Climate Science and Energy Engineering Dinner

Monthly Dinner Website with much more detail about this event.

On Monday, January 12th, at 7:00pm the Conservative Climate Activists and Nuclear New York will be hosting our monthly Climate Science and Energy Engineering Dinner, which will usually occur on the 2nd Tuesday of every month.

The event will be at the Skylight Diner, by 9th Ave & 34th St in Manhattan, within easy reach of the A/C/E & 7 subways, and one block from Penn / Moynihan station. The diner has a large menu with affordable prices, generous portions, and is willing to do separate checks for a large group, with everybody using their own credit card.

The topics of conversation will be

• Climate Science: you have to be able to debate climate science in order to reach out to conservatives, and also, even if you don't talk with conservatives, there is a lot of controversy over just how bad things will get, and how fast.
• Energy Engineering: We have to decarbonize the economy, but there are many unresolved / controversial issues to discuss -- which zero carbon sources of energy are preferable, how to decarbonize transportation, particularly aviation. To get public cooperation, we have to figure out a path to decarbonize that won't involve too much negative impact on per capita GDP, or too much disruption to our way of life.

This Month's Topic: The Climate Equivalent to the Far Right's Project 2025

Well, 2025 was a disastrous year for climate progress. Trump has de-funded a lot of climate science, as well as other science in general, and shut down wind projects whenever possible. He has promoted infamous contrarian crackpots to provide leadership on the climate issue. So what should we do, for the time being?

We can learn something from what the Heritage Foundation did when Biden was inaugurated in 2021. The wrote down a plan, "Project 2025", of what they would do if they acquired power again.

Outreach to conservatives on climate is currently extremely difficult, because political polarization is so extreme that anything either end of the political spectrum wants, the opposite end will oppose, apparently just out of spite.

So for this meeting we will discuss climate strategy, what we will push for once the Democrats take power, and possibly ways to reach out to conservatives better.

One area where progress is possible is nuclear energy. The Republicans, including the administration, are fully supportive of nuclear energy. The soot pollution from coal kills more people worldwide every four days than have been killed by the nuclear industry since the creation of nuclear power. Next-gen nuclear plants cannot melt down like Fukushima did, and it is possible that with more R&D, next-gen nuclear will be cheaper, per kWh, than fossil fuls, which is unlikely to happen for renewals + storage. If a non-intermittent energy source is discovered that is cheaper than fossil fuels, that will solve global warming right there.

If you're interested in debating people to try to change minds, there is a Facebook Group named Climate Change Debate where people go to discuss climate. Most of the replies one gets there are ignorant snark from people who are poorly-informed and uninterested in becoming better-informed, but a substantial fraction of them are interested in good faith, constructive conversations.

One tactic that one can use when debating climate skeptics is to post links to the SkepticalScience website, which is a Wiki with rebuttals to every popular climate skeptic argument, usually with rebuttals at the "Basic", "Intermediate", and "Advanced" levels depending upon your appetite for detail.