Greens launch ads against Trump environmental pick

The Sierra Club is running a Facebook advertising campaign to oppose Kathleen Hartnett White, President Trump’s nominee for a top environmental policy position.

The nation’s largest green group says in the ads that Hartnett White is “uniquely unqualified” to be chairwoman of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality.

“She’s said that believing in climate change is ‘a kind of paganism’ and dismissed carbon dioxide as a pollutant,” the ad says.

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“Kathleen Hartnett White is a direct threat to Americans’ health and safety and her nomination must be rejected,” Matthew Gravatt, the Sierra Club’s associate legislative director, said in a statement about the campaign.

The ad campaign came after Sen. Tom Carper (Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said he would object to any attempt by GOP leaders to allow Hartnett White’s nomination to extend into 2018.

Without unanimous consent to extend the nomination, Trump may have to re-nominate her, requiring her to start from square one, including a new vote in the Environment and Public Works Committee.

“Throughout her nomination process, Kathleen Hartnett White has confirmed what her record clearly shows: her views are extreme, her words are staggeringly inappropriate and her disrespect for science and our nation’s chief environmental laws is a danger to public health,” Carper said in a Tuesday statement.

“Let’s start the new year off with a clean slate and allow President Trump the opportunity to nominate a leader for the Council on Environmental Quality who takes environmental laws and public health protections seriously.”

White, a senior fellow at the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation and former chairwoman of the Texas Council on Environmental Quality, has been under fire for numerous controversial statements she’s made on environmental matters.

She’s compared environmental activism to “paganism,” called renewable energy “parasitic” and said carbon dioxide levels have not gone up “drastically” in recent years.

“Your positions are so far out of the mainstream they’re not just outliers, they’re outrageous,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said at her confirmation hearing in November. “You are a fringe voice that denies science and economics and reality.”

The Environment and Public Works Committee advanced her nomination later that month along party lines.