Rolling Stone takes a peek into the thinking of a rumoured Donald J. Trump administration nominee to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and meets “a nightmare.”
Texan Kathleen Hartnett-White is a senior fellow at the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), “a leading right-wing climate denialist think tank” the paper reports. The organization “has been funded by the likes of the Koch brothers, Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, the Heartland Institute, and a slew of small fracking oilfield players.”
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Trump, the publication observes, has repeatedly cited figures and themes that appear to have been drawn from Fueling Freedom, a book that Hartnett-White published earlier this year with another Trump adviser, Stephen Moore, a fellow at the climate science-denying Heritage Foundation.
Rolling Stone describes the book as “a hymnal to all things fossil fuels,” which its authors venerate as a “master resource.” They deride “weak and parasitic renewable energy,” mock the “green job craze,” electric cars, and biofuels. Global warming is dismissed meanwhile as “exaggerated nonsense…a creed, a faith, a dogma that has little to do with science.”
The book reviles the agency Hartnett-White is tipped to lead under a Trump presidency for policies that “undermine human progress” and for wanting people “build windmills and ride our bicycles to work.”
To the former chair of the Texas Environmental Quality Commission, (a position to which she was appointed by Governor Rick Perry), science comes second to opinion. “We’re not a democracy if science dictates what our rules are,” Hartnett-White told Rolling Stone.
In a masterpiece of understatement, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon recently said the Republican nominee’s election would create a ”complex situation” for efforts to restabilize the global climate. (As The Energy Mix went to virtual press Tuesday evening, polling synthesis site electoral-vote.com reported Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton with 323 electoral college votes and Trump with 215—with 270 needed to win the presidency.)
