Why calling the Texas flooding ‘an act of God’ is a dangerous form of political denial

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

In the aftermath of the catastrophic flooding in Texas last week, government officials from President Donald Trump to the governor of Texas to county representatives have sought to deflect blame and shift public focus away from questions of responsibility. 

The White House press secretary called the flooding “an act of God”: “It’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did,” Karoline Leavitt said. Gov. Greg Abbott said that asking about blame was for “losers.” And Trump himself told the media that “nobody expected it, nobody saw it.”

To understand more about how governments communicate with the public in the wake of a tragic loss of life, and how to interpret the Trump administration’s messaging on Texas, Inside Climate News spoke to Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist and the author of the book “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.”

“Heat Wave” investigates the government response during and after the deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave—the 30th anniversary of which begins Saturday—and the social, political and institutional causes that ultimately led to more than 700 deaths. Klinenberg catalogs the typical strategies used by governments when they are seeking to evade accountability, from euphemism and denial to silencing experts and trying to paint an event as uniquely unprecedented. He used this framework to analyze the way that Mayor Richard Daley and his staff talked about the heat wave and its victims.

Today, Daley’s comments sound eerily similar to Trump’s: “Let’s be realistic,” Daley said at a press conference as the death toll rose. “No one realized the deaths of that high an occurrence would take place.” A Chicago health department official said that “government can’t guarantee that there won’t be a heat wave.” Later, the heat wave was officially described as a “unique meteorological event.”

“This kind of rhetoric promotes complacency, since it signals there’s nothing anyone could do to make a difference,” Klinenberg said.

When it comes to what happened in Texas and in Chicago, he said, we know that’s not true.

I read your book “Heat Wave” a few months ago, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot ever since, but especially in the last week, reading the news about what happened in Texas and reading everything that some of our politicians and government officials have been saying. What was your initial reaction to hearing that type of messaging from government officials in the wake of what just happened?

It’s totally predictable and totally familiar. And it’s a total cop out.

It’s a strategy that political officials have used for ages to deny accountability after failing to do their jobs. We know by now that there’s no such thing as a natural disaster. First of all, the weather is no longer natural in our climate-changed world. Second, the reason some people are especially vulnerable has far more to do with social and political factors than with Mother Nature.

And this is by now so well known, it’s a cliche, but if you’re a political official, calling a disaster “natural” absolves you of responsibility, makes it seem inevitable.

Especially the phrase, “an act of God.”

We already know there are countless decisions that people and political officials made that turned the floods into a human catastrophe: the decision to settle and develop a vulnerable riverfront area. The decision to expand in harm’s way, even when scientists warned about the risks. The decision to ignore environmental reviews. The decision to fire government officials who track the weather and communicate with local officials. The decision by local officials not to invest in emergency warning systems. Up and down the line, we see human causes of a catastrophe that, at minimum, made this significantly more lethal than it should have been. God didn’t ordain that.

The camp that was most affected had expanded and built more cabins about six years ago. And they built right in the floodplain.

The camp was aware of the dangers on the river and concerned about the dangers on the river. Yet it did it anyway. Texas is a state that’s notoriously in denial about climate change, notoriously hostile to environmental review and notoriously unwilling to regulate in the name of public health and safety.

In your book, you write about the 1995 Chicago heat wave and the messaging used in the aftermath of that event by the mayor and his administration. What were the results of the communication about the heat wave?

Unfortunately, that kind of rhetoric worked in Chicago. It confused the public. It generated a media debate about whether the deaths were really real, because the mayor challenged the medical examiner’s mortality findings, and it also generated a debate about who was responsible, because the city government’s position was that people died because they neglected to take care of themselves.

During a time of crisis or uncertainty, leading political officials and big media organizations have an outsized influence on our interpretation of the situation. I think the rhetoric of the natural disaster, of blaming the victim, made it far more difficult for Chicago to make sense of what happened in 1995 and made the world far less likely to learn from their failures.

To come back to Texas, what are your concerns with this being the immediate reaction from not just federal officials, but also on the local level?

My concern is that by calling this “an act of God,” and obfuscating the social and political causes of the disaster, they make the next one inevitable.

It’s especially sad because so many young people lost their lives, and it’s been a horrific week to track their stories and to learn about the families, unsure of their children’s fate. It’s been a terrifying week, and I don’t know a single climate scientist who believes that we’ll have less of this in the future, right?

Everyone knows we’re just going to see more dangerous weather systems like this one, and as long as we deny the ways that we’re making them worse, we’re doomed to repeat them.

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