Federal government can’t solve alone

AT resource wars

Resource wars not going to happen – especially over oil

Tetrais 2012 (Bruno Tetrais – senior researcher at fellow foundation for Strategic Research, Summer 2012, The Washington Quarterly, “The Demise of Ares: The End of War as we know it?”, http://csis.org/files/publication/twq12SummerTertrais.pdf)

Future resource wars are unlikely. There are fewer and fewer conquest wars. Between the Westphalia peace and the end of World War II, nearly half of conflicts were fought over territory. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been less than 30 percent.61 The invasion of Kuwaita nationwide bank robberymay go down in history as being the last great resource war. The U.S.-led intervention of 1991 was partly driven by the need to maintain the free flow of oil, but not by the temptation to capture it. (Nor was the 2003 war against Iraq motivated by oil.) As for the current tensions between the two Sudans over oil, they are the remnants of a civil war and an offshoot of a botched secession process, not a desire to control new resources. China’s and India’s energy needs are sometimes seen with apprehension: in light of growing oil and gas scarcity, is there not a risk of military clashes over the control of such resources? This seemingly consensual idea rests on two fallacies. One is that there is such a thing as oil and gas scarcity, a notion challenged by many energy experts.62 As prices rise, previously untapped reserves and non-conventional hydrocarbons become economically attractive. The other is that spilling blood is a rational way to access resources. As shown by the work of historians and political scientists such as Quincy Wright, the economic rationale for war has always been overstated. And because of globalization, it has become cheaper to buy than to steal. We no longer live in the world of 1941, when fear of lacking oil and raw materials was a key motivation for Japan’s decision to go to war. In an era of liberalizing trade, many natural resources are fungible goods. (Here, Beijing behaves as any other actor: 90 percent of the oil its companies produce outside of China goes to the global market, not to the domestic one.)63 There may be clashes or conflicts in regions in maritime resource-rich areas such as the South China and East China seas or the Mediterranean, but they will be driven by nationalist passions, not the desperate hunger for hydrocarbons.

No resource wars

Salehyan 2007 – Idean Salehyan Professor of Political Science at the University of North Texas. “The New Myth About Climate Change Corrupt, tyrannical governments—not changes in the Earth’s climate—will be to blame for the coming resource wars.”, Foreign Policy.com, August 14, 2007 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2007/08/13/the_new_myth_about_climate_change)//JS

First, aside from a few anecdotes, there is little systematic empirical evidence that resource scarcity and changing environmental conditions lead to conflict. In fact, several studies have shown that an abundance of natural resources is more likely to contribute to conflict. Moreover, even as the planet has warmed, the number of civil wars and insurgencies has decreased dramatically. Data collected by researchers at Uppsala University and the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo shows a steep decline in the number of armed conflicts around the world. Between 1989 and 2002, some 100 armed conflicts came to an end, including the wars in Mozambique, Nicaragua, and Cambodia. If global warming causes conflict, we should not be witnessing this downward trend. Furthermore, if famine and drought led to the crisis in Darfur, why have scores of environmental catastrophes failed to set off armed conflict elsewhere? For instance, the U.N. World Food Programme warns that 5 million people in Malawi have been experiencing chronic food shortages for several years. But famine-wracked Malawi has yet to experience a major civil war. Similarly, the Asian tsunami in 2004 killed hundreds of thousands of people, generated millions of environmental refugees, and led to severe shortages of shelter, food, clean water, and electricity. Yet the tsunami, one of the most extreme catastrophes in recent history, did not lead to an outbreak of resource wars. Clearly then, there is much more to armed conflict than resource scarcity and natural disasters.

Resource scarcity doesn’t lead to war

Bier 11 (David Bier – immigration policy expert, November 28^th, 2011, “Steven Pinker: Resource Scarcity Doesn’t Cause Wars”, Global Warming.org, http://www.globalwarming.org/2011/11/28/steven-pinker-resource-scarcity-doesnt-cause-wars/)//JS

Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery… it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources. Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers. As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating or encouraging the ethnic cleansing. In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable, and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages, or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries rather than cherry-picking one or toe, he concluded, “Those who foresee doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent internal conflict, have very little support from the large-N literature.”

No risk of resource wars

Victor 2007 (David G. Victor – professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and director of the School’s new Laboratory on International Law and Regulation, The National Interest, 2007, “What Resource Wars?” http://irps.ucsd.edu/dgvictor/publications/Faculty_Victor_Article_2007_What%20Resource%20Wars_The%20National%20Interest.pdf)

Rising energy prices and mounting concerns about environmental depletion have animated fears that the world may be headed for a spate of "resource wars" - hot conflicts triggered by a struggle to grab valuable resources. Such fears come in many stripes, but the threat industry has sounded the alarm bells especially loudly in three areas. First is the rise of China, which is poorly endowed with many of the resources it needs - such as oil, gas, timber and most minerals - and has already "gone out" to the world with the goal of securing what it wants. Violent conflicts may follow as the country shunts others aside. A second potential path down the road to resource wars starts with all the money now flowing into poorly governed but resource-rich countries. Money can fund civil wars and other hostilities, even leaking into the hands of terrorists. And third is global climate change, which could multiply stresses on natural resources and trigger water wars, catalyze the spread of disease or bring about mass migrations. Most of this is bunk, and nearly all of it has focused on the wrong lessons for policy. Classic resource wars are good material for Hollywood screenwriters. They rarely occur in the real world. To be sure, resource money can magnify and prolong some conflicts, but the root causes of those hostilities usually lie elsewhere. Fixing them requires focusing on the underlying institutions that govern how resources are used and largely determine whether stress explodes into violence. When conflicts do arise, the weak link isn't a dearth in resources but a dearth in governance. Feeding the dragon Resource wars are largely back in vogue within the US threat industry because of China's spectacular rise. Brazil, India, Malaysia and many others that used to sit on the periphery of the world economy are also arcing upward. This growth is fueling a surge in world demand for raw materials. Inevitably, these countries have looked overseas for what they need, which has animated fears of a coming clash with China and other growing powers over access to natural resources. Within the next three years, China will be the world's largest consumer of energy. Yet, it's not just oil wells that are working harder to fuel China, so too are chainsaws. Chinese net imports of timber nearly doubled from 2000 to 2005. The country also uses about one-third of the world's steel (around 360 million tons), or three times its 2000 consumption. Even in coal resources, in which China is famously well-endowed, China became a net importer in 2007. Across the board, the combination of low efficiency, rapid growth and an emphasis on heavy industry - typical in the early stages of industrial growth - have combined to make the country a voracious consumer and polluter of natural resources. America, England and nearly every other industrialized country went through a similar pattern, though with a human population that was much smaller than today's resource-hungry developing world

Resource scarcity will solve itself

Sharp 07 (Travis Sharp – fellow at Center for a New American Security – PhD. Student Princeton University – Woodrow Wilson school of Public and International Affairs, The Center for Arms-Control and Non – proliferation, July – September 2007, “Resource Conflict in the 21^st Century”, http://armscontrolcenter.org/issues/securityspending/articles/resource_conflict_twenty_first_century/)//JS

Scholars have developed two separate visions of resource depletion. The Cornucopian model offers an optimistic approach to dealing with non-renewable resources. Relying on the virtues of the free market, the Cornucopian model asserts that, ceteris paribus, as resources become scarce and supply decreases, prices will increase and prolong total depletion. In the time between initial price increases and total depletion, humans will make technological advances that ameliorate the crisis. Essentially, the Cornucopian model is a prescription for procrastination - we will wait until the situation is critical before we start working on solutions. The Malthusian model takes the opposite view of resource depletion. Emerging from the writings of English economist Thomas Malthus, this theory suggests that population growth will place an undue burden on resources and ultimately lead to a cataclysmic clash over scarce commodities. Advocates of the Malthusian worldview support immediate action to prevent the apocalypse coming as a result of world resource depletion.