The United States Congress should restrict the National Security Agency’s ability to collect “bulk data” without a warrant

AT Dedev

No impact – consensus and IPCC projections

Hsu 10

Jeremy, Live Science Staff, July 19, pg. http://www.livescience.com/culture/can-humans-survive-extinction-doomsday-100719.html

His views deviate sharply from those of most experts, who don't view climate change as the end for humans. Even the worst-case scenarios discussed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change don't foresee human extinction. "The scenarios that the mainstream climate community are advancing are not end-of-humanity, catastrophic scenarios," said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate policy analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Humans have the technological tools to begin tackling climate change, if not quite enough yet to solve the problem, Pielke said. He added that doom-mongering did little to encourage people to take action. "My view of politics is that the long-term, high-risk scenarios are really difficult to use to motivate short-term, incremental action," Pielke explained. "The rhetoric of fear and alarm that some people tend toward is counterproductive." Searching for solutions One technological solution to climate change already exists through carbon capture and storage, according to Wallace Broecker, a geochemist and renowned climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York City. But Broecker remained skeptical that governments or industry would commit the resources needed to slow the rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, and predicted that more drastic geoengineering might become necessary to stabilize the planet. "The rise in CO2 isn't going to kill many people, and it's not going to kill humanity," Broecker said. "But it's going to change the entire wild ecology of the planet, melt a lot of ice, acidify the ocean, change the availability of water and change crop yields, so we're essentially doing an experiment whose result remains uncertain."
Warming tipping points inevitable – too late

NPR 9 (1/26, Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says, All Things Considered, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99888903)
Climate change is essentially irreversible, according to a sobering new scientific study.

As carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise, the world will experience more and more long-term environmental disruption. The damage will persist even when, and if, emissions are brought under control, says study author Susan Solomon, who is among the world's top climate scientists.

"We're used to thinking about pollution problems as things that we can fix," Solomon says. "Smog, we just cut back and everything will be better later. Or haze, you know, it'll go away pretty quickly."

That's the case for some of the gases that contribute to climate change, such as methane and nitrous oxide. But as Solomon and colleagues suggest in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is not true for the most abundant greenhouse gas: carbon dioxide. Turning off the carbon dioxide emissions won't stop global warming.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we're showing here is that's not right. It's essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years," Solomon says.

This is because the oceans are currently soaking up a lot of the planet's excess heat — and a lot of the carbon dioxide put into the air. The carbon dioxide and heat will eventually start coming out of the ocean. And that will take place for many hundreds of years.

Solomon is a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her new study looked at the consequences of this long-term effect in terms of sea level rise and drought.
No shift – collapse is violent

Monbiot 2009

George, columnist for The Guardian, has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), Oxford Brookes (planning), and East London (environmental science, August 17, 2009, “Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/aug/17/environment-climate-change

I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I'm sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement. Here are three observations: 1 Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom learn from others' mistakes. From the first observation, this follows: even if you are hardened to the fate of humans, you can surely see that our species will not become extinct without causing the extinction of almost all others. However hard we fall, we will recover sufficiently to land another hammer blow on the biosphere. We will continue to do so until there is so little left that even Homo sapiens can no longer survive. This is the ecological destiny of a species possessed of outstanding intelligence, opposable thumbs and an ability to interpret and exploit almost every possible resource – in the absence of political restraint. From the second and third observations, this follows: instead of gathering as free collectives of happy householders, survivors of this collapse will be subject to the will of people seeking to monopolise remaining resources. This will is likely to be imposed through violence. Political accountability will be a distant memory. The chances of conserving any resource in these circumstances are approximately zero. The human and ecological consequences of the first global collapse are likely to persist for many generations, perhaps for our species' remaining time on earth. To imagine that good could come of the involuntary failure of industrial civilisation is also to succumb to denial. The answer to your question – what will we learn from this collapse? – is nothing. This is why, despite everything, I fight on. I am not fighting to sustain economic growth. I am fighting to prevent both initial collapse and the repeated catastrophe that follows. However faint the hopes of engineering a soft landing – an ordered and structured downsizing of the global economy – might be, we must keep this possibility alive. Perhaps we are both in denial: I, because I think the fight is still worth having; you, because you think it isn't.
Growth sustainable – their models omit service shift and fertility declines

Coglianese 3/31/14 http://www.greensocietycampaign.org/alternatives-journal-interviews-part-1-with-john-coglianese/ ohn Coglianese, doctoral candidate for economics at Harvard.

What are the most common misconceptions about economic growth? GDP consists of the total value of all goods and services sold in the economy. We often pay attention to the goods side of GDP, thinking about economic growth in terms of manufacturing and resource extraction. Most of the examples I remember from Econ 101 consisted of a person or a firm trying to figure out how many goods to make using some production technology. But in most advanced economies, services actually play a much larger role. In the US, personal consumption of services accounts for 45% of total US GDP, compared to less than 25% for personal consumption of goods. GDP only measures final sales in the economy, but even if you look at the inputs to those final sales, much of the value is coming from intermediate services. Raw resources are typically a small percentage of GDP. Oil is one of the most important natural resources for the US economy, but oil imports are only about 1% of GDP. In most introductory economics classes, students are taught to think about the economy through examples about producing goods, when actually services account for a larger share of economic activity in developed countries these days. The production of services in the modern economy is fundamentally reliant on human capital – the accumulated value of education and skills. Oded Galor has been doing really fascinating work integrating the entire history of economic growth into a single unified theory. He shows how up until a few centuries ago economic growth was governed by the type of dynamics described by Thomas Malthus. Technological progress and population growth were relatively slow, and economic growth was even slower since resources per capita were diminishing. The explosion of industrial technologies about two centures ago enabled workers to be much more productive and led to the creation of giant factories producing goods at a rapid pace, although the real success of the Industrial Revolution was that it changed much more than the production of goods. Previous advances in technology had produced only temporary spurts of growth, while the Industrial Revolution managed to generate sustained growth through raising the value of human capital. Human capital became so valuable that fertility has declined as families in developed countries have decided to invest more heavily into the education of fewer children. Much of the developing world is still in the post-Malthusian, pre-fertility-decline stage of economic growth, but signs indicate that this may change in coming decades. Lastly, although as an economist it’s easy to think that economic growth is the only measure of our success as a society, there are other measures to consider. One of my professors would frequently point out that life expectancy in developed countries has grown steadily over the last century. He told us that if you calculate the amount of extra economic consumption coming from increased longevity in the US over the last forty years, it’s approximately equal to the total amount of GDP growth over the same time period. Additionally, there’s some really interesting research looking at measures of happiness across countries. While they’re mostly correlated with economic growth, it may be that the uncorrelated portion is picking up something unique that we should be giving more attention. 2) If you were trying to answer the question, ‘Is infinite economic growth possible in a full environmentally sustainable world?’ what questions would you want to know the answer to? I’d mainly want to know if there are any limits to human capital. Education and the growth in skilled workers have had a transformative effect on economic growth over the last two centuries, and if they can continue indefinitely, economic growth will continue at this rapid pace. I’d also want to know how effective computers will be at replacing human labor. I know only a little about artificial intelligence, but I know that a common area of debate is over whether there are fundamental limitations on the amount of intelligence that can be embedded in a machine. 3) Can infinite economic growth theoretically exist on a finite planet? I think it depends on what you’re willing to assume about the nature of technological progress. If technological progress can continue forever, making production more efficient and human capital more valuable, its absolutely possible to have infinite economic growth. If technological progress has some fundamental limitations though, it’s less clear whether infinite economic growth is possible. 4) In your opinion is infinite economic growth actually possible on a finite planet? Just like the last question, I think it depends on what you assume about technological progress. 5) Is economic growth inherently tied to resource extraction/consumption/GHG emissions? In the near-term, there’s some amount of economic growth that is tied to consumption of natural resources, although it may be a relatively small portion. In the long-term though, it’s possible that new technologies could remove these constraints or enable us to extract resources in a sustainable way.
Dedev always wrong – fails to calculate new tech and romanticizes poverty

Strouts 14 Permaculture teacher Permaculture Ireland Currently holds this position Teacher Kinsale College 2005 – 2013 (8 years), http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/renewable-energy-cannot-sustain-a-consumer-society/

Another writer firmly in the “civilisation-is-bad-and- we- should-return to simpler-lifestyles” camp but who could see through the myth of replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar power is Ted Trainer. Below is a review of his book on the subject which formed one of my earliest Zone5 posts. My views on the false claims made for renewables are one of the things that have not changed since those days. They have become more informed: in particular, I would refer to Colin McInnes’ analysis showing the importance of energy density: fossil fuels and nuclear power are two- or three orders of magnitude more energy dense than diffuse and unreliable wind and solar power. If we look at the world leader in transition to renewables- Germany with its Energiewende- we can see even from a recent favorable report how this translates into real practical obstacles: firstly, to reach 100% renewables (including biomass and storage of surplus power as gas through electrolysis and methanation- an as yet hardly developed technology) is predicated on a 50% reduction in total energy consumption- almost as unrealistic as Trainer’s views; and apart from anything else, includes covering fully half of Germany’s entire arable land in solar cells. An interesting thought experiment perhaps, but hardly practical. Where I differ with Trainer today of course is a)his assumption that such a powerdown scenario is necessary or desirable; and b) his views on “peak uranium” should nuclear power be pursued: predictions of “peak” are nearly always wrong because they underestimate the development of new technology, for new resource discoveries, new extraction technologies, and new efficiencies in end-use: fast-breeder reactors which are in the pipe-line are able to extract more than 90% of the energy from uranium fuel rods, as opposed to just 1-2% from current models. And after Uranium of course, there is Thorium. I would also be strongly critical of his advocacy of “the Simpler Way”. There is no way to objectively differentiate “needs” from “wants”, and attempts to lay down the law and tell everyone else what constitutes “enough” seem paternalistic and oppressive. They are also based on deeply flawed Limits to Growth thinking, creating a sort of scarcity-consciousness which I feel all too often leads to a self-serving romanticizing of poverty. I also completely reject his idea that technology s not key- it is not the only crucial element, but for the billions of urban dwellers to have good lives into the future will certainly need ongoing technological innovation, as will farming and food production. The moral approach to addressing poverty and inequality will certainly involve more energy consumption, not less.