Slate: Climate Change Should Kill the Act of God
By KYLE PISCIONIERE
JAN 02, 2019 7:30 AM
Climate change keeps challenging our understanding of, well, everything. Carolyn Merchant and Bill McKibben famously argued that our quaint ideas of nature are dead. But nature was only one of climate changes early victims. Other deceased include rationality and, in smaller terms, the way we use language.
But theres one thing that climate change
should kill: the act of God.
This isnt a theological discussion; the term has actual legal meaning. Act of God provisions protect parties from being held responsible for unpredictable and unpreventable circumstances, usually extreme acts of weather like hurricanes, earthquakes, and lightning. They get written into insurance policies, business contracts, and foundational American environmental legislation like the Clean Water Act and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act.
Broadly, two criteria qualify an event as an act of God: 1) No human agency could have stopped the event, and 2) no human agency could have exercised due care to prevent or avoid the events effects. In other words, acts of God must be unpredictable, and their damage must be unpreventable. On that basis alone, the act of God is nearly obsolete, or at least it should be. While specific weather events such as hurricanes or fires may seem to be acts of God, our growing knowledge of climate systems challenges any vision of weather divorced from human activity. Humans meddle with the climate, which meddles with weather, and the two cant be disentangled.
But legislators havent yet caught on. Theyre stuck with a centuries-old precedent built on outdated understandings of nature. While no one person can be held legally responsible for causing a specific hurricane, its just wrong to say that weather events are uncaused or unpreventable by human activityaka human agency. We cant prevent all weather, but human action could have prevented the cataclysmic droughts, fires, and floods that lurk in the near future. The public now knows who triggers the growing spate of hurricanes, floods, and extinctions, and it is not God. Scientists have been warning the public about human-caused climate change for decades. In fact, the act of Gods obsolescence is just one symptom of a deeper disease. Our legal and intellectual frameworks have not kept pace with our understanding of the climate.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/act-of-god-climate-change-legal-environmental-defense.html
Likely Trump Voter Reaction
: "See? I toldja it weren't God! It was a act o' SATAN!"