? Market libertarian ideologues often promote a policy of "market-naturalist" resignation that seems to me exactly as disastrous in its consequences as Joy's recommendation of relinquishment. In fact, the consequence of both policies seems precisely the same —- to abandon technological development to the least scrupulous, least deliberative, least accountable forces on offer. My point is not to demonize commerce, of course, but simply to recognize that good governance encourages good and discourages antisocial business practices, while a healthy business climate is likewise the best buttress to good democratic governance. While I am quite happy to leave the question of just which toothbrush consumers prefer to market forces, it seems to me a kind of lunacy to suggest that the answer to coping with emerging existential technological threats is, "Let the market decide." What we need is neither resignation nor relinquishment, but critical deliberation

 and reasonable regulation. What we need is Regulation between Relinquishment and Resignation (RRR). Resources for Hope? Lessig and Rorty make different but complementary recommendations in the face of the dreadful quandaries of cheap and ubiquitous, massively destructive emerging technologies. Taken together, these recommendations provide what looks to me like the basis for a more reasonable and hopeful strategy. Rorty insists, first and foremost, that citizens in the North Atlantic democracies must challenge what he describes as "the culture of government secrecy": "Demands for government openness should start in the areas of nuclear weaponry and of intelligence-gathering," which are, he points out, "the places where the post-World War Two obsession with secrecy began." More specifically, we must demand that our governments "publish the facts about their stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction [and] make public the details of two sets of planned responses: one to the use of such weapons by other governments, and another for their use by criminal gangs such as al-Qaida." He goes on to point out that "[i]f Western governments were made to disclose and discuss what they plan to do in various sorts of emergency, it would at least be slightly harder for demagogic leaders to argue that the most recent attack justifies them in doing whatever they like. Crises are less likely to produce institutional change, and to have unpredictable results, if they have been foreseen and publicly discussed." Never has the need for global collaboration been more conspicuous. Never has the need to unleash the collective, creative, critical intelligence of humanity been more urgent. And yet the contemporary culture of the "War on Terror" has seemed downright hostile to intelligence in all its forms. Efforts to understand the social conditions that promote terror are regularly dismissed as "appeasement." Critical thinking about our response to terror is routinely denigrated as "treason." Authorities strive to insulate their conduct from criticism and scrutiny behind veils of secrecy in the name of "security." (And all of this is depressingly of a piece, of course, with the current Bush Administration's assaults on consensus environmental science, genetic research, effective sex education, and all the rest.) It is no wonder so many of us fear the "War on Terror" quite as much as we fear terrorism itself. But how much more damaging than the self-defeating and authoritarian responses to conventional terrorism can we expect the response to the emerging threats of Lessig's "Insanely Destructive Devices" to be? When devastating technologies become cheap and ubiquitous we must redress the social discontent that makes their misuse seem justifiable to more people than we can ever hope to manage or police. Since we cannot hope to halt the development of all the cheap, disastrously weaponizable technologies on the horizon, nor can we hope to perfectly control their every use, Lessig suggests that "perhaps the rational response is to reduce the incentives to attack... maybe we should focus on ways to eliminate the reasons to annihilate us." Fantasies of an absolute control over these technologies, or of an absolute control through technology (SDI, TIA, and its epigones, anyone?), are sure to exacerbate the very discontent that will make their misuse more widespread. Anticipating the inevitable objection, Lessig is quick to point out that "[c]razies, of course, can't be reasoned with. But we can reduce the incentives to become a crazy. We could reduce the reasonableness - from a certain perspective - for finding ways to destroy us." Criminals, fanatics and madmen are in fact a manageable minority in any culture. (Racist know-nothing slogans to the contrary about a so-called epic and epochal "Clash of Civilizations" deserve our utter contempt.) Although there is no question that Lessig's "Insanely Destructive Devices" could still do irreparable occasional harm in their hands, it is profoundly misleading to focus on the threats posed by crazy and criminal minorities when it is as often as not the exploitation of legitimate social discontent that makes it possible for lone gunmen to recruit armies to their "causes." Lessig concludes that "[t]here's a logic to p2p threats that we as a society don't yet get. Like the record companies against the Internet, our first response is war. But like the record companies, that response will be either futile or self-destructive. If you can't control the supply of IDDs, then the right response is to reduce the demand for IDDs. [Instead, America's] present course of unilateral cowboyism will continue to produce generations of angry souls seeking revenge on us." For generations, progressives have sought to ameliorate the suffering of the wretched of the Earth. We have struggled to diminish poverty, widen the franchise, and ensure through education and shared prosperity that more and more people (though still obscenely too few people) have a personal stake as citizens in their societies. We have fought for these things because we have been moved by the tragedy of avoidable suffering, and by the unspeakable waste of intelligence, creativity and pleasure that is denied us all when any human being is oppressed into silence by poverty or tyranny. The emerging threat of cheap and ubiquitous, massively destructive technologies provides a new reason to redress social injustice and the discontent it inspires (for those among you who really need another reason): The existence of injustice anywhere might soon threaten you quite literally, and needlessly, with destruction.

Contention 4: Solvency Feebates solve by subsidizing the cost of hydrogen to make it economically competitive Ty Cashman and Brett Logue, staff writers for Yes magazine, fall 2001, the coming hydrogen economy, http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=450 While hydrogen will be somewhat more expensive than gasoline in the early years of its introduction, this could easily be offset by collecting a portion of its extra cost from the price of gasoline. This mechanism is termed a “feebate”: the cost of hydrogen and gasoline at the pump are kept the same by collecting the extra cost of hydrogen from a slightly increased gasoline price. Because the cost of the feebate on the relatively small volumes of hydrogen fuel would be spread over the infinitely larger volumes of gasoline, the impact of the feebate would not become noticeable to the consumer until hydrogen comprised roughly 10 percent of the total market. By then, the costs of producing hydrogen are likely to have dropped substantially.

Feebates solve – savings spark incentives to use alternative energy vehicles David Greene, representative of the National Transportation Research Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. February 2007. Interview produced for NOVA. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/car/greene.html#note Greene: Feebates are an alternative to fuel-economy standards that have some very positive attributes. Feebates get around this problem of the consumer not fully considering the value of fuel economy, because the feebate comes at the time of purchase. It essentially affects the price of the car, and we know that people focus on the price of cars, and we know that manufacturers focus on keeping those prices down. If a manufacturer can add a fuel-economy technology and avoid a fee or gain a rebate, it's very likely that they will do that. So even though we have not tried feebates, there's every reason to think they would work well. Q: Do feebates have any advantages over fuel-economy standards? Greene: An advantage of feebates over fuel economy is that when you set out a fuel-economy standard (as we set 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985), once the manufacturers meet that standard, they're done. There's no reason to keep going. If new fuel-economy technology comes along, they can use it to increase horsepower, they can not use it at all. On the other hand, with a feebate system, there's always a dollar to be gained, or a dollar of cost to be avoided, if a new fuel-economy technology comes along. So there's a continuous incentive for the manufacturers to adopt fuel-economy technology.

Feebates cause a technological shift towards hydrogen vehicles. Kenneth C. Johnson, staffer at Energy Policy Journal, December 2006, Energy Policy Volume 34 Issue 18 Pages 3965-3976 Feebates: An effective regulatory instrument for cost-constrained environmental policy Feebates represent an inherently technology-focused, incentive-based regulatory mechanism that could be very effective at catalyzing and accelerating the development and commercialization of low-emission automotive technologies. But unlike the Swedish NOx program, which has encountered little political opposition, vehicle feebates have not yet overcome limitations of political acceptability. For example, a feebate proposal in Canada's 2005 Budget Plan (Canada, 2005) was described in the press as “a plan to tax large vehicles and turn over the money to consumers who buy smaller cars” (Doelen, 2005). This characterization, though disparaging, is a technically accurate description of the most common type of vehicle feebate. Such feebates have the distributional characteristics of a highly progressive tax (i.e., their main effect is to transfer feebate revenue from large to small vehicles), because they rate emissions performance simply in terms of emissions per vehicle, irrespective of vehicle size or utility characteristics such as seating and load capacity. The emissions-per-vehicle performance rating creates a strong incentive to downsize vehicles, resulting in a dilution of the feebate's technology-forcing incentive. However, economic studies of feebates (Davis et al., 1995; Greene et al., 2005) indicate that even with the downsizing incentive, only about 10% of the feebate-induced emissions reduction would actually result from a shift in the vehicle fleet mix. Most of the reduction (about 90%) would result from technology improvements. Thus, the downsizing incentive provides little benefit; but the feebate disparity between large and small vehicles, which induces the downsizing incentive, significantly limits the feebate's political acceptability and the level of technology-forcing incentive that can be induced within limits of political viability.

Government investment and incentives are key to development of hydrogen cars Britta Gross, General Motors Corporation Alternative Fuel Developer, 12/11/07, Hydrogen Fueling Infrastructure Assessment, accessed through JStor

Incentives are key to causing companies to transition to hydrogen Christopher Bordeaux, Program Analyst, Office of Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and Infrastructure Technologies, U.S. Department of Energy, 2002, http://www.hydrogenus.com/advocate/ad72inf.asp [Jeffrey Boxer] Some believe there is no chicken and egg problem. Yes, the auto manufacturers can produce fuel cell vehicles and yes energy providers can produce huge amounts of hydrogen. The real question to ask is how fast will auto manufacturers change gears on the assembly line from the internal combustion engine to fuel cell vehicles? What are the economic incentives for energy providers to change existing fueling infrastructure from motor gasoline and diesel to hydrogen? What time frame will the stockholders support? One industry will not change without a commitment from the other industry. Perhaps this should be the role of the Federal Government. To establish the timeline for demonstrations and to offset the initial risk of investments. There are other underlying questions about cost and durability that continue to encumber the fuel cell industry.

US key to solving climate crisis- empirically proven The Irish Times, 6/19/08, “US Stance Must Change to Solve Climate Crisis.”, accessed through Lexis THERE ARE some challenges that are just too big for individuals, even individual countries to try to tackle alone. When it comes to climate change, one huge political challenge, as identified this week by the Danish climate minister, is the US. "Until the US changes its position, we will not have China and other growing economies on board," said Connie Hedegaard. The US is, she added, the key. The Bush administration has well earned the opprobrium heaped upon it for its cynical foot-dragging and denial of the growing climate crisis. The irony is that on the other great environmental crisis of our times - ozone depletion - it was the US that led the world in developing binding international agreements that allowed us to narrowly avert a calamity. Just how close we came is worth considering. The story begins with the inventor, Thomas Midgley, the individual who "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth history", according to historian Prof John McNeill. In 1930, Midgley (who also came up with the idea of putting lead in petrol) gave the world Freon, the first of the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These were initially hailed as a scientific miracle. Inert, seemingly harmless and safe, they were widely used as aerosol propellants and in fridges and air conditioning units. By the early 1970s, over one million tonnes of CFC emissions a year were silently making their way into the ozone layer in the Earth's stratosphere. Ozone is a rare form of oxygen that filters out over 99 per cent of deadly solar ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Without this stratospheric screen, there would be no life on the surface of this planet. In 1974, two scientists published a theoretical paper speculating on what impact CFCs might be having on the ozone layer. One of the authors, Sherwood Rowland, arrived home one evening from the University of California and said to his wife: "The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world." They had identified that at extremely high altitudes, CFCs are bombarded by solar UV radiation, causing a release of chlorine. A single molecule of chlorine can destroy up to 100,000 ozone molecules. This was bad news. Although the study had little direct physical evidence to back it up, it was widely accepted by both government and the public in the US. The US Environmental Protection Agency instituted a ban on CFCs in aerosols in 1978. The US emerged as the clear world leader in tackling the ozone threat, and its influence meant many other countries quickly fell into line. The CFC manufacturers weren't going to give up without a fight. In July 1975, for instance the chairman of DuPont described ozone depletion as "a science fiction tale, a load of rubbish . . . utter nonsense". This line may sound familiar if you've been listening to climate change sceptics recently. Progress on eliminating CFCs stalled with the election of the pro-industry Reagan administration in 1981, and ozone disappeared from the political agenda even faster than from the stratosphere. Then, less than five years later, a bombshell. The British Antarctic Survey had discovered a gigantic area of severe thinning in the ozone layer. Science theory had become fact. This hole had in fact been growing since the 1970s, but astonishingly, it had gone undetected for several years. The evidence was overwhelming, as was the public reaction. Reagan's interior secretary Donald Hodel then floated the idea that instead of tackling ozone depletion, people should instead "adapt" - by wearing sunglasses and a hat when outdoors. Hodel's "Ray Ban plan" made him a laughing stock and the US quietly got back on board. By September 1987, the Montreal Protocol had been signed, in which 24 countries had committed to cut CFCs by 50 per cent within 10 years. Today, 21 years after Montreal, worldwide production of CFCs has been cut by 95 per cent. These chemicals are persistent, however, and it will take at least another 70 years before the ozone layer recovers. Nor is the battle yet over. The Bush administration today continues to insist on its right to use the pesticide methyl bromide, another potent ozone destroyer. Indeed, back in 1930, Thomas Midgley might as easily have chosen bromine instead of chlorine as his active ingredient. Had he done so, the ozone hole would today cover the planet. "More by luck than wisdom this catastrophic situation did not develop," said Nobel laureate, Paul Crutzen. "Montreal would have to be seen as a major international success", according to Peter Lynch, professor of meteorology at UCD. "Of course, we could live without aerosols, but the parallel here is could we do the same for global warming? We can't quite live without energy and transport and we don't have easy alternatives." The lessons of the ozone hole can help us in tackling climate change. First, without the US engaged, we will certainly fail. Next, vested commercial interests and their PR acolytes must be faced down. They stymied progress on eliminating CFCs for nearly 15 years and some are now fighting an equally grubby war in denying the reality and extent of global warming.