Neg - UBI - Michigan 7 2023 BFHGR

UBI NEG
JOBS COUNTERPLAN
1NC
The United States federal government should adopt a green job guarantee program, [FUNDED BY____], aimed at preserving sustainable agriculture, ocean recycling, hospital care and wildfire management.
The counterplan is comparatively the most effective strategy for solving inequality and promoting social cohesion. Basic Income fails.
Huq 2017
Yameen, Senior analyst at Ernst & Young, “For a Universal Job Guarantee,” American Affairs Winter Volume I, Number 4, 2017 https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/universal-job-guarantee/
The Politics of a Basic Income
Political Concerns and Sustainability
In its politics, a JG is a superior option to BI in many respects. Today, people make a mental distinction between what they perceive as “welfare” and “entitlements.” “Welfare” is perceived as frivolous and unearned, but “entitlements” are viewed in the language of rights and obligations. Food stamps are seen as “welfare,” but Social Security is seen as an entitlement, since people pay into it. By providing goods to workers as a payment for adding value to necessary public projects, policy-makers can increase the likelihood that a program is viewed as a genuine entitlement. An unconditional, no-strings-attached cash grant to everyone is much more likely to be viewed as “welfare” and is therefore harder to defend in the political arena.
Related to the welfare-entitlement dichotomy are the power dynamics between different class groups. At a time of rising social polarization, new social programs should strive to balance and raise interclass, national solidarity. An unconditional BI that divides working-class people into those who work, and those who choose not to, would raise these divisions. These nonworkers would also be more beholden to the elite classes and could, therefore, be more of an impediment to further reform.42
A JG program, however, can build supporting coalitions across industrial and regional lines. Because the JG program can use private contractors to support various public projects, it can secure the support of various industries to help build and sustain the program. A BI program would face much greater difficulties because its benefits are diffuse across the general population and, therefore, less likely to create a focused constituency.
Regions of the United States most affected by long-term employment problems, such as the Rust Belt, would benefit most from a targeted JG program, designed to build human and social capital in the most blighted regions.43 By building public projects in these regions and coordinating their efforts through the local government and public-private partnerships, the federal government can foster a culture of production and work to build the social capital needed to create a thriving commercial ecosystem.
A BI, however, would not be targeted to address any of the above concerns. In fact, its key mechanism for improving welfare, individual freedom, would likely lead to relocation of individuals out of these blighted communities, thereby reducing social capital and exacerbating the prevailing problems.
The counterplan is the key mechanism for ensuring workers enter green jobs. That solves nutrient pollution.
Tcherneva ’22 [Pavlina; January; PhD Economics, associate professor of economics at Bard College, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute and expert at the Institute for New Economic Thinking; RED, “The Job Guarantee and Economic Democracy: Why a Legally-Enforceable Right to Employment is Needed and How It Can Be Implemented,” Volume 4, Issue 1]
The Job Guarantee matches unmet needs with available resources. Because it aims to address the social deprivations of people, communities, and the environment, it is not only a green policy, but can be viewed more broadly as a care policy. Large swaths of the population, even in developed countries, face shortages of vital goods and services. Food deserts, where millions of people lack access to healthy and affordable food, blanket the US. So do medical deserts – nearly a quarter of all residential areas lack acute-care hospitals and 80% of rural areas are designated as medically underserved. [20]
All the while, the planet is burning. Perennial fires, floods, hurricanes, droughts are intensifying. Air, soil and water pollution are preconditions for the accelerating and at an unprecedented rate of species extinction, according to a recent UN report. [21]
[21]United Nations. (2019). ‘Nature’s dangerous decline… Environmental work is endless and urgent. It includes investment and rehabilitation projects that are small and large. The Job Guarantee is one key mechanism for ensuring that the work is being done. A global tree army can repair the lungs of the planet, provide green infrastructure in dense urban areas, and help restore biodiversity. Rural areas can benefit from sustainable agriculture investments, drought prevention, and other public services. The examples are many.
Global recycling programs can help save the oceans from plastics and other polluters. The climate crisis is an existential threat to fishing communities that help feed the planet. Meanwhile, mangroves, wetlands, tidal marshes, seagrass, seaweeds sequester carbons effectively and up to five times more than tropical forests. [22][22]
Smith, B., Bowman, J. and Johnson, A.E. (2019). ‘Seafood, blue… Restoring them is an urgent and labor-intensive task. The Job Guarantee can be a springboard for implementing sustainable fishing and regenerative ocean farming practices. Reef reconstruction and habitat restoration can reverse the impacts of coastal development on coastal marine ecosystems and vulnerable (and often indigenous) communities. Wetlands are natural embankments that often provide better protection than seawalls. Coastal communities often suffer mass unemployment and underemployment. The Job Guarantee would employ the unemployed and underemployed to do these critical tasks. And the program would be well targeted, as coastal communities often have some of the highest unemployment and underemployment rates nationwide.[/22]
A similar approach would help impoverished rural communities, who have born the ill effects of commercial agriculture. Firm concentration in agriculture (known as Big Ag) has led to some of the most abusive labor market practices of any industry (wage theft, dangerous working conditions, substandard housing for workers) and has consistently produced environmental hazards (methane emissions, water crises, soil erosion), public health concerns (antibiotic resistance, food born illnesses, dwindling nutritional content), and unfair competition wiping out small family farms (raising monopoly pries of patented seed and equipment, while lowering purchase prices for crops and cattle for sale). As noted above, despite the increased agricultural output, food deserts are ubiquitous around the globe. But corporate farms have been especially detrimental for working people. Agriculture has reliably produced some of the most precarious and poorly paid jobs. Big Ag often relies on cheap migrant labor that in many countries is exempt from basic labor protections like minimum wages, work contracts, or collective bargaining. Yet sustainable agriculture is critical from a strategic point of view (communities need to know where their food comes from), from an environmental point of view (sustainable agriculture relies on regenerative farming) and from the point of view of workers (community supported agriculture CSAs create more and better paid local jobs). The Job Guarantee can help multiply CSAs, farm cooperatives, and community garden initiatives. Because it is a program that creates jobs where they are most needed, by focusing on sustainable agriculture, it can be an effective method for wiping out food deserts while creating living wage employment opportunities.
The problems with agriculture are connected to the problems of water pollution. Agricultural runoff contaminates underground water tables as well as river, takes and beaches, poisoning marine life and destroying the habitat. Small infrastructure projects in every farming community can help reverse these effects. Fencing cattle appropriately, recycling wastewater, planting vegetation and fortifying wetlands can help with runoff. So can basic landscaping that diverts stormwater in communities where construction has built impervious surfaces (roads, parking lots, sidewalks) and overwhelmed the natural environment’s capacity to deal with flooding.
Commercial development in wildfire prone zone have meant loss of life and livelihoods. Building residential communities so close to wildlands has increased the incidents of human ignition and conflagrations (eg, virtually all fires in California – more than 90% – are caused by humans, often along roads or buildings from use of flammable invasive grasses). Meanwhile, fire prevention investments have not kept pace with the rate of construction. A program of massive retrofitting with the latest fire-resistant materials is needed, as well as the construction of effective evacuation routes, and implementing building restrictions in certain areas. In the meantime, while communities are regularly incinerated, the work of fighting the fires and cleanup is daunting. A 21st Century Fire Brigade and Firefighter Reserve can provide well paying jobs in many communities.
The discussion above barely scratches the surface of the kinds of work that could be done with a Job Guarantee. In the US, lack of universal healthcare has been compounded by lack of accessible healthcare. Public health deserts can be remedied by building a network of community health clinics which can provide basic preventative care on ongoing basis for free. These can be important sites for on-the-job training opportunities for Job Guarantee workers and internships for young people, who wish to transition into better-paid employment opportunities in healthcare. Coupled with other educational and certification programs, the Job Guarantee can be a springboard for anyone facing obstacles to paid employment. While there are many easily identifiable areas of critical need, addressing the climate crisis alone, requires an all-handson-deck approach. And while the Job Guarantee is a key piece to a comprehensive climate strategy, environmental and community care needs are ongoing, thereby necessitating ongoing public service employment.
Nutrient pollution is existential---it collapses oceans and outweighs climate change---US runoff reduction buys time to confront extinction
Craig ’22 [Robin Kundis; February; Robert C. Packard Trustee Chair in Law, USC Gould School of Law Stanford Environmental Law Journal, “Re-Valuing the Ocean in Law: Exploiting the Panarchy Paradox of a Complex System Approach,” 41:3 3-80]
One notable aspect of the Planetary Boundaries Project is that—at least for the moment—climate change is not the planetary boundary that we are at most risk of having already crossed. Instead, there are two other boundaries currently far more worrisome than climate change itself— biosphere integrity, or the global loss of biodiversity, and biogeochemical flows, or nutrient pollution. U.S. ocean law can both feasibly and profitably focus on these two issues—couched in terms of food security and public health, respectively—to reduce existing stressors to its marine ecosystems while simultaneously improving the well-being of its residents.
1. Seize the moment regarding marine food security.
Marine fish, shellfish, and algae are a significant component of global food security. According to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), “Global food fish consumption increased at an average annual rate of 3.1 percent from 1961 to 2017, a rate almost twice that of annual world population growth (1.6 percent) for the same period, and higher than that of all other animal protein foods (meat, dairy, milk, etc.), which increased by 2.1 percent per year.”406 However, wild-caught marine fisheries leveled off in the 1990s,407 and less than two-thirds of fish stocks are being fished sustainably.408 In contrast, marine aquaculture plays an increasing role in the world’s food security, producing in 2018 30.8 million metric tons of fish and shellfish and over 32 million metric tons of aquatic algae, primarily kelp.409
Marine food security and marine biodiversity are interlinked. Overfishing and the related phenomenon of fishing down the food web threaten both ecosystem resilience and marine biodiversity.410 Indeed, there is considerable evidence that industrialized commercial global overfishing produced some of the first pervasive stresses to marine ecosystems, creating legacy problems that still stymie effective marine management.411 At the same time, marine biodiversity loss is a food security issue. As the discussion in Part II suggests, the changes occurring in the ocean and their impacts on marine food webs and ecosystems have direct consequences for human food security. From a global perspective, the IPCC concluded in 2019 that, already, “[c]hanges in the ocean have impacted marine ecosystems and ecosystem services with regionally diverse outcomes, challenging their governance (high confidence).”412 While, at the moment, these changes are both enhancing and undermining food security, depending on the exact community involved, the impacts on ecosystem services already “have negative consequences for health and well-being (medium confidence), and for Indigenous peoples and local communities dependent on fisheries (high confidence).”413
Future changes to the ocean, including species migration and food web simplification, pose greater threats to global food security, fisheries governance, and even national security—including for the United States.414 Moreover, the decreasing supplies of wild seafood are also likely to be less safe because of elevated concentrations of mercury and other toxics in marine plants and animals and increasing contamination, especially of shellfish, by both Vibrio pathogens (the family of bacteria that include cholera and the flesh-eating Vibrio vulnificus) and harmful algal blooms like red tides.415 “These risks are projected to be particularly large for human communities with high consumption of seafood, including coastal Indigenous communities (medium confidence), and for economic sectors such as fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism (high confidence).”416
Overfishing has long been considered the primary threat to marine biodiversity and ecosystem function,417 and, as discussed in Part II, even the United States continues to struggle with managing fish stocks sustainably. However, range shifts primarily induced by climate change are challenging that belief, and they are already complicating fisheries regulation. A 2018 study of 686 marine species indicated that species along the Pacific Coast of North America could shift ranges as much as 1500 kilometers (more than 930 miles), while those on the Atlantic Coast could shift more than 600 kilometers (more than 370 miles).418 As the researchers noted, “In the United States, fisheries are managed regionally, including species that are managed by individual states and federally managed fisheries that are governed by regional councils with representatives from neighboring states,”419 and their projected range shifts are more than sufficient to move commercially important fish stocks across regulatory jurisdictions within the United States, from the United States to Canada, from Mexico to the United States, and, on the Pacific Coast, from Canada to the United States (Alaska).420 Other management challenges include “shifts in fishing locations, conflict over regional allocation of fisheries quota, displaced fishermen, and changes in stock boundaries.”421
Given the future increasing risks both to and from U.S. fisheries, a renewed focus on marine food security from a systems perspective, with the goal of greatly reducing the stresses that marine food production imposes on marine ecosystems, is an appropriate starting point for incorporating a systems valuation of the ocean in U.S. ocean law. Indeed, this timing and new focus are even more appropriate given the likely shifts in how the United States will secure its marine food supply in the near future. Even before climate change complicates the subject, marine fisheries are at their limits globally,422 and, as noted, marine aquaculture is quickly making up the marine food security gap.423 While the United States is currently a relatively minor marine aquaculture producer on the global scale,424 the aquaculture industry is poised to expand rapidly over the next few decades, especially in federal waters.425
Like overfishing, many types of marine aquaculture can stress marine ecosystems.426 However, neither all aquaculture operations nor all aquacultured species have the same impacts to ecosystems, and some forms of marine aquaculture can actually improve marine ecosystem function and reduce other stressors. For instance, marine aquaculture can enhance the stocks of imperiled or previously imperiled species.427 More expansively, shellfish and kelp aquaculture are often two of the least polluting forms of human food production, marine or terrestrial.428 As the FAO has emphasized, mollusks like clams and oysters are filter feeders, meaning that aquacultured mollusks do not need to be fed.429 Similarly, seaweeds grow through photosynthesis.430 As a result, “[m]arine bivalves, filter-feeding organisms that extract organic matter from water for growth, and seaweeds, which grow by photosynthesis by absorbing dissolved nutrients, are sometimes described as extractive species.”431 Thus, not only does aquaculture of these species impose little pollution burden on the marine environment, but these species can actually reduce nutrient pollution in marine environments while providing tasty human food, regardless of whether the pollution comes from fed finfish aquaculture432 or other sources, such as fertilizer runoff from upstream agriculture.433 In addition, shellfish aquaculture and kelp aquaculture can improve water quality,434 and kelp aquaculture is being promoted for its carbon sequestration amenities.435
There are also benefits to growing kelp and shellfish together. Seaweed aquaculture can help buffer areas of the ocean from the effects of ocean acidification.436 This buffering phenomenon has already been observed in connection with natural seagrass beds and kelp forests,437 but recent studies in Japan, Korea, and China indicate that kelp farms produce the same effects—namely, a higher pH level (less acidic water) for the waters within the seaweed farm compared to adjacent waters away from the farm.438 “These findings demonstrate that the net primary production of seaweed farms acts as an important sink of CO2,” and “co-culture of bivalves and seaweed aquaculture in multitrophic aquaculture systems can protect the bivalves from ocean acidification, while also mitigating the impacts associated to nutrient release from the bivalves.”439
We are at a moment in the United States when fisheries managers know that they will need to adapt to climate change impacts. Various state and federal agencies know that they need to decide more comprehensively how to regulate marine aquaculture. Federal agencies are already testing the limits of their jurisdiction to regulate this expanding industry through their fragmented regulatory authorities,440 and Congress has considered a new federal statute to govern it,441 potentially creating another siloed compartment of federal ocean regulation. No approach offered thus far from within the United States’ fragmented governance has considered marine aquaculture as simultaneously a food security, fisheries job transition, public health, marine biodiversity, climate adaptation, and climate resilience enterprise. The state and federal governments’ i

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