Kathleen Harnett White: Common Energy/Climate Sense

“White’s failure to give the politically correct answer to heat storage in the ocean pales in comparison to the response of EPA Director Gina McCarthy in Senate testimony in 2005 when asked: ‘Is the temperature around the globe increasing faster than was predicted, even 10 years ago?’ McCarthy’s answer: ‘I can’t answer that question’.”

“Having a well-experienced, pragmatic, and scientifically literate head of the CEQ has fallen victim to political correctness, anti-scientific dogma, and political bullying.”

The Trump administration’s announcement last month to withdraw the nomination of Kathleen Harnett White to head the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) gives yet another example of Voltaire’s commentary on the intersection of politics and, in this case,  science: “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authority is wrong.”

White currently heads the energy and environmental program at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Prior to this post, she served a six-year term as Chairman and Commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality with regulatory jurisdiction over air quality, water quality, water rights & utilities, storage and disposal of waste. With a staff of 3,000, an annual budget of over $600 million, and 16 regional offices it is the second largest environmental regulatory agency in the world after the U.S. EPA.

White is also a published scholar on energy and environmental topics, authoring Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case (Texas Public Policy Foundation: 2014) and, recently (with Stephen Moore), Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy (Regnery: 2016).  Her writings reflect a focus on the relationship between sound public policy and objective thinking.

What happened on the way to this promising appointment which was first announced by President Trump in October 2017?  The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee approved her nomination, but it proceeded no further.

White’s fatal flaw?  Her answers at a November 8, 2017, Senate confirmation hearing threatened the ruling class with “the emperor has no clothes” truthfulness.  She was “uncertain” of the extent to which humans influence climate change.  Good for her … this is the stated position of many qualified climatologists.

Reading beyond the politically correct consensus party line of mainstream scientifically illiterate news reporters (i.e. propagandists), the discerning reader will note that the postulated influence of human activities on the climate is a hypothesis, not a proven fact.  One-liner quips to such links almost never quantify the postulated change secondary to parameters such as land use changes, regional variations in observed sea-levels, manipulated surface temperature records, and actual claims of hottest, when the actual temperature spike may be less than the accuracy of the measuring instruments involved.

The panicked reports and overheated claims of recent hottest years neglect to note that the temperature differences involved are less than the temperature difference between one’s nose and toes..

Members of the Senate committee were seemingly unaware that they themselves are carbon-based life forms dependent on the oxygen produced by plants as the plants feed upon atmospheric carbon dioxide.  Carbon dioxide is essential to our existence and is indeed a “gas of life.”  At the November 2017 hearing, committee Democrats exhibited group apoplexy over her testimony regarding carbon dioxide when she said:

As an atmospheric gas, [CO2] is a plant nutrient.  It’s likely CO2 emissions from human activity have some influence on the climate, but CO2 in the atmosphere has none of the characteristics of a pollutant that contaminates and fouls and has a direct impact on human life.

Democrats cannot bear the environmental shame of admitting that they are part of the carbon cycle of life.

Democrats objected to her other statements which included those involving Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in which White doubted the connection between climate change and rising sea-levels.

Whitehouse proclaimed:

A nominee who can’t follow the thread from carbon pollution, to ocean warming, to sea-level rise, who imagines science that is not there, and ignores science that is there, is a preposterous nominee.

The Senator artfully wordsmiths carbon dioxide into carbon; implies that his undefined climate change (how does one measure climate change?) is connected to his undefined rising sea-levels.

Sea-levels have been rising since the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago.  Whitehouse appears ignorant of the fact that the controversy is over the rate of sea-level rise. Sea-level rise is location specific because the findings are tied to local tectonic movements.  Long-term studies where the underlying land mass is neither rising nor sinking show a rather consistent rate of raise of 7 to 12 inches per hundred years or less, and  with no linkage to atmospheric CO2.

The poster child for manmade catastrophic sea-level rise has been the Pacific Isle of Tuvalu. Recent data now show that this island nation has been gaining land mass area, rather than the falsely projected sinking beneath the waves and unleashing a hoard of climate refugees to dry land elsewhere.

The unbearable truth that renewable energy is “unreliable,” and “parasitic” was another criticism of her. The senators must know that with no wind there is no wind energy, and that absent sun gives no electricity. Generous production tax credits and tax write-offs, coupled with socialized transmission finance (“99 percent of American wind farms built in rural areas,” AWEA acknowledges) are the financial sustaining energy provided by the Federal Government to fund these inefficient and unreliable energy sources.

Taxpayers see their monies funneled by complicit politicians to favored corporate interests. What better illustration of parasitism than to see the work product of many sucked up by the unsustainable few?

White’s failure to give the politically correct answer to heat storage in the ocean pales in comparison to the response of EPA Director Gina McCarthy in Senate testimony in 2005 when asked: “Is the temperature around the globe increasing faster than was predicted, even 10 years ago? “I can’t answer that question,” was McCarthy’s answer.

Having a well-experienced, pragmatic, and scientifically literate head of the CEQ has fallen victim to political correctness, anti-scientific dogma, and political bullying.