Chicago is in terrible shape in 2024. The last Republican mayor left office in 1931, and the city has not fared well under 93 years of Democrat rule. They had 2,800 shootings last year, which they’re bragging is an “improvement.” The current mayor’s preferential treatment of illegal alien invaders has Chicago Democrats threatening to vote for Donald Trump in November. They need a distraction, quick! Mayor Brandon Johnson has announced that the city is suing the world’s five largest oil and gas companies for global warming.
The irony of this move is that the weather in Chicago has been fairly pleasant for the last few years. You wouldn’t think that from the coverage of the lawsuit. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the lawsuit is for the “climate change destruction” that’s happened in the city.
“There is no justice without accountability,” said Mayor Johnson when he announced this frivolous suit. “From the unprecedented poor air quality that we experienced last summer to the basement floodings that our residents on the West Side experienced, the consequences of this crisis are severe, as are the costs of surviving them.”
Chicago’s bad air quality last year was caused by eco-terrorists lighting forest fires across Canada. As for basement flooding, Chicago is built on a system of underground rivers. Any time the city gets more than two-thirds of an inch of rainfall in an hour, everyone’s basement floods in certain neighborhoods. Everyone in Chicago has known this since they first started pouring modern concrete basements there in 1910. Neither one of those problems seems to be caused by global warming.
They haven’t had any tornadoes or major weather catastrophes in the Chicago area in quite a few years. The weather has been really nice, with temperatures consistently falling within historic ranges. The last time they had a record rainstorm in Chicago was in 2011. They had 6.86 inches of rain in 24 hours.
The last time they set a record for high temperatures in Chicago was over a three-day heat wave in July 2012. It was 103 degrees, and no one died. That hardly seems like the “climate change destruction” that the Chicago Sun-Times is hyperventilating about.
Since the weather has been nice and unnoteworthy in Chicago for the past few years, the lawyers who drafted the lawsuit had to go all the way back to the heat wave of 1995 to find any weather-related deaths. More than 700 people died in Chicago over a four-day heatwave. That does seem like a lot, but haven’t there been any weather-related deaths more recent than 29 years ago? Apparently not. What’s the statute of limitations on when we’re allowed to blame something on global warming?
Plus, how do you measure it as a “catastrophe” when 700 people died in a weather anomaly 29 years ago but not consider it a catastrophe when thousands of people have been shot every year since then?
What’s this really about?
The City of Chicago is broke. It’s been bankrupt for years because of unfunded pension liabilities, and the city is getting closer to financial insolvency. Now that Mayor Johnson is having to rob regular city services just to pay handouts to illegal aliens, the cracks in the façade are starting to show.
Chicago has to come up with some money from somewhere to keep its city government functioning, and the oil companies have deep pockets. Suing the oil companies also serves as a distraction for the Democrat Party’s base, which is ready to abandon them over their extreme mismanagement of the city.
