President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the White House senior adviser for environmental policy has said publicly in the past that the goal of the United Nations and climate change activists is “all-powerful government” that would effectively end democracy.
Kathleen Hartnett White, who previously led the Texas Commision on Environmental Quality, is Trump’s pick to head the White House Council on Environmental Quality. If confirmed by the Senate, White would coordinate environmental and energy policies across the government.
White has a long history of questioning established science on climate change, which has drawn criticism from environmentalists who oppose her nomination. CNN’s KFile previously reported on White’s comments in 2016 calling support for climate change science a “kind of paganism” and describing the goals of climate change activists as “one-world state ruled by planetary managers.”
White did not respond to a request for comment.
In radio and event appearances in 2015 and 2016, White pushed a conspiratorial view of climate change activism, arguing that the goal of political leaders and activists who seek to address climate change is “power and control.”
At a climate change conference in June 2015, White, asked about the agenda of UN efforts on climate change, said, “Power and control, to control economies, to control individual human life and it has been from the beginning. The United Nations didn’t create the climate change or global warming issue but they institutionalized it in the vast apparatus of the United Nations.”
White added that the UN had tried, but failed, to use the issues of overpopulation and sustainability as control means before moving onto the issue of climate change.
“They moved to climate change and they all have to do with the same thing, that human beings are somehow living in a way that will destroy the mechanics of the planet and the solution is always all-powerful government that allocates resources,” White said. “Don’t let greedy, stupid human beings allocate resources, let smart, enlightened people in governments allocate resource and control our lives.”
Appearing on the Internet radio show “The Right Perspective” in 2016, White argued the “climate crusade” would effectively end democracy.
“This is something I think we all should talk about,” White said. “It’s not just an issue kind of in the corner that might add another $100 annually to our electric bill. It’s not only about making electric rates go sky high. It’s about not even having enough electric to keep the grid stable or our home warm, and it’s also changing, sir, on the inside is keen — it would change our entire form of government. Words like democracy would only be used in symbolic manner, because this climate crusade, I call it, is mad.”
In a 2016 appearance on the “Rush to Reason” radio show, White said the goal of those trying to control greenhouse gas emissions was a centralized economy controlled by elites, invoking the economies under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union as examples.
“Really, for over more than the last century, there is a significant part of our elite influential leaders — in media, academia, the arts and letters — who I think, whose objective is control by the elites,” White said. “The allure of, you know elegantly, elaborately, articulated plans for the smart guy can make things happen exactly in the way that is perfectly fair and redistributes wealth and all that. Those don’t work.”
“We knew that a lot before the Obama administration came in, and I don’t need to list examples, I don’t think for many people, but the Soviet Union and Hitler and many other countries, Centralized control of economies don’t work,” White added. “They impoverish people. They take people back to what I call pre-industrial society, where you always had the wealthy elite who had abundant energy, and then you had the overwhelming bulk of the population was really, I was going to say slaves but enslaved. They worked around the clock trying to provide the energy resources.”
