Conservative Climate Activists




Who Are We?

We are a

  • conservative-leaning
  • market-oriented
  • pro-human
  • pro-technology
group that believes that climate change is a dire situation.

A lot of the people who are drawn to this group are not conservatives, and they misunderstand the purpose of the group, thinking that it is to persuade conservatives to embrace the existing environmental movement, warts and all. That is not the case, and such a goal is neither achievable nor desirable:

  • The existing environmental movement is profoundly lacking in proper focus and distracted by every imaginable left-wing agenda. For conservatives to embrace the existing environmental movement would mean their complete and total capitulation on everything. The only environmentalists we support are those well-focused on solving environmental issues in isolation, and we try to encourage them to maintain that focus.
  • Most of the existing environmental movement is also tragically technically underinformed and misinformed, often even downright technophobic, and thus pursuing technically unwise or ineffective policies and prone to making inaccurate predictions that, when they fail to materialize, undermine the credibility of the whole climate movement.

Facebook Group

Click here to apply to join the group and join in the conversation. Facebook requires us to have a Facebook page (as opposed to a group), but pages are useless because only the organizer is allowed to speak there. Once you join the group, you'll be allowed to make posts and comment.

Most of the discussion in the group is about engineering, trying to solve the problem of "How can we decarbonize the economy with minimal disruption to our standard of living and way of life?".




What Is the Evidence?

The evidence is very strong and most of the public is convinced that global warming is happening, is man-made, and a serious problem. If you're not sure about that, we can discuss it: click here.

The Case for Nuclear Energy

The environmental movement has a long history of opposition to nuclear energy, but most of that stems from misinformation, irrational fear, and ignorance.

Al Gore said in one of his books that when he was trying to get people worried about global warming in the early 1990's, a lot of environmentalists were opposed to talking about it because they feared that a desire to reduce our carbon emissions would lead to support for nuclear energy.

Many engineers feel that we don't have much hope of decarbonizing the economy without a heavy reliance on nuclear. The case for using nuclear energy as a major part of the solution to global warming is very compelling: click here.


What Should Be Done?

Most of the environmental movement in this country leans very far-left, and they're the ones proposing most of the solutions to climate change.  Typically, these proposals are drafted without anyone to the right of Elizabeth Warren in the room.  As a result, the solutions one usually hears being bandied about are downright horrifying to the political right.

And, as we shall see, the solutions do not have to be market-hostile.

For a discussion of solutions, click here.


Cost / Benefit Analysis

In recent years, the debate has shifted, with relatively few people arguing that climate change is not happening, but rather that the effects will not be very problematic while the expense of decarbonizing the economy will be much higher.

To see economic analysis of cost / benefit analysis, click here.







The Need for Bipartisanship

It will take several decades of sustained action to bring our emissions of greenhouse gases under control.  It is utterly unrealistic to expect one political party to control the government for anywhere near the needed length of time, especially when as recently as 2020, that one party had control of none of the 3 branches of government, is currently (2021) hanging on to the senate by their fingernails, and that party, like most incumbent parties in midterms, can be expected to lose seats in 2022.

A state of affairs where one party, when in power, makes slow progress without any cooperation from the opposition, all of which is dismantled overnight when power changes hands, is unacceptable and inadequate.

We had 20 years of Democratic presidents from 1932 to 1952, and it took a Great Depression and a World War to bring that about, and even, then, Truman's re-election defeating Dewey in 1948 was so close that he went to bed thinking he had lost.

The current state of affairs is that the left wants action on climate change, and the right is neither convinced nor cooperating.  In this context, one conservative committed to solving this problem is worth a dozen liberals.

In most environmental organizations, since everybody there leans far left, they wind up dragging irrelevant left-wing agendas into their proposed solutions, which is very counterproductive to building broad support. For that matter, most environmental organizations are so far left that they don't even believe that conservatives can be reasoned with.

When measuring progress, one shouldn't simply add up the number of Republican votes for climate measures. A situation where "nobody is quite ready to vote 'yes'" is profoundly different from "everybody is vehemently opposed". There is a whole range of progress that is possible (and existing gains to be lost) before we see evidence in the form of significant Republican votes.










The Case for a Conservative Environmentalism
the Failings of the Environmental Left

This article in National Review sums up the many failings of the environmental left, and why, if the environment is to be preserved, conservatives must get involved.

Some liberal readers objected to the article criticizing the environmentalist goals of "dismantling white supremacy" and "smashing the patriarchy" and felt that National Review was saying that "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" were good things that should be preserved. That's not quite the right interpretation -- to a conservative, phrases like "white superemacy" and "patriarchy" are not accurate descriptions of reality, but rather, hyperbole that is bandied about by silly people who should not be taken seriously.

The Environmental Justice Movement Threatens to Derail the Whole Environmental Movement.

There is something called the Environmental Justice movement that has taken over much of the environmental movement and is preventing it from achieving its goal of saving the planet.


People who want aggressive action on climate change are to be referred to as "climate activists".

The people on the other side are to be referred to as "climate skeptics".  This includes not only people who claim that no warming is going on (such people are becoming pretty rare), but also people who believe that warming is occurring, but no action of any kind is warranted.

We will try to avoid the term "climate deniers". Calling someone a "denier" is no way to start a remotely civilized conversation.

Climate skeptics are welcome to attend, but people who are rude, shout, or interrupt will not be tolerated.






We take what Al Gore says with a grain of salt.  He's a politician with a background in law, not a scientist. He's also not very careful -- it a dozen scientists say a dozen things, he'll take the scariest prediction and talk about it like it's the consensus. He's been doing that for awhile now, so he's chalked up a pretty substantial track record of being wrong about things.

Geoengineering will be discussed, but only in terms of something that is not currently being done, as a possible future strategy to reduce warming. We will not be discussing conspiracy theories about how white trails currently seen behind jets in the sky contain anything other than water vapor.

Many environmentalists think that the whole problem will be solved if we just buy a lot of solar panels and windmills.  It's nowhere near that simple -- the transition of our energy sector is a difficult and fascinating problem, and we will be discussing the engineering and economics of alternative energy.


Stanford professor Mark Z Jacobson has a plan to completely decarbonize the economy by 2050 without using nuclear energy, but many peoople say his plan won't work.






Online Discussion

We encourage discussion on the meetup event pages and in the Facebook group.  Rude comments will be deleted at the organizer's discretion, as will comments by people who won't be attending, especially if they are running down the topics.

Video Policy

Links to videos more than 10 minutes long will be allowed in the Facebook group or on the meetup message boards, but not on pre-event discussion on meetup events (the organizer will delete them).  The problem with people posting long videos is that they aren't skimmable, often go on and on without getting to the point, and deter attendees from showing up because they feel unprepared unless they sit through them.

If you want to share a video, do so in the Facebook group, or create a thread for it on the meetup message boards or on the Facebook group, mentioning why you think it is worth watching, and hopefully, how much time in to skip to for the part that you feel is relevant.


Differences Between 1.5 and 2.0
Degrees C of Warming

Why is a target of 1.5 degrees C preferable to one of 2.0 degrees C? See chart here.













One Free Beer or Soda
For Attendees!
Former Lecture Series

This group used to hold regular events / lectures / get-togethers / discussions in New York City prior to changing from a local organization to a nationwide one.

Past Events:

  • We showed and debunked the climate skeptic movie Climate Hustle.
  • Slide show on:
    • Popular climate skeptic arguments with rebuttals
    • The economics of the solutions to climate change
  • Visit by climate scientist Dr. Sharir Maasri
  • Germany's and California's experiences with renewable energy
  • How painful will reducing our carbon footprint be?
  • History of the climate change debate: movie "Merchants of Doubt"
  • Richard Ruins Everything: Berkeley physicist Richard A Muller's outrage at ClimateGate and investigation of the reliability of climate science.
  • Panel: "Legal Ramifications of Event Attribution": "Event attribution" is new field of study to determine precisely what proportion of extreme weather events can be blamed on climate change.
  • Lecture: A Zero-Carbon, Zero-Nuclear Economy by 2050. Stanford professor Mark Z Jacobson has been working for over a decade on his very detailed plan for a carbon-free, nuclear-free economy by 2050.
  • Lecture: Nuclear Energy by the organizer and nuclear engineer Herschel Specter.
  • Social get-together -- Discuss climate change over dinner
  • A Variety of Proposals for Dealing with Climate Change -- analysis of many different political proposals
  • Pro-Nuclear Movie "Pandora's Promise" and Discussion
  • Networking with the NYC Alternative Energy Meetup and movie Climate Hustle



Marc Morano
Famous Climate Skeptic
Climate Hustle

In 2016, the climate skeptic movie Climate Hustle was released for a one-day showing in theaters.

We have this detailed written review and rebuttal to the movie.

In addition, we have a 40 minute video presentation of rebuttal to the movie, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A.


Visit our links page to find information sources and interesting organizations.

Organizer: Bill Chapman
Email the Organizer,
Bill Chapman