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With party-line vote, Trump environmental picks head to Senate floor

The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works voted along party lines in endorsing the Trump administration's nominations to two key environmental posts at a Nov. 29 hearing.

The committee voted 11-10 in favor of coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler as deputy administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and climate skeptic Kathleen Hartnett White to chair the White House Council on Environmental Quality, or CEQ. The two nominees will head to the full Senate floor for final consideration.

Republicans kept their remarks short but Democrats spent most of the time criticizing Trump's pick to head the CEQ, which oversees implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and resolving disputes between government agencies and the public.

A former chairman and commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, White has been vocally skeptical of any scientific evidence linking human activity with climate change and opposed to both renewables and reducing emissions. Currently a senior fellow-in-residence and director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank, White has described carbon dioxide as "not a pollutant" and "certainly not a poison."

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D.-R.I., compared White's nomination to the CEQ to the legend of Roman Emperor Caligula appointing his horse as a consul.

"A nominee who can't follow the thread from carbon pollution to ocean warming to sea levels rising, who imagines science that is not there and ignores science that is there, is a preposterous nominee," Whitehouse said.

"Discussing the merits of the horse would be pointless," he continued. "The real question becomes about the power of our fossil fuel emperors and the spine of the Senate."

Committee Chairman John Barrasso, R.-Wyo., called the "demeaning, disturbing and dehumanizing" comparison of White to a horse as "a new low" and chastised Whitehouse.

Wheeler's nomination to the EPA was more mundane, with his most recent career as an energy lawyer and registered lobbyist for coal mining juggernaut Murray Energy Corp. coming under attack.

Nonetheless, the committee's ranking Democrat, Tom Carper of Delaware, commended Wheeler for being more transparent and straightforward than any other Trump administration EPA nominee so far.

Wheeler is also a familiar face at the Senate committee as he once served both as its staff director and aide to former chairman Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who still sits on the panel. Inhofe attributed previous "successes" of the committee to Wheeler's 12-year stint there.