Big Insurance, Unaware Climate Change A Hoax, Sues Chicago For Failing To Prepare For It

 #167001916 / gettyimages.com 

You know how climate change is just a big scam by liberal scientists to shake loose grant money and to force Americans to submit to socialist Big Government schemes to make everyone buy an electric car? Turns out that insurance companies, those bastions of crunchy-granola radical Marxism, are also trying to get in on the climate change scam, possibly because insurance companies are unpatriotic racists who hate freedom.

Here's the dealio: Farmer's Insurance has filed a lawsuit against the City of Chicago and some 200 other municipalities for allegedly failing to take adequate measures to offset the effects of global climate change, which the suit claims they should have known was on the way and could have prepared for by beefing up sewers and storm drainage systems. According to CBS News:  

At the heart of the class-action lawsuits is a storm that hit the Chicago area on April 17, 2013, described by CBS station WBBM as so bad that some neighborhoods were only navigable by boat. The storm also shut down major expressways and flooded hundreds of basements and streets.

While some might cite the storm as simply bad luck for Chicago-area towns, Farmers Insurance is claiming that the towns had the time and opportunity to prepare their storm-water and sewer systems, but failed to “implement reasonable pre-storm practices.”

While many already-strapped municipalities grapple with the costs and impact of climate change, the lawsuit may indicate a strategy from insurers to mitigate payouts, given that claims related to worsening weather events are likely to rise.

Ah, the climate deniers will say, that proves nothing in the world of science, it is merely lawyers for insurance companies acting as if climate change were real! And while it's true that scientific fact is a matter of science, not something that's decided by a court, it's also pretty telling that Farmers is pursuing this at all, since generally, courts do tend to take "reality" into account. And the language of the suit definitely treats the changing climate as something that's real enough that the municipalities should have seen it coming and planned accordingly:  

“The defendant knew or should have known that climate change in Cook County has resulted in greater rain fall [sic] volume, greater rainfall intensity and greater rainfall duration than pre-1970 rainfall history evidenced, resulting in greater stormwater runoff,” the lawsuit says ...

A Farmers spokesman described the damage as “completely preventable” and said the court case is meant to “prevent it from happening again.”

After all, if climate change were merely a hoax, why would the City of Chicago have adopted an Action Plan in 2008? Obviously, argues the suit, the city knew problems were coming, and knew that changes were needed...they just didn't make those changes fast enough, so please pay Farmers all the moneez, Chicago, to offset the damage awards Farmers will need to pay out.

Yr Wonket won't venture a guess as to the merits of the case, because we are not the lawyer person at Wonket, we are the liberal arts person at Wonket. But we're pretty confident that Farmer's Freakin Insurance, Inc. is not exactly a hotbed of Birkenstock-wearing socialists chanting hymns to Gaia.

[ Minnesota Public Radio ]

 Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. He's glad to see the Marxist Earth-First radicals have successfully infiltrated the insurance industry.