How to Entrench Decline
A Chicago lawsuit reveals the dark logic of climatism
Chicago and its mayor, Brandon Johnson, have filed a lawsuit against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66, Shell, and the American Petroleum Institute for “climate deception.”
The “nearly 200-page complaint details a myriad of climate change-related damages Chicago has incurred, and will continue to incur, because of Defendants’ conduct” and “seeks relief in the form of compensatory and loss-of-use damages, penalties and fines for statutory violations, disgorgement of profits, and enjoining the Defendants from engaging in the deceptive and unfair acts and practices alleged in the lawsuit, as well as associated fees, interest, and other relief as deemed appropriate by the jury at trial.”
“These companies knowingly deceived Chicago consumers in their endless pursuit of profits,” said Alderman Matt Martin in the press release. “As a result of their conduct, Chicago is enduring extreme heat and precipitation, flooding, sewage flows into Lake Michigan, damage to city infrastructure, and more. That all comes with enormous costs.”
No doubt, Chicago’s infrastructure seems overburdened. I live in the Windy City, and the problems are well-known. Perhaps the most prominent issue is Chicago’s $3.8 billion Deep Tunnel system, which is supposed to keep the city from flooding during heavy rainstorms. It has recently proven inadequate. Last summer, the system was overwhelmed during a storm, resulting in the discharge of 1.1 billion gallons of waste water into Lake Michigan, from which the city drinks.
But the lawsuit provokes the question: is it Chevron’s fault that Chicago can’t get its act together and build the infrastructure it needs? Solving these problems is a practical question of engineering, a municipal question of funding, and a political question of will. The fundamental assumption of the city’s complaint is that it is powerless. This lawsuit reveals climatism’s ultimate political logic: scapegoating and lawfare to avoid the difficult work of building and stewarding infrastructure. It’s a self-exculpatory justification for decline via the moral license of environmentalism. Committing to this line of thought and action guarantees the entrenchment of urban decline because it deprioritizes proactive solutions and abrogates civic duty.
The long-term effect this has on a polity should be obvious: demoralization, pessimism, and the degradation of social trust. In a lecture he gave as a young man about the dangers of vigilante justice, Abraham Lincoln observed that when mobs were allowed to take the law into their own hands, their actions had deleterious second and third order impacts on society as a whole. Vigilante justice and its “mobocratic” sentiment encourage the “lawless in spirit” to become “lawless in practice” and grow “absolutely unrestrained” in their behavior. No surprise there.
But, on the other hand, Lincoln said:
[…] good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose.
And, in such a state of affairs, the best among us would see no point in bringing to bear their greatest talents to serve the public, leaving government “without friends,” or with friends too few and too weak to succeed. Thus, only the corrupt rise to power and prominence, perpetuating the downward spiral.
As it goes for the law, so it goes for infrastructure. Climatism isn’t a dead-end; it’s an on-ramp to decay.
Dark logic indeed. This seems to be the urban equivalent of the forest management issue. No forest management is required when you can blame every bad wildfire on climate change.
This is SO good.