Vote for the Climate Topic

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.