Are Climate-Change Deniers Guilty of Treason?

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

Mr. Krugman then gives a rundown of the latest climate research, whose predictions are far worse than previously thought. He describes climate change as a "clear and present danger" – borrowing a phrase first deployed in 1919 by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to imprison a man for opposing the draft – and concludes:

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn't it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that's why it's unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an "existential threat" to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it's in their political interest to pretend that there's nothing to worry about. If that's not betrayal, I don't know what is.

As Krugman suggests, recent years have seen the bar set pretty low for what can get a person branded as a traitor. In a February 2003 editorial, the now-defunct New York Sun called for police to monitor protesters opposing the invasion of Iraq "with an eye toward preserving at least the possibility of an eventual treason prosecution," for giving "aid and comfort to the enemy," a crime that in the United States carries the death penalty.