The 1ac’s idea of competing tech with other countries and the idea that people innovation for profit is the root cause of existential extinction risks like climate change.

A relentless focus on technological innovation alone, however, can create as much harm as good. The kinds of innovations that are most needed today are as much in ourselves and our societies as they are in our inventive prowess. If we cannot work collectively to make a world that provides genuine forms of meaning, purpose, and decency for everyone—what I call a “good-enough world”—then our technological innovations will simply lead into the next major set of crises. In fact, we can achieve greater innovations simply by working together in a collaborative and ethical manner than if we continue on our current path of competitive greed.

Most contemporary pursuits of innovation aim to find the most talented people in the world and let them compete with each other to win the vast rewards that can come with their inventions. On the surface, this seems to make sense. Obviously to make progress we need talented people. And, we assume, those people need to be offered incentives in the form of great wealth and power. Otherwise, they would not work so hard or so quickly.

But does this image of how progress occurs really make sense? The prevailing model assumes that, unless they are competing for riches, humans are willing to let the planet die before they will extend themselves to help bring about change. If you ask most research scientists or activists working on climate change, you will find that in fact, almost none of them are doing it for the money. They are doing it because they believe in another kind of value system, one that is about the value of life itself.

This other value system not only motivates great numbers of talented people; it also helps ensure that the resulting innovations actually serve our planet. Consider messenger RNA vaccines. Although they were developed with billions of dollars in support from public funding and collaborations between scientists, the monetary rewards have largely gone to a few corporations. The results of this process show both the logic of our competitive system and its terrible dangers. Perhaps incentives for profit led to some part of the final breakthrough. However, the continued seeking of profit has meant that companies have been slow to get vaccines to low-income countries (LICs) and have refused to allow generic versions of their products to be reproduced and created at scale. As of March 2022, while 70% of people in high-income countries had one dose of a vaccine, that number is only 14.3% in LICs. Such discrepancies have led to uncounted numbers of preventable deaths. They harm rich nations as well by allowing variants to grow and spread, while this damage to public health, in turn, undercuts the global economy. A 2021 report by The Economist Intelligence Unit predicted that the loss caused by vaccine nationalism alone would be upwards of $2.3 trillion over the next three years.

If negative feedback loops are occurring with vaccines, what is to stop them from happening with advanced climate technology? Will rich nations and corporations refuse to share their advances equitably? Bill Gates, in his 2021 book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, in fact encouraged this, saying that one incentive for advanced industrial nations to pour money into climate solutions was that they could then sell these innovations to poor countries (likely with high-interest loans provided by wealthy banks in their home countries). Again, not only is such a position unethical, but it may also damage the likelihood of success. While profit motives may help incentivize creating green technology, they also undercut transitioning away from fossil fuels. Many good ideas are excluded because they do not conform to the current demands of profit and power. For example, according to a major global model for how to decarbonize the economy, from a team of more than twenty authors, we may not even need many new technologies to avert climate catastrophe. What’s really needed is the political will to decrease wasteful consumption and transition to the already-existing green technologies that can solve this problem in the short term.