A question often asked about climate litigation is, when does the steady drip of legal actions based on climate damages reach the kind of critical mass that tobacco litigation, after 30 or so years of failed attempts, reached in the 90s?
This case is interesting in that, it comes from an insurance company – one of the few sectors of the economy that, like the oil industry, has more money than God.
A major insurance company is accusing dozens of localities in Illinois of failing to prepare for severe rains and flooding in lawsuits that are the first in what could be a wave of litigation over who should be liable for the possible costs of climate change.
Farmers Insurance filed nine class actions last month against nearly 200 communities in the Chicago area. It is arguing that local governments should have known rising global temperatures would lead to heavier rains and did not do enough to fortify their sewers and stormwater drains.
The legal debate may center on whether an uptick in natural disasters is foreseeable or an “act of God.” The cases raise the question of how city governments should manage their budgets before costly emergencies occur.
“We will see more and more cases,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in New York. “No one is expected to plan for the 500-year storm, but if horrible events are happening with increasing frequency, that may shift the duties.”
Gerrard and other environmental law experts say the suits are the first of their kind.
The world is truly losing its mind when we have come to this insane point. What will be next? Will the insurance companies start denying claims by registered Republicans or filing suit against them individually because of how they voted? Doing so on the basis that they voted for the fools that valued lower taxes over improved infrastructure, and are therefore are guilty of contributory negligence?
Come to think of it, that may not be a bad idea! OOH-rah lawyers! Hit them conservatives in the thing they value above all else—-their pocketbooks!
You wrote: ” Doing so on the basis that they voted for the fools that valued lower taxes over improved infrastructure, and are therefore are guilty of contributory negligence?”
Hell, yes. This seems imminently sensible to me. And the GD-GOP voters would surely lose. Because THEY ARE SELFISH IDIOTS! 🙂
Yes, some of us live in communities. The rest of us live in a state of self-gratify denial. It’s undeniable that the U.S. has been grossly retarded when it comes to infrastructure.
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Case History:
The year was 1958. I was with my Mom and Dad visiting Mom’s side of the family on the south side of Chicago. My cousins took me to the next street over, 58th St. South near Pulaski. What I saw made my chin drop. It was an excavation for a sewer catchment. It was 60 feet deep, 60 feet across and designed to hold a 48 foot diameter drainage pipe. It was miles long. It was in a neighborhood that had been built in reclaimed swampland. And, by golly, it worked. Before the massive storm sewer project was put in place, the basements of the neighborhood flooded about three or six times a year. After the massive catchment was in place that went down to about once a decade.
Infrastructure works. But only if you build it.
I should add that my cousins all moved out of Chicago into the near suburbs to avoid taxes… and other ethnicities, like Ukrainians. And they were happy for 30 years. Now the Insurance bullies want to come along and ask them to pay for the privilege? Harrumph! The libertarian answer is stronger sump pumps so you can out-compete your neighbor on individual basement draining. It’s the American way.
They moved out to get away from the UKRAINIANS? That’s funny, but E-pot will not get it—-not enough “ethnicity” in your basic Ukrainian for him—-how do you tell them apart from Poles and Lithuanians?.
Speaking of “libertarian approaches” to drainage issues, when my house was built 40+ years ago, the builder flattened the top of a small hill to make my lot level (taking away 2+ feet of nice topsoil and some nice trees and leaving good red VA clay). My lot is the highest in the development of ~75 houses and the original ground sloped away in all directions. He graded it so that nearly all the water first gathered across the back yard and flowed around the sides to the front and eventually to the street. Unfortunately, this resulted in a 10 foot wide and 60 foot long standing puddle across the back yard beginning maybe 15 feet out from the house. After my many pleas to correct this were answered with “we can’t run the water from your property onto someone else’s lot” and my failure to get him to see that “that’s where it always went—my lot is on top of the hill”, I hired a guy with a bulldozer and dump truck to come in and restore the “natural drainage”. When the builder came by and said “you can’t do that”, I gave him a polite GFYS and sent him on his way.
Re: They moved out to get away from the UKRAINIANS? That’s funny, but E-pot will not get it—-not enough “ethnicity” in your basic Ukrainian for him—-how do you tell them apart from Poles and Lithuanians?.
The Poles lived on 58th and 59th. The Ukrainians lived on 61st St. South. You could tell them apart because they went to different churches and prayed to different saints. Actually, I told you a little white lie. I recall visiting the cousins and overhearing the aunts and uncles telling my folks (Polski) all about how the Ukrainians were lifting cobblestones and hurling them at blacks trying to buy houses and move in on 61st Street. These people never change. They’re doing the same bickering in Kiev, Donetsk and Odessa today that they were doing in Chicago in 1961. Oh, except they didn’t burn the blacks to death back then, though they sure were hateful enough to do so.
So how do you tell a Pole from a Ukrainian? The subtlety of the glottal stop and the degree to which a robust pig sh*t aroma permeates the air when they walk up to you.
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Re: “libertarian approaches” to drainage issues,
I have two sisters who each have drainage issues. One in Illinois, the other in Phoenix. (A third sister in Sand Iego mainly has fire issues) My dad built a house on high ground and he had drainage issues. Me? I live on sandy alluvium above a river and it drains like a charm. 🙂
http://frankfort.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/insurance-co-suing-will-county–12-towns-over-sewer-water-invasion-Frankfort
Farmer’s insurance brings up climate change in their argument in that the rain intensity has increased since 1950.
Bad link. Googling “frankfort.patch.com insurance companies suing” will get you to it.
The blogging software munged the link by converting two hyphens to an emdash. Bad, bad blogging software!
Here is a link I hope won’t get munged.
I don’t see any prospects for legal action against fossil-fuel producers or users. From what I recall from when my GF was taking civil procedure, the rule is “join everyone, claim everything”. If a respondent can show that liable parties have not been joined, the suit can be dismissed. The problem is that major liable parties are outside the USA (Alberta tar sands), or are outright sovereign nations (Chindia). Since the courts have no jurisdiction over them, the suit fails.
That’s irony nearing the density of a black hole – the insurance industry complaining about the fact they are liable for weather not quite bad enough to be dodged as an “act of God”. Hundreds of years escaping their responsibilities for geological disruptions, but not quite enough guts to claim flooded basements are the will of Zeus.
Amazing no one has sued them to prove the existence of this Divine Geomentor for whom they claim they can not be responsible.
Meanwhile, if municipalities can be sued for making poor decisions re infrastructure, can municipalities sue the purveyors of climate disinformation which engendered those bad decisions? And if the disinformationists can be sued for material damages to property, can they be held responsible for punitive damages from human deaths resulting from their dishonesty – much as the tobacco companies were held responsible for damages to lung cancer victims due to their dishonest disinformation campaigns?
If I was a Koch brother, or an executive of the Heartland Institute, or Anthony Watts, I would NOT be pleased to see this lawsuit by Farmer’s go forward.
Suppose an imaginative lawyer at, say, the Environmental Defense Fund or perhaps a more aggressive player, presented an amicus brief which argued that the Koch’s or Anthony Watts should not be held responsible for a dishonest propaganda campaign because their publications were not propaganda, but were instead valid scientific analyses by valid qualified scientific personnel asking valid scientific questions and offering valid scientific conclusions – all of which, of course, be validated by independent panels of qualified published experts in the field?
Imagine finding a way to make that the legal issue involved?
Great. So no insurance claims in North Carolina whatsoever. Does this come under the heading of “if you are too stupid to come out of the rain, we can’t insure you, you turkey”? Is this the new form of Darwin Awards? 🙂
Will this push communities to get the connection to GW or just to put up a lot of expensive and useless mitigation? The interesting angle is the insurance GW pitch, you should have known. Once this becomes establishes legally, (and it will), we will see a legal angle to breaking the GW logjam. The legal ramifications we saw in Mann vs. Steyn are just the beginning.
The Christian Science Monitor coverage:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0517/Climate-change-lawsuits-filed-against-some-200-US-communities