By: The Writers of the Climate Area Paper
 
We appreciate the hard work of every topic writer, and all the effort each paper put in. This post is a defense of the climate topic from the recent guest post’s arguments, which we find to be ill-founded.
 
The core premise of the earlier post assumes the climate paper was written and endorsed by coaches looking for a quick paycheck. This paper was the only paper written by an overwhelming number of current policy debaters. The conversation includes the opinions of current students and the hard work of debaters from dozens of different programs. The broad agreement amongst students is we want to talk about climate change. Debaters receive a limited number of years to debate the subjects they find interesting, and current students have lost many emblems of a college career to COVID restrictions. Prioritizing the likes of coaches who have an infinite number of topics and tournaments ahead of them fails students. Climate change debates are educational, interesting to research, and something this generation of debaters wants the opportunity to debate.
 
As for the two main assertions in this blog:

 A. File Recycling and Laziness:

1. If you copy and paste old files, you are going to lose. Take the oil DA, for example: if you construct a file by recycling old cards and tossing them into a 1NC, the 2AC will say “COVID denies impact” and your speech will evaporate. Constructing a coherent impact story requires working around COVID’s shock and finding impact cards and narratives that post-date it. Impact cards must post-date the 2020 pandemic shock and say an “insufficient price rebound” instead of simple “low prices” lead to instability, for example. Copying and pasting a file on this question is poor strategy. This is equally true for DAs like trade, rare earth mineral production, or economic growth, all of which fluctuated extensively during COVID. These arguments are still highly viable positions, but only if they’re constructed from the outset with recent cards. It is intellectually lazy to claim that you can simply copy and paste articles from 2016—a time when everyone thought Hillary Clinton would crush the election in a landslide—and expect to win a debate. The climate literature base is robust, dynamic, and evolves frequently in correspondence with current events. Literature bases that are fast-paced and deeply connected to recency create a logical competitive incentive to screen out old evidence. COVID, Biden, and recent trends in energy markets have shaped topic generics to an extent that forces innovation and deters file recycling.
   
2. Innovation is inevitable, and the extent that it’s not is a problem with hyper-generics, not climate change. Politics, spending, Con Con etc. can be read on any topic.  The analogy to a military topic is backwards. In alliances, there were so few Korea and Japan affirmatives (the “recycled” part of military presence) and so many Philippines and NATO affs (the “new” part.) Sure, people don’t change terminal impact cards until forced to (We’ll still be seeing Clary and Tonnessen on any economic topic,) but that’s because those cards are rarely relevant to an RFD. If we exclude all resolutions that risk inter-year repetition, we’d better be ready to delete “international” from the topic cycle. If the continuity of evidence across topic areas is a problem, it is not new and not unique to climate.
   
3. Debate programs are dying and the barrier to entry is far too high. Debates about climate change can be easily explained to novices and administrators. Online debate, COVID, and its mass uncertainty has resulted in overwhelming burnout from students, which poses a unique year for recovery. The existing videos on the climate change area are an amazing instructional resource for novice and JV debaters and substantiate backfiles good! Simply put, the author of the original post wants people to work harder in the late stages of a pandemic.
   
4. Breaking up, punishing, and harshly fining larging companies was a major part of the CJR topic. If the author is correct that debaters are hyper-lazy, they’ll poach relevant high school cards as a substitute for antitrust research. “But those cards will be outdated, have a wildly different context, and be bad!” Then we should expect a similar incentive structure—the desire for recency, context/policy specificity, and simple quality—to shape climate research.
   
   
   

 B. “New ideas”:

1. There is a depth of nuance and complexities to climate change policy that the debate community hasn’t even started to discuss. Two presidencies, new and recent data given the time span of EU, RGGI, and CA cap and trade, the development of carbon border adjustments, and broader carbon pricing policies.
   
2. As a determinant of topic quality, novelty is one factor among many and rarely the most significant. Debate is not a book club over interesting topics. The reason some controversies are more popular than others is because they have unified negative ground. Being negative against truisms like “reduce the wage gap” is impossible.  If the debate community chose a topic solely off “words students couldn’t give a working definition for,” we’d be stuck with empty 1NCs, unbalanced topics, and disillusioned debaters. Debaters have expressed overwhelming concern about negative ground on the other topics. “New for the sake of new” has thrown the debate community down a trend of bad politics, disads, and stale debates (Space, Executive Authority, etc.) The assertion that the quality of literature for the oil DA or REMs DA is in any way equivalent to economic inequality good simply lacks research.

We’ll answer some of the authors random mentions:

1. “I’m also mostly talking about policy debates as opposed to K debates” -- That would be one of the central problems with the post. The Climate Paper as written describes the complexities and nuances of policy debates in a 2021-2022 version of the topic. But there also exists a ton of amazing kritikal literature about environmentalism that has been published in the past few years that can and should be used by students in debates. It’s really “lazy” to assert that your only qualms are with policy-policy throwdowns, instead of getting into the nuances and opportunities that arise in clash and kritikal debates provide on this specific topic. All evidence is incredibly qualified and details actual controversies that both politicians and movements face when combating global warming and biosphere destruction, which affect all levels of politics. Concerns have been leveraged about topicality for the k affs on the climate paper, while entire papers got away with not having a section about k affs at all.
2. “Given this, we need corrective action. The most effective way to encourage someone to research something new is to ensure that they don’t have the option of credibly copy-pasting old work.  Independent research as well as collective research is good, but only if taught how, which is a much better use of your time than needlessly chastising students’ intellectual work online in an anonymous blog post. If you see a problem with the current state of research in debate, then put your energy towards teaching students how.

 
Perhaps courage is less so an anonymous fear-mongering blog post, and rather an expression of interest in learning about climate change from students across a diverse number of districts and ideological styles of debate.

By Anonymous 
​
As we near the time to choose a college topic again this year, I humbly approach readers of the blog with an earnest plea: don’t pick the climate topic. Off the bat, I want to make clear that I’m mostly talking to coaches and older folks, not the actual debaters per se, as most of these discussions unfortunately are dominated by the former and don’t include too much inclusion of the latter’s perspective. I’m also mostly talking about policy debates as opposed to K debates. Anyways, here we go…
First and most significantly, picking the climate topic will encourage laziness in research. For those living under a rock, we just had a climate topic in 2016-2017. A whole year’s worth of debates was just had on this issue only 4 years ago. I wish I could say that people will work hard to develop new ideas and original research on this topic, but truly, anyone who says that will happen is not being honest with themselves about quality and quantity of research this past couple years. There’s an unfortunate reality when it comes to doing debate research: most people will work only as hard as you require them to, and no harder. If climate is our topic, the first move for most of the card-cutters in our community will be to go back to the 2017 Dropbox and copy+paste large quantities of args. Sure, some files will require some updates, but the important part – actually coming up with ideas for affs, DAs, and CPs, and cutting a critical mass of cards about them – is done. Coaches will throw a couple 2021 uniqueness cards into a DA file, maybe change some formatting, and voila – a whole file is done! They’ll send their teams the files, bask in the compliments about how quickly they’ve done all this preseason work, collect their check, and be entirely insulated from the adverse consequences it has on the community. Don’t believe me when I say that people will be as lazy as you allow them to be? Look at how many times Fisher 15 was read as a 1ac impact card last year in NATO 1acs! That card is AWFUL, and it was everywhere! Instead of taking 5 minutes and cutting a new 2020 US-Russia war impact card (of which there are literal thousands), people just went back to college wikis of old – because it was the easy thing to do. I don’t even really blame them – debate work is a pretty thankless task, and most coaches are not paid very well for their work. If I’m a 28-year-old card cutter, I have other things to do, and I’m getting paid either way, why WOULDN’T I just copy+paste from the old wiki/Dropbox? In fact, it’s the rational thing to do!
Here’s the problem, though – decline in quality and quantity of research is a large contributing factor to the decline in quality of debates. When coaches decide that they only have to do the bare minimum for research, it sets the same example for students under them. If you’re not willing to put in the work to develop sound original argument ideas with recent and qualified evidence, how could you possibly ask your debaters to do the same? This dynamic creates a race to the bottom (for lack of a better phrase) that has follow-on effects in the actual quality of debates as well. Given this, we need corrective action. The most effective way to encourage someone to research something new is to ensure that they don’t have the option of credibly copy-pasting old work. Let’s say we picked income inequality, anti-trust, or even labor. How many cards are there circulating about those topics in debate right now? Probably less than 100. Pick one of those topics, make the community debate about it, and card-cutters will have no choice but to do original research. If you’re an argument coach, your job should be to do this anyway. Do your job.
Secondly, the college debate community is experiencing a pretty serious patch of stagnation when it comes to actually learning about new ideas. We’ve decided that there’s a set of topics that we’re interested in and will debate ad nauseum, and that there’s other topics that appear “boring” on the surface and thus won’t be touched by a 10-foot research pole. Don’t get me wrong, climate policy is an interesting area, and there’s a lot to learn from studying it. However, it’s an area that the community already has a relatively high level of knowledge about. Even when it comes to young current debaters who never debated the climate topic, most know something about climate policy, climate change, and the various energy industry DAs. That stuff comes up on every topic. You know what literally never comes up in debates? Anti-trust law. If you polled a random sample of debaters and coaches, I would estimate that less than 50% could even give you a working definition of what “anti-trust law” means. The same is true (to slightly varying extents) when it comes to income inequality, labor, AI regulation, etc. These are all staggeringly important areas of public policy that will shape a lot of our lives in the coming decades. Why doesn’t anyone want to research them? The purpose of debate is at least ostensibly to learn a lot about different areas of public interest. We haven’t been too good at picking “different” areas as of late – hell, we just did military topic redux, even though the community recently debated that one too!
It's good to learn new things and explore new areas of research. This should be uncontroversial. Unfortunately, many powerful figures in our community seem to want us to debate the same stale topics over and over again because it makes their jobs easier. As a community, let’s have some moral courage and try something new.