WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Thursday tapped Kathleen Hartnett-White, a former chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, to head a key White House office that coordinates environmental and energy policies across the government.

The nomination of Hartnett-White to chair the administration’s Council on Environmental Quality is not entirely surprising – she previously had been considered to head the Environmental Protection Agency – but nevertheless is sure to infuriate environmental advocates.

Like other members of the Trump administration, she has long questioned the overwhelming scientific consensus on human-fueled climate change and has criticized the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a volunteer group of climate scientists whose findings are considered the gold standard of climate science. And she has described efforts to combat global warming as little more than an attack on the fossil fuel industry.

“I am not at all persuaded by the IPCC science that we are standing on some precipice,” Hartnett-White told The Washington Post last October, referring to the urgency to combat global warming. “We’re not standing on a cliff from which we are about to fall off.”

Hartnett-White currently is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an organization whose board of directors includes oil industry executives and GOP activists. Koch Industries, an oil-based conglomerate that has funded a variety of libertarian political groups, was among the group’s broad range of original donors.

From her post at the foundation, Hartnett-White often has challenged the conclusions of international experts on climate change science, as well as criticized the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants that can be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

“I take issue with that,” she told the Post last fall. “Carbon dioxide has none of the characteristics of a pollutant that could harm human health.”

She has displayed similar contempt for international climate efforts, calling scientific conclusions from U.N. panels “not validated and politically corrupt.” Hartnett-White has also questioned the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant at all, calling it “an odorless, invisible, beneficial, and natural gas.”

“Our flesh, blood and bones are built of carbon,” she wrote in 2016. “Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the gas of life on this planet, an essential nutrient for plant growth on which human life depends.”

She made similar arguments in a book she co-authored in 2016, entitled “Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy,” as well as in numerous essays questioning climate change, including one last year in which she called President Barack Obama’s efforts to slow global warming by reducing carbon emissions “deluded and illegitimate.”

The Council on Environmental Quality, formed in 1970, doesn’t just coordinate environmental policy at the White House. It plays a central role in the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which requires an assessment of the environmental impacts of many proposed federal actions before they are undertaken.

Critics of Hartnett-White have long seen her as far outside the mainstream, a denier of well-established science who would reflexively side with fossil fuel interests.

“Her ill-conceived policies would put the health of our families at risk and increase the deadly impact of climate change,” Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, wrote last fall.

Christy Goldfuss, vice president of energy and environmental policy at the Center for American Progress and a former managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, called Hartnett-White’s nomination a win for the industry interests.

“She advocates for the moral case for developing fossil fuels, which flies in the face of the responsibilities of the chair to engage the public on environmental issues and advise the president on how to protect the public from the greatest environmental threats,” Goldfuss said in a statement. “As communities rebuild across the country from climate fueled wildfires and hurricanes, her stated alliance with the fossil fuel industry makes her unfit to hold the highest environmental post in the government to advise the president on the real moral threat to our county: climate change.”

Even with the nomination of Hartnett-White, who must be confirmed by the Senate, the Trump administration has left empty dozens of key scientific posts throughout the government. The positions span high-level science advisory jobs in the White House, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.