As the world starts a new year, the White House, too, is finding itself back at the beginning. About 100 nominees will have to be renominated in 2018 after being blocked in the Senate. Among those dozens of names is Kathleen Hartnett White, former chairwoman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and Donald Trump's choice to head up the Council on Environmental Quality.

At a time when Houston is still recovering from Hurricane Harvey, we need federal leaders who take seriously the connection between climate change and extreme weather events. Hartnett White is not up to the task.

There are plenty of other Texans who Trump can pick to fill this important position, preferably ones who won't compel us to cover the collective eyes of Texas out of embarrassment during a confirmation hearing. In November, Hartnett White provided one of the most painful C-SPAN experiences in recent memory as she stumbled over basic issues of science - including one particularly embarrassing exchange with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., about whether water expands when it heats up.

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Her record at the TCEQ was no better. In 2003, the state auditor found that the White-led commission allowed polluters to get away with breaking the law, and also undermined its own regulations.

As a fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin, she has promoted coal at the expense of cheaper, cleaner natural gas. She also has bizarrely compared the growth of renewable energy to a rollback of the industrial age - which is news to the wind farms of West Texas and the panhandle.

Overall, Hartnett White recklessly dismisses the threat that global climate change poses to our nation, and to humanity, and she should have no place at a federal environmental regulatory agency.

A federal failure to prepare for the effects of a warming planet, and refusal to reduce carbon emissions, will put Texans at greater risk of falling victim to natural disasters.

More extreme weather, including more rain, is one of the most agreed-upon consequences of global warming, and Texas' own state climatologist, Texas A&M professor John Nielsen-Gammon, has pointed out that our state infrastructure was not built to handle the expected storms.

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Hurricane Harvey may have broken every record in the history book for rainfall, but those historic patterns are no longer reliable measures of what our weather is going to look like.

"Not thinking about climate change means you're already making an implicit assumption about the future that's probably incorrect," Nielsen-Gammon told The Associated Press last year.

Cities across the globe are preparing for a wetter world, with higher oceans and the greater threat of storm surges by constructing extensive flood prevention system to help keep them above water.

The city of Tokyo has spent $2 billion to build a massive underground storage system large enough to hold Godzilla. But these tanks aren't designed to protect the city from a giant radioactive lizard - they're built to accommodate rising sea levels.

The United States will soon have to start making those billion-dollar investments in our own survival, and we shouldn't have to wait until the next president is in the White House.

Climate change is happening, and we have to be prepared. The first step is putting someone on the Council on Environmental Quality who will help a state like Texas prepare for the next century of Harveys.