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But as Vox's Zack Beauchamp and others have written, the choice is confusing because Huntsman does not speak Russian and is not "a Russia expert, or anything close." Huntsman's experience in Russia appears to be limited to his business interests there. A company owned by Huntsman’s family does business in Russia, and he has traveled to that country in that capacity, report The Post's Abby Phillip and Lisa Rein.

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And for the past three years, Huntsman has served on the board of directors of Chevron, the second largest U.S. oil and gas company — and one of the biggest corporations affected by curent U.S. sanctions against Russia.

One of Chevron's biggest oil plays abroad is in landlocked Kazakhstan. In partnership with Russia's state-owned Transneft, Chevron gets that oil to the Black Sea via a pipeline through Russian territory. Transneft is one of several Russian firms targeted by the Treasury Department with sanctions — although, according to a 2015 Bloomberg News report, "Chevron and its lobbyists convinced U.S. officials to spare Transneft, which is subject to financial penalties, from more onerous restrictions that would have prevented U.S. companies from doing business with it."

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In recent years, Chevron has shown interest in doing more business with Russia. It sought a deal to drill in the Russian Arctic with another state-owned oil company, Rosneft, but that partnership was ultimately forged instead with the only larger U.S. energy firm, ExxonMobil (Huntsman's future boss, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, formerly headed that company.)

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And according to lobbying disclosure filings and media reports, Chevron over the past year has lobbied on bills seeking to codify into law sanctions President Obama placed on certain Russian firms — closing the door for good on the opportunity to strike new deals with sanctioned Russian oil firms. As it stands now, those sanctions, issued by executive order after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, could be done away with by the stroke of President Trump's pen.

“We continue to monitor developments regarding the legislation," Chevron spokesperson Morgan Crinklaw said in a statement. "Chevron abides by a stringent code of business ethics, under which we comply with all current applicable laws."

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As chair of the Atlantic Council, a foreign-policy think tank, Huntsman oversaw initiatives that scrutinized Russia's role as an energy supplier to Europe and advocated for Ukraine's territorial integrity.

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Vriddhi Sujan, associate director of board relations and business development at the Atlantic Council, said Huntsman "will resign from all boards" once confirmed by the Senate.

So far, the White House has raised concerns over a Russian sanctions package that passed the Senate last month in a 98-2 vote — a position actually not out of line with previous administrations. Traditionally, the executive branch usually prefers to have the discretion to apply or remove sanctions freely as negotiation chips rather than have Congress tie its hands.

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"Normally, you want to allow the executives, those that are responsible for foreign policy, to have the ability to lift sanctions as a way to encourage Russian better behavior," Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia under the Obama administration, said in an interview last year before the election.

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That Russia sanctions bill that passed the Senate is currently stalled in the House over oil concerns.

POWER PLAYS

-- Sad news: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has been diagnosed with brain cancer, his office said Wednesday night. The Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix said in the statement that following a procedure on Friday to remove a blood clot above McCain’s left eye, a pathology report “revealed that a primary brain tumor known as a glioblastoma was associated with the blood clot.”

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“The Senator and his family are reviewing further treatment options with his Mayo Clinic care team,” the statement continued. “Treatment options may include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.”

Glioblastoma is an aggressive cancer with a generally poor prognosis. It’s the same type of cancer that killed Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Beau Biden, the son of former vice president Joseph Biden.

-- A six-month check-in at the Department of the Interior: The Post's Juliet Eilperin has a great overview of everything that's happened at the department that manages a fifth of the nation's land. With Trump's efforts to reform the tax code and health-care law so far stalled, rolling back environmental regulations is one of the few areas of real progress Trump has made in enacting his agenda.

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In the past few weeks alone, Trump and his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have:

lowered the price companies must pay the government for offshore drilling

acted to accelerate approval for onshore drilling permits; approved exploratory drilling in the Arctic’s Beaufort Sea

and scheduled lease sales on Western lands the Obama administration had deemed off limits.

Eilperin's conclusion: "Zinke is taking concrete action to deliver on one of Trump’s most important campaign promises."

-- Al Gore's new climate documentary, "An Inconvenient Sequal: Truth to Power," screened at the Newseum on Wednesday evening with over 400 people in attendance, organizers say.

Among the moviegoers: Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and, of course, Gore.

"I know this is a bipartisan group — maybe barely bipartisan. So I'm going to transgress on some toes by saying, I really hope you become speaker again," Gore said to Pelosi to applause in a speech before the screening.

-- Law endangered? Republican lawmakers are looking to amend the Endangered Species Act (ESA) as the Trump administration continues to lift various protections on animals.

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Committees in the House and Senate considered bills on Wednesday targeting the 1973 law. One of the bills would allow economic factors to be considered, the Associated Press reported, when deciding whether a species will be added to the endangered list.

What Republicans say: House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) said he believes the law “doesn’t work... We have to find a way to reform it so that it actually solves problems, not just continues on the process."

What Democrats say: “Despite years of Republican efforts to pass bills weakening the act and cut funding from agencies that protect and recover imperiled American wildlife, 99 percent of listed species have continued to survive, and 90 percent are on schedule to meet their recovery goals,” said Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the committee’s top Democrat.

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Inertia is on Democrats' side: Given widespread Democratic support for the law on the books, it's hard to see any overhaul effort overcoming a filibuster in the Senate.

-- Whistle blown: An Interior Department employee says he believes he was reassigned to a job in an accounting office for speaking out about the effects of climate change on Alaska Native communities. He calls his transfer retaliation.

“During the months preceding my reassignment, I raised the issue with White House officials, senior Interior officials and the international community, most recently at a U.N. conference in June," Joel Clement wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post. "It is clear to me that the administration was so uncomfortable with this work, and my disclosures, that I was reassigned with the intent to coerce me into leaving the federal government."

Until last week, Clement was director of the Office of Policy Analysis at the Interior Department. He is now a senior adviser at the department’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue.

-- A new brand of USDA-approved science: Trump just nominated a self-described climate "skeptic" and co-chair of Trump's campaign Sam Clovis, to the top science post at the Department of Agriculture, report Juliet Eilperin and Chris Mooney.

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What he's said: In a 2014 interview with Iowa Public Radio, the former economics professor and radio host said he was “extremely skeptical” about climate change and added that “a lot of the science is junk science.”

“It’s not proven; I don’t think there’s any substantive information available to me that doesn’t raise as many questions as it does answers,” Clovis said in the interview. “So I’m a skeptic.”

-- A great big, Great Lakes about-face: After months of defending the presidential budget that zeroed out funding for the popular Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency gave in.

“I understand the investment that’s been made historically,” Pruitt said in an interview with the Star Tribune, the largest newspaper in Minnesota. “It’s a continuing need and we have to see that it’s adequately funded.”

The big question: Will the Trump administration concede to funding the cleanup effort at current levels — that is, to the tune of $300 million annually?

-- Trump vs. kayakers: A top House Transportation Committee Democrat is urging the U.S. Coast Guard to reverse its decision to create a restricted access zone on a section of the Potomac River when President Trump or any of top administration officials visit Trump National Golf Club. Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Adm. Paul F. Zukunft of the Coast Guard charging that the president has “disregarded the needs of the general public for his own personal benefit and convenience.”

"We implore you not to allow the President’s frequent leisure activities to take away access to the river," it continued, writes The Post’s Peter Jamison.

OIL CHECK

-- Getting more permits through the pipeline pipeline: The House voted 248 to 179 to make Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the lead agency when it comes to approving interstate pipelines.

What the bill will do: In short, it means pipelines will be approved more quickly should the bill become law.

How it works now: As of now, FERC rarely says "no" to a new pipeline project. "Only twice in the past 30 years has FERC rejected a pipeline out of hundreds proposed," according to an investigation this month by the Center for Public Integrity and StateImpact Pennsylvania.

-- With Congress and the White House weighing whether to open more of the Alaskan Arctic to drilling, it's worth asking: Are we ready to clean up a potential oil spill in the Arctic as the region thaws from climate change?

The U.S. Coast Guard's answer: No, we are not.

-- Not something to expect the head of a major coal hauler to say: "Fossil fuels are dead,” Hunter Harrison, chief executive of the freight-railroad company CSX said, according to the Financial Times. "That’s a long-term view. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s not going to be in two or three years. But it’s going away, in my view."

Why he is saying it: Given that in his view the decline of coal is inevitable, with or without Trump's intervention, CSX will be making investments elsewhere.

THERMOMETER

-- Trash talk: There’s about 7 billion tons of plastic in the world as garbage is piling up in landfills, recycled trash or stuck as pollution in the environment. That’s literally a ton of plastic garbage for every human on Earth, writes The Post’s Darryl Fears. And most of it is still stuck in the environment. Of the 9 billion tons that’s been produced since plastic became part of mainstream use after World War II, only 2 billion tons is still in use, a new study has found.

-- When headlines need a "This is not about politics" disclaimer: Tropical storm Don bites the dust in Atlantic. It’s not yet Hilary’s time in the Pacific.

Capital Weather Gang’s Jason Samenow writes that the tropical storm Don “perished” in the tropical Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday evening. Another tropical depression, that could have developed into Tropical Storm Hilary, failed to gain enough strength in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.

Samenow quips: “The near-simultaneous emergence of Don and Hilary is mere coincidence. Storm names are designated for both the Atlantic and eastern Pacific Ocean basins years in advance. But it does prove the weather has a sense of humor.”

-- A novel comparison to climate change worth reading: "It was a problem that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to fix, whose technical basis was not immediately obvious to most non-specialists and which some even doubted was real at all," writes New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo. "It was also a fight that we won — and that we ought to be proud of winning, since it offers a blueprint for combating the many catastrophes that may arise from the technologies underpinning civilization, including a warming planet.

"I speak, of course, of Y2K."

-- The outlook keeps getting worse and worse and worse: A new study says climate change will force today’s kids to pay for costly carbon removal technologies, Chelsea Harvey reports in The Post. "The longer humans continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the closer we draw to leaving the next generation with an unmanageable climate problem, scientists say. A new study, just out Tuesday in the journal Earth System Dynamics, suggests that merely reducing greenhouse gas emissions may no longer be enough — and that special technology, aimed at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, may also be necessary to keep the Earth’s climate within safe limits for future generations."

DAYBOOK

Today

The House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources will hold an oversight hearing on the future of hardrock mining.

The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee holds a nomination hearing on several Energy and Interior Department nominees.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee on Fisheries, Water, and Wildlife will hold a hearing on water infrastructure.

EXTRA MILEAGE

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been diagnosed with a brain tumor:

Here are President Trump's top 5 misleading claims, so far: