The Friday ”bad news dump” of the Trump kakistocracy continued at full speed as Trump named the worst, most anti-environment person he could possibly find as his “top environmental advisor.”
Trump named Kathleen Hartnett White, a hard-line critic of climate change science, to the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality late Thursday night.
The Office of Environmental Quality develops the White House’s environmental policy and also coordinates actions between the EPA and the Department of Energy, agencies which Trump has already filled with anti-environmental zealots and climate change deniers such as Scott Pruitt. Hartnett White is not just a bad nominee for this post, but in keeping with Trump’s pattern, she is absolutely wretched:
Hartnett White has argued that carbon dioxide levels are good for life on Earth, the shift to renewable energy amounts to “green folly” and “a false hope,” and that “carbon dioxide has none of the attributes of a pollutant.” She lambasted the Obama administration’s environmental policies as a “deluded and illegitimate battle against climate change,” railed against the Paris climate agreement and attacked Pope Francis’ stance on global warming.
This tool of the fossil fuel industry now “serves," (if it can be called that) as a Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, described by the New York Times as a “free market think tank,” primarily funded by the coal industry, the oil industry, and the Koch Brothers’ network of polluters. If the title of “Texas Public Policy Foundation” isn’t enough to make you queasy, perhaps her theory that the fossil fuel industry was responsible for the demise of slavery in the U.S. may be enough for you:
In a blog post criticizing an article in The Nation by MSNBC host Chris Hayes, Hartnett White made the connection between “the abolition of slavery and humanity’s first widespread use of energy from fossil fuels.”
“Fossil fuels dissolved the economic justification for slavery,” she wrote. “When the concentrated and versatile energy stored in fossil fuels was converted to mechanical energy, the economic limits under which all societies had formerly existed were blown apart.”
Actually, as pointed out by the (many) critics of Ms. White, the only thing that accelerated slavery’s demise was the Civil War. The development of coal and fossil fuels actually made slavery worse:
One critic pointed out that the coal-fired industrial revolution actually “exacerbated the problem of slavery,” in part because the hunger for raw materials in English factories and mills funded plantations in the American South and the subjugation of colonized peoples around the world.
But don’t tell that to a climate-change denialist:
“Now you have a full house for the fossil fuel industry,” said Christy Goldfuss, who served as managing director of the White House environmental council under former President Obama. She called Mrs. White’s appointment particularly troubling, citing a piece she wrote entitled, “Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case.” In it, Mrs. White argued that labeling carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant is “absurd” and asserted that it should be considered the “gas of life.”
She should try breathing it, then.