Marc Morano: My name is Marc Morano, and I’m the Communication Director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, CFACT. I also publish the website called Climate Depot.
I’ve testified at Common Core hearings throughout the states. We have a collegiate division that has over 50 chapters and thousands of kids across the country. I speak on campus. I’ll be speaking at the University of Tennessee next month, and I plan to bring a different viewpoint today because I want to talk about the element of fear in education that they instill in kids, and I think it’s been severely overdone and counterproductive.
And some of my PowerPoint, some of my examples will be that I’m also registered NGO with the United Nations; I go to every UN climate summit. I shouldn’t say everyone I’ve been to, like, 23 of the last 26; I’ll be going to Turkey; I was in Brazil. Last year I was in Azerbaijan; I went to Argentina in 2004 and to Bali, Indonesia, in 2007; I went to Kenya in 2006, so I covered that climate beat with the United Nations.
I’ve worked for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, so again, all the different perspectives today
…
I worked in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and I come from a skeptical view that students should be educated to drive climate action; I think we should focus more on diversity of viewpoints. The value of debate is allowing dissent and not forcing a specific viewpoint, and not instilling fear in students.
I wanted to share a few examples I’ve dealt with over my 2 decades, going back to the U.S. Senate, to re-evaluate how we have kids coming out of college and high school full of climate fears.
Leonardo DiCaprio has made many climate films, and a lot of them aimed at young people and his philosophy was, ‘we need to get kids young’ in order to turn them into climate activists.
Al Gore’s producer, Laurie David has said, ‘we want you to grow up to be activists’, that is her message, and I think this has been a flaw approach because what happens is you get these overly aggressive, scared, passionate kids, which you think are great. But then as time goes on, their passion fades, and I think fear-based motivation is not sustainable.
Greta Thunberg, the hero of youth activism, and the education system that did the school strike said, ‘I want you to feel the fear I feel. This is my cry for help. Why should we be studying for a future that’s soon to be no more.’
This is my biggest beef with the climate establishment in terms of education and the young; I don’t think fear should play this role in schools. It’s widespread.
NASA, the U.S. space agency, featured a website where kindergarteners were warned of an inescapable death spiral of climate change on the Climate Kids website. This is only from 2024, just 2 years ago. NASA wrote that entire U.S. cities will be underwater, and they had little kids’ cartoons; they go after elementary school kids.
Youth climate activist, this is Teen Vogue’s Jamie Margolis: ‘It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how many dreams we have. The reality is we’ve. Been committed to a planet that’s collapsing.”
I would argue this messaging is counterproductive.
A UK teachers’ guide for 5 to 14-year-olds urged them to take personal action. They said the students need to ‘mitigate climate change and focus on the Earth’. The authors suggest lyrics like: the Earth is getting warmer, oceans are rising. ‘We know about the dangers and must be changes. The future is in our hands.’
The last line is very concerning, because we’re talking about 5-14-year-olds; it puts this pressure on them, and that pressure to essentially save the planet. And it implies their parents ruined the planet and they have to save it. Then the students get recruited to these climate lawsuits.
And these lawsuits, I know, it sounds great to many. All these kids are activists, and they’re fighting the establishment. But the problem is they’re in high school, they’re in elementary school, and they’re being told that their future has been ruined, and they need to sue governments and corporations to ensure their future. It’s a burden on them.
60 Minutes presented kids suing the government, and the program claimed what the kids were saying was not ‘gobbledegook’. But the show presented climate evidence like this: ‘a 15-year-old put her ankle in climate change.’ This is all part of this whole lawsuit.
So this student/kid agenda has been really pushed. NBC News is reporting about ‘climate grief’, the growing emotional toll.
The Washington Post quoted a 9-year-old girl who said, ‘I’m afraid to die because of climate change’, and the Metro UK newspaper reported climate change is causing panic, anxiety, and damaging our mental health. Global warming caused an increase in ‘ecological grief’.
This is an actual peer-reviewed academic paper published in the journal Nature in 2018. A small but growing number of scholars are suffering from ecological grief — it’s becoming increasingly common. Now, I just think this is what needs to stop.
This is a teenager suffering from climate anxiety, and of course, they want you to act now, a lot of these kids are speaking out.
This is — she’s in her 30s, this is Lucy Biggers, she said, ‘Climate change scared the living hell ever. When she saw Al Gore’s film, she had existential dread watching the film.’
We detailed kids who watched Al Gore’s movie 4 times in four different classes, and the big thing I would argue is there’s no climate dissent allowed in most of schools or academia.
So a kid is taught that there’s no dissent, no debate on these issues. And they’re told that this is the way it is.
Whether Channel did the same thing, video using kids. ‘Dear Mom and Dad, climate change could be catastrophic.’
NBC News: ‘College students getting emotional about climate change; it’s making young people distressed.’
So I just wanted to start out with that. And to say, you need to do diversity of opinion in academia. You need debate, you need less fear, and you need to let kids have critical thinking skills. Thank you.
Morano’s intro ended.
Moderator: “It’s a very fear-driven presentation to start with, but ending with a very positive remark that there’s something that education social can do. Thank you so much, Marc.
…
Marc Morano: I think the biggest thing is one of the biggest things with college is you want to show a diversity of viewpoints. When I was working in the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, these scientists reached out to our office who were skeptical of climate change, and they were just giving horror stories of how academia was crushing them and not allowing dissent or debate.
And actually the same thing happened during COVID. So I think students need to know that a teacher’s not going to be canceled for saying the wrong thing. Number one, that gives them the idea that academia is a safe space that allows discussion and you’re not canceled. And this suppression of dissent happened to a lot of professors, even renowned professors who were against the sort of Anthony Fauci lockdown technique during COVID.
The exact same sort of stifling of debate happened in climate, but I think with kids you want to show them debate is healthy. If you look at Gallup polling on environmental issues, climate is always ranked dead last as a concern every year by Americans. So I think the biggest thing you want to do with kids is teach them about the environment, teach them about the first Earth Day and about how much the Earth has improved since then.
We’ve radically decreased air pollution and water pollution, and at the same time we have seen huge economic growth and had a huge population increase.
The progress on cleaning up the environment since the first Earth Day is a huge success story that should instill hope in students and instill practical solutions for pollution cleanup. I would argue students need to see a diversity of speakers come to speak to them with differing views on issues. I would also try to avoid some of the jargon like sustainable development that the UN promotes, Agenda 2030. I think they become very sort of narrow activists who are in a little niche world that the rest of their students can’t even relate to or understand what they’re talking about; it’s got to be a sort of way forward.
And to answer the other question, if I can’t just real quickly tie that in the trade-offs and the balances are a huge issue. To replace toilets with bidets to get rid of toilet paper. The problem with all of that is you have to look at the big picture on these issues. Even if you look at EVs.
Everyone says their EV is ‘green’. Well, there was an engineering estimate. It takes half a million pounds of materials dug up from the Earth to make one 1000 pound Tesla EV battery, which is then transported on a diesel ship, which is then plugged into a grid, that is roughly 70 to 80%dependent on fossil fuels, depending on where you live, to recharge that battery.
So there’s always a trade-off. I think we had to get away from this is ‘green’. This is not green, and you look at the overall big picture.
…
Marc Morano: One of the things, at our organization, Committee for Constructive Tomorrow, we’re very grassroots, so our cooperation is working with local communities. And there’s actually been a lot of our activists who oppose offshore wind on the coast. Recently, in New Jersey. We have people protesting an offshore wind, because they don’t like what it’s doing to whales, and we have cooperation with local communities, as they need them and the grassroots. I think that is one of the most important things. I mean, all the other stuff’s important too, technology and cooperating with corporations and organizations. But the grassroots is where everything sort of begins and ends.
…
Marc Morano: I did stories on sustainable forestry; at one point, doing an Amazon rainforest report, I interviewed professors, and they could tell me within 7 years, using these sustainable forestry techniques where it’s not slash-and-burn techniques or clearcutting but a slice of trees here or a slice of trees there. Within 7 years, you couldn’t distinguish between the logged forest and the unlogged forest because plants and animals regenerated.
That’s the kind of hopeful message, instead of fear-based, that I think we should be pushing, and when you look at technology, whether you’re talking about endangered species, we know how to save endangered species. The success rate is incredible to the point where now you have battles about whether a species should be delisted, in case it could be a Wolf or something else, and agriculture, where there become too many of a species.
And this is a very important point I’m about to make: showing kids a hopeful message that even fossil fuels or coal plants have dramatically increased pollution standards in the past 50 years since the first Earth Day, 60 years ago.
I guess almost, and I think the biggest mistake that activists should avoid is getting the UN or someone like Al Gore, making environmental issues political left, right, or Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal — all of that makes it a niche issue because you’re going to have people who are repulsed immediately.
I think this is one of the biggest mistakes with the UN. The UN politicizes the hell out of climate change to the point where they do all the tipping points; it just turns off half of the audience immediately.
So if you focus on a technology aspect and improving the environment across the board, cleaning up oceans, cleaning up pollution.
It is wrong to have ANY climate alarm.
All global warming alarm is wrong, false, an error.
The only thing about this man’s approach would be for him to recommend that all points of view must be permitted and encouraged in all debates everywhere.
He must begin with the CORE LIE, that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and contradict that at the beginning of every debate, every mention, every publication.
Don’t get me wrong – I didn’t mean to imply that a little bit of “alarm” might be OK. There is no good reason to have ever expected a perceptible influence on ANY climate variable from emissions of CO2.
Does U. Mass. get federal funding? Is it a state institution or state funded institution? I would guess that there may be a 1st amendment issue if they don’t let him speak there.
That I don’t know. I presume it must. It’s THE state university in Amherst- a big one with something like 30K students. They have a history of harassing speakers that don’t sing the lefty party line regardless of the 1st amendment.
I just check with AI, and I apparently am not correct here. The 1st amendment only applies to students and faculty at the institution and NOT outside speakers. So they do not have to allow Marc Morano to speak there.
If the U. Mass@Amherst is a lefty institution as I suspect, he would probably be very unwelcome there anyway. As you say, no dissent from the party line is permitted.
According to AI, an outside speaker (Marc Morano) must be allowed to speak when invited by a student organization:
“3. So when must a university allow a speaker? Only in one situation: https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/17.0.2/svg/2714.svg If a student group at a public university invites a speakerThen the university cannot block the speaker based on viewpoint. This is because the speaker is part of the student group’s expressive activity, which is protected by the First Amendment. “
The trick is that the school cannot officially block him. However if they send in students to disrupt his speech so that nobody can hear him, that’s just those student’s exercising their free speech rights to drown out anyone the party disagrees with.
I doubt there’s any organization of any type on the campus or in the entire state that would invite him. I even doubt the state GOP would do it. I’ve tried contacting the state GOP’s web site but they never get back to me.
I’d be shocked if U. Mass. ever invited him. I doubt there’s enough non lefties on campus that would have an interest in Morano. Certainly the profs wouldn’t invite him.
Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a Utah Univ……just sayin’…..be careful
Bruce Cobb
September 29, 2026 7:07 am
Stop lying to kids about climate. Our climate is fine, and we have very little, if any effect on it anyway, so we don’t actually have to do anything except what we’ve always done; adapt.
And appreciate that many areas now have a slightly better weather pattern. Anyone in the colder parts of North American, Europe or Siberia certainly should.
strativarius
September 29, 2026 7:25 am
Arch megaloon Bill McKibben: The climate fight has one great ally. You just can’t look at it directly
A return to rational empirical science or a ramping up of the supercomputer modelled faith?
There is hope in solar power.
Hope is the new common theme on the left, maybe that’s all they ever had…
Andy Burnham pledges to ‘bring back hope’ a “ten-year plan to bring back hope” Andy Burnham promises ‘hope in every heart’ ‘Hope again’: Burnham returns to Labour conference
There’s a lot of hope, but managed decline remains the order of the day. The decline goes on, and the management is losing control of it.
This is quite a compendium of scientific illiterates. One has to ask what it is the Guardian is guarding? ….. their bank accounts? He has the aggrieved look of someone who might have to get a real job for the first time in his life.
Actually coper in an electrical fire becomes black.
Corrosion results in green.
Corrosion = corruption in one sense of the word.
Therefore (wait for it)
Green energy is corrupt energy.
Fun with words. 🙂
Regarding the fire in Bootle, I wonder how many more MSM outlets will report on the cause of the fire.
My bet is not many.
CD in Wisconsin
September 29, 2026 7:44 am
“Leonardo DiCaprio has made many climate films, and a lot of them aimed at young people and his philosophy was, ‘we need to get kids young’ in order to turn them into climate activists.”
Yes, and Hitler wanted young Germans to grow up to be good Nazis and Nazi activists. Hence, the Hitler Youth.
DiCaprio originally never finished high school but would later get his GED equivalent. He appears to have never learned the old adage about learning from history and not repeating its mistakes. Today’s U.S. youth are the victims of his ignorance.
mleskovarsocalrrcom
September 29, 2026 7:53 am
I’m surprised they let him speak. I’m betting it was to tic the “opposing views included” box.
I don’t think that is accurate. From my reading of their positions, they don’t believe there is crisis level global warming. They’re still not at the level where they say that climate sensitivity to a doubling of carbon dioxide has never been shown empirically to be a number other than zero though (if that’s what you meant).
The ways in which nature works incessantly to off us are incalculable.
Nature’s primary function is to replace all extant species with more evolved, adaptable species.
Nature never guarantees us a life of any duration or without injuries or illnesses along the way.
And yet – we succumb to the wild conjectures of all manner of carpetbaggers who “know” what nature’s “proper” behaviors should be, if only we resile from “interfering” with nature.
I mean, the hutzpah is mind-boggling.
And then, when the carpetbaggers conclude from many surveys & polls that their climate doomsday conjectures aren’t really accepted by most ordinary adults, they then devise to take after the kids.
These climate carpetbaggers are just as big a harm we are confronted with as anything nature throws at us.
abolition man
September 29, 2026 12:12 pm
The various Marxist Mind Cults, like Climastrology, only work on the fearful, the envious, and the ignorant! Without instilling fear in children, they are far too likely to realize that we are actually living during the Modern Warm; a period of flourishing for ALL life, not just humans!
The alarmists claim to worry about an “extinction level event,” yet the main threats to wildlife, and humans, around the world are Unreliable Energy systems and other boondoggles foisted on an unsuspecting public by those that seek to destroy liberty and prosperity, and install a worldwide command and control economy; the one system that has never worked, ever!
Bob
September 29, 2026 3:13 pm
Good for Mark. The other side is lying and worse trying to scare young people into believing their crap, they deserve severe punishment. We need to give these kids the straight scoop and reassure them they aren’t doomed. We can’t stop there we need to reach their parents and grandparents, we need to reach the whole population with the truth.
Morano featured speaker at UN’s NYC Climate Week
From CFACT
By CFACT Ed
Marc Morano: My name is Marc Morano, and I’m the Communication Director for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, CFACT. I also publish the website called Climate Depot.
I’ve testified at Common Core hearings throughout the states. We have a collegiate division that has over 50 chapters and thousands of kids across the country. I speak on campus. I’ll be speaking at the University of Tennessee next month, and I plan to bring a different viewpoint today because I want to talk about the element of fear in education that they instill in kids, and I think it’s been severely overdone and counterproductive.
And some of my PowerPoint, some of my examples will be that I’m also registered NGO with the United Nations; I go to every UN climate summit. I shouldn’t say everyone I’ve been to, like, 23 of the last 26; I’ll be going to Turkey; I was in Brazil. Last year I was in Azerbaijan; I went to Argentina in 2004 and to Bali, Indonesia, in 2007; I went to Kenya in 2006, so I covered that climate beat with the United Nations.
I’ve worked for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, so again, all the different perspectives today
…
I worked in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and I come from a skeptical view that students should be educated to drive climate action; I think we should focus more on diversity of viewpoints. The value of debate is allowing dissent and not forcing a specific viewpoint, and not instilling fear in students.
I wanted to share a few examples I’ve dealt with over my 2 decades, going back to the U.S. Senate, to re-evaluate how we have kids coming out of college and high school full of climate fears.
Morano PowerPoint:
Leonardo DiCaprio has made many climate films, and a lot of them aimed at young people and his philosophy was, ‘we need to get kids young’ in order to turn them into climate activists.
Al Gore’s producer, Laurie David has said, ‘we want you to grow up to be activists’, that is her message, and I think this has been a flaw approach because what happens is you get these overly aggressive, scared, passionate kids, which you think are great. But then as time goes on, their passion fades, and I think fear-based motivation is not sustainable.
Greta Thunberg, the hero of youth activism, and the education system that did the school strike said, ‘I want you to feel the fear I feel. This is my cry for help. Why should we be studying for a future that’s soon to be no more.’
This is my biggest beef with the climate establishment in terms of education and the young; I don’t think fear should play this role in schools. It’s widespread.
NASA, the U.S. space agency, featured a website where kindergarteners were warned of an inescapable death spiral of climate change on the Climate Kids website. This is only from 2024, just 2 years ago. NASA wrote that entire U.S. cities will be underwater, and they had little kids’ cartoons; they go after elementary school kids.
Youth climate activist, this is Teen Vogue’s Jamie Margolis: ‘It doesn’t matter how talented you are, how many dreams we have. The reality is we’ve. Been committed to a planet that’s collapsing.”
I would argue this messaging is counterproductive.
A UK teachers’ guide for 5 to 14-year-olds urged them to take personal action. They said the students need to ‘mitigate climate change and focus on the Earth’. The authors suggest lyrics like: the Earth is getting warmer, oceans are rising. ‘We know about the dangers and must be changes. The future is in our hands.’
The last line is very concerning, because we’re talking about 5-14-year-olds; it puts this pressure on them, and that pressure to essentially save the planet. And it implies their parents ruined the planet and they have to save it. Then the students get recruited to these climate lawsuits.
And these lawsuits, I know, it sounds great to many. All these kids are activists, and they’re fighting the establishment. But the problem is they’re in high school, they’re in elementary school, and they’re being told that their future has been ruined, and they need to sue governments and corporations to ensure their future. It’s a burden on them.
60 Minutes presented kids suing the government, and the program claimed what the kids were saying was not ‘gobbledegook’. But the show presented climate evidence like this: ‘a 15-year-old put her ankle in climate change.’ This is all part of this whole lawsuit.
So this student/kid agenda has been really pushed. NBC News is reporting about ‘climate grief’, the growing emotional toll.
The Washington Post quoted a 9-year-old girl who said, ‘I’m afraid to die because of climate change’, and the Metro UK newspaper reported climate change is causing panic, anxiety, and damaging our mental health. Global warming caused an increase in ‘ecological grief’.
This is an actual peer-reviewed academic paper published in the journal Nature in 2018. A small but growing number of scholars are suffering from ecological grief — it’s becoming increasingly common. Now, I just think this is what needs to stop.
This is a teenager suffering from climate anxiety, and of course, they want you to act now, a lot of these kids are speaking out.
This is — she’s in her 30s, this is Lucy Biggers, she said, ‘Climate change scared the living hell ever. When she saw Al Gore’s film, she had existential dread watching the film.’
We detailed kids who watched Al Gore’s movie 4 times in four different classes, and the big thing I would argue is there’s no climate dissent allowed in most of schools or academia.
So a kid is taught that there’s no dissent, no debate on these issues. And they’re told that this is the way it is.
Whether Channel did the same thing, video using kids. ‘Dear Mom and Dad, climate change could be catastrophic.’
NBC News: ‘College students getting emotional about climate change; it’s making young people distressed.’
So I just wanted to start out with that. And to say, you need to do diversity of opinion in academia. You need debate, you need less fear, and you need to let kids have critical thinking skills. Thank you.
Morano’s intro ended.
Moderator: “It’s a very fear-driven presentation to start with, but ending with a very positive remark that there’s something that education social can do. Thank you so much, Marc.
…
Marc Morano: I think the biggest thing is one of the biggest things with college is you want to show a diversity of viewpoints. When I was working in the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee, these scientists reached out to our office who were skeptical of climate change, and they were just giving horror stories of how academia was crushing them and not allowing dissent or debate.
And actually the same thing happened during COVID. So I think students need to know that a teacher’s not going to be canceled for saying the wrong thing. Number one, that gives them the idea that academia is a safe space that allows discussion and you’re not canceled. And this suppression of dissent happened to a lot of professors, even renowned professors who were against the sort of Anthony Fauci lockdown technique during COVID.
The exact same sort of stifling of debate happened in climate, but I think with kids you want to show them debate is healthy. If you look at Gallup polling on environmental issues, climate is always ranked dead last as a concern every year by Americans. So I think the biggest thing you want to do with kids is teach them about the environment, teach them about the first Earth Day and about how much the Earth has improved since then.
We’ve radically decreased air pollution and water pollution, and at the same time we have seen huge economic growth and had a huge population increase.
The progress on cleaning up the environment since the first Earth Day is a huge success story that should instill hope in students and instill practical solutions for pollution cleanup. I would argue students need to see a diversity of speakers come to speak to them with differing views on issues. I would also try to avoid some of the jargon like sustainable development that the UN promotes, Agenda 2030. I think they become very sort of narrow activists who are in a little niche world that the rest of their students can’t even relate to or understand what they’re talking about; it’s got to be a sort of way forward.
And to answer the other question, if I can’t just real quickly tie that in the trade-offs and the balances are a huge issue. To replace toilets with bidets to get rid of toilet paper. The problem with all of that is you have to look at the big picture on these issues. Even if you look at EVs.
Everyone says their EV is ‘green’. Well, there was an engineering estimate. It takes half a million pounds of materials dug up from the Earth to make one 1000 pound Tesla EV battery, which is then transported on a diesel ship, which is then plugged into a grid, that is roughly 70 to 80%dependent on fossil fuels, depending on where you live, to recharge that battery.
So there’s always a trade-off. I think we had to get away from this is ‘green’. This is not green, and you look at the overall big picture.
…
Marc Morano: One of the things, at our organization, Committee for Constructive Tomorrow, we’re very grassroots, so our cooperation is working with local communities. And there’s actually been a lot of our activists who oppose offshore wind on the coast. Recently, in New Jersey. We have people protesting an offshore wind, because they don’t like what it’s doing to whales, and we have cooperation with local communities, as they need them and the grassroots. I think that is one of the most important things. I mean, all the other stuff’s important too, technology and cooperating with corporations and organizations. But the grassroots is where everything sort of begins and ends.
…
Marc Morano: I did stories on sustainable forestry; at one point, doing an Amazon rainforest report, I interviewed professors, and they could tell me within 7 years, using these sustainable forestry techniques where it’s not slash-and-burn techniques or clearcutting but a slice of trees here or a slice of trees there. Within 7 years, you couldn’t distinguish between the logged forest and the unlogged forest because plants and animals regenerated.
That’s the kind of hopeful message, instead of fear-based, that I think we should be pushing, and when you look at technology, whether you’re talking about endangered species, we know how to save endangered species. The success rate is incredible to the point where now you have battles about whether a species should be delisted, in case it could be a Wolf or something else, and agriculture, where there become too many of a species.
And this is a very important point I’m about to make: showing kids a hopeful message that even fossil fuels or coal plants have dramatically increased pollution standards in the past 50 years since the first Earth Day, 60 years ago.
I guess almost, and I think the biggest mistake that activists should avoid is getting the UN or someone like Al Gore, making environmental issues political left, right, or Democrat, Republican, conservative, liberal — all of that makes it a niche issue because you’re going to have people who are repulsed immediately.
I think this is one of the biggest mistakes with the UN. The UN politicizes the hell out of climate change to the point where they do all the tipping points; it just turns off half of the audience immediately.
So if you focus on a technology aspect and improving the environment across the board, cleaning up oceans, cleaning up pollution.
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