Fake News: Fossil Fuels Ended Slavery
About a week ago the White House announced that Donald Trump will nominate a climate change skeptic with ties to the fossil fuel industry to serve as a top environmental adviser. Kathleen Hartnett White will serve as chair of the Council on Environmental Quality. The Council on Environmental Quality coordinates federal environmental efforts and works with agencies and White House offices in the development of environmental policies and initiatives.
She is very critical of the Obama administration's "imperial EPA" and pushed back against stricter limits on air and water pollution. She is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that has received funding from fossil-fuel companies that include Koch Industries, ExxonMobil and Chevron. In an op-ed published in The Hill newspaper last year this STANFORD educated woman wrote that, "The truth is that our bodies, blood and bones are built of carbon! Carbon dioxide is a necessary nutrient for plant life, acting as the catalyst for the most essential energy conversion process on planet earth: photosynthesis. Carbon dioxide is an odorless, invisible, harmless and completely natural gas lacking any characteristic of a pollutant."
In addition to calling the Obama administration’s environmental policies a “deluded and illegitimate battle against climate change,” railing against the Paris climate agreement and attacking Pope Francis’ stance on global warming, in 2014, she said fossil fuels are to thank for ending slavery. I will repeat that one more time for the people in the back, she said FOSSIL FUELS ENDED SLAVERY. In a ‘research’ paper Hartnett White made the connection between “the abolition of slavery and humanity’s first widespread use of energy from fossil fuels.” She said “Fossil fuels dissolved the economic justification for slavery,” [...] “When the concentrated and versatile energy stored in fossil fuels was converted to mechanical energy, the economic limits under which all societies had formerly existed were blown apart.” 1
However critics have pointed out that the industrial revolution actually increased slavery in the modern world because the hunger for raw materials drove slavery in the American South and the subjugation of people around the world. It is so important to understand the information we are learning in class because 1.) it happened, 2.) it has implications to today, and 3.) you will look dumb if you don’t understand historical truths and post a paper claiming fossil fuels ended slavery. Not only is it deeply troubling from an environmental perspective that a top political leader/ advisor has these environmental ideas, it is disturbing to see the deeply inaccurate historical and racial attitude she holds. Environmental policy is a modern way to continue systematic racial injustice in the United States (ie. Flint) and I fear that will only get worse with Kathleen Hartnett White in office.
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Rachel Farley
If you want to read her full paper it is called Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case and can be found at the link below…
1 Biesecker, Michael. "Trump to nominate climate change doubter as top environmental adviser." Chicagotribune.com. October 14, 2017. Accessed October 23, 2017. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-trump-nominates-kathleen-hartnett-white-20171014-story.html.
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