Last year, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the Trump administration released a terrifying report about climate change, which might as well have been simply titled, “You Should Be Shitting Your Pants Right Now.” The second volume of a federally mandated assessment, the 1,656-page investigation laid out the devastating costs associated with not taking immediate steps to combat climate change: $141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from rising sea levels, $32 billion from infrastructure damage by the end of the century, and so on. At the time, Donald Trump simply brushed the whole thing off, telling reporters, “I don’t believe it,” even though, by his own admission, he’d only read “some” of the report and his mind was probably elsewhere during the relevant sections (i.e. wondering if all the turkeys he didn’t pardon were going to rise up and peck him to death) But with certain lawmakers, irksome citizens, and, um, the director of national intelligence insisting that climate change is the most imminent threat of our lifetime, the White House knew it needed to do more to convince people this whole thing was a hoax. And reader, the administration has truly outdone itself this time.

The Washington Post reports that the White House is assembling a panel to “assess whether climate change poses a national security threat,” headed by a guy who makes coal lobbyist-turned-Acting E.P.A. Administrator Andrew Wheeler look like a radical environmentalist. Yes, the administration has hired some real crackpots before, but this guy laps those suckers by miles. So, just who is William Happer? According to the Post, he’s a former Energy Department staffer under George H.W. Bush who joined this White House in September to work on “emerging technologies,” and, naturally, has no formal training as a climate scientist. But what he lacks in relevant knowledge he makes up for in a deep and abiding love for carbon dioxide, which he said during a summit in December 2016 is “not a pollutant at all” and is “actually a benefit to the earth,” despite having been unfairly maligned by “decade after decade of abuse, for no reason.” And, of course, he thinks that abuse has some historical parallels.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” Happer explained to CNBC in 2014, after yelling at Andrew Ross Sorkin to “shut up” about him supposedly being a climate-change denier. In January 2017, he added in an e-mail to a Jezebel reader that the vilification of carbon dioxide also “differs little from . . . the Soviet extermination of class enemies or ISIL slaughter of infidels.” (Upon learning that Jezebel would be writing an item about the correspondence and his views, he responded, “If I understand the thrust of the article you are writing, your organization is well named. The original Queen Jezebel had an innocent man, Naboth, smeared and stoned to death so her husband, King Ahab, could steal his vinyard [sic]. You can smear me, as the original Jezebel did, but if you want to physically destroy me, you may find it [a] bit harder.”)

Other choice quotes from Happer, who, shockingly, has received money from the fossil-fuel industry: