The best 2425 Climate/Energy res: #6 is elegant, or a betrayal?

[Revelins]

“The United States Federal Government should adopt a clean energy policy substantially disincentivizing non-governmental consumption of fossil fuels in the United States.” is resolution option #6

Is this resolution an elegant sentence that in plain, not-too technical language gets at what people want to debate for the 2425 season?

Or is this resolution’s attempt to distill the essence of the policy debate community’s momentum/vote to debate climate/energy an abomination because it leaves out explicit floors from the topic paper, it does not mention transmission, and it in fact strays the most from the topic paper altogether?

Please discuss!

[Truf]

Thanks for tee-ing this up! I will suggest a small amendment to this framing of the conversation. The option is on the ballot; it doesn’t seem like this issue of fidelity or betrayal or whatever is that salient at this stage. Like it or not, the ship has sailed.

That leaves us to focus on the practical question: is the resolution option good? My core worry about this resolution remains limits. I am simply not convinced that this wording can exclude much of anything. This is not a selfish concern. Dartmouth is happy to give a block on K and Process CP vs your do-nothing subsidies aff that ratifies 0.1% of the Inflation Reduction Act. But I suspect those debates are not what proponents of this wording are looking for.

To put it differently: this is basically the water protection resolution. But maybe worse, because disincentivize might permit an even looser relationship between the policy and the goal.

Seriously, this took like two minutes to find. Would you say any of the below phrases exclude anything? https://chge.hsph.harvard.edu/files/chge/files/carbonfeema.pdf
Policies and projects are often developed with the intent to reduce GHG emissions through disincentivizing fossil fuel consumption. However, many studies have shown that these policies can also improve near term health outcomes and confer so-called health “co-benefits”.
Examples of policies and projects aimed at greenhouse gas mitigation but which also provide co-benefits range from clean energy standards and cap-and-trade standards (Thompson et al 2014, 2016), to national-scale carbon emissions policies (Driscoll et al 2015, Buonocore et al 2016a), to implementation of renewable energy and energy efficiency (Buonocore et al 2015, 2016b, Siler-evans et al 2013).

To be clear, I don’t think the outcome and process questions can be completely separated. If a topic area paper was submitted to the committee with the level of evidentiary backing produced for this wording, my guess is that it would have been rejected as an area paper. It was nowhere near sufficiently vetted to have been included in the slate.

That’s unfortunate – but let’s rectify the error by vetting now. I will repeat my plea from Facebook: before anyone votes for this resolution option, you should demand to see any limiting T evidence that someone could actually give a speech about. The cards need to have intent to exclude. We’ve all seen the 10 variations of “taxes disincentivize” when you do version one of this search. Those cards are of no help at all in demonstrating that ONLY taxes meet the DEFINITION of disincentivizing consumption.

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