It turns out that President Trump’s pick to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality is a conspiracy theorist who believes in a toddler’s view of science. But this is Trumplandia, so…
The Senate initially rejected Kathleen Hartnett White after her disastrous confirmation hearing this November where she couldn’t answer whether or not water expands when exposed to heat. After the hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse tweeted, “I don’t even know where to begin … she outright rejects basic science.”
Now thanks to an extensive investigation by the Daily Beast, White’s flubbed confirmation hearing has a little more context since she’s been exposed as a quack who thinks flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide is a good thing.
According to a 2015 op-ed she wrote., White believes that carbon dioxide is “the gas of life” and is “an essential nutrient for plant growth on which human life depends” — a woefully inept take, considering that the question over climate change isn’t about how carbon figures into lifeforms but how it causes the earth’s temperature to rise when too much of it is released into the atmosphere.
“No matter how many times, [sic] the President, EPA, and press 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,” she wrote in TownHall.com. “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!”
In the same piece, she claimed that climate change stats are actually a grand scheme to “decarbonize human societies.”
“White has made this claim many times: that the entire climate-science field, all around the world, is actually a cabal to undermine fossil fuels,” the Beast’s Jay Michaelson writes.
In a 2014 blog post,she wrote, referring to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, “Sometimes a single voice throws in hard relief the delusion, misanthropy, and unabashedly totalitarian policy of the Left. These characteristics are particularly embedded in the Left’s secular religion: Apocalyptic Anthropogenic Global Warming.”
That was also the piece in which White wrote that “There is, in fact, a historical connection between the abolition of slavery and humanity’s first widespread use of energy from fossil fuels.”
Now, White has been re-nominated due to Senate rules that say nominees not confirmed at the end of the year are to be re-submitted. Just two no-votes from Republicans would block her candidacy.
You can read the Daily Beast’s report here.
Featured image via screen grab/YouTube
