President Donald Trump appointed Kathleen Hartnett White in October 2017 to lead the Council on Environmental Quality, which was created by the National Environmental Policy to advise the president and “develop policies on climate change, environmental justice, federal sustainability, public lands, oceans, and wildlife conservation, among other areas.”
Trump withdrew the appointment several months later when it became obvious that the U.S. Senate, including Democrats and Republicans, would not confirm White, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a fossil fuel industry-funded think tank whose “mission is build and promote conservative public policies.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/white-house-to-withdraw-trump-environmental-nomination
If Trump had instead appointed White to lead the Council on Environment Destruction or the Council to Destroy the World So There’s Nothing Left for Your Grandchildren, she would have passed with unanimous or near unanimous support.
But this wasn’t the case.
White, it seems, was no more qualified to lead an environmental council than a lump of coal.
White once wrote an essay on “the moral case for fossil fuels,” and followed that with a blog post in 2014 that she said that “fossil fuels dissolved the economic justification for slavery.” She argued that carbon dioxide was not a pollutant but “the gas of life”; that the human contribution to climate change is “very uncertain”; and that ozone, or smog, isn’t harmful unless “you put your mouth over the tailpipe of a car for eight hours every day.”
In 2016, she characterized the belief in “global warming” as a “kind of paganism” for “secular elites.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/19/politics/kfile-kathleen-hartnett-white-paganism/index.html
White, like so many other Trump appointees, disqualified herself during confirmation hearings by demonstrating to senators that she was no more for qualified her position than the chair she was sitting on.
The chair, unlike White’s arguments, at least had a leg to stand on.
White “struggled with questions about basic environmental science in her confirmation hearing,” CNN reported.
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/19/politics/kfile-kathleen-hartnett-white-paganism/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/climate/trump-climate-nominee-white-withdraw.html
U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, asked White if she believed climate change is real.
She answered, “I am uncertain.”
She then clarified her response, adding, “No, I’m not. I jumped ahead. Climate change is of course real.” She then added she was uncertain about the extent to which humans were responsible for climate change.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat of Rhode Island, asked White to estimate the amount of heat in the Earth’s atmosphere that’s stored in the oceans. “I don’t have numbers like that,” she said.
She then added, “I believe that there are differences of opinions on that, that there’s not one right answer.”
According to the Trump administration’s own data on climate change, the world’s oceans had absorbed “about 93 percent of the excess heat caused by greenhouse gas warming since the mid-20th century, making them warmer and altering global and regional climate feedbacks.”
The New York Times reported Democrats also criticized other writings by White that called renewable energy “unreliable and parasitic,” described global warming as “a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science,” and asserted that science should not dictate policy in democracies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/04/climate/trump-climate-nominee-white-withdraw.html
