Kathleen Hartnett White is Trump’s new pick to become his top adviser on the environment. As with all of Trump’s picks, White crawled out of a swamp, filled up a truck with that swamp, and now plans on dumping that swamp into the corrupt mess that is our current White House.
Back in 2001, White found her way into then-Gov. Rick Perry’s Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Dumb-dumb Perry appointed her chair and commissioner, in charge of making serious environmental decisions for the state of Texas. Kathleen Hartnett White is most recently remembered for calling climate change a form of “paganism.”
The job that Trump and the Republican Party want her to do is a singularly important one. As head of the executive branch’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), established in 1969, she will help shape and actually coordinate, from one of the top positions in our government, our country’s environmental efforts and initiatives.
Congress enacted the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to “declare a national policy which will encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment; to promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man; to enrich the understanding of the ecological systems and natural resources important to the Nation; and to establish a Council on Environmental Quality.” 42 U.S.C. § 4321.
CEQ oversees NEPA implementation, principally through issuing guidance and interpreting regulations that implement NEPA's procedural requirements. CEQ also reviews and approves Federal agency NEPA procedures, approves alternative arrangements for compliance with NEPA for emergencies, and helps to resolve disputes between Federal agencies and with other governmental entities and members of the public. The Environmental Quality Improvement Act of 1970 and other statutes have provided CEQ with additional responsibilities and authorities.
Now let’s learn more about Kathleen Hartnett White, and how she believes the fossil fuel industry is more Abraham Lincoln than Abraham Lincoln himself.
Texas has terrible governors: Kathleen Hartnett White’s rise into political power
White saves the oil and gas industry money:
White’s movement into the public political arena begins in Texas. An “environmental lobbyist,” White was appointed by former Texas Gov. George W. Bush to his Texas Water Development Board. She served there until 2001, when Rick Perry, or GW Bush 2.0, made her chair and commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Under her guidance, the TCEQ did the kind of things that turn into movies starring leading actors as lawyers, defending communities from poison.
Among the most significant decisions during her time on TCEQ is her handling of a 2003 audit of the agency. The report found that for 80 enforcement cases TCEQ pursued between 2000 and 2003 the agency could have issues $8.6 million in fines, but instead it settled for about $1.6 million. As a result, “violators often have economic benefits that exceed their penalties, which could reduce their incentive to comply,” the report’s authors noted.
After a lengthy review process, when the agency’s executive director proposed reforming the penalty structure for polluters, White opposed the change.
Luke Metzger, director of Environment Texas, said White and the other commissioners “deliberately shifted resources” from the enforcement department to divisions in charge of permitting.
White left the TCEQ as pressures mounted from environmental advocates and people in general. The Dallas News’ editorial staff cheered her departure.
Whether Ms. White jumped or was pushed, her exit is welcome news.
She has been an apologist for polluters, consistently siding with business interests instead of protecting public health. Ms. White worked to set a low bar as she lobbied for lax ozone standards and pushed through an inadequate anti-pollution plan. She also voted to approve TXU's pollution-intensive Oak Grove coal units, ignoring evidence that emissions from the lignite plant could thwart North Texas' efforts to meet air quality standards.
Join a gassy Think Tank
Oil and gas pays White’s bills:
In 2008 White joined the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). The TPPF is a Koch brothers-funded conservative think tank that has brought you greatest hits like promoting school voucher privatization plans in Texas as “education savings accounts.” It did not work. The TPFF’s list of donors is a who’s who of the oil and gas industry, which is what allows them to boast that they are independent of government “influence.”
It’s easy for the organization to make that claim; as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, TPPF doesn’t have to disclose its funding sources. But a list of TPPF’s donors was inadvertently posted on Guidestar.org.
According to the tax filings, TPPF gets a majority of its funding from a relatively small group of major corporations, conservative foundations and wealthy individuals with a financial interest in the type of policies that TPPF promotes. Altogether, the list of donors includes 129 individuals, corporations and foundations and totals $4.7 million in donations.
“Most think tanks work for their funders and TPPF’s donors are a Who’s Who of Texas polluters, giant utilities and big insurance companies,” said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice. “TPPF is thinking the way its donors want it to think.”
For her part, White dances the fossil industry’s TPPF dance unabashedly.
Like many Trump picks who came before her, Hartnett White is an outspoken climate skeptic. In an interview with the Washington Post last fall, she said, “Carbon dioxide has none of the characteristics of a pollutant that could harm human health.”
Fossil fuels freed the slaves
Oh boy:
It is during White’s time at the TPPF that, as Mother Jones explains, she wrote this special blog explaining that fossil fuels are America’s savior—and broke the chains of slavery of African Americans. She was attacking a Chris Hayes article in The Nation and she explained how that black gold freed us all from bondage:
Chris Hayes might have devoted as much research to the economic history of energy as he does to what he calls the "political economy of slavery." Had he done so, he may have discovered a real relationship between fossil-fuel use and human enslavement. Hayes acknowledges that slaves were a major source of mechanical energy throughout human history, but he neglects to explore why this is no longer the case. There is, in fact, a historical connection between the abolition of slavery and humanity's first widespread use of energy from fossil fuels. First harnessed in the English Industrial Revolution, fossil fuels spawned unceasing economic growth- an unprecedented productivity of most benefit to the poor until then consigned to poverty and enslavement across the world.
White explains a new form of science
Carbon dioxide isn’t carbon dioxide:
Writing for Townhall, she explained her well thought-out understanding of the environmental movement, as well as the science of carbon dioxide:
No matter how many times, the President, EPA and the media rant about “dirty carbon pollution,” there is no pollution about carbon itself! As a dictionary will tell you, carbon is the chemical basis of all life. Our flesh, blood and bones are built of carbon. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the gas of life on this planet, an essential nutrient for plant growth on which human life depends. How craftily our government has masked these fundamental realities and the environmental benefits of fossil fuels!
Reduction much? What’s also interesting about CO2 is that if you get rid of the carbon, you’re left with oxygen! We all love oxygen. Unless you’re some kind of environmental cultist communist!
The meaning of “climate change” now includes so many disparate matters that the phrase is virtually meaningless. Stretching the phrase to include pollution is factually incorrect and grossly misleading to the public. As the evidence for unprecedented warming temperatures, extreme weather events, declining arctic ice, and rising sea levels wanes, the entrenched warmists’ grasp for familiar tags such as “pollution” or “environmental protection” to sanitize their grand schemes to decarbonize human societies. Consideration of the fundamental physical realities about energy and the environmental benefits of fossil fuels, which enrich human well-being across the world, are dangerously absent from the public square.
White sees the White House from her back porch
It’s time to promote promote promote for an election year:
In July 2016 White wrote a little ditty for the National Review titled “The GOP Platform Is Right: Coal Is Clean,” because:
In contrast with wind and solar power, coal, as well as natural gas, can ramp generation up and down in split-second response to demand and thereby balance the grid. And the massive transmission and voltage infrastructure of our electric system was designed around the availability of coal and other dispatchable energy sources. In stark contrast, the variability of wind and solar cannot be controlled. In other words, the availability of wind or solar power has no correlation to demand. This is a rarely admitted but huge challenge for renewable energy.
Environmentalism is anti-Christian
Who has a doctorate in comparative religion?
Like on the issue of guns, we should probably throw our hands up in the sky and wait for God to smite us all with climate change. In 2016, White was on radio, blathering through her talking points on fossil fuels and the religion/conspiracy of climate change, when she dropped this bit of knowledge.
"There's a real dark side of the kind of paganism -- the secular elites' religion now -- being evidently global warming," Hartnett White said.
A writer and consultant on environmental laws, free market natural resource policy, private property rights, and ranching history, White received her bachelor cum laude and master degrees from Stanford University where for three years she held the Elizabeth Wheeler Lyman Scholarship for an Outstanding Woman in the Humanities. She was also awarded a Danforth National Fellowship for doctoral work at Princeton University in Comparative Religion and there won the Jonathan Edwards Award for Academic Excellence. She also studied law under a Lineberry Foundation Fellowship at Texas Tech University
Environmentalism is anti-American
War is peace:
See, she understands how to conflate religions, and more importantly, she understands how to incite her oil-loving-Christian-base with words like “paganism.” While White was a part of Trump’s transition team, she said this in an interview with the
Orlando Sentinel:
Congress several times considered but ultimately rejected giving the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. With the goal of reducing CO2, the EPA's Clean Power Plan seizes a federal power to re-engineer the nation's entire system of electricity. This is a power far beyond the limited power delegated to the EPA under the federal Clean Air Act. Policies of this national consequence must be authorized by Congress and not an administrative agency like EPA if our country is to remain a democracy. Even Harvard's constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe has admonished the EPA saying, however worthy an environmental goal may be, it is not worth "burning the Constitution."
It will be interesting to see how she plans on securing our “democracy” now.