Commonplace is launching a new newsletter, Future Voices, that invites young people from across the country to share their thoughts in response to each month’s issue of the magazine.
For the first edition, respondents provided answers to the question: “After decades of dismissing the subject, how should a new generation of conservatives approach climate change, and environmental policy more broadly?”
Rather than try to summarize second-hand, we wanted to share a selection of responses to capture what young people on the Right really think:
Give Us a Positive Vision for Climate
Grace Plath, Patrick Henry College
For decades, climate alarmists have spread their message of environmental apocalypse far and wide. Although these dire predictions haven’t come to pass (see Al Gore’s claims that Glacier National Park’s glaciers would disappear by the year 2021), young adults still believe climate issues are important. Surveys estimate that 80% of 16-24-year-olds worldwide suffer from “climate anxiety.” A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that 69% of Gen Zers felt anxious about the future when they interacted with social media content addressing climate change.
American conservatives have largely failed to cast a positive vision for a conservative approach to environmental stewardship. By doing so, we have ceded that space to radical voices who claim that our only hope of saving the planet lies in population reduction and extreme policy changes that will drastically lower quality of life for people around the globe.
Today, conservatives stand at a crossroads in the climate discussion. We have an incredible opportunity to give the younger generations an alternative message of hope rather than fear. Conservatives must reframe the environmental debate in terms of a pro-life, pro-stewardship mindset. Yes, the earth is a gift that we must care for, and it is a resource that we should use to promote human flourishing. Clean air and water are important, but so is affordable energy, and the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Population growth is not a burden on the environment, but a gift that promotes innovation and enterprise.
It’s time that climate alarmism is relegated to the landfill of history. Let’s reclaim environmental conservation for the conservative movement.
Reclaiming Sustainability
Christopher Lynch, Florida State University
The climate radicalism of the Left demands a serious conservative response. Crafting policy to address environmental concerns should be a goal of conservatism. Across the pond in Europe, degrowth climate alarmists who destroy great works of art to protest “Big Oil” demonstrate what progressives will do when conservatives cede the argument on climate and environmental policy.
At this point it is cliché to state that it was a Republican, President Richard Nixon, who oversaw the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. But environmental policy intersects other traditional conservative policy priorities. Energy modernization policy should not eradicate fossil fuels or retrofit the American economy in a green sheer, but instead, we should encourage development of nuclear energy.
Cast aside due to fearmongering over a few examples of mismanagement, nuclear development in America was halted in the 1980s, which forced the climate debate to focus only on renewables. Nuclear power promises cheaper and reliable power and addresses affordability concerns without reliance on Chinese produced green energy sources. It also avoids the significant visual blight of windmills.
Maintaining America’s beautiful landscapes, as President Trump helped do with the Great American Outdoors Act, is a core function of government. Effective environmental oversight is also critical, as California’s chronic mismanagement of wildfires has demonstrated. But spurning proper forest management in favor of the Green New Deal and carbon demonization has disastrous real-world implications.
The Left is excellent at capturing and weaponizing terminology. However, “sustainability” need not be a dirty word. Conservatives should pursue environmental policy that overlaps with our other priorities, or else we will fail to offer an alternative to the worst of the Left’s climate agenda.
Innovation Can Do What Protests Cannot
Abigail Smith, University of Notre Dame
For decades, too many conservatives treated climate change as someone else’s issue. We let the Left own it, and what did they do with it? Turned it into a prop. Greta Thunberg scolding world leaders at the UN didn’t solve anything; rather, it gave activists a permanent reason to complain and gave conservatives an excuse to roll our eyes. We both lost.
The new generation of conservatives should refuse that trap. We should start with the premise: the climate is changing, human activity contributes, and pretending otherwise costs us credibility on every other issue. But acknowledging the problem does not mean accepting the Left’s remedies.
Their toolkit is mandates, bans, and bureaucratic five-year plans. Ours should be better.
Conservation is embedded in the conservative tradition itself. A movement dedicated to conserving what is good, beautiful, and enduring should not ignore the natural world. Stewardship is not a progressive value but a conservative one.
Since 2005, the U.S. cut carbon emissions by roughly 20 percent, largely because fracking replaced coal with cleaner natural gas. Innovation did what protests could not.
So what is the agenda? Expand nuclear power by ending permitting paralysis. Reform environmental review laws that block transmission lines and reactors. Use a simple, transparent price on pollution instead of a maze of subsidies and special favors. Invest in adaptation so communities can withstand whatever comes.
Cheap, abundant energy lifted billions out of poverty. Policies that make energy scarce do not save the planet. They punish working families while China builds coal plants anyway. Conservation, stewardship, clean air, and clean water are conservative ideals. Teddy Roosevelt was no activist. He was a hunter who loved nature.
Let the Left complain, but should conserve what matters and use innovation to protect it.
Reject Denialism and Apocalyptic Politics
Alex Mooney, Hillsdale College
Early Americans often treated the continent’s resources as inexhaustible, until that myth began to collapse around the turn of the twentieth century. The Right largely retained an ethos of maximal use, while parts of the Left embraced preservationism without human use. Theodore Roosevelt forged a middle path: conservationism that rejects unregulated exploitation and hands-off preservation in favor of stewarding our inheritance for “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.” Conservatives should recover this tradition.
Conservation should be a politics of stewardship. Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton grounds environmental ethics in oikophilia—affection for home, place, and inherited ways of life. Roosevelt called conservation a national duty, obligating generations to pass on their natural inheritance intact and productive. Environmental policy should protect the conditions of human flourishing across generations, including clean air and water, healthy ecosystems, resilient communities, affordable energy, and industrial strength.
Conservatives should reject both denialism, which tends to disregard real harms in the name of resistance to climate alarmism, and apocalyptic politics, which subordinates human wellbeing to emissions targets and justifies sweeping mandates. Neither unrestricted extraction nor preservation without due regard for human needs is adequate. The MAHA emphasis on everyday health and environmental conditions offers one practical way to connect environmental quality with human flourishing.
Climate change warrants policy attention, including adaptation to heat, fires, and floods. Conservatives should prioritize reliable energy, innovation, and resilience over sacrifice for its own sake. Following Roosevelt, conservatives should treat conservation as both a public ethic and a national responsibility, respecting local knowledge and authority where appropriate. Environmental policy inevitably involves trade-offs among health, nature, prosperity, community, and national security. The principles are enduring; the precise policies, trade-offs, and shared practices required to realize them belong to politics and prudence and are the task ahead of us.
Conservatives Need a Conservation Rebrand
Nikos Mohammadi, Columbia University
I write as someone who is, in a sense, concurrently both within and outside the conservative movement. On economics, I’m solidly on the left, though I cross over with conservatives (and especially the so-called “New Right”) on many social and cultural issues. Notwithstanding, I talk to conservatives frequently, and I’ve ended up affiliated with various right-of-center institutions.
So, I might have a unique vantage point to offer conservatives. For far too long, mainstream conservative commentary has sought to deny that climate change is even real. But intelligent people of all ideological stripes can recognize that climate change is in fact real, and should be dealt with, without succumbing to the hysteria of banning all fossil fuels.
Though I’m far from an expert on climate change, I believe that there are practical things that can be done, which I think the next generation of conservatives ought to at least seriously contemplate.
For one, conservatives could be inspired by the legacy of ultra-woke social justice warrior Theodore Roosevelt (they/them). On a serious note: following in the footsteps of the 26th president, and ensuring that our public lands remain, well, public, is important.
Green energy, too, shouldn’t immediately be shunned. And conservatives ought to embrace new, greener, and more efficient modes of transportation, like high-speed rail, which we could urgently use in much of the country.
These things have been seen as “lib-coded,” but they don’t need to be. Sometimes a rhetorical shift is all that is needed. Healthy eating and opposition to war, not too long ago, immediately registered as “left.” Perhaps the language of national greatness can get us more efficient, climate-friendly transportation? After all, a country as great as America should have a high-speed rail network.
The Market Alone Will Not Conserve The Environment
Lincoln Patience, Patrick Henry College
Environmentalism may be a back burner issue for Conservatives right now, but the Right would be wrong to dismiss reports of record-breaking heat waves and increasingly violent natural disasters as “fake science.” Instead of lamenting bureaucratic overreach or debating the accuracy of projections 30 years in the future, conservatives should support renewable energy projects for data centers, rebuild the critical mineral supply chain, and restore damaged ecosystems within our borders.
AI models and data centers have become a proxy for environmentalists’ opposition to fossil fuels. But conservatives can remain pro-development without needlessly alienating data center NIMBYs or AI skeptics. A successful AI buildout will require an “all of the above” approach to energy that includes wind, solar, and nuclear power. Congressional Republicans should defend the NEPA reforms President Trump implemented last year, and should work to reduce the environmental costs of nuclear and solar waste.
Reshoring the critical minerals supply chain is another needed aspect of conservative climate policy. Free-market purists believed we could safely outsource mineral processing to China, spreading the allure of capitalism while cutting costs and avoiding domestic environmental regulations. Ironically, the opposite happened. The U.S. funded the growth of an emerging geopolitical rival through the WTO, and American tech companies built China’s deep state apparatus and made possible an ecological nightmare. The Trump administration’s investments in rare earth startups has done much to restore our supply chain, but even greater vigor and vigilance are needed to preserve our technological edge.
Traditional conservatives insist that “market forces” and human ingenuity will solve climate problems like overfishing before the consequences become irreversible. But stewarding ecosystems requires the kind of collective action libertarians find alarming. Republicans should restore funding to our national parks and identify concrete solutions to the water pollution, soil erosion, and urban droughts our country faces.
Next month, we’ll be publishing responses from students in response to the question: “How confident are you in your local election, and why?” Responses can be submitted here and are due on November 20.