While what James B. Comey accurately described as the morally unfit President Trump continues to unravel before our eyes to reveal his ugly inner character, we unfortunately don’t have time to let him self-immolate at his own speed.
Comey expressed a preference for his defeat in 2020 rather than impeachment, but whatever the practical or Greek-drama superiority of the electoral mechanism of defeat, some things simply can’t wait. Trump isn’t just taking up space in the low-grade crime-family drama that Comey aptly described. He is presiding over a policy-driven global catastrophe of blinding proportions.
While most people have come to accept that the best climate science is the (surprise!) best climate science, there is a mistaken assumption that what we are doing about it will correct the problem in time. And it might have, if Trump had never set foot in the Oval Office and installed Scott Pruitt in his soundproof booth to conspire against the public interest in a stable climate. He has set us on a massive backward retreat from the policies everybody now knows full well are essential to addressing this crisis. Yes, crisis. We simply don’t have time to let Trump diddle as Rome burns. Or if you prefer other Trump analogies, piddle. Because the large-scale effects of climate change are tending to show up ahead of schedule.
And just as we are wasting time that we don’t have by trying to revive and expand fossil energy sources, including coal, we are simultaneously falling behind the rest of the world in the technologies of 21st-century energy production.
If we stand by and allow a full four years to be wasted in this insane misdirected dawdle, we will not be fulfilling Trump’s prediction that we will get tired of winning; we will live to be very, very tired of losing. Losing the race for a new technology, losing our last-best opportunity to slow the accelerating progression of climate change, and losing the climate stability of the planet that has, you know, sustained human civilization.
Homeland security, anyone?