2NC---A/O Climate

Jenny Formby, 9-2019, Jenny Formby is the general secretary of the Labour Party in London. (UNIVERSAL BASIC SERVICES: The Right to a Good Life, Labour UK, 9-2019, https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/12730_19-Universal-Basic-Services_v5.pdf, 7-18-2023)//AAlmand

I have reservations about UBI. But these are not the result of believing work is inherently virtuous. I believe that technological change should lead to more leisure time rather than, as at present, to higher profits. So permit me to critique UBI not from the right, but the left. The planned pilot schemes attracting such ire will take place in Jarrow in north-east England and East Finchley, north London. Between those two locations, 30 people will receive monthly payments of £1,600 for two years – which will supplement their existing earnings. I support the programme because it will test Voltaire’s hypothesis about the necessity of work for happiness. Will those taking part become bored and lazy, or will they become more productive and virtuous? But given the demands for a national – and truly universal – UBI, consider for a moment the cost of expanding the scheme. This would mean 38 million working-age people receiving monthly payments totalling £19,200 a year – meaning a total cost of £730bn. It’s important to point out that nobody is suggesting replicating the exact figures in the pilot scheme nationally, so let’s look at alternative projections by the pressure group Compass. In 2016, it modelled a scheme that would pay £244 a month to every working-age adult in and smaller payments to other groups. This would complement rather than replace existing social programmes, adding more than £170bn a year to public spending, around the same as the day-to-day health budget this year. Yet Compass found that even with this extraordinary intervention, child poverty would only fall from 16 per cent to 10 per cent, while pensioner poverty would stay broadly the same. Even if we assume this is too pessimistic, it is worth comparing such a proposal with a different approach: (UBS). For £170bn a year we could not only fund primary and secondary education (already themselves forms of UBS) but higher education too. Alongside this we could create a national care service, for young and old alike, a critical resource for any society facing the challenge of demographic ageing. We could also provide free (and eventually entirely electric) public transport – – as well as a . Finally we could return to a world of abundant social housing: where publicly owned homes meet demand and help limit house prices for those looking to buy. With extra funding we could reimagine energy as a universal basic service with the customer, rather than private energy firms, benefitting from of renewable energy. The return on such an investment seems superior to UBI, not least because it permits society to engage with the principal challenges of the 21st century – the climate crisis, demographic ageing, stagnant living standards and automation. After all, we are told UBI would mean we work and commute less, thus reducing consumption of fossil fuels. I support a four-day week for precisely this reason but the truth is that to decarbonise by 2040 we need the one thing market fundamentalists hate: planning. Public transport as a UBS would help us engineer a zero-carbon economy in a highly coordinated way. The same is true for housing, with new social homes built to of energy efficiency and solar panels adorning every roof. Then there is care work and the challenge of an ageing population – often gestured to by proponents of UBI. Women do most care work so we should have UBI. This is certainly true. But then why should men, who are less likely to be care-givers, also receive it? And why remunerate care in such a chaotic way if it is analogous to a job? Surely a preferable alternative is , free at the point of use and paid for through progressive taxation? Finally, there are the politics of UBI vs UBS. Universal basic services are readily comprehensible to the electorate, not least because they build on something everyone is already familiar with: postwar public services. It may be fashionable to say we can’t go back, but even a majority of Conservative voters favour public ownership of energy, water and the . Why wouldn’t the left use that as a launchpad to argue for UBS? Offering to instead spend the money on a political programme that few have tried and which has uncertain benefits seems a mistake.

Extinction—famine, fires, war, droughts, and disease

Damien Carrington, 8-1-2022, Damien Carrington is the Environmental Editor at The Guardian. (Climate endgame: risk of human extinction ‘dangerously underexplored’, 8-1-2022, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-endgame-risk-human-extinction-scientists-global-heating-catastrophe, 7-21-2023)//AAlmand

The risk of global societal collapse or human extinction has been “dangerously underexplored”, climate scientists have warned in an analysis. They call such a catastrophe the “climate endgame”. Though it had a small chance of occurring, given the uncertainties in future emissions and the climate system, cataclysmic scenarios could not be ruled out, they said. “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” the scientists said, adding that there were “ample reasons” to suspect global heating could result in an apocalyptic disaster. The international team of experts argue the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of the climate endgame. “Analysing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy,” they said. Explorations in the 1980s of the nuclear winter that would follow a nuclear war spurred public concern and disarmament efforts, the researchers said. The analysis proposes a research agenda, including what they call the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine, extreme weather, war and disease. They also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce a special report on the issue. The of heating drove a “groundswell of public concern”, they said. “There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said Dr Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis. “Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history. “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” The analysis is published in the journal and was reviewed by a dozen scientists. It argues that the consequences of global heating beyond 3C have been underexamined, with few quantitative estimates of the total impacts. “We know least about the scenarios that matter most,” Kemp said. A thorough risk assessment would consider how risks spread, interacted and amplified, but had not been attempted, the scientists said. “Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world,” they said. “For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heatwave.” The Covid pandemic underlined the need to examine rare but high-impact global risks, they added. Particularly concerning are tipping points, where a small rise in global temperature results in a big change in the climate, such as huge carbon emissions from an Amazon rainforest suffering major droughts and fires. Tipping points could and some remained little studied, they said, such as the that could cause an additional 8C of global warming. The researchers warn that climate breakdown could exacerbate or trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international wars or infectious disease pandemics, and worsen existing vulnerabilities such as poverty, crop failures and lack of water. The analysis suggests superpowers may one day fight over geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight or the right to emit carbon. “There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming,” the scientists said. “If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur.” There were further good reasons to be concerned about the potential of a global climate catastrophe, the scientists said: “There are warnings from history. Climate change has played a role in the and in each of the five mass extinction events in Earth’s history.” New modelling in the analysis shows that extreme heat – defined as an annual average temperature of more than 29C – could affect 2 billion people by 2070 if carbon emissions continue. “Such temperatures currently affect around 30 million people in the Sahara and Gulf Coast,” said Chi Xu, at Nanjing University in China, who was part of the team. “By 2070, these temperatures and the social and political consequences will directly affect two nuclear powers, and seven maximum containment laboratories housing the most dangerous pathogens. There is serious potential for disastrous knock-on effects.” The current trend of greenhouse gas emissions would cause a rise of 2.1-3.9C by 2100. But if existing pledges of action are fully implemented, the range would be 1.9-3C. Achieving all long-term targets set to date would mean 1.7-2.6C of warming. “Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories,” the scientists said. Temperatures more than 2C above pre-industrial levels had not been sustained on Earth for more than 2.6m years, they said, far before the rise of human civilisation, which had risen in a “narrow climatic envelope” over the past 10,000 years. “The more we learn about how our planet functions, the greater the reason for concern,” said Prof Johan Rockström, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “We increasingly understand that our planet is a more sophisticated and fragile organism. We must do the maths of disaster in order to avoid it.”