President Donald Trump has picked Kathleen Hartnett White, a former Texas regulator and unapologetic advocate of expanding U.S. fossil fuel production regardless of carbon dioxide emissions, for the top White House environment post.
Putting her in charge of the Council on Environmental Quality, which has been rudderless since Trump took office, would place an extreme denier of mainstream climate science, a hero of those who oppose urgent action on global warming, at the fulcrum of federal interagency policy discussions on energy and environmental matters.
White has argued against the federal government’s “endangerment finding” that carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas feeding worldwide climate change, is a danger to human health and the environment. If confirmed to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality, she would be coordinating environmental efforts across the federal agencies.
As a fellow of the conservative Austin-based think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, White leaves a long paper trail that will surely be fodder for her confirmation hearing. The group has been funded by fossil fuel interests, including Exxon and the Koch brothers.
She has decried regulation of carbon dioxide, which she calls “the gas of life,” and co-authored last year’s paean to the fracking boom, “Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy.” Her co-author, economist Stephen Moore, founded the Club for Growth, the political action group that weaponized the primary process to successfully move the Republican party to the right over the past two decades.
“An invisible, harmless trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere, CO2 is a plant food,” White said last year in a Q&A with the Orlando Sentinel.
In her 2014 monograph, “Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case,” she wrote: “Humanity’s use of fossil fuels has released whole populations from abject poverty. … Until energy sources fully comparable or superior to fossil fuels are securely available, policies to reduce emissions of CO2 should proceed with caution lest they prematurely exhaust the well-springs of mankind’s greatest advance.”
She has also promoted tactics for undermining the Endangered Species Act, claiming its protections for endangered wildlife imperil prosperity.
In its announcement Thursday of Trump’s intent to nominate White, the White House highlighted her role on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (2001-2007) and as a former director of the Lower Colorado River Authority.
White’s appointment to a top position in the administration has long been rumored; she met with the president-elect in Trump Tower while he was mulling his choice for Environmental Protection Agency administrator. But her supporters betrayed no sense of disappointment when Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was named to that post instead.
At an energy policy summit that the Texas Public Policy Foundation co-hosted with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., last December, the group’s president Brooke Rollins, said she expected that there would be “something very special” ahead for White in the Trump administration.
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Marianne Lavelle is the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.
