Debating “Sustainability”

There is a simple trick used in many impact turn debates I have dubbed the “sustainability trick”. Basically, if you argue X is bad but don’t want to have to deal with “x is good” turns you argue that X will inevitably collapse and is therefore unsustainable. Take de-dev as an example, in a normal round a judge may have to decide at the end do the benefits of growth outweigh its downside? The sustainability trick is a way to radically change this process of weighing- if growth will collapse inevitably than the affirmative doesn’t “solve” the impacts to growth good- they are inevitable, or “thumped”. So unless there is a compelling timeframe differential- i.e. a reason it is better to collapse the economy 10 years from now rather than right now- the neg has a much easier time winning they outweigh.

This can be ramped up with other impact differentials, like saying nuclear war doesn’t cause extinction etc, but lets focus on just the basic trick. This trick makes winning “sustainable” in an impact turn debate about growht, heg, cap- basically anything- very important. In fact, in some rounds I’ve seen recently teams have skipped right past arguing X is good to just arguing X is sustainable, which is IMO a major mistake. So in this part I am going to give some tips to the side arguing “yes sustainable” and in the next part we will talk about the other side

1. Don’t let the other team define what “sustainable” is- in a recent debate I judged the negative said capitalism was unsustainable because XYZ resources would run out. Now, in general when debating cap there are a lot of ways you can answer “limits to growth”- argue innovation solves, argue the market will substitute one resource for another- these are all good arguments/ones you should make. However, the negative knows that the aff is prepared for major resources like “peak oil” with specific responses and so they have been increasingly trying to find more and more obscure resources that will run out so they can catch the affirmative unprepared without a card. While an argument can certainly be made that something like Oil is absolutely crucial to the global economy/if it ran out tomorrow that would be a big deal, many of these other resources are much less important/central to the economy, yet I never see the affirmative contest that X random chemical is the LIFEBLOOD OF CAPITALISM!! This is making things much harder than they need to be- yes it is great to have an on point card/argument for every single resource, but it isn’t necessary. Capitalism has faced shortages in the past and had to adapt, reading a generic card like that isn’t a silver bullet but combining that with some analytics about why the other side’s scenario is ridiculous shifts the debate from “is X or Y finite” which is very one sided for them to “is X or Y the only thing key to capitalism” which is one sided for you.
2. Read qualified evidence- it’s easy to find “environment fine” cards from the Heartland Institute or Ronald Bailey and those may be fine in some circumstances (narrator: no they aren’t) but remember we started by saying this is a REALLY important part of the debate for the other team, that means you have to assume they are at least somewhat prepared. That means reading ev that is easily indicted/memed for being nonsense is a waste of time- you know this is important, why is your opening move to read trash? Even when it’s not this egregious the aff is reading lots of ev from unqualified writers writing for general reading periodicals while the neg is reading scientists in journals- this is devastating for the aff. Because sustainability is so important you need to make sure your evidence is ABOVE average in quality, not below. This doesn’t mean you need to cut updates every week, this isn’t an issue that changes that much, but it does mean that when you DO cut cards on it you want to cut some that will hold up to scrutiny so you can read them for more than one tournament.
3. Understand the other teams warrants- lets take cap and climate change as an example. Usually the aff will read a card that says something like “green cap will innovate new tech that solves warming” and the other team will come back with something like “profit motive can’t save the environment”. Now what the neg’s argument is here needs to be fully understood. Capitalism can destroy the environment because environmental damage is an “externality”- its not factored into the price of a good. So if you need oil to produce a widget, the price of a widget reflects the price of oil that had to be purchased but does not reflect future environmental damage from global warming caused by oil production. For capitalism to save the environment either producing green technology would need to be cheaper/more profitable OR environmental benefits would need to be a “byproduct” the same way pollution is currently a byproduct. Many people explain their cap good climate args as basically “companies will develop a space vacuum that sucks all the carbon out of the air”. Ok, assume that tech exists- who pays companies to do that? I literally mean why would they chose to suck the carbon out of the air, how is it PROFITABLE to do so? Even if capitalism innovates/comes up with that technology why would it ever be used? There are tons of environmental problems that have existed for decades that we could solve, we just don’t because it would cost too much money. So here the aff needs to go further, they need to explain why green tech would get used/why the profit motive wouldn’t interfere. It’s not enough to just say “innovation”- we already have Teslas but they are so expensive most people still use gasoline.
4. In rebuttals focus on argument resolution, not more evidence- in a typical debate each side will read 10 or more cards on sustainability. This would be one thing if each of these cards was Tier S, but most of the time they are all pretty meh. This time would be much better spent debating warrants/resolving them than reading a lot more just ok evidence. At the end of a round on hegemony good bad there may be as many as 5 or 6 warrants on each side for sustainability- thats a lot of moving parts to just leave out in the open for the judge to decide how they see fit. Here you need to do the same thing you need to do in any complicated impact turn debate: decisively win your best argument, play defense with/explain why it beats their arguments. You don’t need to win every single one, and in fact dividing your time that way is generally a guaranteed loss. For our cap environment impact example from above, rather than arguing about are 4 specific resources running out collapsing to a meta argument like innovation or substitution allows you to spend your 30 seconds winning/weighing 1 point while the other side was probably divided with 3-5 seconds on 6 different arguments. Creating a contrast like this is a good way to get a W.