A striking tableau on the front page of Friday’s New York Times: Jennifer Doudna, “an inventor of a new genome-editing technique,” sitting at her desk and “calling for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new method.” A scientist trying to regulate her own research? How responsible and elegant!

Move across the page and you will not fail to notice an article “McConnell Urges States to Help Thwart Obama’s ‘War on Coal'” A politician trying to perpetuate his own way of life (and the hand that feeds him)? How typical!

If you live in Kentucky Mitch McConnell is probably your hero, because he protects an industry that puts food on your table, but McConnell is now trying to recruit governors from other states to his cause, states where carbon pollution from coal-fired plants drift into their skies. In a letter to every governor in the United States he lays out a legal strategy for blocking the enactment of pollution controls from the Environmental Protection Agency on the grounds of executive authority overstepping its Constitutional bounds.

Yesterday the National Governors Association announced that four states–Michigan, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Utah–“would take part in a program that would prepare to meet the climate-change regulations” (New York Times, March 20, 2015). Although these are states with Republican-controlled legislatures, they are within breathing distance of Kentucky’s coal fields (maybe not Utah), which produce coal for plants in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. This is clearly a breathing issue, not partisan politics.

So Mitch McConnell can rant all he wants about “Obama’s war on coal.” The issue is health, the nation’s health, not Kentucky’s. And if Mitch McConnell had an ounce of principle in his veins, he would be working to bring jobs to Kentucky that did not depend on fossil fuel and urging the passage of carbon tax laws to help coal-manufacturers face their inevitable future.

Anyone who remembers when cigarettes were unregulated knows how hard senators from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia lobbied to protect an industry that was killing Americans. How they defied scientific studies and drafted their own rogue scientists to try to disprove the carcinogenic effects of nicotine. The cost of American lives was secondary to the preservation of an industry. Yes, jobs were lost when cigarettes were heavily taxed and commercials were banned from television, but lives were saved and continue to be saved by allowing the mere truth about cigarettes to be acknowledged and publicized. Does anyone think that the jobs that were lost were more valuable than the lives that were saved?

The story foreshadows the life cycle of coal in the United States. Eventually more states than those bordering on the Rust Belt will admit their air is compromised by coal, and the health of our children is at stake. Eventually it will become prohibitively expensive to burn coal and new sources of clean energy will replace it. Eventually even Kentucky will diversify its economy and support clean energy industries.

In the meantime Mitch McConnell will campaign against America’s health to protect the private interests of his state. Surely that was what he was elected to do. And surely there are legal principles that could slow down the progress of the regulation of carbon fuels by the EPA. But there are higher principles that a true statesman would recognize– the greatest good for the greatest number. Genetic scientists recognize this principle so far as to limit their influence in the health care industry.

Mitch McConnell is not that kind of leader. His principles end at the borders of Kentucky and West Virginia. Hopefully his influence will end there, too.