Imagine for a moment that you are the mayor of a large and prosperous city on America’s Atlantic Coast. You get a call from the Department of Homeland Security that a tropical storm in the Caribbean is evolving into a major hurricane and computer models show your city is in its path. The feds tell you that nine out of 10 weather experts at NOAA agree.
As word gets out, some of the heavy hitters in your city urge you to do nothing. It’s the tourist season and they don’t want to lose business. Unless 100% of the experts at NOAA concur that the storm is a serious threat, the heavy hitters say, you should ignore the warnings.
What do you do? The hurricane is shaping up to be one of the most powerful ever recorded. Should you act upon the risk that the storm will hit your city full-force?
There is no law that requires you to mobilize your city to be prepared. It’s likely that the heavy hitters will not support you in the next election if you don’t follow their advice. So, you decide to listen to the 1% of NOAA experts who disagree with their colleagues. You not only ignore the city’s emergency plan; you curry favor from the heavy hitters by repealing it. You tell your citizens that the hurricane warnings are a hoax dreamed up by the governor of Florida to draw your tourists away.
Back in the real world, of course, the “mayor” is Donald Trump, who with a thoughtless stroke of his pen has just reversed the work his predecessor did to manage the risks of global climate change. Trump violated no statute when he did this; his actions appear to be within his legal authority. But has he violated his moral obligation to protect the American people? Should he have supported a preemptive strike against the climate’s assault?
If it were enemy legions approaching the United States, Trump would mobilize our defenses. The threat of climate change is worse because its assault is irreversible. It will undermine our ability to grow food. It will endanger regional water supplies. It will unleash the biological weapon of new diseases. It will attack our communities with extreme weather that damages them as though they’ve been bombed.
There are a few things that Trump and members of Congress should get straight.
First, there has been no war on coal. The Obama Administration’s effort to cap carbon emissions from power plants was to be a war against air pollution, lung disease and climate disruption. In fact, Obama supported billions of dollars of research on technology that would allow power plants to keep burning coal without injecting more climate-altering carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Second, regardless of what is in federal code, a president can be negligent at levels equivalent to felony in the unwritten moral code of an elected leader’s obligation to his people. In that context Trump has already crossed the line.
If investigators find that Trump or his campaign organization colluded with Russia to sabotage American democracy, we will hear credible arguments that he should be impeached on grounds of treason. There may also come a point where the precedents he is setting by commingling his family and fortune with his obligations and privileges as president exceed what the Courts or Congress can tolerate. But Trump has already stepped into impeachable territory by giving carbon barons the right to profit by polluting the atmosphere without limit. As the Heritage Foundation’s Guide to the Constitution explains:
“A plausible reading supported by many scholars is that the grounds for impeachment can be not only the defined crimes of treason and bribery, but also other criminal or even noncriminal behavior amounting to a serious dereliction of duty.”
Thanks to Trump, it is now America’s official policy to discredit and defund climate science and to pretend despite all evidence to the contrary that climate change does not exist. His dereliction of duty is clear.
There is no provision in the Constitution that allows the American people to recall a president; only Congress can remove a president from office. The Republicans who control Congress now have two choices to keep faith with their own obligations to the American people, present and future. They can pass laws to override Trump and revive the government’s efforts to mitigate climate risks, or they can begin impeachment proceedings.
The Constitution obligates Congress to keep a president from abusing his or her power. If the Majority Party fails in that responsibility, it should be removed from office, too.