Kathleen Hartnett White, who is President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), has been exposed as a conspiracy theorist who believes that nothing bad will happen if human beings flood the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
The Daily Beast reports that White -- who has been renominated after the Senate declined to consider her nomination in the wake of a disastrous confirmation hearing in which she could not say whether water expands as it's heated -- has a long history of spouting scientifically illiterate theories about climate change.
In a 2015 op-ed, for example, White calls carbon dioxide "the gas of life" and is "an essential nutrient for plant growth on which human life depends."
Of course, the issue is not whether CO2 is a necessary gas for life on Earth, but whether putting too much of it in the atmosphere will cause the Earth's temperature to rise in ways that will make for more extreme weather.
In the same op-ed, White said that climate scientists were lying about rising temperatures and sea levels because they were part of a "grand scheme to decarbonize human societies." She has also called climate science "the Left's secular religion," and is part of a "totalitarian" aim to enslave humanity.